Spring 2004
H501 (C293) Historical Methodology
Department of History, IUPUI
Time: Wednesdays,
Place: Cavanaugh Hall 537
Faculty: Dr. Kevin C. Robbins
Associate Professor of History
Office: CA 504Q
Office Phone: 317-274-5819
Office Fax: 317-278-7800
E-Mail: krobbin1@iupui.edu
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays,
H501 is here conceived as a course on historical research methods requiring students to familiarize themselves with the techniques professional historians now employ in selecting and framing historical problems, in the identification, collection, and analysis of sources, and in the cogent development of significant arguments or presentations explaining change in human behavior over time. The course has two main practical objectives: 1) to present students with required readings in recent masterworks of historical writing enabling sustained analysis of how professional historians now work, especially in European cultural history, to document and decipher prior eras, communities, and habits of human comportment—corporal, intellectual, collective, and institutional; and 2) to enable each student to plan, to contextualize richly, and to launch his or her own graduate level research project—ideally related directly to their M.A. thesis or Public History paper plans (or, for non-degree students, to a significant subject or historical problem of appeal to them and for which they might undertake later sustained research). The instructor regards both objectives as eminently practical and mutually capable of helping students to organize and apply their own research talents. Progress toward these objectives should help students to appreciate historical investigation as essentially a labor-intensive craft most reliant upon practitioners’ empirical skills of source location, source analysis, and source interpretation based upon common sense. High theory or the theoretical implications of specific research methods in history and the social sciences are thus not considered by the instructor as relevant to this course of training in analysis and practice of creative, resourceful, and effective research methods.
Students for whom the assigned European readings fall outside of their areas or eras of research specialization should not worry over this matter. Please recall that we are reading these works for their methodological insights. This investigation does not require students to have extensive background information on the cultures, eras, or problems addressed. It is more what these authors do with the sources at their disposal rather than what they argue through or about these sources that matters for us.
This course will run as a graduate
seminar. All students will complete all
assigned class readings and come to all class sessions fully prepared to
discuss at length the texts assigned.
The instructor may provide brief introductory lectures prior to
discussion informing students of relevant biographical or cultural factors
shaping the work of the author or authors read.
Student participants will also take an active assigned class role in
presenting and commenting upon the texts read and the research designs
presented. Each student will be responsible for initially presenting one or part
of the assigned readings to the class. This work will come at the start of
class and should run approximately 20 minutes in length. This work will involve a brief
biographical profile of the author or authors, references to the career and
publications of the author or authors, some general overview of the assigned
text's prime arguments and relationship to the author's prior course of
research and writing, specific commentary on the sources utilized in the
assigned text--especially by close study and reference to the notes and
supporting bibliographies if any, and commentary or critique on the methods
employed to exploit those sources for gain in power of argumentation and
interpretation. Students are encouraged to offer their classmates print copies or
printed illustrations of their text presentations as they deem
appropriate. Presentations must be well
organized, cogent, to the point, and comprehensive, covering the points
outlined above. Students are welcome to consult with the instructor over the
content of their introductions prior to delivering them.
Written work for this class over the semester will include two brief critical review essays focused on masterworks read. The format and content of these essays will
be discussed in class and via handouts.
Students are encouraged to use these review essays to assess whether and
how methods of historical work in the assigned readings may beneficially
inform, reshape, and improve their own research designs. The main
written component of the course will
be a thorough research project
design. This organized research
plan will include: a project statement, an annotated bibliography of primary
and secondary sources highly relevant to the projected inquiry, a
bibliographical essay on this relevant historical literature, and a final
research design. All students are
encouraged to discuss their research project extensively with the
instructor. The instructor will also be
happy to collaborate as needed with the student’s main thesis advisor(s) and
other members of the university faculty engaged in the project so as to produce
(with the student’s active assistance, the most efficient, innovative, and
insightful project design possible.
Required readings for this edition of H501 are listed below in order of use. Students will note several unifying themes central to some of the latest and most influential European historical scholarship interconnect these assigned works: the new cultural history, the history of women and gender, the new history of the law, the history of charity and gift giving, the history of popular cultures and morals, and the selective appropriation by historians of anthropological and ethnographic methods of analysis so as to illuminate the folkways and mentalities of Europeans, humble, ordinary, and elite. Students will also note that another key connection in the readings exists between books written by one author that are expressly methodological in nature followed by another work by that same author focused on the writer’s own area of professional research and argument. Here we will examine how scholarly advisors on proper historical methods put those same methods to work in their own professional investigations. The course will conclude with review of historical methods of inquiry and consideration of those methods in both historical teaching and research.
Howell, Martha, and Walter Prevenier. From
Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical
Methods.
Howell, Martha The Marriage Exchange: Property,
The
0-226-35516-0
Ginzburg, Carlo. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1992. ISBN: 0-81018-4388-X. (Original Italian Eds.: 1961-1985.)
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992. ISBN: 0-8108-4387-1. (Original Italian
Ed.: 1976. This English paperback version is in its 9th edition.)
Hunt, Lynn. The New Cultural History.
06429-1.
Davis, Natalie. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century
ISBN: 0-299-16884-0.
Thompson, E.P. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New Press, 1993.
ISBN: 1-56584-074-7. (Current text is 3rd edition of this volume.)
Corbin, Alain. The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered
World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-
Century
French Ed.: 1998.)
Wineburg, Sam. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural
Acts.
ISBN: 1-56639-856-8.
All texts are for sale in the IUPUI Bookstore and can also
be found (often at a great discount) via various online book dealers (try
Amazon.com first). All students should have their own copies of these required readings
well before they are to be discussed.
The following written assignments integral to the research design will be due according to the weekly class schedule given below.
Project Statement: 2-3 pages. Give the title of your proposed thesis or research project and briefly discuss its significance. What historical problem(s) will you address? Why is it or why are they important? What sources in general will you use to get at and explore this subject? Where are they and on what scale will you work? How many sources do you think you need? What do you hope your work will contribute to the existing literature in the area you have selected and how will your work differ from that of other historians? Have you come up with a preliminary working hypothesis about your subject/problem? What is it? What will be the size or scale of the finished written product that will come out of this research? If it is a thesis, how many chapters will it have, what will its prime parts be? If a research paper, what will its component parts be?
Annotated Bibliography: a list to include approximately 20 primary and secondary sources, if both are available. Secondary sources should include books and articles and may also incorporate images, websites, maps, and other media of all kinds relevant to the project. Each entry should have a complete bibliographical citation (single-spaced) according to accepted format (Chicago Manual of Style is best). This entry should be followed by a double-spaced paragraph (no more) describing the source and its most important contributions to your own project in terms of content, methods of investigation, or research questions presented. Primary sources should be listed first, followed by secondary materials, all arranged alphabetically.
Bibliographical Essay: approximately 20 pages. This assignment will be due toward the end of
the semester and should reflect closer scrutiny of the most vital sources
listed in the annotated bibliography as well as of any additional material
found over the course of the semester and deemed highly valuable to the
research project. This essay should
accomplish the following objectives: 1) revise the project statement based on
the instructor's comments and additional research by the student; 2) connect
the project thickly and informatively to the secondary literature included in
the bibliography; and 3) tie the project to wider issues of methodological
investigation, source interpretation, and revision of existing historical
arguments about the subject and the research fields or sub-fields in which it
lies.
Research Design: in an essay of 7-10 pages cogently describe your project, the historical problems it addresses, and how it complements, expands, or revises existing historical literature in the field or sub-field to which the project belongs. In addition, describe carefully your proposed new plan of research, anticipate the research problems you may encounter, and explain briefly your anticipated strategies for coping with or surmounting such problems. What sources will you use and what difficulties may the sources themselves pose in terms of availability, reliability, and interpretation. State clearly, how, if at all, your key research questions or hypotheses about your project have changed over the course of your preliminary project readings and contextualizations.
Grading for this course will be determined as follows:
Review Essays 15%
Project Statement and Annotated Bibliography 20%
Bibliographic Essay 30%
Research Design 15%
Class Participation (including text presentation) 20%
Course Outline and Reading Assignments
Wed. Jan. 14 Course Introduction, Distribution of Syllabus, Explanation of Course
Content and Objectives. Brief Description of Main Course
Sign-UP Sheet Circulated for In-Class Text
Presentations.
Wed. Jan. 21
Introduction, and Chapters 1-3, pp. vii-87.
Discussion: Sources and Critical Historical Interpretation: the most useful
components of this text so far. What are the most important things you
are learning about historical research methods?
Wed. Jan. 28
5 and Research Bibliography (Scan), pp. 88-195.
Discussion: What’s new in history research and writing? What are the
skills and means by which to revise prior interpretations of the past?
Research Project Statement Due in Class.
Wed. Feb. 4
Note on Money, Introduction, and Chapters 1-4, pp. vii-123.
Discussion: What does it take to do the history of law, family, and marriage
700 years ago? How do authors organize publishable monographs on such
topics?
First Brief Critical Review Essay
Distributed in Class
Wed. Feb. 11
Conclusion, pp. 124-239
Discussion: How does one explain human lives and logic in past
time and contextualize the experience of historical change long ago?
First Brief Critical Review Essay Due Back in Class.
Wed. Feb. 18
Popular Piety,” “The High and the Low,” and “Titian, Ovid, and
Sixteenth-Century Codes for Erotic Illustration,” pp. 1-16, and 60-95.
Discussion: What are the key sources and methods of inquiry here?
What are the methods to handle folklore, printed books, and images?
Wed. Feb. 25
of an Evidential Paradigm,” “Freud…and Werewolves,” and “Inquisitor
as Anthropologist,” pp. 96-125 and 146-164.
Discussion: The historian as imaginative and intrepid detective. Learning
to look for, find, and describe clues to past times and people. The utility of
informed suppositions about things we cannot ever really know.
Wed. Mar. 3
1-128.
Discussion: What are the historical sources and methods available to climb
inside the heads of people already dead? By what methods of analysis and
argument can the crazy ideas of one working man exemplify an entire era and
its problems?
Second Brief Critical Review Essay
Distributed in Class.
Wed. Mar. 10
and 8, pp. 1-22, 47-96, 131-153, and 205-232.
Discussion: What are the key methods of the “new cultural history”?
What does it take to do this revisionary work?
Second Brief Critical Review Essay Due in
Class.
Mon. 3/15--Fri. 3/19 SPRING BREAK NO CLASSES SPRING BREAK
Wed. Mar. 24
Discussion: Why the history of gifts? What are the sources,
methods of inquiry, and arguments involved in learning what
it once meant to give?
Preliminary Annotated Bibliography Due in Class.
Wed. Mar. 31
and 4, pp. ix-15 and 185-258.
Discussion: What are the sources and methods of analysis and argument
By which the “moral economies” of the past can be reonstructed?
Wed. April 7
467-538.
Discussion: How does one do the history of time keeping and time
consciousness
in the past? How does an historian
smoothly explore
“rough music” and other manifestations of popular moral culture?
Bibliographical Essay Due in Class.
Wed. April 14
pp. vii-93.
Discussion: What is the form, content, and prevailing
investigative method
of this book? Why do the history of an utter “unknown”? How can we
come to know the “unknowable”? What is the language of the illiterate?
Wed. April 21
Discussion: How does one “decompose” and “recompose” the past?
Where is the method and meaning in that?
Wed. April 28
1-5, pp.vii-136.
Discussion: What’s to be gained methodologically by asking: “Why
study history?” How do you read history? Do you write it like you read it?
What’s to be
learned by imaging and imagining how we picture the past?
Final Research Designs and Final Annotated
Bibliographies due in
Class. NO EXCEPTIONS!