GHIS 6133 Historiography and Historical Practice
GHIS 6238 War, Revolution and The Popular Front
Fall 2010. Three credits.
Spring 2011.
Oz Frankel
Eli Zaretsky
This course focuses on U.S. history to examine current permutations of historiographical interests, practices, and methodologies. Topics include identity politics, the culture wars, major trends and controversies in American historiography, the multicultural moment in historical studies, the emergence of race and gender as cardinal categories of historical analysis, the preoccupation with popular culture, the impact of memory studies on historical thinking, the recurrent agonizing over American exceptionalism, and recent attempts to globalize American history. Also examined are the intersection of analytical strategies borrowed from the social sciences and literary studies with methods and epistemologies of historicization that originated from the historical profession. This course should be taken during a student’s first year in the Historical Studies program. Cross-listed as GPOL 6133.
Between 1933 and 1945 the world divided between fascism and The Popular Front (i.e., the alliance of the Soviet Union, the democracies and much of the colonial world). The results were two-sided. On the positive side, the left was transformed from a set of narrow sects focused on revolution to a broad coalition of democratic forces that created new forms of literature, film and personal relations, reshaped liberal and democratic politics, and invented the democratic welfare state, the United Nations and the modern human rights discourse. But there was a negative side. Even as fascism was destroyed, other forms of authoritarianism triumphed, not only in the Soviet Union but in China, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Thus, the Popular Front is the seedbed not only of the cold war but of the post-9/11 world. Exploring its contradictory character, our readings will include works by Ian Kershaw, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Gary Gerstle, Arno Mayer and Francois Furet.
GHIS 6134 Historical Methods and Sources
Spring 2011. Three credits.
GHIS 6425 The Idea of Revolution
Paul M. Ross
Fall 2010.
Historical Methods and Sources orients students to historical inquiry and equip them to undertake the writing of an MA thesis on a historical topic. The course aims toward three specific learning outcomes: to develop fluency in several current models of historical practice; to develop the practical skills necessary for locating and interpreting primary historical sources; and to compose a proposal for an MA thesis. With these goals in mind, the midterm assignment is a 10 page “document collection” essay requiring students to collect, paraphrase, and contextualize five historical documents gathered from New York City-area libraries or archives. The final paper is a thesis proposal—a 15-page document sketching out the student’s topic and preliminary hypothesis, as well as the student’s sources and their locations. (Note: students from other social science or humanities disciplines may write a term paper with a significant historical component in lieu of an MA thesis proposal.) Weekly readings from the instructor’s area of expertise (Latin American history) have been chosen to illustrate different genres and approaches in historical practice today. The course is emphatically not intended to be a survey of the historiography of Latin America, and can only offer a limited sample of important trends in the recent historiography of Latin America. Students’ written work necessarily deals with topics from their own areas of research, which (in most cases not be Latin America). This course is the first of a pair of seminars (with a single course number) meant to be taken during a student’s second year in the Historical Studies MA program. This course is also a requirement for PhD students who enter the joint doctoral program in Historical Studies without having been in a master’s program at The New School for Social Research. Students register for the Fall and Spring sections of the course separately. The Fall section of the course is a prerequisite for the Spring section. The course is open to Lang seniors with the instructor’s permission, and can serve as a venue in which senior history concentrators develop their thesis topics. Cross-listed as GPOL 6134.
Ayse Banu Bargu, Eli Zaretsky
62
Modernity is characterized by revolutions. Our political landscape and imaginary have been decisively shaped by the experience of the great revolutions in America, France, England, Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Bolivia and Mexico. But what are the ideas, questions, and dilemmas animating these grand transformations? What is the political theory that accompanied these events or their later reception and interpretation? In this course, we are interested in inquiring into the core idea of revolution, its evolution and dissemination, interpretation and critique. We ask what the idea of revolution has achieved, where it has failed, and whether it retains any value today. Readings by Paine, Robespierre, de Tocqueville, Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao, Hannah Arendt, Theda Skocpol, Barrington Moore, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Francois Furet, George Rude, Perry Anderson, among others. GHIS 6715 Cultures of Documentation Spring 2011. Ann Stoler
Documents are cultural artifacts with lives and itineraries of their own. While historians treat documents as the grist of their historiographic labors, they have often neglected to reflect on the content lodged in particular documentary forms. Anthropologists, on the other hand, once steered clear of documents altogether, passively, sometimes aggressively sharing Claude Levi-Strauss contention that ethnology defines itself by the study of “what is not written.” Neither of these postures and approaches holds today. Over the last decade there has been an explosion in attention both to visual and written archives, to “paper trails,” to “paper empires” and to the latin root of documentation, docere, to the “teaching” task that documents perform. In this seminar, we will look at the wide-range of fields and disciplines in which the nature of documents has come into analytic focus and creative question. Our focus will be in part on how documents create the realities which they only ostensibly describe. Principles of organization, systems of storage and retrieval, forms of reproduction, technological innovation—all shape the political forces to which they rise. Documentation can be vital technologies of rule in themselves, the apparatus that shape and permeate our lives. Among the documentary “artefacts of modern knowledge” that we will explore are identity papers, passports, state commissions, as well as letters, diaries, photo albums, electronic record-keeping, and fiction. Readings will include Annalies Riles, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, Chris Penney, Camera Indica, Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, Carolyn Steedman, Dust, Natalie Davis, Fiction in the Archives, Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry, Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets, Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, Estelle Lau, Paper Families.