approaches to history

SPRING 1995

HISTORY 400

Crown 528, M 6:15-8:45

TWENTIETH-CENTURY APPROACHES TO HISTORY

Zouhair Ghazzal

http://www.luc.edu/depts/history/ghazzal/ghazzal.htm

Crown 544, M: 5:00-6:00

(and by appointment)

zghazza@luc.edu

The purpose of this course is (1) to investigate methods and styles in writing history; (2) to show that the enterprise of writing history creates new concepts and horizons of thought; (3) to analyze the complex relationships between history and the social sciences, in particular anthropology and sociology; (4) to investigate how philosophical themes such as the subject/individual, the public and the private, reason and madness, etc. could be problematized within a historical perspective (see the works of Foucault, Elias, and Habermas); (5) to study the creation of “social history” as the dominant genre in academia today; particularly the impact of the Annales on twentieth-century historiography and the transfer of the narrative from the political to the social; (6) an analysis of the shortcomings of the Annales: if “social history” as a “total history” is in crisis, what are the new emerging trends?; (7) an exploration of some new ways in writing history: “textual” history as a way of exploring “documents” as totalities; anthropological history which focusses on micro levels of the social and creates totalities out of the microscopic; the awareness that there are several historical becomings (particularly in the so-called Third World) despite the overwhelming dominance of the Western-capitalistic-liberal system which serves as a model of progress, individualism, democracy, and the success of science and technology (the Western model imposes itself on the enterprise of writing history, even Third World history: it is almost impossible, from a non-Western perspective, not to question the history of the West as a civilization); (8) What is the historiographical status of non-Western societies and civilizations? Are their social and political structures “obsolete”? What can we learn from them in terms of writing and thinking history?

What has thus far been referred to on many occasions as the “crisis of the Annales” is nothing more than the difficulty to conceive “social history” as a “total history.” What has become problematic in modern historiography is the “unit of analysis” itself. Perhaps the shift is best illustrated in the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who, under the supervision of Braudel, did his first work on the peasants of the Languedoc. His then bestselling book, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324, clearly shows the shift in the unit of analysis: in Montaillou, the “village” becomes the unit of analysis, that is, what gives the historian the possibility to explore a totality in itself, while Ladurie’s earlier work on the Languedoc followed Braudel’s footsteps in focussing on large units of analysis. Like the anthropologist—and Ladurie’s initial training was in ethnology—who sees totalities in the smallest of all objects, the “village” is what opens the historian towards an understanding of broader units of analysis—and society-as-a-whole in particular.

In short, this course is about the enterprise of thinking history, and the rejection of the notion that history is primarily descriptive and factual. Two problems (at least) need to be addressed within the context of this course and from the sample of readings we have at our disposal:

(i) Historians do use “texts” as a source for their data, but they rarely question them critically, that is, first, and above all, as texts. The “data” that a historian usually pulls out of a document belongs to the textual nature of this document, which, in turn, has an institutional and ideological context which made its drafting possible. For example, a police record from nineteenth-century Paris could provide us important information on beggars, criminals, prostitutes, political activists, and other categories of the social. But this is only an aspect of police records. What should be done is the contextualization of these “data” into the institution of the police, that is, how such an institution “thinks” and relates to individuals and groups (Foucault’s notions of “discipline” and “surveillance” could be quite enlightening). The same could be said about other types of documents commonly used by historians: court-records, psychiatric and medical records, newspapers, journals, etc. Foucault’s distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices could be helpful in bringing to historical analysis levels of the latter usually left out as too fragmented or visual: bringing architectural, disciplinary, kinship, etc., practices to the level of “thought” (or the “unthought”).

(ii) One should meditate on and question the difficulty of the Annales in creating a historiography of the “modern,” that is, for anything which is post-French Revolution. Thus while the Annales did well for the medieval period (with Bloch, Duby, and Le Goff) and the early or pre-modern (Febvre, Ladurie, Braudel), it does less well for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular. For the latter, historiographical research weakens in favor of sociologists, philosophers, and other intellectuals: Foucault, Elias, Thompson, Habermas and the Frankfurt School, Bourdieu and his sociology school, and many others are the apostles of the modern and post-modern. In short, the Annales fails whenever single systems of representation in the form of the Monarch, King, or Prince cease to be present. The French Revolution could be considered as the turning point in the European system of political representation: the subject-individual-citizen takes over and becomes the focus—for the state and its institutions. Once the monolithic system of representation breaks up, individuals have to create their own, in the form of parties, newspapers, assemblies, publications and journals, etc. Thompson provides a unique portrait of the English “working class” making itself through a process of “class consciousness.”

Problems, Approaches, Objects

In conformity with previous offerings of the same course, and to the outline provided in the last Graduate Bulletin, I would suggest to start with the Annales literature and show how this historiographical school has transferred the narrative dimension from the political to the social and economic, in a first stage, and then, later on, with Braudel and Ladurie, went beyond the purely descriptive level of the social. Thus Braudel worked out, after the publication of his Méditerrannée, the three “time strata” of historical analysis—the social and economic being at the bottom, because they are subject to the slowest change—, while Ladurie, originally by training an ethnographer, combined in a work like Montaillou the ethnographic with the historical. (It should be noted that when Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded the Annales in the late 1920s, Marxism provided at that time the general framework for an economic and social history, and what the two Founding Fathers thus did was a kind of “secularization” of Marxism, together with a broadening of the perspectives of the latter so that the category of the “social” went with the Annales far beyond the usual class struggle analysis.)

The broad success of the Annales did not go without problems, and a recent editorial of the notorious journal celebrating its sixtieth birthday, pointed to lots of difficulties in the current writing of history. What the 1989 editorial of the December issue pointed out to was a general malaise among historians (and in particular those belonging to the Annales) due to the large infiltration of the practices of the social sciences (in particular from literary criticism and cultural anthropology) in historical writing. In short, we are now at a (historical) juncture where history seems to be much more taking from other disciplines than creating anything by itself. Thus history, always left at the unambitious level of being the “witness of the past,” is now wondering what it could contribute to the rest of the social sciences. In other words, the question could be formulated as follows: How could historians write history in order to transform history into a discipline that contributes to the rest of the social sciences?

New Approaches

“Social history,” in the way it has been traditionally practiced by the Annales school in Europe and by Past and Present in the Anglo-Saxon world, implicitly assumed a “totality” to “history” and “society” in the sense that there exists a “reality” “outside” us that we can reconstruct through the medium of language. This “reality” is something like a “continuum” in space and time. Different historical periods not only succeed each other in time in a linear fashion, but what comes “after” is explained by what comes “before”: this presupposes a continuity and “connection” between periods, and the task of the historian would be to collect an infinite number of an infinitely small number of “facts”—the totality constitutes the “data.”

Historians usually make use of “documents” to collect their data. Thus, police records, court documents, and newspapers, among others, have become common type of documents for European and North American history in particular, and when such documents are available for Third World societies, they have been widely used as well. The organization of such data usually follows the process of facts-collection. In fact, the two steps of collection and organization are closely inter-linked. Historians usually collect their data with—explicitly or implicitly—something in mind as to how to organize it. Furthermore, considering that the act of data-organization could not be thought of independently of the act of writing, it turns out that data-collection, its organization, and the act of writing are inseparable from one another. In my view, the main purpose of “textual history” is to question the entire process of collecting data, its organization and writing.

Data-collection is probably the most vulnerable step of traditional “social history,” and it is in the concept of “collecting” altogether that “textual history” would like to demarcate itself from previous approaches in historical writing. In fact, historians tend to isolate the “fact” from the rest of the “document” because the former is seen to have a value in itself independently from the “context” of the “document” that created it. The “fact” is seen as having a value-in-itself because of the implicit belief of an “external reality” that the historian could reconstruct through the artificial medium of language. “Reality,” according to this view, is made up of an infinite number of discrete facts that are part of this continuum usually referred to as “nature” or “society” (usually “reality” is thought of as a combination of both, “nature” and “society”). The facts in themselves are discrete, disconnected, and without any particular meaning, but when brought together, they could be part of a continuum or series that makes sense. In fact, the series that brings meaning to an otherwise lifeless fact(s) is an artificial reproduction of this other natural series-continuum, that inherent in “reality” itself, i.e. the natural and social worlds. Historians (and some of their fellows in the social sciences) have always presupposed that the natural and social worlds are by definition coherent, and continuous in the sense that events succeeding each other in time and space are somehow naturally related to each other—even though the facts in themselves are discrete entities, at least the way they are perceived at first sight by the mind.

The alternative that I would like to propose to the traditional social history approach as briefly outlined above would be as follows. Historical events, institutions, social structures, etc. of the past and present could only be “represented” to historians and social scientists through the medium of language; or, in other words, events, institutions, structures, and the like are only accessible to us through the “documents” that make their existence possible. It doesn’t make much sense then to speak of a “social reality” “outside” the “documents” since the reconstruction of an objective history is only possible through the documents that make the latter possible. Thus any approach to history is by necessity “textual” since what we usually refer to as the “reality-outside-us” could only be represented through language, in the form of documents, archives, legal codes, the arts and sciences, etc. It is of course perfectly possible and legitimate to posit a “reality” “outside” these socially constructed linguistic realities—a kind of Kantian approach to the world where a “thing-in-itself” is posited as outside the realm of understanding and judgment—, but this “reality” is only accessible to us through language. If we accept these basic assumptions, the next step would be to proceed in investigating the nature of “documents” (and the like).

“Textual history” considers documents (and the like) as “social constructions” and as “discourses.” Any “document” is a “social construction” for the simple—and obvious—reason that language is socially constructed. In fact, there are, to simplify, at least two levels in any human language. First, and this is the most obvious level, words represent and denote objects (“things”) and “ideas.” The accuracy of such representations is usually verified by means of a set of empirical procedures: systematic investigations, laboratories, comparisons, etc. But the aspect of language that is of interest to us, within the context of the social sciences, is the second one. This level presupposes that words, propositions, statements, etc. have meanings that are socially constructed, hence the re-construction of such meanings could only be done by contextualizing every aspect of a particular language within the ideological and institutional frameworks that made this language possible. In other words, language serves more than simply representing and denoting, or, in addition to denoting something—a thing, an idea, etc.—it also vehicles social representations. It is usually such social representations, mediated by language, that are of interest to historians and social scientists.

If we accept that documents (“archives”) are socially constructed, then gender, sex, nations, etc. are also “social constructions.” The problem now is what can we do with such an idea? Where can we go from here?

First, the textualist approach puts an end to what has become a common practice to social historians, namely the use of documents as sources of information and data accumulation. Social historians, instead of treating documents as “textual totalities,” are more interested in the data provided in such sources (“archives”). Thus, for example, a court document from eighteenth-century France on land-properties would provide, in the eyes of social historians, data about land production and tenure, and family land-holdings, etc. Textual history, by contrast, would consider first the logic of such documents: With what logic (rationale) were they written? For what purpose? To what institution(s) do they belong (judicial, legal, literary, scientific, etc.)? All these questions, among others, would help us to determine the social contexts of these documents. In fact, to be more precise, any document requires at least two levels of investigation, one that would consider it as a discursive practice, i.e. as a “text” whose rationale is determined by the discursive level in which it is situated—the drafting of a legal document, for example, is primarily affected by the very existence of judicial discourses to which it belongs. Discourses are logocentric and require (impose) a logic of their own, and such requirements come before anything social—supposing, of course, that an order of priorities could be self-imposed. But this is only one aspect of these documents/discourses. At another level, we have to understand the “social logic” of these texts, in other words, their “contexts.”

The search for “contexts” is an ad infinitum task. In fact, since events, structures, and institutions could only be objectified through the medium of language, there’s no “level” that would absolutely determine all others. In other words, there’s no primary reference point, be it economic, political or social. Discourses contextualize each other. For example, court documents are structured, among others, by the judicial discourse, but, another discourse set (say, police records) might reveal that judges had a distorted image of some social problems and issues.

In short, the consideration of documents as texts and the systematic study of their social logic would lead us to some still hitherto unexplored ways of writing (social) history. It would even undermine the logic of the latter because it would be difficult within the textualist approach to perceive the “social reality” in terms of “levels”—political, economic, etc.—through which a “totality” of phenomena would be possible to construct.

Perhaps the contrast between the two approaches, that of traditional “social history” and that of “textual history,” could best be summarized by the former’s implicit use of language as that that denotes and records something (an event, a fact, etc.), while the textualist approach we’ve outlined above presupposes an institutional and social use of language—one that makes the social world by inscribing and giving meaning to words and actions. This is why the reconstruction of such historical experiences and meanings is essential in order to understand social praxis from the viewpoint of the actors that made it possible.

Reading Texts

Knowing how to approach “documents” or any other “textual” material should be at the center of the historian’s activity and approached as such. Some disciplines, such as philosophy and literary criticism, have explicitly posed the problem of reading texts, while in other disciplines—and history in particular—the question is either totally eluded or, at best, marginally posed. Yet, historians use a much greater variety of textual sources than, say, philosopher and literary critics who usually limit themselves to the “great texts” in human history. In addition to the “great texts,” historians usually include police records, court-documents, legal codes, correspondences, personal files, biographies, newspapers, to name only a few of the sources common to the discipline of history. Here are some preliminary suggestions (“rules of thumb”) to read documents as totalities, that is, as texts endowed with “meaning” rather than as pure sources for collecting facts and data. The notion of document-as-text-and-as-totality implies the following:

(i) The notion of “text” or “discourse” (in the sense implied by Foucault) presupposes that a “document” is more than a combination of meaningful words, propositions, and statements. In fact, “text” and “discourse” imply that “documents” are drafted within an ideological and discursive context which frames them within a structure, or matrix, or grid through which they become readable. It is therefore the historian’s task to discover (re-construct) and find “meaning” to such “regularities” in the “texts” themselves, that is, to discover what the general structures, forms, and rules of these discursive formations are.

(ii) Documents are usually so fragmented that they might look deceitful and disappointing at first. One way to describe them would be to look at them as “non-discursive” practices (again, in the sense of Foucault) or more accurately as pre-discursive practices. If we limit the use of “discourse” to a well established set of ideas, theories, and concepts, then court-documents with their fragmented narratives, pieces of evidence, and their links to “practice,” fall “below” the usually accepted criteria for “discourses.” The historian, however, should not look at this fact as a handicap or weakness. On the contrary, due to their intermediary nature between discursive formations and social practices, documents are important in unraveling the power-relations within a particular social-context. Documents-as-text could provide us with a body of knowledge very different from well-established discursive formations such as philosophy, literature, and the sciences, which could signal, at a particular historical moment, the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a practice unknown to more rigid or formal discursive formations.

(iii) The notion of “text-as-totality” does not necessarily imply that documents should be read line-by-line or that the meaning of words, statements, ambiguous propositions, etc., should be systematically studied. What is more important than the historical meaning of individual words and statements is the use of language by all the social actors. Historians quite often approach documents as made up exclusively of statements on a true or false basis. We should keep in mind, however, that what we have left are “summaries” or transcriptions of actual hearings or debates, which means that originally, that is, prior to their transcription and editing in a written form, the statements were performative utterances. This should force historians to look beyond the usual truth-claims of statements into how effective were the utterances of the social actors involved.

(iv) The historian could proceed in the creation of specific themes such as gender, kinship, property, and the like, which could serve as an underlying “grid” in the reading of documents. Such themes, however, are not to be found in the text itself—a nineteenth century court-document could not possibly directly suggest to us to read it in terms of gender or property—since what we commonly do is read such themes into the document. The idea here is that we first read a document by placing it into the context of its own period, and we then re-contextualize it for a second time in respect to our own period, and we do so by referring the document-as-text to the themes which are most common (or uncommon) to the social sciences.

(v) What we are aiming at in the final analysis is an anthropological epistemology of the documents-as-text: What kind of “thought” is implied in such documents? What kind of discourse do documents reconstruct about society, its institutions and practices, about the self and the other?

(vi) The historian is thus left with a great deal of freedom to interpret, look for themes, and reconstruct the general (global) meaning of the text. We should keep in mind, however, that this freedom is limited by the structure of the text itself: There is a logic to the text which we assume beforehand to be consistent and makes sense, which means that any interpretation should be consistent in itself and in respect to the text it is analyzing also.

Readings

It is obvious that the underlying concepts of “textual history” could not have been possible without the various post-modernist trends in literary criticism and philosophy, in particular the works of Derrida and Foucault. This led since the early 1980s to a textual trend in cultural anthropology (for an overview, see Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Chicago University Press; and also the work of James Clifford, Writing Culture, Harvard University Press). The work of Clifford Geertz was also decisive for the notion of linguistic turn.

To the best of my knowledge, it was only very recently that such notions, borrowed from literary criticism and cultural anthropology, have started to show up in historical research. At the origin of the debate in history was an article by Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 65(1990), 59-86, that immediately created a series of criticisms and counter-criticisms in Past and Present; see in particular Lawrence Stone, “History and Post-Modernism,” Past and Present, 131(1991), 217-218, and also the series of articles under the same title in issues 133 and 135 of the same journal, by Patrick Joyce, Catriona Kelly, Lawrence Stone (second intervention), and the final overall reply by Gabrielle Spiegel. The debate was summarized by Enrico Artifoni, “Une logique sociale du texte?,” Liber, 95(1992), 14-15. See also in the same issue Maria Luisa Pesante, “Un défi pour les historiens,” 16-17, which contains a commented bibliography of the most recent trends in history. Gabrielle Spiegel has a book, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1993) in which she applies her textual approach.

Since this trend is still very recent, I shall limit myself in what follows to historians who have shown interest in the effects of language on the writing of history. Hayden White was probably among the first to have accepted the notion of the linguistic turn and its implications for history, see his Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Johns Hopkins, 1973).

Some books from the German Begriffsgeschichte era (conceptual history and history of concepts) are now available in English. Two works by Reinhart Koselleck are of particular interest to us, Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time are both available at The MIT Press.

We could also add to our highly selective bibliography some of the works to what has been loosely known as the “School of Cambridge” that focuses on the formation of “ideas” during a particular period: “What were the available languages in this particular historical situation?” John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), is one of the most well known works in this tradition. See also his Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985).

Finally, for those who are already bored with the idea that all of culture is constructed in discourse and would like to get beyond this stage, see the challenging and eccentric Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge, 1993).

Course Requirements

The ten books listed below are compulsory reading. The weekly sessions shall be mostly devoted to detailed—“textual”—discussions of the readings. For each session, two students will be responsible for presenting the material and analyzing issues related to the enterprise of writing history (a list will be circulated during our second meeting for you to sign for the presentations you would like to perform). Class presentations and discussions will count as 50% of the final grade. I would encourage you for informal presentations—that is, avoid reading papers prepared in advance—and try to focus on specific methodological issues relevant to the context of this course. Remember that by the time you’ll start your presentation, we would already have gone through a general framing of the book in question.

A term-paper will count for the remaining 50%. Term-papers could focus on any particular theme and/or twentieth-century historian(s). Students are expected to discuss periodically their papers and are requested, during the last session, for individual oral presentations.

Tentative Schedule

• Week 1: January 16, 1995: Introduction

• Week 2: January 23: Cohen, Law, Sexuality & Society;

• Week 3: January 30: Herrin, Formation of Christendom;

• Week 4: February 6: Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies;

• Weeks 5 & 6: February 13 & 20: Elias, Civilizing Process;

• Week 7: February 27: Habermas, Structural Transformations of the Public Space;

Spring Break: March 6 till March 12

• Week 8: March 13: Foucault, Discipline & Punish;

First drafts must be submitted on March 13

• Week 9: March 20: Thompson, Making of the English Working Class;

• Week 10: March 27: White, Metahistory;

• Weeks 11 & 12: April 3 & 10: Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, & The Wild Man;

Easter Vacation: April 13 to April 17 (4:30 PM)

Please note that Easter Vacation ends at 4:30 PM and that there will be a regular evening class on April 17

• Week 13: April 17: Thomas, New Historicism;

• Week 14: April 24: Concluding Remarks—En guise de conclusion. Discussion of Term-Papers.

Final drafts must be submitted on April 24

notes on the reading list

This is my third list for this course (the first two were in Spring 94 & Fall 94), and even though I’ve been subjecting each list to major alterations, I’ve also kept the core of the course almost identical with the previous two lists. Indeed, Kantorowicz, Elias, Habermas, Foucault, and Thompson form a unit of their own. Such texts provide us with a history of modern Europe with unique perspectives (all these texts should be thematically connected with each other):

(i) European societies, around the 8th-10th centuries, were composed of warrior states whose territorial expansions ensured their survival. The newly conquered lands were divided by the warrior state among its various military feudal lords. When expansionism became difficult, if not impossible, the revenues of the warrior state decreased considerably. In the meantime, central Europe became re-populated after a substantial loss of its populations since the fifth century—a movement that was reversed by the eighth century.

(ii) The lack of expansionism, and the inevitable weakness of the warrior state which followed, triggered the process of early feudalization in central Europe by the tenth century. Feudalization meant excessive territorial divisions under the supervision of competing lords and seigneurs and their small feudal armies: expansionism, impossible on the outside, turned inwards.

(iii) Both Kantorowicz and Elias argue that the thirteenth century was a decisive period in many respects: First, the feudal powers, exhausted from fighting against each other, aimed towards an internal reconciliation towards a more centralized state. Second, and because this semi-centralized state had to bargain for its power and existence, it could not simply impose itself by brutal force (hence a main difference with “Oriental despotism”): it created a complex judicial apparatus, and the foundations of political power became “legalized” by the thirteenth century—one of the many forms of the “King’s Two Bodies” doctrine.

(iv) This led to the “Absolutist State” and the beginnings of the “society of manners” which Elias describes so well.

(v) One of the many forms of the “King’s Two Bodies” doctrine, and its later elaborations, is a division between “state” and “civil society.” The latter had to protect itself from the former. To Habermas, the concept of “civil society,” which was elaborated by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, is what makes possible, since the seventeenth century, the existence of a “public sphere”: it is as if, in order to protect itself from the omnipotent power of the “state apparatus” that “civil society” created for itself a “public sphere”—a space where discourse became accessible to “all.”

(vi) Following E. P. Thompson’s arguments, one wonders whether was a “oneness” to Habermas’ “public sphere”: even though Habermas made it clear that this was a bourgeois public sphere, we cannot but pose the question whether there was another plebeian public sphere in competition with this other, bourgeois space for communicative action.

I am perfectly aware that the reading list is too complicated and too long, and embraces far too many themes and approaches from what we can actually handle in a fourteen-week semester. I certainly do not believe that bigger means better; on the contrary, a big qualitative loss might follow from pouring too much material into the heads of the students. There are basically two reasons for which I assigned that many readings: First, I realized (without much surprise) that history students generally start their graduate work without much experience in methodology and historical writing and only seldom do they know some of the main social thinkers of the last two centuries (Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in particular); this actually is typical of American education where “history” is looked upon more as a factual, descriptive discipline than a thought provoking one (such as philosophy and anthropology). Second, and taking seriously the first point into account, it is easier to understand what methodology is all about by comparing various historical approaches with one another.

A final remark. Throughout this course, I will use “history” very broadly: First, as any study which encompasses social, political, economic, and intellectual structures for a specific society (at least one). Second, in such studies time should be an important factor. I have included European intellectuals such as Habermas and Foucault, even though both are usually not regarded as professional historians, because their research on the public sphere and the prison was done within a historical perspective.

PAPERS

You are requested to write one major research paper to be submitted during the last session, Monday, April 24, 1995. You will have to submit, however, a first draft of this paper on Monday, March 13, 1995. The first draft should follow the same presentation and writing guidelines as your final draft, but it won’t be graded. Only your final draft will count as one-half of the total grade. The purpose of the first draft is to let you assess your research and writing skills and improve the final version of your paper. It is advisable that you choose a research topic and start preparing a bibliography as soon as possible. I would strongly recommend that you consult with me before making any final commitment. It would be preferable to keep the same topic for both drafts. You will be allowed, however, after prior consultation, to change your topic if you wish to do so.

It is extremely important that you submit your first draft on time so that you could have a month left for a re-write and/or revisions. If you submit only one draft towards the end of the semester (more specifically, during the last week of classes), then this draft will be considered as your first (non-submitted) one: you will be then given the temporary incomplete grade of (I) or (X) till you complete the second final draft. Outlines and short papers of 5-6 pages are not considered as first drafts.

keep in mind the following:

· This is not a course about a specific period, geographic area, or nation, but about methodology and the writing of history. Your papers should therefore concentrate on methodological issues: if, for example, you select nineteenth-century urban America as a topic, your primary focus should be in explaining how a topic like “urban America” is methodologically constructed: If, for example, a “city” is analyzed in terms of the aggregate of its classes, neighborhoods, social groups (race, gender, sex, etc.), how is each one of these categories constructed, and how do they articulate together? (There are obviously several ways to tackle such a vast theme—I am simply choosing the most common and frequently asked questions.)

· There are no restrictions as to the time period or geographic area you might choose. This is not the most crucial issue here since what is important are the methodological questions which you need to construct.

· Because methodology is the basic issue, start your paper with a short introduction of two-three pages which clearly explains and delimits the themes you intend to develop. Explain briefly, right from the beginning, what you think are the main methodological issues for your topic, author(s), and set of books and articles. Then clearly formulate the question you think is crucial for your paper—the main question should be directly related to a methodological problem and relevant to the process of writing history.

· Many students select a twentieth-century historian as a topic. In case you do so, make sure that you read his/her main works (including some key articles and interviews, if available) even if you’re not planning a full coverage of the works in question. It is probably much simpler to select a single historian rather than several—this is especially true if you are new to historical methodology. If you therefore focus on a single historian, make sure that, in the context of this course, the aim is not a summary of his/her works, but an analysis of their historical writing. When you’re dealing with more than one work, integrate them together into some common theme(s) and avoid presenting them separately. Always check how the writing evolves from one work to another.

· Concerning formatting and other related problems, follow Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 5th ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, intended for students and other writers of papers not written for publication, and has useful material on notes and bibliographies.

Please use the following guidelines in preparing your papers:

-use 8x10 white paper (the size and color of this paper). Do not use legal size or colored paper.

-use a typewriter, laser printer or a good dot matrix printer and hand in the original.

-only type on one side of the paper.

-should be double spaced, with single spaced footnotes at the end of each page and an annotated bibliography at the end (check the following section for an example of an annotated bibliography).

-Keep ample left and right margins for comments and corrections of at least 1.25 inches each.

-all pages should be numbered.

-the first page should include the following: title, course number, name, your address and telephone number (with fax and e-mail address, if you have one).