All work will be submitted on UNM Learn, either through the discussion board or via a quiz.
Everything you need to turn in is listed in a red box. Most weeks have short reading quizzes or reflections due on specified days to keep everyone moving along together and space out the work. But I am also aware that sh!t happens and takes up valuable time unexpectedly. If need be, you can submit work up to TWO DAYS after the due date for full credit IF THE NEED ARISES. But this leeway should be used only as a last resort in the wake of unusual circumstances. Because there is a natural tendency to let things slide until the last weeks of the semester, unless you’ve made arrangements with me (and please do!), work more than 2 days late will be scored a 0.
We use a tool called Zotero to manage PDFs of reading assignments apart from the books. As you read the Zotero set up instructions, you will need the following links. Save yourself confusion by reading the directions FIRST. We use Zotero throughout the semester—and occasionally I add stuff to this during the semester that we’ll use for an assignment—so don’t be foolish enough to think you can get by without it.
Our Zotero Group homepage is https://www.zotero.org/groups/2703269/making-history-unm. This link is best for joining the course Zotero Group.
Our Zotero Library page is https://www.zotero.org/groups/2703269/making-history-unm/library. Once you are a member of our group, this link is best for accessing our Zotero Library.
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.
Peter Sterns, Why Study History?.
USING THE READINGS FOR THIS WEEK—and as a way of getting to know each other just a little bit—answer the following (~200 words): What kinds of history to you find interesting? What reasons for studying history have appealed to you (even if you didn’t think explicitly about them until now)?
GIMICK ALERT: Just for fun (apologies if this ends up being stupid), we’re going to try to connect all our responses together. I’m going to start a thread on the Learn Discussion Board, and everyone is going to reply to the person who posted immediately before them. You don’t need to respond directly or in depth to what the person says, but try your best to connect your post to the previous one. The post you will respond to will probably mention a historical topic or period that you’re familiar with (or really dislike), or have been meaning to learn more about (or intend to avoid), and you can use that as your connection. You and your connection might like totally different topics for the same reason or the same topic for very different reasons.
This assignment is a standard reading reflection, where you should answer the prompts
To understand more about what history is and what it is for, it’s imperative to have a sense of how historical methods, motivations, and interpretations have changed over time. That’s what our first book is about. It’s a very high-level overview that helps keep the big picture of historiographical change in focus. Short lectures and reading guides will complement the text with additional details and historic examples. This book provides a foundation of historical tradition that is necessary to appreciate the critical questions and changes in historical writing that are the focus of our second book.
Popkin’s book is very good at making its main points very clear while providing lots of historical examples and detail, so it’s easy to read slower when getting the more important overview and read more quickly through the details. Don’t treat it like a textbook where everything is equally important.
Some questions to keep in mind while reading and in preparing for the quiz:
Below are a few questions you should address in your reading reflection. For each point that you want to make, give at least one specific example:
This week we continue our historiographical survey.
Originally we had a lecture quiz scheduled for today, but that is CANCELED! Nothing due today. However, the lecture video will help you score higher on the Wednesday reflection.
A few broad questions to (paradoxically) answer in your reflection:
Your quiz will cover the whole chapter as usual, but will focus on one particular question: Why was there a tension between ‘scientific’ history and global conflicts happening in the early 20th century?
We finish up our historiographical survey this week. This week’s chapters cover how approaches to history changed in the second half of the 20th century. We are taking a short break from reading responses in favor of READING SUMMARIES. They are described below.
No video, no quiz, nada. Nothing due for today! Use the time to produce better reading summaries due this week.
Using both readings, make a bullet point list of what you consider the most important historical changes described in the chapter. These should be in your own words—don’t just copy sentences out of the book—and you should have ~8–10 bullet points. Bullet points should be COMPLETE sentences, and you can have more than one sentence in a single bullet to make more complex points. Make sure each bullet is a separate topic.
Same thing as Wednesday (but for today’s assignment, obviously).
Our next book (though we briefly dabbled in it already) introduces and explains some critical questions that we should always be asking about every history we encounter. It covers some of the same material as Popkin’s final chapters, but in a very different way. Unlike the broad chronological overview Popkin gives us, Maza takes a more thematic approach to analyzing contemporary history writing and what’s new about it compared to past traditions. We will apply these questions (and historical examples) to analyzing our final book for the course towards the end of the term. These first two chapters are especially useful for our exercise next week examining how US History should be taught.
WHOM has history been about? How has this changed over time? What shifts do you find most interesting and WHY?
WHERE has history been about? How has this changed over time? What shifts do you find most interesting and WHY?
Having completed our historiographical survey (Popkin) and started to think about critical historical questions (Maza, and her first two chapters are especially relevant for this week), we can reflect more thoughtfully on our own historiographical moment. How should we conceptualize and write about U.S. history?
There are NO DAILY ASSIGNMENTS for this week, just one longer-than-normal reflection essay due on Friday that should demonstrate your familiarity with everything listed below. I have recommended doing work on certain days to space everything out, but you can decide what works for your schedule. HOWEVER, be sure you understand what you need to do for Friday EARLY in the week so that you have time to get everything done.
Browse quickly the full issue of the New York Times Magazine 1619 Project (Aug 26, 2019). The goal here is to get a sense of entire publication—namely what it covers, what it doesn’t, and what perspectives the editors and contributors promote.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Idea of America. An easier-to-read-online version, but without images, is here.
The following two responses to the NYTM issue (and reactions to it) are online, but sometimes access can be limited. In case you can’t access the articles through the links below, they are also in our Zotero library.
After browsing the full issue, reading Hannah-Jones’s introduction, and reading through the two different perspectives on how we should view the project, write a 800-900 word essay to answer the following TWO questions (using roughly half your space for each, but don’t sweat the exact ratio):
WARNING: Make specific use of ALL READINGS THIS WEEK to inform your response. Don’t just rant for or against the project or make bland generalizations about how it’s great or stupid without engaging with the arguments from the readings. There is no right answer, but there are better and worse ways of making an informed argument, and that’s what your grade depends on.
As noted above, two questions:
As a heftier weekly reflection, your 1619 Project reflection (800-900 words) is worth up to 30 points (not counting extra credit, as usual). It uses the same grading rubric as the usual weekly reflections. Be aware that the challenge is NOT simply to fill up the space but to provide thoughtful answers to the questions BASED ON THE READINGS.
This week we’re back to Maza, and in fact mostly finishing with it. We’re reading chapters 3 and 4 carefully this week, but just skimming 5 and 6 next week. Because everything starts to get a little crazy this time of the semester, don’t fret about the specific recommended due dates this week—just BE SURE TO GET EVERYTHING IN BY FRIDAY (or Saturday if you’re hopelessly behind, as I seem to be this semester). There is a video wrap-up (and quiz) on the 1619 Project critiques, but it doesn’t really need to (and won’t) address the Maza chapters, so you can treat them independently.
As Maza explains early in the chapter, history has traditionally been about people, but more recently it’s been about a lot of other stuff. Two questions:
We’re finishing Maza this week, but there are no individual chapter reflections as we’ve done previously. As a few weeks ago, NOTHING DUE UNTIL FRIDAY as we’re winding down for break. Because your assignment this week is to reflect over Maza as a whole, it’s important to be familiar with the final two chapters (5 and 6), but we don’t need to read for the same level of detail.
There is no quiz or reflection on just these chapters, but there is one last reflection on the whole Maza book to close out this half of the term.
Be sure you are providing SPECIFIC examples in addition to generic statements. To say “Maza is useful because it’s organized by question” is basically saying to me that you have no idea what’s in the book.
Remember, it’s a REFLECTION, not a summary. Any brief summary should be in the service of providing examples and illustrating your informed opinion on the questions. I’m looking for your familiarity with the Maza book as a whole; there is a not a list of stuff you’re supposed to mention.
Enjoy the break! And start reading Seven Cheap Things to make life easier over the next month! See Week 11 for a brief introduction.
Welcome back!
Before we dive into our final book for the course, I thought it would be useful to think about how history is written out in buildings and monuments all around us.
There are no daily assignments for this week, just one slightly-longer-than-usual reflection (~600 words/20 points) due on Friday. After reading Monteiro and her argument for the power of architecture and monuments to promote white supremacism, read through the essays about Confederate monuments in the Civil War Monitor and whether they should be left in place or removed. Thanks to our TA Chase for the suggestion and PDF of the CWM.
Lyra D. Monteiro, Power Structures: White Columns, White Marble, White Supremacy,” Medium, November 1, 2020.
Selections from the Civil War Monitor (in Zotero) on preserving Confederate monuments. The first and last essays are interesting but less on this debate specifically, so I would skim them quickly.
A two-part reflection for this week as we ramp up again. Like your final assignment before break, this reflection is double length (~600 words) and double points. In your response, answer the following:
1) Monteiro uses many specific examples to support her argument—no surprise to you that I would like that at this point, right? What do you see as the most important points that she makes about the links between architecture, monuments and white supremacy?
2) The Civil War Monitor pieces are quite short and obviously can’t do what Monteiro does in much more space. How useful is it to have several short essays with different points of view compared to a longer form article with a singular argument? Each form has its advantages and disadvantages, obviously, but which did you find more beneficial? Which (between Monteiro vs the Monitor) changed your understanding or thinking the most? WHY?
We’re reading this book to critique its use of history, not because it’s “right” (you can decide for yourself how much you agree or disagree with it). The book’s goal is to offer a critique of capitalism, but that’s beside the point for us. OUR goal is to apply the Maza book on how we should approach history to this specific text, which has a very particular way of using history. Thinking through how history is used here will help us be more informed and critical readers when we see history invoked in any context.
For each week, you’ll have about 3 chapters to read. The number of pages per week seems high compared to what we’ve been doing but the book is a quick read and we’re not reading it to learn specific information as we were before.
To keep on track, you’ll submit a reading reflection on the assigned chapters at the end of each week (see box directly below), and that will be the only thing to turn in for the week. I will offer a few guiding questions for you to respond to, but you should feel free to address whatever aspects of the chapters are most interesting to you—but remember that the main goal is to make it clear to me that you’re keeping up with the readings and reading carefully enough that you have an informed opinion about them.
For the next few week you’ll be submitting the same kind of reading reflection EACH FRIDAY. Although there is just one thing to turn in per week, your reflection should have distinct sections for each chapter. You should aim for about ~300 words per chapter, which is basically the same as the daily reflections that you were doing earlier. I encourage you to draft your chapter sections as you read them, but I think you will get ideas about how to improve them as you move through the set of chapters for the week, hence one submission per week. Also, it’s just less stuff to post and more flexibility for reading on your own schedule, which isn’t a bad thing at this point.
Feel free to write a little more or less in for each chapter in accordance with how much it resonated with you as long as you’re getting close to ~900 words total. My goal with articulating a word count here is not to be a stickler about it, but to help avoid anyone unintentionally writing way too much or too little.
Your weekly reflection (due end of day Friday) should provide the following FOR EACH CHAPTER:
Standard 7CT weekly reflection. See yellow box just above.
Standard 7CT weekly reflection. See Week 11 Yellow Box.
This reflection is the SAME LENGTH BUT MORE POINTS (~900 words and 30 points) as you’ve been doing. THIS IS NOW DUE MONDAY 4/26!
When we’ve read about history books, usually it’s been about books that discuss particular historical events and explain what happened and why it was significant. 7CT does that to some extent, but obviously the authors are more interested in changing our thinking about capitalism than in expanding our knowledge about the past (despite the plethora of historical examples!).
So 7CT clearly uses history in a very deliberate way with enough historical analysis that it can be classified as a history book. What I want you to think and write about this week is how the book fits in the historiographic tradition that we surveyed in the first half of the course.
Allow me to set the stage a bit more.
The book seems to presume that the past can reveal to us something important about the present (in terms of capitalism, anyway) and can therefore help us shape the future more effectively (instead of, say, repeatedly moving from one capitalist crisis to another). And to do this, the authors have made numerous choices via their historical examples about who/what/when/where to include and exclude in their story of capitalism. Given their approach, do you consider this book a postmodern history? That is, how does it resemble one of the post-1970 history books that Maza described as approaching history in a new and productive way?
Think back to Popkin. We don’t need to compare 7CT to Herodotus or medieval chroniclers, but it might be worth considering how much the global ecology idea central to Patel and Moore is related to the universal histories of the Enlightenment. Or how much their history immersed in capitalist markets might remind us of the Annales school that employed an economic analysis to study history at large scales. If we see in 7CT such similarities to such “big picture” history, perhaps it’s actually a bit old-fashioned.
Two parts to your assignment for FRIDAY (give each roughly equal space [~450 words]):
AS MENTIONED: THIS ASSIGNMENT IS NOW DUE ON MONDAY 5/1!
The article for this week describes the idea that aggregated historical data can be used to predict, if not solve, human crises. The idea is that complex systems, like complex ecologies in nature, may seem impossible to control but if in fact you know how to analyze them, you can devise mathematical models that can help you decide what actions will result in desirable outcomes.
Your penultimate assignment (~900 words and 30 points, as we’ve been doing), is to situate the Spinney article in a larger historiographical context—similar to what we just did with 7CT. We’ve talked both explicitly and implicitly about who history is about, who writes it, how they do it, what history is for, etc. Your task is to evaluate the approach to history as explained in the Spinney given our historiographic overview over the semester. How does this approach reflect previous historiographical traditions? How is it novel? How does it compare with various uses of history that we’ve discussed this term?
There is no right answer! As usual, what’s most important is how you justify your opinion using examples from the course. Just be sure that you clearly and thoroughly explain your thinking. Building off our exercise from last week, the meta-goal of this assignment is to get you to think and write about the fit between methods, goals, and uses of history.
HINT: It’s no accident that 7CT relies heavily on the concept of ecology to explore capitalism AND that the reading this week relies heavily on the concept of ecology to suggest how complex systems (like, say, capitalism and history) behave in predictable ways.
If you haven’t posted your assignment from last week, please do that ASAP.
Your final reflection for the course is a bit different from previous reflections. Instead of responding or a particular reading (and my prompts), it’s a more free-form reflection on the entire course. I want to learn about what from the course is going to stick with you.
I can’t emphasize enough that your final reflection should be personal statements about YOUR LEARNING EXPERIENCE, not just a recitation of course topics. What did you find most interesting? What did you want to want to explore in more depth? Where did you get confused? What connections between topics did you make? What was not part of the course that should have been?
This final assignment is the last chance you have to show off for the course—to present a holistic view of what you learned. Without any new readings this week, I hope you’ll be able to spend some time skimming back through what we’ve read. You’ll read some things a bit differently and maybe notice a few things that you didn’t before. Most importantly, it gives you a chance to take in a bird’s eye view of the course and make connections between readings and ideas that simply weren’t possible when going through them for the first time.
No reason to change now! Same rubric, 800-900 words, 30 points. Beyond your numeric score, this final assignment is a last chance for a grade tweak. if you’re near the bubble between two grades as far as your point total indicates, a thoughtful reflection here gets you the higher grade.