Schedule of Readings & Activities

General Info

• Regular bullet points listed under each session indicate what you should READ BEFORE CLASS
• Readings are listed in the order that I think works best
• ALL readings are available online or through Zotero

---

1: Foundations

The course starts with a question that sounds simple but isn’t: what’s the difference between “the past” and “history”? By the end of this week you’ll have a working answer — and you’ll start noticing history-making happening in places you never thought to look.

1.1: Welcome and Introduction

• Course and syllabus introduction.
• 📗 James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), Ch. 1: “Handicapped by History,” ~25 pp. Why American textbooks are bad at history. Read as a case study of how national history gets made — and distorted.

Discussion: What counts as history?

• Is a family story “history”? Is a Wikipedia article? Is a monument?
• What makes something “count”?

1.2: The Past vs. History

The word “history” means a lot of things. Academic discipline, a political claim, as a way of making sense of the world. These readings use different angles to highlight a crucial distinction: the past is everything that happened; history — or more accurately histories — are purposeful, selective accounts of it that serve a purpose. And those purposes have always been constantly changing.

• 📗 Alice Dreger, What is History?. A short, accessible piece that uses an anecdote to show the difference between immediate practical explanations and structural historical ones. Good entry point.
• 📗 John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000), Ch. 1: “What is History?,” 1–18. Short, lively, written for beginners. Sets up the basic puzzle: history is not the same thing as the past.
• 📜 E.H. Carr, What Is History? (1961), Ch. 1: “The Historian and His Facts,” 3–35. Carr is one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers about historical method. His argument — that facts don’t speak for themselves, that historians choose which facts matter — is foundational for the course. Focus on the central argument rather than every obscure reference that you’re not supposed to get anyway.

Discussion

• What’s the difference between a “fact” and a “historical fact”?
• Carr wrote in 1961. Has anything about his argument changed?

---

2: Ancient History and Myth

Ancient historians had strong opinions about what history was for, how to tell it, and what counted as evidence — and they disagreed with each other. This week we read them to compare those opinions across cultures and centuries. The question to keep in mind across all the readings: why do societies need stories about their past?

2.1: Storytelling, Evidence, and Purpose — The Greeks

The Greeks basically invented Western historical writing — but there wasn’t agreement about how to do it. One approach favored vivid storytelling and moral lessons; the other demanded strict evidence and cool analysis. Both choices shaped what counted as “real” history for centuries, and the tension between them hasn’t gone away.

• 📗 Jeremy Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography (2016), 26–40.
• 📜 Selections from Herodotus, The Histories, Book 1 (the opening pages + the story of Croesus), ~15 pp. The so-called “father of history” tells stories that mix research, hearsay, and moral lessons. Don’t worry about the details — pay attention to HOW he tells the story, not just what happens, and what he seems to think history is for.
• 📜 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, the “Funeral Oration of Pericles” and the “Melian Dialogue” (selections), ~15 pp. More analytical and harder than Herodotus. Thucydides claims to write only what he can verify. Focus on the contrast: what counts as evidence for each, and why does it matter?

Discussion

• What counts as evidence for Herodotus? For Thucydides?
• Both are writing about the past — why do they tell such different kinds of stories?
• Is Herodotus a historian or a storyteller? Does the distinction matter?

2.2: Ancient History — Purpose and Form

Rome and Han dynasty China produced historical writing around the same time, in complete independence from each other — and arrived at strikingly similar conclusions about what history is for, but with telling differences. Reading them side by side helps us see where they agree, where they diverge, and what that tells us about why societies write history at all.

• 📜 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Preface + Book I, Ch. 57–60 (“The Rape of Lucretia”), ~10 pp. Read the preface first — Livy tells you exactly what he thinks history is for. Then read the Lucretia passage and notice how a single dramatic story carries enormous moral and political weight: the end of a dynasty, the birth of a Republic, all hinging on one woman’s death. This is what Livy means when he says history provides moral examples.
• 📜 Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian (selection on the fall of Xiang Yu), ~10 pp. Writing in Han dynasty China around 100 BCE, Sima Qian invented Chinese historical biography. His account of Xiang Yu’s defeat is vivid, morally complex, and structured very differently from Livy. But both historians use dramatic narrative about political downfall to make arguments about power and virtue. What is Sima Qian’s argument? How does the form of the story carry it?

Discussion

• Livy says in his preface that history exists to provide moral examples. Does the Lucretia passage do that? How?
• Both Livy and Sima Qian use dramatic stories of political collapse. What’s similar about how they work? What’s different?
• Why do ancient historians — writing in very different cultures, with very different audiences — seem to agree that the past should be useful?

---

3: Medieval and Early Modern

Every society decides who gets to write history and what counts as valid evidence. This week we see very different answers — a Christian monk using miracles as proof, a bare-bones chronicle that just records events, an Islamic scholar insisting on strict sourcing, and a Renaissance politician reading history for practical lessons. The contrast can be stark. Week 4 will show how modern historians made their own version of those same decisions and called them “objective.”

3.1: Medieval Divine Histories

Medieval historians didn’t share our assumptions about evidence, causation, or what history was supposed to accomplish. For a Christian monk, God was a perfectly valid historical force. For an Islamic scholar studying a foreign culture, the goal was rigorous cross-cultural documentation. These three texts show very different answers to a question the ancient world hadn’t settled: what makes history trustworthy?

• 📗 Jeremy Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography (2016), 40–47.
• 📜 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (selections), ~10 pp. A monk writing the history of England as the story of Christianity’s arrival. Miracles are evidence here. Pay attention to what Bede thinks history is for — compare his answer to Livy’s.
• 📜 Excerpts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (selected annals), ~5 pp. Bare-bones year-by-year record. What counts as worth recording — and what gets left out entirely?
• 📜 Al-Biruni, Kitab al-Hind (The Book of India), Preface, ~8 pp. Writing in the Islamic world around 1017 CE, Al-Biruni traveled to India to study its culture, learning Sanskrit and consulting sources before making any claims. His preface reads almost like a modern methodology section: he names his biases, describes his sources, and explains what kinds of evidence he will and won’t trust. Set alongside Bede, it shows a very different medieval answer to the question of how history should be done — and who gets to do it.
• 📙 Gabrielle Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990). Spiegel argues that medieval chronicles do active political work through the form of history — the key argument behind the discussion of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Discussion

• What makes Bede’s history different from Herodotus or Thucydides? From Livy?
• What role does God play as a historical actor for Bede? What plays a comparable role for Al-Biruni?
• Al-Biruni explicitly describes his methodology — what does that tell you about what he thinks good history requires?
• If miracles count as evidence for Bede, what counts as evidence for Al-Biruni? For the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle?

3.2: Early Modern Statecraft

By the Renaissance, some writers had a sharply practical answer to “what is history for?”: it teaches you how power works. Machiavelli is the famous example, but even something as dry as the scholarly footnote turns out to have been invented for reasons that have as much to do with authority as with accuracy.

• 📗 Jeremy Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net (2016), Ch. 3: “The Historiographical Revolution of the Early Modern Era”, 49–69.
• 📜 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch. 1–8 (selections), ~20 pp. Machiavelli reads history for lessons about how to get and keep power. History is a toolkit. Read for the argument — you don’t need to track every historical reference he makes.

Discussion

• How does Machiavelli use historical examples?
• What’s the difference between using history to teach virtue (ancients) and using it to gain power (Machiavelli)?
• Grafton says the footnote was invented. What does that tell us about how authority in history is constructed?

4: Enlightenment and Scientific History

The Enlightenment produced a new theory of what history meant: reason was advancing, civilization was improving, and therefore history had a direction. That idea shaped how historians wrote for two centuries. The second session shows what it looked like when those ideas were institutionalized into a profession — with rules, archives, and a claim to objectivity.

4.1: Enlightenment Progress

The Enlightenment didn’t just produce new history — it produced a new theory of what history meant. If reason was advancing and civilization improving, then history had a direction. That idea seems obvious now, which is exactly why it’s worth examining: where did it come from, and what does it take for granted?

• 📗 Jeremy Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net (2016), Ch. 4,: “The Rise of Academic Scholarship and Nationalist History”, 61–69. Popkin describes what’s new in history during the Enlightenment — the shift from religious and dynastic history toward secular, civilizational narratives.
• 📜 Voltaire, selections from The Age of Louis XIV (1751), ~10 pp. Voltaire thinks history should be about civilization, culture, and manners — not just kings and battles. Seems obvious now, but was a new idea in his time. Read for what he’s arguing history should be, not just what he describes.
• 📙 Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784). Kant argues history has a direction toward reason and freedom — the foundational Enlightenment claim behind this week’s discussion, explained in class.

Discussion

• Why did Enlightenment thinkers believe history had a purpose?
• Is the idea of “progress” a historical fact or a story we tell?
• Who benefits from a story of inevitable progress? Who doesn’t?

4.2: Scientific History

In the nineteenth century, historians began claiming that history could be a science — rigorous, evidence-based, objective in ways earlier history hadn’t been. That claim transformed the profession.

• 📗 Jeremy Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net (2016), Ch. 4: “The Rise of Academic Scholarship and National History”, 71–98. Popkin’s accessible account of nineteenth-century professional history — Ranke, the archive, the university seminar, and the dream of scientific objectivity.

• 📜 Leopold von Ranke, preface to Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations (1824), ~5 pp. The most famous sentence in historiography: Ranke said he wanted to show the past “as it actually was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Very short — read it carefully and think about what he’s claiming and what it would actually take to do it.
• 📙 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1975), Ch. 2: “The Historiographical Operation.” De Certeau argues that history is produced in specific institutional places with specific practices; the institution shapes what counts as legitimate knowledge. Foundational but demanding.
• 📙 Bonnie Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1995): 1150–1176. Smith shows that the professionalization of history was also a story about who got to be a historian — and the structural reasons women were excluded. Important and well-argued; key argument covered in lecture.

Discussion

• What does “objectivity” mean for a historian? Is it possible?
• Why did Ranke’s idea feel revolutionary in 1824? Would it still feel revolutionary today?
• If objectivity is a historical idea with its own history, what does that tell us about how we evaluate it?

5: Structural History

What if the really important history isn’t about events or individuals at all, but about deeper forces — economic systems, geography, long-term climate? Two very different thinkers make versions of that argument this week. It’s worth comparing them to the event-centered histories of Weeks 1–4: what do you gain by zooming out, and what do you lose?

5.1: Marx and the Idea That History Has a Motor

Marx offered the most dramatic version of the structural zoom: not contingency or leadership, but class conflict as the engine driving all of history. Reading him as a historical thinker — not just a political figure — lets you see both the power of that argument and its blind spots.

• 📗 Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History, 2: Marxist Historians, 33–41.
• 📜 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Part I: “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” ~15 pp. Read it as a piece of historical argument: Marx says class struggle is the engine of history. Short, punchy, dramatic — focus on the logic of his claim, not the politics.
• 📜 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), opening sections, ~15 pp. Marx’s most explicitly historiographical piece. Famous opening line about history repeating “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Harder than the Manifesto; focus on his theory of how the past constrains the present.

Discussion

• What is Marx’s theory of historical change?
• Is class struggle a good explanation for everything? What does it miss?
• Why has Marxist history been so influential — and so controversial?

5.2: Big Structures — The Annales School

While Marx saw economics as history’s motor, a group of French historians proposed a different kind of deep structure: geography, climate, trade patterns that move slowly across centuries rather than years. The Annales school turned historical writing upside down — instead of asking “what happened?” they asked “what changed, and how slowly?” Braudel alongside Marx poses the question directly: what do you gain by zooming out to centuries, and what do you lose?

• 📗 Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History, 4: The Annales, 87–95.
• 📗 Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–2014 (2015), Ch. 1–2, ~25 pp. Burke explains how a small group of French historians created an entirely new approach to history. Read before Braudel — Burke is the secondary that explains the school; Braudel is the primary voice from inside it.
• 📜 Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée” (1958), selections, ~15 pp. Braudel argues that the most important history happens slowly — geography, climate, trade routes — not in dramatic events. A genuinely new way of thinking about time. Read after Burke and focus on the core contrast: slow structures versus fast events.

Discussion

• What is the “longue durée”? Why does Braudel think events are less important than structures?
• How is Annales history different from Ranke’s “scientific” history?
• What gets lost when you zoom out to centuries-long patterns?

---

Week 6: History From Below

The “professional” history that emerged in Week 4 mostly told stories about elites. This week we read historians who decided that was a problem and started looking for everyone else — workers, women, communities whose histories survived in memory and oral tradition rather than archives. The question is harder than it looks: to write history about people the archives weren’t designed to remember, you often have to change not just the topic but the method.

6.1: Social History — History From Below

Professional history mostly wrote about elites — kings, statesmen, great thinkers. The historians in this session decided that was a serious problem and started looking for everyone else: workers, women, communities whose histories were preserved in memory rather than archives. What makes this methodologically interesting isn’t just new topics — it’s the argument that the sources themselves need to change.

• 📗 Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), Ch. 1: “The History of Whom?”, 10–44. Maza presents a clear overview of social history — where it came from, what it changed, and what debates it opened.
• 📜 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Preface, ~10 pp. Thompson’s famous preface argues that ordinary people make their own history and deserve to be “rescued from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Passionate and short — read every word.
• 📜 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (1985), Introduction + Ch. 1, ~20 pp. Vansina argues that oral tradition is not myth or folklore but systematic historical evidence — and that African history, much of which was preserved orally, deserves the same methodological rigor as written archives. A direct challenge to the Week 4 professionalization story. Read for the core methodological argument; you don’t need to follow the specific African examples in detail.

Discussion

• What does “history from below” mean? Below what?
• Thompson, Rowbotham, and Vansina all argue that dismissed sources deserve serious historical treatment. What makes a source “dismissible” — and who decides?
• Who is missing from the histories you learned in school? What kinds of sources might recover them?
• Is recovering “hidden” histories enough, or do we need to change how we think about history itself?

6.2: Women’s and Gender History

What if gender isn’t just a topic (the history of women) but a lens for seeing how power works everywhere? Scott’s influential argument is that gender is a system for organizing and naturalizing relationships of authority — not just between men and women, but across all historical relationships. That claim transformed what questions historians thought it was possible to ask.

• 📗 Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History, 10: Gender and History, 253–260.
• 📜 Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (1973), Introduction, ~15 pp. Rowbotham argues that women have been systematically left out of historical narratives — not because they didn’t act, but because historians didn’t look. Read alongside Thompson: the same argument, applied to gender.
• 📜 Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075 (read first 12 pp.). Scott argues that gender isn’t just about women — it’s a framework for understanding how power works in all historical relationships. A landmark article; read slowly and focus on her core definition.
• 📙 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990), Ch. 1 (selections). Butler pushes further than Scott: gender isn’t just a social role, it’s performed. Demanding without philosophy background; core argument explained in class.

Discussion

• What does Scott mean when she says gender is “a useful category”?
• How does thinking about gender change the kinds of history we can write?
• What does it mean that gender is performed?

---

Week 7:

7.1: Microhistory

Microhistory embraces the mundane. Rather than privileging big patterns, microhistorians focused on a single person, event, or community and asked what one case could reveal about the world around it. Ginzburg’s miller is the canonical example — a man whose bizarre ideas were preserved only because the Inquisition found him interesting enough to interrogate, and whose trial record opens a window onto a hidden popular culture. Davis’s case study is the example: a single mystery about a sixteenth-century peasant opens questions about identity, gender, and what people took for granted in their world that no official document was designed to answer.

• 📗 Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), Ch. 5: “Causes or Meanings?”, 178–198. Maza’s overview of the “cultural turn” in history — what it means to treat symbols, rituals, and everyday life as evidence.
• 📗 Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 129–144. Lepore reflects on what microhistorians do — and the emotional and ethical complexities of writing about individual lives. Engaging and self-aware; treat it as secondary commentary on Davis and Ginzburg.
• 📙 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” (1973), ~25 pp. Geertz argues that culture is like a text you have to read, not a mechanism you can explain. Foundational for cultural history but demanding without background in anthropology; key ideas covered in lecture.
• 📜 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976), Preface + Ch. 1–4, ~30 pp. A miller in 1500s Italy is put on trial by the Inquisition for his bizarre cosmological beliefs. Ginzburg uses one person’s story to reveal an entire world of popular culture. Reads like a novel; let it.
• 📜 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), selections, ~20 pp. A peasant in 16th-century France disappears and someone takes his place. Davis uses this one case to reveal an entire world. Read it like a mystery; pay attention to what kinds of evidence she uses and what she asks of them.

Discussion

• How does Ginzburg use a single story to illuminate a whole society?
• What is “thick description”? How is it different from just describing what happened?
• What makes culture a kind of “evidence”?
• What can one person’s story tell us about an entire society?
• What are the risks of microhistory? What does Lepore mean by loving “too much”?

7.2: Course Review So Far

• No readings before class

Discussion

1. Has history gotten better — or just different? The course is structured as a sequence of “turns,” each claiming to fix something the previous approach missed. Ranke corrects Voltaire’s speculation; Marx corrects Ranke’s elitism; Thompson corrects Marx’s abstraction; Ginzburg corrects Thompson’s anonymity. By Week 7, are we closer to the truth — or just accumulating competing frameworks? Is historiography progress or fashion?

2. What is history for? Livy wants moral examples. Voltaire wants civilizational lessons. Ranke wants truth. Marx wants revolution. Thompson wants to rescue the forgotten. Davis wants to understand how people made sense of their world. These aren’t compatible goals — they produce different histories even from the same sources. Which purpose do you find most defensible, and why?

3. The fact/interpretation problem — is it solved? Carr says historians choose which facts matter. Ranke says show it “as it actually was.” Vansina and Thompson say the problem is that the archives were built to exclude certain people, not that interpretation is unavoidable. Does any approach we’ve read actually escape the tension Carr identified on day two? Or does it just move it?

4. Scale and the cost of zooming out (or in). Braudel zooms to centuries; Ginzburg zooms to one miller’s trial. Marx explains everything through class; Davis explains identity through one impersonation case. You can’t do both at once. What do you actually lose when you zoom in — and what do you lose when you zoom out? Is there a scale that’s “right” for historical argument?

---

Week 8: Reflect and Rest

8.1: Midterm Review

8.2: Fall break! No Class. Nothing Due.

---

Week 9: Nations and Decolonization

National histories feel ancient and natural — but most of them were built quite recently, often deliberately, by people who wanted to make a political point. This week’s first session shows how that construction works; the second asks what it looks like from the perspective of those on the receiving end of “civilizing” narratives.

9.1: Inventing Nations

National histories feel ancient and inevitable, but most were actively constructed — often quite recently — to make a political point. This session introduces the key idea that many “traditional” features of national identity were invented and then naturalized.

• 📗 Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), Ch. 2: “The History of Where?,” 45–82. Maza’s accessible overview of how historians have thought about nationalism and national identity — read before Hobsbawm and Anderson as orientation.
• 📜 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), 1–14. Short, punchy, and eye-opening: many “ancient” traditions were invented recently. Full of great examples; skim for the argument and pick out two or three examples that interest you.
• 📜 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983), Ch. 1–2, ~30 pp. Anderson argues that nations are imagined — not fake, but constructed through shared stories, print media, and collective memory. A foundational text. Take it slow; focus on his explanation of why nations need historical narratives.
• 📜 Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?” in The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, 1993), Ch. 1, ~15 pp. Chatterjee responds to Anderson directly from a postcolonial perspective: if colonized peoples’ nationalisms simply followed the European model Anderson describes, why did anti-colonial movements look so different? Read immediately after Anderson; it’s a direct conversation with a text you’ve just finished.

Discussion

• What is an “invented tradition”? Can you think of examples from your own life?
• Anderson says nations are “imagined.” Does that make them fiction?
• Chatterjee says colonized peoples couldn’t simply adopt Anderson’s model. Why not? What did they do instead?
• How does history make a nation feel real — and does that look different depending on who is doing the imagining, and under what conditions?

9.2: Power, Knowledge, and the Archive

Western narratives of progress assumed their own universality — and that assumption shaped not just popular history but the scholarly frameworks historians used to ask questions. This session pairs the experiential critique (what it feels like to have your past flattened or erased) with the theoretical one (how power operates inside the archive itself), and anchors both in a specific historical case that shows the argument at full force.

• 📗 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” (TED Talk, 2009), ~19 min. Watch first — Adichie’s talk is the accessible entry point, showing from the inside how dominant narratives flatten complex realities.
• 📜 Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), Introduction (selections), ~20 pp. Said argues that Western scholarship about the “East” was never neutral — it created a framework of superiority that shaped what historians could even imagine asking. Dense; Adichie helps you see what Said is getting at. Focus on his core claim about how knowledge and power are linked.
• 📜 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995), Ch. 1: “The Power in the Story,” 1–30. Trouillot argues that power operates at every stage of history-making: who creates the sources, who builds the archives, who writes the narratives. One of the most important readings in the course — the framework pays off for weeks.
• 📜 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, Ch. 3: “An Unthinkable History” (on the Haitian Revolution), ~25 pp. Trouillot shows that the Haitian Revolution was literally unthinkable to European historians because it didn’t fit their frameworks. Read Ch. 1 first; this is the argument in action.
• 📙 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (1986), Preface + Ch. 1. Ngũgĩ argues that colonialism’s deepest damage was linguistic — forcing colonized peoples to think and remember in European languages was itself a form of historical erasure. Closely related to Said; key argument covered in lecture.
• 📙 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (2000), Introduction. Chakrabarty argues that all modern historical thinking has been shaped by European frameworks — the foundational postcolonial historiography argument, covered in lecture.

Discussion

• How does Adichie’s “single story” connect to Enlightenment progress narratives?
• What does Said mean by “Orientalism”? How does his argument extend beyond the Middle East?
• According to Trouillot, where does silencing happen? Is it intentional?
• Why was the Haitian Revolution “unthinkable” — and what does that tell us about whose past gets written?

---

Week 10: Linguistic Turn + AI Language

This week pairs two major interventions. The first asks: if history is always told through language and narrative, can it ever be more than a story? The second asks: If history is just words put together in ways we expect, can a computer write it?

10.1: The Linguistic Turn — Is History Just a Story?

The “linguistic turn” is the claim that since historians always use narrative, selection, and interpretation, their work is never a transparent window onto the past. White and Jenkins press that argument hard; Evans pushes back, arguing historians can still make true claims if they’re careful. Read Evans first so you have a counterpoint before the arguments get more extreme.

• 📗 Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), Ch. 8: “The Questions of Narrative”, 204–211.
• 📗 Richard Evans, In Defense of History (1997), Introduction + Ch. 1, ~20 pp. Evans pushes back against the claim that history is just a narrative — he argues historians can make true claims about the past, carefully. Accessible and lively; read before White and Jenkins so you have a counterpoint in mind.
• 📜 Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 5–27 (first 12 pp.). White argues that history isn’t a transparent window onto the past — it uses the same narrative techniques as fiction. Provocative and readable; focus on his central claim, not every example.
• 📜 Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (1991), Ch. 1–2, ~25 pp. Jenkins pushes White’s argument further: if all history is narrative, can we ever really know the past? Written as a polemic — lively and opinionated, meant to provoke.

Discussion

• If history uses narrative techniques like fiction, does that make it fiction?
• What would a history WITHOUT narrative look like? Is that possible?
• Where do you draw the line between a story and a lie?

10.2: Campus History with AI

• Readings on AI and History TBD

---

Week 11: Public History and Memory

All semester we’ve been reading about history being made — in archives, universities, national narratives. This week we ask what happens when it enters public life: monuments, textbooks, museums, built environments. The two sessions work together: the first builds the theoretical framework for thinking about history and memory; the second puts it into practice on the ground around you.

11.1: History, Memory, and Public Space

History and memory are not the same thing — and the gap between them is where public controversy lives. This session builds the framework for thinking about how the past circulates in public life: why certain stories get commemorated while others disappear, and what happens when historical argument enters spaces that weren’t designed for it.

• 📗 James Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999), Introduction + one case study of your choice, ~25 pp. Loewen visits monuments and historic sites and asks what stories they tell — and leave out. Pick a case study that interests you.
• 📗 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1995), Ch. 1, ~20 pp. Hayden shows how the built environment — streets, buildings, neighborhoods — embodies historical narratives that most people walk past without noticing.
• 📙 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Nora argues that sites of memory emerge precisely because living memory is disappearing. A theoretical frame directly relevant to the discussion; covered in lecture.
• 📜 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, Ch. 5: “The Presence of the Past,” ~20 pp. Trouillot’s conclusion: the past doesn’t just sit in archives — it is present in daily life, in rituals, in common sense, in things we take for granted. Read slowly; bring the whole course with you.

Discussion

• What’s the difference between “history” and “memory”? Why does it matter?
• What does Nora mean by a “site of memory”? Can you identify one on campus or in your city?
• Loewen looks at monuments. What historical narratives do they tell, and what do they leave out?
• What does Trouillot mean by the “presence” of the past?

11.2: Campus History + Archives

• AI and the Future of History

---

Week 12: The 1619 Project

When historical argument enters public life — journalism, school curricula, monuments, political debate — the stakes change. This week uses the 1619 Project as a sustained case study: how does serious historical work travel into public space, and what happens when it gets there? The two sessions work together: the first reads Hannah-Jones’s essay as a piece of historical argument; the second asks why the controversy it sparked runs so much deeper than any factual dispute.

12.1: The 1619 Project, Part 1

The 1619 Project is not just journalism — it’s a historiographical act. Nikole Hannah-Jones takes the tools of historical argument and deploys them in a public forum, claiming that slavery and Black resistance are not a footnote to American democracy but its founding contradiction. This session reads the project as history — asking what evidence it uses, what narrative it builds, and what it means to intervene in public memory rather than write for an academic audience.

• 📜 Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Idea of America,” New York Times Magazine (August 19, 2019), ~15 pp. The lead essay from the 1619 Project. Read for its historical argument and for how it uses the past to intervene in the present — that intervention is itself a historiographical act.

Discussion

• What historical argument is Hannah-Jones making? How does she use evidence?
• How is writing for the New York Times Magazine different from writing for an academic journal? What changes — and what stays the same?
• How does this connect to Trouillot’s argument about silencing from Week 8?

12.2: The 1619 Project, Part 2

If history were just an academic exercise, controversies about it would stay in seminar rooms. But history claims authority over the present and future — it shapes identity, legitimates policies, defines who “belongs,” and who gets to make the rules. When those claims are contested, the fight is rarely really about whether the facts are right.

• 📗 Adam Serwer, “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts”, The Atlantic (December 2019), ~15 pp. Serwer argues the controversy over the 1619 Project is less about factual errors than about whose version of America is at stake — a model for analyzing why history wars happen at all. Read first.
• 📜 David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998), Ch. 1, ~20 pp. Lowenthal argues that “heritage” and “history” are fundamentally different things — heritage comforts, history challenges. Read for the distinction and apply it to the 1619 case.

Discussion

• Serwer argues the fight over the 1619 Project isn’t really about historical accuracy. What is it about?
• What’s the difference between Lowenthal’s “heritage” and “history”? How does that distinction help explain why history wars happen?
• Can you think of another current “history war”? What’s really at stake in it?
• Using Trouillot’s framework from Week 8: where does the “silencing” happen when the 1619 Project gets banned from state school curricula?

---

Week 13

Both sessions this week ask what happens when historians look beyond human political events. Environmental history (13.2) placed landscapes and climates at the center; this week the history of science and medicine asks how humans have constructed — and contested — knowledge about the natural world and the body. Both sessions share the question: who gets to say what counts as knowledge, and what are the consequences of that authority?

13.1: History of Science and Medicine

Science and medicine have their own histories — they change, they have turning points, and they are never neutral. This session introduces two frameworks that have shaped how historians think about knowledge production. Kuhn’s account of paradigm shifts has been widely applied to history itself; Foucault’s argument that medical and scientific knowledge is always entangled with power underlies much of what we’ve read since Week 7 without being named.

• 📗 Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), Ch. 3: “The History of What”, 83–108.
• 📗 Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996), Introduction, ~15 pp. Opens with the line “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it” — which immediately signals the argument: scientific knowledge is historically constructed, shaped by social forces and institutional context rather than simply discovered. Written for a general audience; no philosophy background needed.
• 📗 Charles Rosenberg, “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,” in Framing Disease (1992), Introduction, ~15 pp. Rosenberg argues that medical categories are historical constructs — diseases get defined in ways that reflect the social, professional, and moral concerns of the moment. Short and methodologically explicit. If medical categories change over time, what does that mean for historians who use medical records as sources?
• 📙 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Introduction + Ch. 1–2. Kuhn argues that science moves through periods of “normal science” punctuated by paradigm shifts where entire frameworks collapse. Historians have applied this model to their own discipline; the key concept is covered in lecture.
• 📙 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971). Foucault’s most direct statement about historical method — “genealogy” traces the contingent, power-laden processes through which things come to seem natural and inevitable. Underlies much of the power/knowledge critique in Weeks 7–9; covered in lecture.
• 📙 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (2007), Introduction. Traces how scientists’ ideals of objectivity have changed over time — a history of the concept we first encountered with Ranke in Week 4.
• 📙 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997), Introduction. Shows how medical knowledge has shaped — and been shaped by — social power; excellent lecture context.

Discussion

• Shapin says there was “no such thing” as the Scientific Revolution. What does he mean? Does that claim apply to the historiographical “turns” we’ve studied this semester?
• Rosenberg argues that diseases are “framed” — defined in ways that reflect social context. Can you think of an example where that framing mattered?
• If scientific and medical categories change over time, how should historians treat them when they appear in sources?
• How does history of science connect to what Said and Trouillot argued about knowledge and power?

13.2: Environmental History

Most history treats humans as the only meaningful actors and everything else as backdrop. Environmental history argues that’s itself a choice — that landscapes, climates, rivers, and organisms don’t just sit there while humans act on them, but actively shape what’s possible. Cronon shows how the same landscape generates opposite stories depending on how you frame it; Chakrabarty pushes further to ask whether climate change forces historians to reconsider the human species itself as a historical actor.

• 📗 Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), Ch. 3: “The History of What”, 108–117.
• 📗 William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347–1376 (first 15 pp.). Cronon shows how two historians can tell completely opposite stories about the same landscape — the Great Plains — depending on whether they frame it as progress or decline. A brilliant, accessible meditation on narrative and nature; read for the method.
• 📙 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222 (first 15 pp.). Chakrabarty argues that climate change forces historians to think about humans as a geological force — breaking many of our usual frameworks. Dense but important; key theses covered in lecture.

Discussion

• How does Cronon show that nature has a “narrative”?
• What does Chakrabarty mean by humans as a “geological force”?
• Does environmental history change what counts as a historical “actor”?

---

Week 14

14.1:

14.2: Thanksgiving

---

Week 15

15.1: Campus History Reviews

• Student presentations of Campus History Review projects.

Discussion

• What did you find in your research that an algorithm couldn’t have found? What would distant reading miss about the histories you studied?
• What can computers tell us about history that humans can’t? What can’t they tell us?
• What happens when an AI “writes” history? Is it history?
• What is the historian’s role in an algorithmic age?

15.2: Course Wrap Up

Everything we’ve read — Trouillot on silencing, Hobsbawm on invented traditions, White on narrative — applies to the built environment, the street names, the monuments, the school curricula of your daily life. Week 1 asked what the difference between the past and history is. Now you have enough to answer that for yourself, about something real.

Final Discussion

• What does it mean to “make history”?
• Has your understanding of history changed? How?
• Where will you see history at work in your life after this course?
• What kind of historical thinker do you want to be?

---

Week 16: No Class