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
- 📗 = more accessible / easier reading
- 📕 = more intellectually challenging reading
- Most sessions have one of each; always read the 📗 first
UNIT I: What Is History?
1
1.1: Welcome — What Do You Already Know About History?
No readings for today. Come ready to talk.
Activity: History Inventory
- What was the last “historical” thing you encountered—a movie, a textbook, a monument, a family story, a TikTok?
- Where did it come from? Who made it? Why?
- Canvas post: What is the difference between “the past” and “history”?
Discussion
- Is a family story “history”? Is a Wikipedia article? Is a monument? What makes something count?
1.2: The Past vs. History
- 📗 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.
-
📗 Alice Dreger, What is History?.
The significance of the anecdote offered at the beginning of this piece is not explicitly stated, but it should be. The point here is that every time we ask WHY? about anything, we can focus either on immediate practical implications (physics), or on much larger structural, social explanations (history). They are both important because they provide different kinds of answers. Those who can move fluidly between these ways of thinking and understanding will be more astute problem solvers in any career.
- 📕 E.H. Carr, What Is History? (1961), Ch. 1: “The Historian and His Facts,” 3–35. A classic. Carr argues that facts don’t speak for themselves—historians choose which facts matter. Dense but rewarding; don’t worry about getting every reference.
Discussion
- What’s the difference between a “fact” and a “historical fact”?
- Carr wrote in 1961. Has anything about his argument changed?
- What surprised you?
2
2.1: Storytelling, Memory, and Myth
- 📗 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. Fun to read; pay attention to HOW he tells the story, not just what happens.
- 📕 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, the “Funeral Oration of Pericles” and the “Melian Dialogue” (selections, ~15 pp.). Thucydides is harder—more analytical, less colorful. He claims to write only what he can verify. Notice the contrast with Herodotus.
Discussion
- What counts as evidence for Herodotus? For Thucydides?
- Why do they tell such different kinds of stories about the past?
- Is Herodotus a historian or a storyteller? Does the distinction matter?
2.2: History as Moral Instruction
- 📗 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita (selections on the founding of Rome), ~10 pp. Romans writing about their own origins. Notice how the story serves a purpose beyond “what happened.”
- 📗 Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian (selection on the fall of Xiang Yu), ~10 pp. The Chinese tradition of history-writing has its own logic. What is Sima Qian trying to accomplish?
- 📕 Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (Chicago, 2017), Ch. 1: “History’s History,” 1–25. A modern historian’s overview of how the discipline has changed over time. Good framing for the whole course.
Discussion
- Why do ancient historians think the past is useful? Useful for what?
- How are the Chinese and Roman traditions similar? Different?
- Maza says historians have always been shaped by their own time. How so?
3
3.1: Medieval History, and Divine Plans
- 📗 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.
- 📗 Excerpts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (selected annals), ~5 pp. Bare-bones year-by-year record. What counts as worth recording?
- 📕 Gabrielle Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 59–86. Challenging but important: Spiegel argues that medieval chronicles aren’t naive—they are doing political work through the form of history. Skim for the argument rather than every detail.
Discussion
- What makes Bede’s history different from Herodotus or Thucydides?
- What role does God play as a historical actor?
- If miracles are evidence, what kind of truth is being claimed?
3.2: History as Power — Early Modern Statecraft
- 📗 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.
- 📕 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard, 1997), Ch. 1, ~25 pp. How did the footnote—that boring thing at the bottom of the page—become the mark of trustworthy history? Grafton shows it was invented, not inevitable.
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)?
- Why should you care about footnotes?
4
4.1: Inventing National Histories
- 📗 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), 1–14. Short, punchy, and eye-opening: many “ancient” traditions were invented recently. Accessible and full of great examples.
- 📕 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.
Discussion
- What is an “invented tradition”? Can you think of examples from your own life?
- Anderson says nations are “imagined.” Does that mean they’re not real?
- What role does history play in making a nation feel real?
4.2: Whose Nation? Whose Story?
- 📗 James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), Ch. 1: “Handicapped by History,” ~25 pp. Why American textbooks are bad at history. Written for a general audience, often funny, and probably relevant to your own experience.
- 📕 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (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, who decides what’s significant. This is one of the most important readings in the course.
Discussion
- Loewen blames textbooks. Trouillot blames the process. What’s the difference?
- Where does “silencing” happen, according to Trouillot?
- Think of a historical event you learned about in school. What might have been silenced?
5
5.1: History as Progress
- 📗 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. A new idea in his time.
- 📕 Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784), ~15 pp. Kant argues that history has a direction—toward reason and freedom. Difficult prose, but the core idea is straightforward: what if history is going somewhere?
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?
5.2: The Dark Side of Progress Narratives
- 📗 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” (TED Talk, 2009), ~19 min. Not about historiography per se, but a powerful illustration of how dominant narratives flatten complex realities. Watch before reading Said.
- 📕 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. Dense, but Adichie helps you see what Said is getting at.
Discussion
- How does Adichie’s “single story” connect to Enlightenment progress narratives?
- What does Said mean by “Orientalism”? Is it just about the Middle East?
- Can you identify a “single story” about a place or group you’ve encountered?
6
6.1: Scientific History and the Dream of Objectivity
- 📕 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (1988), Ch. 1 (“That Noble Dream”), ~25 pp. Novick tells the story of how historians tried to become “scientific” and objective in the 19th century. Readable and often wry.
- 📕 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.
Discussion
- What does “objectivity” mean for a historian? Is it possible?
- Why did Ranke’s idea feel revolutionary?
- Novick suggests the dream of objectivity has a history of its own. What does that mean?
6.2: Building the History Machine — Archives, Universities, Journals
- 📗 Bonnie Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1995): 1150–1176 (read first half, ~15 pp.). Smith shows that the professionalization of history was also a story about who got to be a historian. Spoiler: mostly men.
- 📕 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1975), Ch. 2: “The Historiographical Operation” (selections), ~15 pp. De Certeau argues that history is produced in specific places (universities, archives) with specific practices (footnotes, peer review). The institution shapes what counts as history.
Discussion
- Who was excluded from professional history? Why does that matter for the stories that got told?
- What is de Certeau’s point about the “place” of history?
- How do institutions shape what we think of as legitimate knowledge?
Activity
- Think of something you know about the past that you did NOT learn from a professional historian. Where did you learn it? Why does that source exist?
7
7.1: Marx and the Idea That History Has a Motor
- 📗 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Part I: “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” ~15 pp. You’ve probably heard of this. Read it as a piece of historical argument: Marx says class struggle is the engine of history. It’s short, punchy, and dramatic.
- 📕 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), opening sections, ~15 pp. Marx’s most historiographical piece. Famous opening line about history repeating “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Harder than the Manifesto, but full of quotable ideas about how history works.
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?
7.2: Big Structures — The Annales School
- 📗 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.
- 📕 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. Good context for understanding Braudel.
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?
8
8.1: Social History — History From Below
- 📗 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 accessible.
- 📕 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.
Discussion
- What does “history from below” mean? Below what?
- Who is missing from the histories you learned in school?
- Is recovering “hidden” histories enough, or do we need to change how we think about history itself?
Midterm paper assigned. Due Week 10.
8.2: Culture as Evidence — Reading the World Differently
- 📗 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.
- 📕 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. The famous example: what’s the difference between a wink and a twitch? Foundational for cultural history.
Discussion
- How does Davis 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”?
UNIT V: Who Gets to Speak? Power, Identity, and Critique
9
9.1: Gender as a Category of Historical Analysis
- 📗 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.
- 📕 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990), Preface to the 1999 edition + Ch. 1 (selections), ~15 pp. Butler pushes further: gender isn’t just a social role, it’s performed. Hard reading but transformative. Focus on the big idea rather than every sentence.
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?
- Butler says gender is performed. What would a history of “performance” look like?
9.2: Race, Empire, and the Colonial Archive
- 📗 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. A stunning chapter.
- 📕 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (2000), Introduction, ~20 pp. Chakrabarty argues that all modern historical thinking has been shaped by European categories—and asks what happens when we try to think outside them. Ambitious and challenging.
Discussion
- Why was the Haitian Revolution “unthinkable”?
- What does Chakrabarty mean by “provincializing” Europe?
- What kinds of history become possible when we decenter Europe?
10
10.1: Postcolonial Histories and Subaltern Voices
- 📗 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988)—use the shorter 1994 revised version in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ~20 pp. Spivak asks whether people who are systematically excluded from power can ever truly “speak” through history. Famous and difficult, but the core question is clear.
- 📕 Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” (1983), selections, ~15 pp. Guha reads colonial archives against the grain, showing how official documents about peasant uprisings in India can reveal the rebels’ perspective—if you know how to look.
Discussion
- Can the subaltern speak? What does Spivak mean by that question?
- How does Guha read “against the grain” of colonial archives?
- What are the limits of trying to recover voices from archives that weren’t designed to preserve them?
Midterm paper due.
10.2: History and Public Memory
- 📗 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 what they leave out. Pick a case study that interests you.
- 📕 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Nora argues that “sites of memory” (monuments, holidays, archives) emerge precisely because living memory is disappearing. A theoretical frame for thinking about why we build monuments at all.
Discussion
- What’s the difference between memory and history?
- Why do communities build monuments? What work do monuments do?
- Pick a monument or memorial you know. What story does it tell? What doesn’t it say?
UNIT VI: Language, Narrative, and the Limits of Knowing
11
11.1: The Linguistic Turn — Is History Just a Story?
- 📗 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.
- 📕 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, which makes it lively even when you disagree.
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?
11.2: Microhistory — History in a Grain of Sand
- 📗 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.
- 📕 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.
Discussion
- 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”?
- How does microhistory relate to the “history from below” we read in Week 8?
12
12.1: Memory, Trauma, and the Limits of Representation
- 📗 Art Spiegelman, Maus (1986), selections (~30 pp. of graphic novel). A son tells his father’s story of surviving the Holocaust—as a comic, with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The medium raises questions about how we can (and can’t) represent trauma.
- 📕 Saul Friedländer, “Introduction” to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (1992), ~15 pp. Friedländer asks: are there events so extreme that our usual ways of writing history break down? What are the ethical stakes of representation?
Discussion
- Why does Spiegelman use a comic to tell this story? What does the form accomplish?
- Are there events that are “too much” for history to represent? What does Friedländer think?
- What is the historian’s responsibility when writing about trauma?
12.2: Whose History? History Wars and Public Controversy
- 📗 Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (1996), Introduction, ~20 pp. The story of how a Smithsonian exhibit about the atomic bomb became a national controversy. A vivid case study in what happens when historical narratives collide with public identity.
- 📕 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. We often confuse them.
Discussion
- Why did the Enola Gay exhibit provoke such a fight?
- What’s the difference between heritage and history?
- Can you think of a current “history war”? What’s really at stake?
UNIT VII: Digital, Global, Environmental
13
13.1: History in the Digital Age
- 📗 Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (2006): 117–146 (first 15 pp.). Rosenzweig takes Wikipedia seriously as a historical project. Surprisingly respectful and nuanced.
- 📕 Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 377–402 (first 15 pp.). Putnam asks what happens when historians can search millions of digitized documents. Does it change the stories we tell? Not always for the better.
Discussion
- Is Wikipedia good history? What makes it different from a textbook or a monograph?
- What does Putnam mean by “shadows”?
- How does the medium of history (book, website, database, video) shape the history itself?
Activity
- Compare the Wikipedia article and a scholarly source on the same historical event. What’s different? What’s better about each?
13.2: Global and Transnational History
- 📗 Pamela Crossley, What Is Global History? (Polity, 2008), Ch. 1, ~20 pp. An accessible introduction to why historians started thinking beyond national borders. Clear and well-organized.
- 📕 Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, 2016), Introduction, ~20 pp. Conrad pushes further: global history isn’t just “history of everywhere”—it requires rethinking the frameworks we use to understand the past.
Discussion
- What’s the difference between “world history” and “global history”?
- Why did historians start thinking globally? What changed?
- What’s lost when we abandon national frameworks?
14
14.1: Environmental History — Nonhuman Actors
- 📗 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 a story of progress or decline. A brilliant meditation on narrative and nature.
- 📕 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—and that this breaks many of our usual frameworks.
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”?
14.2: AI, Algorithms, and the Future of History
- 📗 Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2017). Underwood explains how computers can “read” thousands of books at once and what that means for how we understand the past. Written for a general audience.
- 📕 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (2014), Ch. 4: “Big Questions, Big Data,” ~20 pp. Guldi and Armitage argue that historians need to think bigger—longer time scales, more data, more public engagement. Controversial within the discipline.
Discussion
- 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?
UNIT VIII: History All Around You
15
15.1: History in Daily Life — Seeing What’s Hidden in Plain Sight
- 📗 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. Accessible and visual.
- 📕 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 the things we take for granted. A fitting capstone reading.
Discussion
- What histories are embedded in your daily environment that you’ve never noticed?
- What does Trouillot mean by the “presence” of the past?
- How does this change the way you see your own neighborhood, campus, city?
Activity
- Walk around campus or your neighborhood. Identify three things that embody a historical narrative (a building name, a street name, a monument, a mural, a tradition). Who made that narrative? What work is it doing?
15.2: Workshop — Final Projects
No new readings. Bring your final project draft or plan.
- Peer feedback: What kind of history is your project analyzing? What “turn” or approach from the course does it connect to?
- Discussion: How do the histories around us shape daily life even when they don’t look like “history”?
16
16.1: Presentations — “How History Works Around Me”
Final project presentations. Come prepared to:
- Briefly describe the piece of “history” you analyzed
- Explain what kind of history it is and why it was made
- Discuss what it reveals—and what it hides
- Reflect on how the course changed the way you see it
16.2: Making History — What Now?
- 📗 Sam Wineburg, “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts,” Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7 (1999): 488–499. Wineburg argues that thinking historically doesn’t come naturally—it has to be learned. A fitting final reading that puts the whole course in perspective.
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?
Final Project Due: [DATE TBD]
Format options: essay (~2000 words), podcast (~10 min), annotated source set, digital exhibit, or poster. Whatever format you choose, your project must demonstrate that you can identify a piece of “history” in daily life and analyze how and why it was made, using ideas and frameworks from the course.