H501 Historical Methodology (Section 8396)

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Spring 2013

H501 Historical Methodology (Section 8396)

Indiana University Graduate School

Department of History, IUPUI

Time: Tuesdays, 6:00 p.m.--8:40 p.m.

Place: IUPUI, CA 537

Faculty: Dr. Kevin C. Robbins

Associate Professor of History

Office: CA 503Q

Office Phone: 317-274-5819

Office Fax: 317-278-7800

E-Mail:

Office Hours: T/Th. 10:30 to Noon (and by Appointment).

H501 is here conceived as a course on historical research methods requiring students to familiarize themselves with the analytical and interpretive techniques professional historians now successfully employ in selecting, framing, and explaining key historical problems. Students will also work individually and together at the identification, collection, and creative analysis of prime, previously unexploited sources. All students will apply themselves to the cogent development of significant, publishable arguments or presentations explaining change in human artistry and behavior over time. This reading- and writing-intensive graduate seminar has two main practical objectives: 1) to present students with challenging required readings in recent masterworks of historical writing enabling sustained analysis of how acclaimed professional historians now work, especially in European and American cultural history, to document and to 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 his or her M.A. thesis or Public History paper plans (or, for non-degree students, toward a significant subject or historical problem of appeal to them and for which they might undertake later sustained research). The professor regards both objectives as eminently practical and mutually capable of helping students to improve, diversify, organize, and apply their own research and interpretive talents. Progress toward these objectives should help students to appreciate historical investigation as essentially a very labor-intensive craft most reliant upon patient practitioners’ empirical skills of source location, source analysis, and source interpretation eminently based upon simple common sense. High theory or the theoretical implications of specific research methods in history and the social sciences are thus not considered by the professor as relevant in any way to this course of training in analysis and practice of creative, resourceful, and effective basic research methods. Good planning for effective expository, non-fiction writing is equally labor-intensive and essential for anyone who seeks ultimately to publish new scholarship in any field of the human sciences to which history belongs.

Students for whom the assigned required readings fall outside of their areas or eras of research specialization should not worry over this matter at all. Please recall that we are reading these innovative and daunting works primarily 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 and problems at their disposal rather than what they argue through or about these sources or conflicts that matters most for us. In-Class handouts will help students to navigate the various types of historical writing now most admired and to discern better and more precisely the essential research methods anchoring those genres of historical inquiry today.

This course will run as a reading- and writing-intensive graduate seminar. All students will complete all assigned class readings by the date they are listed on the syllabus and come to all class sessions fully prepared to discuss at length the texts assigned. Whether current students like it or not, the discipline of history continues to be animated by the production of great books by authors often single-handedly capable of producing epoch-making scholarship that powerfully alters and improves not only the methods and arguments by which the best historical research gets done, but also entirely reshapes how the past itself is now understood. Throughout this semester of intensive readings, students will be continually forced into the company of such audacious, artful, innovative, and insightful scholars. Be prepared! These clever and gifted writers have often produced massive bodies of incisive, even searing historic scholarship that demands close, sustained, and long-term attention. For those who aspire to become competent working historians themselves, intensive and extensive exposure to such scholarly masterworks in their fields is imperative for proper training and future success as independent and insightful investigators. In class sessions, the professor 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 masterwork readings to the class. This exposition will come at the start of class and should run no more than 20 minutes in length. This work will involve a brief biographical profile of the author or authors, references to the career and major publications of the author or authors, and some general overview of the assigned text's prime arguments and relationship to the author's prior course of research and writing. Student reviewers will give specific commentary on the main sources utilized in the assigned text--especially by close study and reference to the notes and supporting bibliographies if any. All students will conclude their assigned presentations with commentary or critique on the specific and most profitable and powerfully explanatory research/analytical methods employed by authors to exploit key sources for gain in sharp, penetrating 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 professor 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 historical masterworks read. The format and content of these essays will be discussed in class and via clear, explanatory 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 at least twenty (20) primary and secondary sources highly relevant to the projected inquiry, a bibliographical essay on this relevant historical literature, and a final research design emphasizing the primary sources and analytical methods the student will employ in the successful conduct of the project. All students are encouraged to discuss their research project extensively with the professor. The professor 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, feasible, and insightful project design possible, covering both prime sources and vital research methods to be utilized.

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 very latest and most influential Euro-American historical scholarship interconnect these assigned works. These integral themes include comparative analysis of historical research methods, the transdisciplinary history of art and aesthetics, and what brilliant art historians can teach fellow scholars about research methods and the vital contextualizations and problematizations of past material objects and their production processes. Unifying themes and questions here also arise from how the complex, dynamic, contentious, and frightening history of religion and human values can best be evoked from past sources. We will explore the essential human impacts that must be documented and recovered within the great, epochal socio-cultural and socio-psychological movements or upheavals of the past—such as the terrible Reformations. Our readings further explore the ways humans use common foodstuffs and alimentary habits, cults, and taboos to shape historic communities and identities for individuals and social groups. Several of our key texts can be interconnected via common questions about how the emergence and consolidation of historic communication networks dramatically altered human norms of social interaction, the police of society, and identity formation in the past. Several of our target masterwork texts address the proper conduct of historical research in densely multi-media environments and thus should help students to comprehend better how literary sources, poems, songs, placards, advertising materials, radio broadcasts, and films can be incorporated in powerfully revelatory research and writing about history. Finally, several texts here confront the formation of myths and mythic figures in the past, decoding such poisonous constructs and notably helping us to study and to explain in better documented fashion the terribly conflicted and hideously violent and destructive nature of contemporary American society.

Required Readings (listed below in Order of Use)

Howell, Martha and W. Prevenier. From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods.

Cornell Univ. Press, 2001. ISBN: 978-0801485602.

Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. Yale Univ.

Press, 1985. ISBN : 978-0300037630.

Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of A Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of

Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Princeton Univ. Press, 2012. ISBN:

978-0691152905.

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580.

Yale Univ. Press, 2nd Ed., 2005. ISBN: 978-0300108286.

Camporesi, Piero. The Magic Harvest: Food, Folklore and Society. Polity Press, 1998. ISBN:

978-0745621968.

Darnton, Robert. Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

Harvard Univ. Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-0674066045.

Henkin, David. The Postal Age: Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century

America. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-0226327211.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.

Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1998. ISBN: 978-0806130316.

All texts listed above are for sale in the IUPUI Bookstore, New Student Center, Basement, History Section, and can also be found (often at a great discount) via various online book dealers (try Amazon.com first). Books have also been ordered, I believe, by Indy’s College Bookstore, 11th St., north of Indiana Ave. All students should have their own copies of these required readings well before they are to be discussed. ALL STUDENTS SHOULD PURCHASE ALL REUQIRED TEXTS AT ONCE. STUDENTS ACQUIRING BOOKS VIA ONLINE DEALERS AT CONSIDERABLE SAVINGS SHOULD THUS ALSO ELECT THE FASTEST POSSIBLE MODE OF DELIVERY (TWO-DAY AIR AT THE LEAST). ALL STUDENTS SHOULD HAVE ALL REQUIRED TEXTS IN HAND IMMEDIATELY. SPECIAL NOTE: THE SLOTKIN ASSIGNED TEXT READING IS LONG, DENSE, AND MAGNIFICENT. ALL STUDENTS SHOULD COMMENCE THIS READING AT ONCE SO AS TO BE FULLY PREPARED FOR DISCUSSION OF THIS HISTORY’S LESSONS IN THE LAST WEEKS OF CLASS. START NOW! IT’S YOUR BED-TIME READING FOR THE TERM (REALLY!).

The following required 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 specific historical question(s) and problem(s) will you address? What specific research questions will you ask? List them and make certain to write out those core research questions as clearly and as simply as possible. Why is that question, why are those questions important? What primary 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 primary sources do you think you need? What are the explicit methods of historical analysis and interpretation you will employ on the sources you have selected? Why have you chosen this method or these methods of analysis? What do you hope your work will contribute to the existing literature in the area of inquiry you have selected and how will your work differ from that of other historians in that field/sub-field? 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. This is 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, recordings, 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 single, double-spaced paragraph (no more) describing the source and its most important contributions to your own project. List first what specific and most important facts or knowledge this source contributed to your project. Then, if possible, state cogently how this source, either in its data or in the helpful research methods manifest there, forced you to construct or to re-conceptualize your research questions and the project overall. Primary sources should be listed first, followed by secondary materials, all arranged alphabetically following standard bibliographical protocols.

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) lay out precisely the revised set of specific, cogent research questions the student will work to answer through the research project; 3) lay out specifically the exact methods of analysis and interpretation by which the student will proceed to use the target sources uncovered or to be found; 4) connect the project thickly and informatively to the secondary literature included in the bibliography; and 5) 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.