I. Introduction
Week 1: Introduction: How Do Historians Think?
View:
- “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED.” (2009) YouTube.
Read:
- John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, pp. 1–52 (Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN: 9780195171570. [Preview with Google Books]
- James Sweet, “Is History History?” Perspectives on History, September 2022.
- David Bell, “Two Cheers for Presentism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 23, 2022.
- Sam Wineburg, “Unnatural and Essential: The Nature of Historical Thinking.” Teaching History 129 (2007): 6–11.
- Jill Lepore, “How to Write a Paper for This Class.” (PDF) Historically Speaking 11, no. 1 (2010): 19–20.
Week 2: Writing from an Archive: Race, Slavery, and American Universities
- Craig Steven Wilder, “Prologue” and “Epilogue,” in Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, pp. 1–11 and pp. 275–88 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). ISBN: 9781608194025. [Preview with Google Books]
- Mike Featherstone, “Archive.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3 (2006): 591–96.
II. Historical Analysis and Interpretation
Week 3: What Is a Good Question? Historiographical and Empirical Contexts
- John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, pp. 53–109 (Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN: 9780195171570. [Preview with Google Books]
Was Abraham Lincoln gay?
- David Herbert Donald, We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends, pp. 29–64 (Simon & Schuster, 2003). ISBN: 9780743254687. [Preview with Google Books]
- C.A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 1–21 (Free Press, 2005). ISBN: 9780743266390. [Preview with Google Books]
- Christopher Capozzola, “The Gay Lincoln Controversy,” Boston Globe, January 16, 2005.
Why did Truman drop the bomb?
- Michael Sherry, “The Slide to Total Air War,” New Republic, December 16, 1981.
- Henry L. Stimson, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine 194, no. 1161 (1947): 97–107.
Why is Haiti poor?
- Anthony P. Maingot, “Haiti: What Can Be Done?,” Latin American Research Review 48, no. 1 (2013): 228–35.
Week 4: How Do Historians Use Theory?
- Shalene Sayegh and Eric Altice, “The Importance of Theory in History,” in History and Theory (Pearson, 2013). ISBN: 9780136157250.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish, esp. Part I, ch. 1, (pp. 1–31); Part III entire (pp. 135–228) (Vintage Books, 1995). ISBN: 9780679752554. [Preview with Google Books]
- Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” in The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989). ISBN: 9780520064294. [Preview with Google Books]
- Regina Kunzel, “Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health.” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 315–19.
- M.J. Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive.” Gender & History 22, no. 3 (2010): 564–84.
Week 5: NO CLASS
- No readings assigned.
III. Sources Used by Historians
Week 6: Writing from a Diary: Midwife’s Tale in Maine, 1785–1812
View:
- A Midwife’s Tale. Directed by Richard P. Rogers. Color, 1998.
Read:
- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812, pp. 1–35, 162–65, 346–52 (Vintage, 1991). ISBN: 9780679733768. [Preview with Google Books]
- Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust, pp. ix–xiii, 22–57, 129–61, 162–67. (Yale University Press, 2006). ISBN: 9780300112528. [Preview with Google Books]
Week 7: Writing from Environment
- Kate Brown, “Learning to Read the Great Chernobyl Acceleration: Literacy in the More-than-Human Landscapes.” Current Anthropology 60, no. S20 (2019): 198–208.
- ———. “Green Privilege.”
- Bathsheba Demuth, “The Walrus and the Bureaucrat: Energy, Ecology, and Making the State in the Russian and American Arctic, 1870–1950.” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019): 483–510.
- Sunil Amrith, “Risk and the South Asian Monsoon.” Climatic Change 151, no. 1 (2018): 17–28.
Week 8: Doing Conceptual History: Japan
- Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018). ISBN: 9781501725845. [Preview with Google Books]
Week 9: Writing from Oral Sources: Nairobi, Kenya
- Kenda Mutongi, Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (University of Chicago Press, 2017). ISBN: 9780226471396.
Week 10: History, Commemoration, and Truth and Reconciliation
- David Thelen, “How the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Challenges the Ways We Use History.” South African Historical Journal 47 (2002): 162–90.
- Richard H. Kohn, “History and the Culture Wars: The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition.” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1036–63.
- American Historical Association, “Statement on Confederate Monuments (August 2017).”
- Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson, “Why the US President Needs a Council of Historians,” Atlantic Monthly, September 2016.
- Adom Getachew and Naomi Kebede, “Monument Gallery,” American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (2022): 831–46.
Weeks 11–14
- No readings assigned.
