Courses:

The purpose of this course is to acquaint you with a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the twentieth century. Most of the books on the list constitute, in my view (and others), modern classics, or potential classics, in social and economic history. We will examine how these historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytic discussion of their topic, and what are the advantages and drawbacks of their approaches.

Historians as a community pursue a huge variety of topics with widely disparate methodologies. A central concern of ours will be the question: is history a discipline? Do historians have anything in common? Or are they a rather random collection of people united only by a shared interest in the past (excluding geologists, paleontologists on one end and journalists on the other)?

It would be impossible to survey everything that historians do. The works I have chosen emphasize long-term social processes, the experiences of ordinary people, collective mentalities, and the structures of material life. They downplay the prominence of great leaders (kings, queens, generals, philosophers, scientists), the simple narration of political events, or the analysis of idea systems divorced from their political and social context. They share an openness to the use of concepts from related social sciences (anthropology, sociology, and economics). They aim to reconstruct the experience of everyone who lived in the past, and they pay special attention to the obscure, the oppressed, and the poor. They try to transcend the narrow boundaries inflicted on historians (and everyone else) by an exclusive concentration on the fortunes of the nation-state and its leaders.

This approach to history originated with the French founders of the Annales school, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, around the turn of the century. (The school is named after the journal which they founded and coedited) Since its founding, the Annales historians have exerted tremendous influence on historical writing around the world. As a historian of China and Japan myself, I also want to emphasize the significant impact of this approach on non-Western history, especially Asia. Of course, many other trends contributed to and altered the Annales paradigm. Things did not look the same when Annales topics migrated to England, the U.S. or China. But following the themes of this historical approach over time provides a useful way to unify the course and get some sense of the commonality of historical problems across time and space.

Our focus is on structure, methodology, and conceptualization, not on specific historical content. A sizeable proportion of the studies here focus on early modern Europe (roughly 1500 - 1800 A.D.). As you can see, there is also representation from nineteenth-century Europe, America, and China. I would urge you to read in areas with which you are not familiar as well as in home ground. It is not necessary to "know the facts" or become an expert in any of these areas; the point is to find out how similar historical approaches work in different cultural areas and time periods.

Requirements for the Course

1. Read the core readings for each week and be prepared to discuss them in class. Many of these classics are large, fat books. I will give you some hints to devise the best way of tackling them. (Starting at page one and plowing straight through is almost never the best method.)
   
   
2. Read or skim at least one of the works from the supplementary list. Each week you should submit before the class meeting (Tuesday afternoon at the latest), a one page essay with your reactions to the reading (not summaries, but critiques: reasoned argument is preferred, but gripes and raves are allowed). These will be useful in stimulating discussion. This is mainly a discussion course; I may sometimes give brief orienting lectures, but I will try to keep them short. To be fair, I will commit myself to producing a similar reaction paper, or something longer. Submit these by email.
   
   Also, someone may be assigned each week to report on one of the supplementary readings, orally: this can be more of a summary with critique, like an extended book review. (Look at reviews in the American Historical Review or New York Review of Books for examples)
   
   
3. Finally, at the end of the term, a longer paper is due (10-15 pp). You are free to choose the subject, but you should take one of two tacks
   • "Horizontal": examine the characteristics of the same historical approach used in several different countries and time periods (one of these countries should be non-Western), e.g.: the historical demography of 17th century France and Japan; the history of women in twentieth-century Russia and China;
   • "Vertical": examine a variety of perspectives on the same historical topic (the French Revolution is the classic one: it is open to Marxist, populist, economic, cultural, feminist, and many other interpretations. Other good possibilities are the English Industrial Revolution, American slavery, European imperialism). In either case, you need to search out the major works in the literature, analyze the basic problematique, discuss the different analytic tools and sources employed, and evaluate the relative merit of different approaches. You might even have ideas of your own about where work in this subfield should go, which you should feel free to develop. You will find, I suspect, that science and technology get short shrift in most historians' accounts. Think about how they might usefully be integrated into general history.