EIU His 5000, Fall 2010, Newton Key
T 19:00-21:15, Coleman 2750
http://ux1.eiu.edu/~nekey/syllabi/historiography.htm
Syllabus as pdf (brief version)
Notes (AHR = American Historical Review; HJ = Historical Journal; H & T = History and Theory; JAH = Journal of American History; JMH = Journal of Modern History; P & P = Past & Present; TLS = Times Literary Supplement)
week 1.
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"Man has been a hunter for thousands of years…. "The hunter would have been the first 'to tell a story' because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events…. "What may be the oldest act in the intellectual history of the human race [is] the hunter squatting on the ground, studying the tracks of his quarry." Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980), 102-3, 105 |
week 2.
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"Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian 'ought to love the past.' This is a dubious injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men of old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future." Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (1961), 29
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week 3.
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"It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present; and though there may be a sense in which this is unobjectionable if its implications are carefully considered, and there may be a sense in which it is inescapable, it has often been an obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present. Through this system of immediate reference to the present day, historical personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it; so that a handy rule of thumb exists by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis. On this system the historian is bound to construe his function as demanding him to be vigilant for likenesses between past and present, instead of being vigilant for unlikeness; so that he will find it easy to say that he has seen the present in the past, he will imagine that he has discovered a 'root' or an 'anticipation' of the twentieth century, when in reality he is in a world of different connotations altogether, and he has merely tumbled upon what could be shown to be a misleading analogy. Working upon the same system the whig historian can draw lines through certain events, some such line as that which leads through Martin Luther and a long succession of whigs to modern liberty; and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents something like a line of causation." Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) |
week 4.
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Ch. IX. "[T]he preceding discussion has indicated that scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. There is more to be said, however, [and the rest of the chapter focuses on explaining the answer to the following question].... Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution?..." |
week 5.
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"The materialist conception of history has a lot of them ["dangerous friend(s)"] nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late [18]70s: 'All I know is that I am not a Marxist'." F. Engels in London to C. Schmidt in Berlin, 5 Aug. 1890
"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity." EPT, MEWC (1963) |
week 7.
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"'History that is not quantifiable,' remarked Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, one of the school's leading exponents, in 1979, 'cannot claim to be scientific.' 'Tomorrow's historian,' he added, 'will have to be able to programme a computer in order to survive.'" Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York, 1999), 33, quoting Ladurie's 1968 article reprinted in The Territory of the Historian (1979) "The quantitative approach to history in general, and the quantitative approach to cultural history in particular, can obviously be criticized as reductionist. Generally speaking, what can be measured is not what matters." Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89 (Stanford, 1990), 79 |
week 14.
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week 15.
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requirements, papers, and exams