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The Catholic University of AmericaDepartment of History

HISTORY 601:HISTORICAL ANALYSIS AND METHODOLOGY

Professor Jerry Z. MullerWednesdays, 5:10-7:10pm

McGivney Hall 005Fall, 2013

Office: Marist Hall 226 Office Hours: T, 2:15-3:00 pmW, 3:00-4:00 pm and by appointment.Phone: (202) 319-5484 e-mail: mullerj@cua.edu

This course introduces graduate students to perennial issues and contemporary trends in the academic study of history. It examines the issues of bias and objectivity, the relationship of ideology to social science, and the fructification of historical writing by borrowing from other social sciences. It explores the relationship of theory, generalization, and historical practice. It examines the use of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence. The course aims to make its participants more analytically acute readers and writers of historical works.

Requirements: A seminar of this type depends upon the thoughtful participation of those involved. Each student is therefore expected to read and think about the assigned readings before the relevant class, and to be prepared to discuss the theses, methods, strengths and weaknesses of the assigned works.

Beginning with the session of September 25, each class will begin with a student offering a ten-minute presentation on the most important issues raised by the week’s reading, as well as an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the assigned readings.

There are eleven writing assignments. Students may write from eight to ten of them, and the best eight grades will count toward the course grade. Each assignment should be about three pages in length, and is due at the beginning of the class at which the work in question is discussed. The paper should be well structured, and clearly written and argued.

In addition, each student has the option of writing a review-essay of approximately fifteen pages on a single historian, historiographical approach, or substantive historical problem, drawn either from topics covered in the course or from other topics. Students are encouraged to use the paper to survey the work of one historian as it developed over the course of his or her career, to trace the development of ideas and the relationship between the work and the historian’s

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own historical context. Good subjects, some of whom have produced their own autobiographies, include: Hugh Trevor-Roper, George Mosse, Fritz Stern, Richard Pipes, Bernard Lewis, and Gerda Lerner, but students are free to choose any historian they prefer. Topics and readings should be discussed with Dr. Muller no later than November 6, and the review-essay must be handed in by November 27. This review-essay will count in place of two writing assignments.

There will be three departmental colloquia during the semester, on Wednesdays from 5:15-7:00pm. All grad students are expected to attend and to read the papers in advance. On those evenings, we will hold our class after the conclusion of the colloquium, beginning at 7:15pm, at a location tba.

Grades will be based on the assignments, oral presentations, and on contributions to class discussions. Assuming that participation and the presentation have been neither outstanding nor disastrous, students can presume that their final grade will be no more than one-third of a grade above or below the average of their assignment grades. That is, with an assignment average of an A-, a student can normally expect the final grade to range between an A and a B+. Nonparticipation in discussion, however, could drop the final grade considerably. The university grading system is available at:http://policies.cua.edu/academicgrad/gradesfull.cfm#iii

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Schedule of Classes and Readings

W August 28: Introduction: Read in advance: Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), pp. 1-89.And consider this question: What does Butterfield mean by “the Whig interpretation of history,” and why is his critique significant beyond the immediate context of British history?

Recommended: Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (written 1940), frontmatter, pp. 3-47; 138-144. Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (2001), pp.1-79.Jerry Z. Muller, “Style is Not a Luxury: Reflections on the Prose of the Profs,” AHA Perspectives, March, 2006, athttp://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2006/0603/0603vie1.cfm

W Sept. 4 Library session with Ms. Anne Lesher, Mullen Library

W Sept. 11: The Historical Discipline as Organized Skepticism: Two Case Studies

a. Christopher Hill, “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” in Hill, Continuity and Change in Seventeenth-Century England (1974) (on Blackboard)

J.H. Hexter, “The Historical Method of Christopher Hill” in his On Historians (on Blackboard)

b. Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud – American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis and Goodwin (2204) (on Blackboard)

Joyce Lee Malcolm, Review of Arming America, Texas Law Review, 79 (May 2001), pp. 1657-76 (Blackboard)

Assignment 1: What are Hexter’s main criticisms of Hill? How effective is his critique?

Recommended:Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Present Standpoints and Past History,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 36, No. 18 (August, 1939), pp. 477-489.Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (1997)David Lowenthal, “How we know the past?” from The Past is a Foreign Country, (Cambridge, 1985), pp.185-238

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Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, “Pattern, Bias, and the Great Systems,” from The Modern Researcher, fourth ed. (New York, 1985), pp. 193-215.Max Weber, "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," in Dallmayr and McCarthy (ed.), Understanding and Social Inquiry, pp. 24-37;David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York, 1970)Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory ed. Lewis Coser (Chicago, 1992)Robert K. Merton, “The Perspectives of Insiders and Outsiders,” in Merton, The Sociology of Science (New York, 1973), pp.99-136; slightly abridged version in Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science ed. Sztompka (Chicago, 1996), pp. 241-63;Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, Revised edition (New York, 1972)Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988)Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians/.John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (New York, 1992)Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (California, 1994), esp. ch. 1 and 2.

Th Sept. 12 – Lecture by Professor John Connelly, location tba- read in advance:Forum on Connelly, From Enemy to Brother in Catholic Historical Review, Volume 98, Number 4, October 2012, pp.751-766, and Jerry Z Muller, review of From Enemy to Brother, Central European History, Vol. 46, #2 (2013), pp. 439-442.

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W Sept. 18: Archives, and More Organized Skepticism

Exercise: A. Go to an archive or rare book room in the Washington DC area in order to

read a manuscript or rare book on a topic of interest to you. Suggested facilities include: The Folger Library, the Rare Book Room at Mullen Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the archives of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, or the American Catholic History Collection at CUA. Be prepared to discuss your excursion in class.For guidance, consult:

http://archiveswiki.historians.org/index.php/US_States

and here is some useful advice on contacting archives:

http://blog.historians.org/2013/06/summer-tips-for-visiting-archives/

B. Spend some time using an online archive. Be prepared to discuss your experience with the class. Some examples of archives online:

Founders papers:http://founders.archives.gov/

Hannah Arendt papers at LC:http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/

Leo Baeck Institute archives:http://www.lbi.org/

C. Bring to class an example of a scholarly book (or one that gives the appearance of a scholarly book) that you believe does not meet the standards of historical objectivity. Be prepared to explain why.

Recommended: Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1990)Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Cornell, 2007)Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (2005)Wayne C. Booth, et al., The Craft of Research, 3rd Edition (Chicago, 2008)Thomas Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research (Oxford, 2005)Mary George, The Elements of Library Research (Princeton, 2008)

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W Sept. 25: Analytic history as integrated historyMarc Bloch, Feudal Society, Foreword, Introduction, skim 3-38, read pp. 39-92, 103-175, 219-230, 281-331, 345-58, 441-53.

Assignment 2: What are the key characteristics of the model of feudal society as put forward by Bloch? Please bring 11 copies of this essay to class, as it will be shared with your classmates. Also please bring 11 copies of the notes that you took on Bloch with you to class, also to be shared.

Recommended: Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89, Chapters 1-3Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics;Bloch, The Historian’s CraftBloch, The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and EnglandBloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1941For a brief biography and character sketch see Eugen Weber, “About Marc Bloch,” in Weber, My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Harvard, 1991), pp.244-258;Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge UP, 1991) by Carole Fink, is a more extensive biographyReynolds, Susan, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1996) is an important re-examination of some of issues raised by Bloch.Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II with J. H. Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien…” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 480-539

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W Oct. 2 Total History from the Ground Up/Family/WomenS. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: Vol. 1, Frontmatter, pp.1-42 (can be read online through ACLS Humanites E-books, available through Aladin),and selections from Vol. 3: The Family (also available online, but you will find it easier to read from the book, which you should bring to class), pp. Frontmatter, pp. 1-65, 118-135, 160-189, 205-212, 223-240, 312-359.

Assignment 3: How does Goitein bring detailed research together with broad historical and social scientific perspectives to illuminate otherwise hidden areas of historical experience?

Recommended:S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society 6 volumes. The one volume abridgement, edited by Jacob Glassner in 1999, has a useful Foreword and Addendum about Goitein and Geniza studies; on Goitein, see also Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2011).Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962).Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error(French original, 1975).David Herlihy, Medieval Households (1985)David Herlihy, Opera muliebria: Woman and Work in Medieval Europe (1990)Mary Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (1984).

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W Oct. 9: First Colloquium – Prof. West, "’The Stupendous Folly of the 15th Amendment:" Debates over the Repeal of a Constitutional Amendment, 1900-1909’”(Class follows colloquium)

Class topic: Intellectual History David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013), pp.1-216. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” History and Theory 8 (1969), pp. 3-53.

Assignment 4: To what extent would Skinner approve of Nirenberg’s book? If you anticipate that Skinner would have criticized some aspects of Nirenberg, are those criticisms merited, or can you mount a defense on Nirenberg’s behalf? Please bring 10 copies of this essay to class in order to share them.

Recommended:Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its TriumphJerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European ThoughtArthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936)Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967; revised edition, 1992) J.G.A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (2009)Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996)Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979)Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (1989)Donald Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (2002)Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition (1999)James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (1994)Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1992)—at the intersection of intellectual history and philosophyLionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (2000)

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W Oct. 16: The Macro and the Micro/Historical SociologyNorbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (2 volumes) (German original, 1939)Vol. 1, The History of Manners, start with 221-223, then Preface, then pp.51-218 (in the revised edition, pp. 449-451; then Preface, then, 45-182)Vol. 2, Power and Civility, pp.1-12, 229-250 (in the revised edition 187-194; 363-381)There is a more recent, revised edition: The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (2000), but the differences are minor, and the print is smaller. So feel free to use the older edition.

Assignment 6: How does Elias connect large-scale processes with the transformation of the psyche of individuals?

Recommended:

Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (2003)Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977—1978.Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011)

W Oct. 23: Military HistoryJohn Keegan, The Face of Battle (1976)

Assignment 7: What are the strengths and limits of Keegan’s form of military history?

Recommended: Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 Second Edition (Cambridge UP, 1996).John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (1989) Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006)John A. Lynn, “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History” Journal of Military History 61.4 (1997): 777-789.Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995)Russell Weigley, The American Way of War (1973)Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)David Bell, The First Total War (2008)

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W Oct. 30 The History of ReligionEamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580, Preface to the Second Edition, pp. 1-206 377-423.

Exercise: Using Dr. Muller’s technique for skimming an academic book, spend an hour looking through the Duffy. Write a paragraph summarizing the main points of the book. Then read the entire selection and write a short reflection. To what extent did you, through skimming, capture the main ideas of the book?

Assignment 5: What are Duffy’s key arguments? What is the position he is attacking, and how is it related to what Butterfield called “the Whig interpretation of history”? Does Duffy provide an account that surpasses the Whig interpretation, or merely reverse its biases?

Recommended: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-2)John Tracy Ellis, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life” Thought 30 (1955)Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (California 1988) [For a stark contrast, see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago 1987)]Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1982) Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia 1988)Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CapitalismNorman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1970)Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2010)

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W Nov. 6 Departmental Colloquium: Simon Ditchfield (University of York), Chapter on “The Catholic Reformation” for the forthcoming Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation”

class follows colloquiumClass topic: Marxist historyMarx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Preamble and Part IRobin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (1997, republished 2010), Introduction, and chapters 1, 8, 9, 12, Epilogue.

Assignment 8: Based upon this book, what are the strengths and weaknesses of Marxist historiography?

Recommended: Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)Walter L. Adamson, “Marxism and Historical Thought” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza*“Marx and History,” in Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1997); as well as the rest of the volumeHarvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Polity Press, 1984), chapter five - a sympathetic study;Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The ‘Group’: British Marxist Historians,” in her The New History and the Old (Harvard UP, 1987), pp.70-93- an unsympathetic studyLeszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (combined volume: Norton, 2008)Chris Wickham, “Memories of Underdevelopment: What Has Marxism Done for Medieval History, and What Can It Still Do?” in Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century

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W Nov. 13 Economic History/Environmental History William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), Preface, 1-151; 207-end.

Assignment 9: In what senses is this a work of economic history? What does a focus on the environment add to economic history? Why is a focus on economic processes central to environmental history?

Recommended: J. D. Hughes, What is Environmental History (Polity, 2006, 78-0745631899) Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011)John McNeill, “Reflections on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History” History and Theory 42:4 (2003): 5-43.William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (1996)Alfred Crosby, Ecological ImperialismLonda Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (2005)Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (1949, 2nd ed. 2010)Mark, Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997)David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (2006)John McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010)There is a useful roundtable on William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” in Environmental History (1996)Carolyn Merchant, “Gender and Environmental History,” Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1117-1121

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W Nov. 20 – Lecture by Prof. Tentler on effects of Vatican II on American CatholicsClass follows lecture

Class topic: History of International Relations/ Political History/ Contingency and HistoryChristopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, pp.1-241.

Recommended:Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton, 2006).

Assignment 10: Discuss the range of sources used by Clark.

W Nov. 27 – Thanksgiving – No Class

W Dec. 4 – Final ClassChristopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, pp.242-563 (skim ch.5 and 9).

Recommended: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian WarD.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1938)Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (1959)A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (1954)David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (1994)Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power (1996)

Assignment 11: Discuss the issues of agency and intention on one hand, and structure on the other, in Clark’s account of the origins of the First World War.

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The required books are recommended for purchase, and should be available in the CUA bookstore as well as on Amazon. They may also be borrowed from the WRLC library system.

Journals that deal frequently with historiographical issues include:

American Historical Review

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Historically Speaking

History and Theory

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Two non-professional journals that publish historical reviews of a high order are The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.

Stimulating works which touch upon a variety of issues dealt with in this course are Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History; David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies (New York, 1970); Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge, MA, 1979); J. H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisals of some the masters of modern history (Cambridge, MA, 1979); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, MA, 1987); Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present, Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (1975); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacobs, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994).