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MASTERING HISTORICAL RESEARCH: BIRKBECK APPROACHES SYLLABUS AUTUMN 2017

Contents LECTURE SCHEDULE .................................................................................................................................... 2

CORE COURSE READING .............................................................................................................................. 2

SEMINARS ................................................................................................................................................. 3

ASSIGNMENTS ............................................................................................................................................ 3

Essay ........................................................................................................................................................ 3

Essay Plan and Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 3

Plagiarism Online Module ....................................................................................................................... 3

SPRING TERM RESEARCH SKILLS MODULE ..................................................................................................... 4

READINGS ............................................................................................................................................... 4

1. Historians ............................................................................................................................................ 4

2. Empires ............................................................................................................................................... 6

3. States and Nations .............................................................................................................................. 8

4. Migration and Encounters ................................................................................................................ 10

5. Thinking Historiographically: Preparing your essay .......................................................................... 12

6. Minds and Bodies ............................................................................................................................. 13

7. Scale and Everyday Life ..................................................................................................................... 15

8. Categories ......................................................................................................................................... 17

9. Readers and Audiences ..................................................................................................................... 20

10. Writing history ................................................................................................................................ 21

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LECTURE SCHEDULE Please note that all locations and times for lectures and seminars will be listed in your My Birkbeck Profile.

2 October Induction evening and welcome drinks

Director of MA Programmes and MA Course Directors

9 October Historians

John Tosh

16 October Empires

Rebecca Darley

23 October States and Nations

David Brydan

30 October Migration and Encounters Julia Laite

6 November Thinking Historiographically: Preparing your essay

Julia Laite and Kat Hill

13 November Minds and Bodies

Anne Hanley

20 November Scale and Everyday Life ESSAY OUTLINE DUE

Jerry White

27 November Categories

Brodie Waddell

4 December Readers and Audiences FEEDBACK ON OUTLINE RETURNED

Nik Wachsmann

11 December Writing History Matthew Champion, Julia Laite and Chandak Sengoopta

CORE COURSE READING In preparation for each lecture you should read the item listed as a 'preparatory reading’

which you will find on moodle available for download. Please note that there will be

additional readings for your individual seminars.

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SEMINARS Each lecture will be followed by a seminar for your particular MA programme. The seminar

teachers have assigned additional essential reading relevant to the specific seminar

discussion, which is listed under the MA programme heading on the core course Moodle

page.

All students are automatically subscribed to the ‘news forum’, which may be used to send

important information to you via the email address you’ve given to college. Please make

sure you don’t unsubscribe, and please make sure that you check the email you’ve provided

regularly.

ASSIGNMENTS Essay The core course, like the optional modules, is assessed by one essay of 5,000 – 5,500 words

(including footnotes), to be submitted 15 January 2018. Essay questions are set by your

seminar teachers, or should be developed by students in consultation with your seminar

teachers.

Essay Plan and Bibliography You are also required to submit an essay plan and a short bibliography of your core course

essay by Monday, 20 November 2017, to your programme directors and online on the

moodle page. This will not be formally assessed, but you will receive some feedback within

two weeks which should help you write a better essay. You will find guidance notes on how

to prepare this outline under the Assignments section of the core course moodle page. You

will also be able to submit the outline under this section.

Plagiarism Online Module Every new MA student is required to complete the plagiarism module on Moodle by the end

of term in December 2017. You will find this online module under the Assignments section

of the core course moodle page.

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SPRING TERM RESEARCH SKILLS MODULE

Your autumn term lectures and seminars are complemented by a programme of seminars

on research skills, which will take place on Monday evenings in the summer term. Like the

autumn term core course, this programme is compulsory for all MA students. It is designed

to help you to identify a dissertation topic and prepare for your dissertation research. You

don't have to write an essay for this part of the course, but you do have to submit your

dissertation proposal form by no later than the final research skills seminar in March 2018.

Failing to submit this will lead to a 'fail' of your core course.

All of this (and more) is also explained in your MA Handbook, which is essential reading. It is

available to download on your MA’s moodle page.

READINGS

Each lecture is accompanied by a set reading, which you will find in your course reading booklet, and which is listed below. Please complete this reading in addition to the readings you are required to do for your seminars. Each core course topic also includes a longer reading list, which you can use for preparing essays or for further reading.

1. Historians

What is an historian? How has the role changed, from antiquity to the 21st century? This

lecture will explore the different roles which historians have played in society, and the

different ways in which ‘history’ has been viewed, as a political and social resource. Through

so doing, we will discover the roots of our current practices as academic historians and

students of history; and will consider how ‘history’ is now related to the wider public, at the

start of the 21st century.

Preparatory reading:

J. H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2000) – Chapter 2 [moodle]

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 6th edition (London, 2015)

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Further reading:

John Tosh (ed), Historians on History, 2nd edn (Harlow, 2009)

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, 2nd edn (London, 2006)

Jo Guldi & David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014)

Eric Hobsbawm, On History (Londopn, 1997)

Jeremy Black, Using History (London, 2005)

Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London, 1998)

Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London, 1999)

Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, eds., Writing National Histories:

Western Europe since 1800 (London, 1999)

Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (Chicago, 1983)

John Burrow, A History of Histories (London, 2007)

E.H.Carr, What is History? (many editions, new ed. Palgrave, 2011)

Richard J. Evans, “Prologue: What is History? – Now”, in: David Cannadine (ed), What is

History Now? (Palgrave, 2002)

Richard J.Evans, In Defence of History (London, 2000).

Denys Hay, Annalists and Historians (London, 1977)

George G.Iggers, Q Edward Wang and Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern

Historiography (2008)

J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London, 1969)

F. Stern, ed., The Varieties of History (London, 1970)

Reba N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English

Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford, 1994)

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2. Empires

It has often been said that the history of the world is largely the history of empires. But

what are empires? What unites such disparate entities as the Roman Empire, the British

Empire and the American Empire that we allegedly live under today? Can one have empires

without colonization? What do historians mean when they talk of “informal empires” or

“economic empires”? Is empire-building a purely Western tendency – or has it been

common to all peoples at all ages? Why do empires have such a negative reputation and do

they deserve it? This lecture will address these general questions through focused

examinations of particular episodes and themes from diverse imperial contexts.

Preparatory reading:

Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2002) – Ch. 1, 2, 5 [chapter 1 on

moodle]

Further reading:

David B Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-

1980 (Yale University Press, 2000)

Susan E Alcock, Terence N D’Altroy, Kathleen D Morrison & Carla M Sinopoli (eds), Empires:

Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge University Press, 2001) – contains

good brief overviews of ancient and medieval empires, European and non-European

W G Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894-1945 (Clarendon Press, 1987)

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of

Difference (Princeton, 2010), Chapter 1

Chun-shu Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire, 2 vols (University of Michigan Press, 2007)

Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of

California Press, 2005)

John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (Allen Lane, 2007)

John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

(Cambridge University Press, 2009)

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J H Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (Yale

University Press, 2006)

D K Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century,

2nd edn (Macmillan, 1982)

Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1923 (2005)

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)

Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe

(Macmillan, 2009)

Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Denis Judd, Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present (HarperCollins,

1996)

**A. Kaldellis (2012) 'From Rome to New Rome, from empire to nation-state: reopening the

question of Byzantium's Roman identity' in L. Grig and G. Kelly (eds) Two Romes: Rome and

Constantinople in late antiquity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 387-404, BBK Library e-

book.

Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale University Press, 2006)

Christopher Kelly, The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press,

2006)

Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals from the Sixteenth Century to the

Present (2003)

Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001)

Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass,

2005)

**G. Woolf (2001) 'Inventing Empire in Ancient Rome' in S. Alcock, T. D'Altroy, K.

Morrison et al. (eds) Empires: perspectives from archaeology and history, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 311-22. BBK Library 930 EMP.

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3. States and Nations

This lecture will consider how historians have thought about the state and the idea of the nation. What do these terms mean and how have they changed over time? How have people in the past understood the relationship between state, nation and themselves? And how should historians approach it? Why has the model of the nation state proved so attractive and yet so destructive?

Preparatory reading:

Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990), ch. 1 (moodle)

David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), ch. 3 (‘A World of Declarations’)

Further reading:

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983), esp. chs.1-3

Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: territory and state formation in the modern world (1996)

Perry Anderson, Lineages of the absolutist state (1974)

John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (1982)

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global Comparisons and Connections, 1780-1914 (2004)

William Beik, Absolutism and Society in seventeenth-century France (1985)

David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (2001)

Tim Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (2002)

Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550-1700 (2000)

Antoinette Burton, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (2003)

Christopher Clark, ‘Power’, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), A Concise Companion to History (2011)

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Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (1986)

Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650-c.1850 (1998)

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1994)

Linda Colley, 'Britishness and Otherness: An Argument', Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 309-29

David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (1989)

Otto Dann and John Dinwiddy (eds), Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution (1988)

Gerard Delanty, ‘Nationalism: Between Nation and State’, in G. Ritzer and B. Smart (eds), Handbook of Social Theory (2001)

J.H. Elliott, 'A Europe of Composite Monarchies', Past & Present, 137 (1992) 48-71

Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (2001)

Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983)

Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992)

Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (1998)

Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (1983)

Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (1999)

Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775 (2011)

Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (2003)

Charles S. Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (2012)

John Meyer, et al. "World Society and the Nation State," American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 1 (1997): 144-81

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010)

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Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (2014)

Anthony Reid, Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia (2010)

James Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998)

Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1994)

Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999)

Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (2010)

Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1995)

Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (1995)

Michael Wolfe (ed.), Changing Identities in Early Modern France (1997)

Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (2004)

4. Migration and Encounters

Migration is one of humanity’s most fundamental experiences yet also one of its most politically, culturally, and historically volatile phenomenon. How and why has the way people moved—and the number of people who moved--changed over time? How have states, and other structures of power, sought to control human migration? What cultural and social changes have resulted from migration and the encounters it brings about in different societies and cultures at different times? What meanings have been ascribed to migration, and how has migration been defined? Finally, how have historians explained and categorized migration, and why is it important that they do so?

Preparatory reading:

David Feldman, ‘Migration’ in M. Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Recommended reading:

James Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997).

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Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, ‘Measuring and Quantifiyng Cross-Cultural Migrations: An Introduction’ Lucassen and Lucassen, Globalizing Migration History: The Eurasian Experience 16th-21st Centuries (Brill, Leiden, 2014)

Further reading:

Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1989)

Bridget Anderson, Us and Them: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Glenn J.Ames and Ronald S.Love (eds), Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600-1700 (2002)

Sunil Amrith, “Tamil Diasporas Across the Bay of Bengal,” American Historical Review, 114, no 3 (June 2009): 547-72

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662-1785 (2005)

Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 4th edn ( Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009)

Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes (eds), Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (2008)

Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2006)

Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2008)

Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Columbia University Press, 1996)

Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: Thinkers on Muslim Government in the Middle East and India (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Stephane Dufoix, Diasporas (University of California Press, 2007)

Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (eds), Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (2010)

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Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (Lawrence & Wishart, 1990).

T.N. Harper, “Empires, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism, 1850-1914,” in: A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (Pimlico, 2001)

Peter Hulme, Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and their Visitors, 1877-1998 (Cambridge, 2000).

A L Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

John M MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester University Press, 1995)

Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration 1846-1940’, Journal of World History, 15, 2 (2004)

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY, 2000).

Lewis Pyenson, “Prerogatives of European Intellect: Historians of Science and the Promotion of Western Civilization,” History of Science, 31 (1993)

Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes 1250-1625 (Cambridge, 2000).

Edward W Said, Orientalism (Penguin, 1978; with new afterword, 1995; with new preface, 2003)

Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton University Press, 1992)

John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport (Cambridge, 2000)

Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Basingstoke, 2014)

5. Thinking Historiographically: Preparing your essay

In this session, we will reflect back upon the discussions and lectures in the first half of the course as students prepare to submit their outlines for their historiographically-focussed core course essay. The session will include general reflections on the importance of thinking historiographically; some practical advice about preparing outlines, researching, and writing; and a Q&A session to give students a chance to address any questions they have about the course so far, or their assignment.

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6. Minds and Bodies

Are our minds and bodies products of biology, or are they shaped by gender norms, racial prejudices and social expectations? Since the cultural turn, historians have been exploring the many ways in which ideas of health and illness have been (and continue to be) socially constructed. In this lecture, we will think about the mind and body as important aspects of human history, but ones that have emerged as subjects of historical inquiry only in the last few decades. With the emergence of the social history of medicine came a new, finer-grained focus on individual experiences of mental and physical illness. Using the historiography of the social history of medicine, we shall explore how such experiences were contingent upon wider social, political and medical contexts. We shall also consider how historians have written about minds and bodies and how these historiographical trends have themselves changed over time.

Preparatory Reading

Roy Porter, ‘The Patient's View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society (1985): 175–98.

Further Readings

Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).

David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Roberta Bivens and John Pickstone (eds.), Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), chapters by areas of interest.

Allan Brandt, ‘Emerging Themes in the History of Medicine’, Milbank Quarterly (1991): 199–214.

William Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopaedia of the History of Medicine (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), chapters by areas of interest.

Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

Flurin Condrau, ‘The Patient’s View meets the Clinical Gaze’, Social History of Medicine (2007): 525–40.

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Roger Cooter, ‘The Turn of the Body: History and the Politics of the Corporeal’ ARBOR Ciencia (2010), 393–405.

Andrew Cunningham, ‘Transforming the Plague: The Laboratory and the Identity of Infectious Disease’, in Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams (eds), The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 209–44.

Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), especially chapters 1 and 4.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London: Tavistock, 1973). This is a challenging book, so please also consider reading Thomas Osbourne, ‘On Anti-Medicine and Clinical Reason’, Colin Jones and Roy Porter (eds), Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body (London: Routledge, 1994), 28–47.

David Harley, ‘Rhetoric and the Social Construction of Sickness and Healing’, Social History of Medicine (1999): 407–35.

N.D. Jewson, ‘The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770–1870’, Sociology (1976): 225–44.

Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge’, Social History of Medicine (1995): 361–81.

Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher, ‘Social Construction and the Concept of Race’, Philosophy of Science (2005): 1208–19.

Mark Micale, ‘Hysteria and Its Historiography: The Future Perspective’, History of Psychiatry (1990): 33–124.

__________ (ed.), Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially chapter 1 (and other chapters by area of interest).

__________ and Roy Porter (eds), Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), especially chapter 1 (and other chapters by area of interest).

Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially chapters 4 and 6.

Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Charles Rosenberg, ‘The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experience’, Milbank Quarterly (2002): 237–60.

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Edward Shorter, Doctors and Their Patients: A Social History (London: Taylor and Francis, 1991).

Keir Waddington, An Introduction to the Social History of Medicine, Europe Since 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), chapters by area of interest.

Jennifer Wallis, ‘Atrophied, Engorged, Debauched: Degenerative Processes and Moral Worth in the General Paralytic Body’, Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge (eds), Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), 99–114.

__________, 'Bloody Technology: The Sphygmograph in Asylum Practice', History of Psychiatry (2017): 297–310.

John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of the System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), especially chapter 8.

Deborah Weiner, The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

Michael Worboys, ‘Was there a Bacteriological Revolution in Late-Nineteenth-Century Medicine?’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2007): 20–42.

7. Scale and Everyday Life

Historians have looked at the past using widely different scales. Some have adopted an eagle-eyed view to capture the whole wide terrain, others a fly-on-the-wall sense of intimacy. What implication does scale have for what historians see and how they understand the past? In this lecture we will zoom in and zoom out, following historians' fascination with everyday life and history from below and then scaling back up to global levels. Microhistorians were particularly interested in capturing the life of ordinary people and it arguably becomes easier to recover the history of everyday lifein small ‘communities’ and discrete cultures where individual agency can be given full play. But how true is this? And what gets lost when our whole attention is given to small things?

Key reading:

J. Brewer, ‘Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life’, Cultural and Social History 7.1

(2010)

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Further reading:

David Abulafia, The Great Sea. A Human History of the Mediterranean (2014)

John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2000) – Chapters 5 and 6

Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Durée [the ‘Long Term’]’

(essay written in 1958) in Histories; French Constructions of the Past, eds J. Revel and L. Hunt

(New York, 1995), pp. 115-145; also in F. Braudel, On History (1980)

John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (eds), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives (Berg,

2006).

P. Burke, ed., New Perspectives in Historical Writing (Cambridge, 1991)

Antoinette Burton, ‘Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World History’, History

Workshop Journal 64 (2007), pp. 323-328.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984)

Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Imposter? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of

Bhawal (Delhi, 2002)

N. Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (London, 1983)

Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution – centenary edition with new

introduction (2017)

R. W. Fogel and S. L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro

Slavery (Boston, 1974)

Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD, 1989), esp. pp. 96-

125

Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know About it’, Critical Inquiry,

Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn 1993), pp10-35

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1992)

Pat Hudson, History by Numbers (London, 2000)

A.Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago,

2007).

D. Herlihy and C. Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine

Catasto of 1427 (Yale, 1985)

L. Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (1989)

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David Kynaston, Modernity Britain. Opening the Box, 1957-1959 (2013)

Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New Brunswick, 1971/84)

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991)

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou. Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324

(1980)

Alf Lüdtke (ed), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways

of Life (Princeton, 1995)

Francis Pryor, The Making of the British Landscape. How We Have Transformed the Land,

from Prehistory to Today (2010)

Jan Rueger, Heligoland. Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea (2017)

E. Muir and G. Ruggerio, ed., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (1991)

Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, "Liquid Politics: Water and the Politics of Everyday

Life in the Modern City", Past and Present, May 2011.

John Tosh, ed., Historians on History (Harlow, 2000) – Chapters 28 and 29

Louis Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 44 No.1

(Jul. 1938), pp1-24

Jerry White, Campbell Bunk. The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars (1986)

Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century. A Human Awful Wonder of God (2007)

Richard White, "The Nationalization of Nature", The Journal of American History , Vol. 86,

No. 3, (Dec., 1999), pp. 976-986.

Donald R. Wright, The World and a Small Place in Africa (second edition, Armonk, NY, 2004).

8. Categories

This lecture will examine some of the categories historians have used, implicitly or explicitly,

to represent past societies: class, race and ethnicity, gender. How have these categories

influenced and shaped their understanding of the past? What challenges have they

encountered? What are the strengths and limitations of their approaches? What lasting

effects has the use of these categories had on the study of history?

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Preparatory reading:

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (2015; 6th edn), pp. 229-253 (ch. 10: ‘Gender history and

postcolonial history’)

Further reading:

Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens (eds), Complicating Categories: Gender, Class, Race and

Ethnicity (2004)

Denise K. Buell, Why this New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (2005)

Joanna Bourke, Working Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity

(1994)

Charles Loring Brace, ‘Race’ is a Four-Letter Word: The Genesis of the Concept (2005)

David Cannadine, Class in Britain (1998), esp. ch. 1

Dipesh Chacrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(2000)

Natalie Zemon Davis, '“Women's History”' in Transition: The European Case', Feminist

Studies, vol.3 (1976)

Geoff Eley and Keith Nield (eds), The Future of Class in History: What's Left of the Social?

(2007)

V.P. Franklin, ‘Introduction: Symposium on African American Historiography’, Journal of

African American History, Vol. 92, No. 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 214-217

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938)

Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-

1982 (1983)

Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People (1991)

Patrick Joyce (ed.), Class (1995)

Alan Kidd and David Nicholls (eds), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism. Middle-Class

Identity in Britain, 1800-1940 (1999)

Sonya O. Rose, What is Gender History? (2010)

Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight

Against It (1975)

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Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical

Review, December 1986, Vol.91, No.5.

Joan W. Scott, "On language, gender and working-class history", International Labor and

Working Class History, Spring 1987, Vol.31, pp. 1-13

Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (ed.)

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988); republished in The Spivak Reader

(1995)

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1st ed. 1960, many later editions)

E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991)

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9. Readers and Audiences

All historians have to give some thought to the readers and audiences they are writing for.

This lecture will explore the development of a number of different audiences for books on

history. What do we know about past readerships of historical works, and how did they

differ from today's? How can we explain the spread of popular history, a genre of

historiography often defined in opposition to so-called "dry-biscuit" academic history? How

should we judge the rise of popular history? Do professional standards of academic

historians have to be sacrificed in popular or public history? What roles can and should

history play outside the academy?

Preparatory reading:

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000) – Chapter 6 [moodle]

Further reading:

‘AHR Forum: How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?’, articles by A. Grafton, E. L.

Eisenstein, and A. Johns, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 84-128.

Neeladri Bhattacharya, "Predicaments of Secular Histories", Public Culture, Vol.20, No.1,

2007

Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life And History Of A.J.P. Taylor (Yale University Press,

2000) – esp. Chapter 7, "The business history of the history business: how Taylor built his

freelance career, 1938-1990", 369-407.

David Cannadine (ed.), History and the Media (2007)

Stefan Collini, "Writing 'the national history': Trevelyan and after", in: Stefan Collini, English

pasts: Essays in history and culture (1999)

Stefan Collini, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (OUP, 2008)

R.Darnton, "How to read a book", New York Review of Books, 6 June 1996.

R. Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?”, in Carpenter (ed) Books and Society in History,

(London, 1983), 3-26

D.Finkelstein and McCleery (eds), The Book History Reader (London, 2002).

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J. de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and heritage in contemporary popular culture

(2009) – esp. Introduction, chapters 1-3

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, (2000)

Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British intellectuals (1983, 1st ed. 1961) –

Chapter 3, "Argument without end" & Chapter 4, "The flight of crook-taloned birds"

Stella Tillyard, "All our pasts: the rise of popular history", Times Literary Supplement,

October 13 2006

John Tosh, "The Uses of History", in: John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: aims, methods and

new directions in the study of modern history (2nd ed. 1991), 1-29.

H.R.Trevor-Roper, "History: professional and lay" (extract), in: John Tosh (ed), Historians on

History: an anthology (Pearson, 2000), 328-333.

10. Writing history

Historians rarely talk about their working methods or the process of writing. In this dialogue

between a medieval, an early modern, and a modern historian, students will be given a

chance to reflect upon hsitorical writing. How do historians do what they do? How do we

relate our specific research to broader questions? How do we join the conversation? How

do we (attempt to) make our version of the past plausible for others? By addressing such

questions, this session aims to get students thinking about the writing of their own essays

and dissertations. What is crucial for any piece of historical work, whether written for a

degree or for publication, is that it mediates between the chosen specific example and

broader questions, between primary and secondary contexts.

Preparatory reading:

A. Sachs, ‘Letters to a Tenured Historian’, Rethinking History, 14 (2010), pp. 5-38. [moodle]

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, Chapter 6: ‘Writing and Interpretation’, (Pearson

Longman, 5th edition, 2010).

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Further reading:

M. Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002) – esp. Chapter 6.

G. Dening, ‘”P 905 .A512 x 100": An Ethnographic Essay’, AHR, 100 (1995), pp. 854-864.

G. Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyages across Times, Cultures and Self (2004), pp. 258-68.

Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory 2002), pp. 164-196.

C. Ginzburg, ‘Checking the Evidence: the Judge and the Historian’, Critical Inquiry 18 (1991),

pp. 79-82.

S. Greenblatt, ‘Writing as Performance’, Harvard Magazine, 110 (2007). Online:

http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/09/writing-as-performance.html (accessed 8 Sep 2010).

**L. Jordanova, History in Practice (2nd ed., 2006), ch. 6

Martina Kessel, ‘Gendering Historiography? Problems and Suggestions’, in Angelika Epple

and Angelika Schaser (eds.), Gendering Historiography. Beyond National Canons (2009).

A. P. Norman, ‘Telling it Like it Was: Historical Narratives on their Own Terms’, History and

Theory, 30 (1991), pp. 119–35.

R. Rosenstone and A. Munslow (eds), Experiments in Rethinking History (2004).

Joan Scott, ‘History-Writing as Critique’, in Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow

(eds.), Manifestos for History (2007).

K. Thomas, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, vol. 32, no. 11.