Schedule and Readings

Week 1: Introduction – 8/25

• James Lockhart, “The Social History of Early Latin America,” pp. 27-80 in, Of Things of The Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
• William Cronon, “Getting Ready to Do History,” Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate, Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, Carnegie Foundation, Palo Alto, 2004, 1-18.

Recommended general works/broad interpretations:

• H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1963)
• E. H. Carr, What is History? (1961)
• Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text. Historians and the Linguistic Turn (2004)
• Sande Cohen, History Out of Joint: essays on the use and abuse of history (2005)
• R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946)
• Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (1999)
• Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History (1999)
• Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (1997)
• David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (1985)
• What is —— History?, History Today vol. 35, (Jan-June, 1985).

Some journals that are oriented towards theory/philosophy of history:

• Clio
• Critical Inquiry
• History Workshop
• Radical History Review

Week 2: German Idealism – 9/1 [FIRST SELF-REFLECTIVE ESSAY DUE]

• Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.”
• Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (NY: Prometheus, 1991), Introduction, 1-102 (of this section the most important and least obtuse material from 1-11 and 54-79).
• Leopoldo von Ranke, The Secret of World History (NY: Fordham U. Press, 1981), 55-72, 101-117, 242-3, 247-254, 258-60.

Recommended:

• History and Theory, 19, 4 (Dec. 1980): Special Issue: Metahistory: Six Critiques.
• Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th Century Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

Week 3: Materialism – 9/8

• Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The German Ideology, “Wage Labor and Capital,” and “Crisis Theory,” Capital Vol. 1, in The Marx-Engels Reader.
• E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9-13, 189-212, 314-374, 711-746.

Recommended:

• Richard J. Evans, “Causation in History,” In Defense of History (New York: WW Norton, 1999).
• Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto .
• E. P. Thompson. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” Past and Present, No. 50. (Feb., 1971), pp. 76-136
• E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, 38 (1967): 56-97.

Week 4: Materialism II 9/15

• Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Week 5: State and Society 9/22

• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
• Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (Verso Books, 2002).

Recommended:

• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
• Antonio Gramsci, “Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc” from Prison Notebooks reproduced in The Gramscian Reader, edited by David Foragcs (NYU Press, 2000), pp. 181-221.
• Lelan McLemore, “Max Weber’s Defense of Historical Inquiry,” History and Theory, 23,3 (1984), 277-295.
• Joseph Shumpeter, “On the Concept of Social Value,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 23:2 (1909_: 213-232.

Week 6: The quest for objectivity in the U.S. 9/29

• Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, Sections I-III.
• Mark Bevir, “Objectivity in History,” History and Theory 33, 3 (October 1994).

Recommended:

• Charles Beard, “That Noble Dream,” AHR 41.1 (1935), pp. 74-87.
• Carl Becker, “Everyman his own historian,” AHR, 37 (1932): 221-236.
• Rolf Torstendahl, “Fact, Truth and Text: The Quest for a Firm Basis for Historical Knowledge around 1900,” History and Theory 42 (Oct. 2003): 305-31.

Week 7: Ethnography and Historical Anthropology

• Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (NY: Basic Books, 1983).
• Claude Levi-Strauss, “Social Structure,” in Anthropology Today: Selections (1962).
• William H. Sewell, Jr. “Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From Synchrony to Transformation,” Representations 59 (Summer 1997): 35-55.
• Marshall Sahlins, “Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History,” American Anthropologist 85,3 (Sept., 1983), 517-544.
• Marshall Sahlins, Waiting for Foucault.

Recommended:

• Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms.
• Thomas Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2004).
• Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
• Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1987)
• Lynn Hunt, New Cultural History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989)
• Hans Medick, “Missionaries in the Rowboat.” CSSH, 29 (1987), 76-98.
• Marshal Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987).

Week 8: A Future for the Anthropological Encounter? [ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE]

• Brian Axel, ed., From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and its Futures (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002).
• Barber and Berdam, The Emperor’s Mirror (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1998), selections. (here, and here.)
  

Week 9: A Different Cultural Turn?

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage, 1995).

Recommended:

• Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”
• Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (2004)
• Michel Foucault, “The Discourse in Language,” The Archeology of Knowledge.
• Michel Foucault, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire” from Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume II, (New Press, 1997).
• David Holdcroft, Saussre: signs, System, and Arbitrariness (1991).

Week 10: Practice Theory

• Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
• De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, selection.
• Sherry Ortner, “Making Gender: Toward a Feminist, Minority, Postcolonial, Subaltern, etc. Theory of Pratice,” from Making Gender.

Week 11: The US Construction of ‘French Theory’

• Cusset, French Theory.

Recommended:

• Jeffrey Weeks, “Remembering Foucault,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.1-2 (2005): 186-203.
• Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History of culture,” from The New Cultural History.
• Lynn Hunt. “French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 21, No. 2, (Apr., 1986), 209-224.
• Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History.

Week 12: Gender and Sexuality I

• Denise Riley, Am I That Name: Feminism and the Category of Women in History (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003).
• Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,”

Week 13: Gender and Sexuality II

• Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988).
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, preface, chapters 1 & 3.
• Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, 1-2 (winter-spring 2005), 10-27.

Recommended:

• Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality
• Sarah Swedberg, “Teaching Women’s History: I Offered Social History, They Took Away Heroes,” History Compass 2 (2004)
• Anjali Arondekar, “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,”

Week 14: Theorizing the Archive

• Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Rutgers University Press, 2002).
• Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories (Duke Univ. Press, 2005).

Recommended:

• Durba Ghosh, “National Narratives and the Politics of Miscegenation: Britain and India,” in Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Duke Univ. Press, 2005.
• “Googlemania,” Wired, 12, 3 (2004)
• Carolyn Hamilton, et al, ed. Refiguring the Archive (2002).

Week 15: Logics of History

• William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformaitions (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005)