History and Historians
The George Washington University
Fall 2010
History 201.10
W 6:10-8:00 PM
PHIL 328
Office Hours: W 4-6
Prof. Daniel Schwartz
Phillips 317
(202) 994-2397
dbs50@gwu.edu
Course Description:
This course serves as an introduction to some of the basic theories, practices, and
problems of Western historiography—that is, the history of historical writing and
inquiry—from the eighteenth century to the present. Its principal aims are: (1) to survey
important conceptual and methodological landmarks in the development of “History” as
both a mode of knowledge and an academic field of study; (2) to study certain theories
that have had a major impact on the writing of history (3) to point to questions about how
we, as academic historians, know and represent the past; and (4) to promote a sense of
intellectual community among incoming graduate students in History with different areas
of concentration. We will consider how academic history came to be seen as a “science,”
rival conceptions that emerged in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
over what exactly this meant, and the challenge posed by postmodern theory to the
classification of historical knowledge as scientifically “objective.” We will explore
debates over how broadly or narrowly historians should delimit their subjects, as well as
what weight they should ascribe to particulars or universals, persons or collectives,
individual events or large-scale processes, ideas or material factors in the understanding
of historical change. We will pay close attention to how historians use evidence and
structure their narratives in writing history. Finally, we will examine how historians have
assimilated (or not) insights and models from other disciplines, including philosophy, the
natural sciences, social and economic theory, literary and critical theory, and
anthropology.
Learning Objectives:
Students will be evaluated on the basis of their ability to:

Discern major themes, problems, and controversies that serve as threads running
through the history of modern historiography.

Connect specific topics and readings to these larger issues, in both the weekly
response papers and in comments in class.

Analyze individual works of historiography and historiographic debates
rigorously, e.g. by situating work(s) in broader intellectual context and
conversation, “reading for argument,” considering how writer uses evidence and
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what might be alternative explanations for given data, identifying methodology
and orientation and discerning possible authorial biases, etc.

Demonstrate promise in teaching by presenting at least once during the semester,
showing an ability to lead class discussion by providing necessary background,
posing good questions, and in general communicating with poise and confidence.

Write with clarity, cogency, and concision.
Course Requirements:

Attendance and Participation (20%). This is a reading-intensive seminar (a
rough estimate of 150-250 pages of reading a week, sometimes less, rarely if
occasionally more), and its success will be largely contingent on students’ regular
attendance and active participation in class. NB: I do not measure “active
participation” by totaling your comments for the semester. Quality trumps
quantity. What I mean by quality, however, is not pearls of brilliance or
“staggering genius,” but simply a consistent demonstration of (1) genuine,
thoughtful engagement with the course texts and themes and (2) attentiveness and
responsiveness to what others have to say. I discourage eating in class. Drinking
is fine.

Weekly Response Papers (20%). Every week you must submit a 250-500 word
critical essay on the reading. The essay should focus on the major themes,
questions, and problems posed by the reading for the week. Since these are short
essays, you should focus only on the most important aspects of the readings, not
on their details or minor aspects. These essays will be a basis for our class
discussion; thus, in addition to summarizing the readings’ main points, they
should point to interesting problems or questions raised by the texts. So that we
can read them all in advance, you must post your essay on Blackboard no later
than 9:00 AM on the morning of class (i.e. every Wednesday morning). You
must also submit stapled hard copies to me in class. I will not make comments on
the essays after the first few weeks. I grade these short papers as follows: “++”
for a truly first-rate essay that is analytically rigorous and furnishes sophisticated
insight into the readings; “+” for a paper that demonstrates a solid grasp of the
readings; and “-“ for a paper that is deficient in substance and/or style. These
three grades correspond to High Pass/Pass/Fail. You may miss one essay with no
penalty.

Seminar Presentation (20%). Each student will be expected to give at least one
10-15 minute presentation in seminar. The presentation will typically involve
introducing a particular thinker or reading and posing questions for discussion. A
week or so into the semester I will distribute a list of possible presentation topics
(depending on the size of the class, there will probably be certain meetings where
we have more than one presentation) for you to sign up for. You will receive a
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grade on your presentation based on four things: (a) how well you contextualize
the thinker, reading, controversy, etc. you are introducing, both in the sense of
conveying the immediate historical background but also the larger themes it ties
into and the broader discourses of which it is a part (b) how well you explain the
main argument(s) or points at stake (c) the quality of the questions you pose (d)
the poise with which you present.

Final Paper (40 %). A term paper of 8,000 words that explores either (a) a
particular historiographic debate, drawing on theoretical perspectives learned in
this course, or (b) a particular question or problem in critical philosophy of history
(i.e. the nature of historical evidence, the degree to which objectivity is possible)
will be due in my box in 335 Phillips on Friday, December 3, by 5:00 PM. More
specific guidelines will be provided for this assignment a few weeks into the
semester. Unless you have consulted with me first, I will deduct a third of a grade
from your final paper for every day it is late.

All writing assignments—from the weekly response papers to the longer essays—
must be typed, paginated, stapled if necessary, and free of typographical and
grammatical errors.

Laptops may be used only to take lecture notes. Texting, sending e-mail, playing
computer games, and web surfing of any kind are unacceptable during class.
Using electronic technology inappropriately will negatively affect your
Attendance and Participation grade.

Plagiarism is a serious university offense. Know from the outset that I am obliged
to report suspected cases of academic dishonesty. Be sure to familiarize
yourselves with both the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) and the GW Code
of Academic Integrity, which can be found at
http://www.gwu.edu/~ntegrity/code.html.
Readings:
The following texts are available for purchase at the GW Bookstore. I have also placed
them on reserve in Gelman Library.






Fernand Braudel, On History (University of Chicago Press, 1982)
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000)
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History (Basic Books, 2009)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (Vintage Books, 1995)
Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Hackett, 1994)
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American
Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
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

E.P. Thompson, The Essential E.P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (W.W.
Norton, 2001)
Hayden V. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985)
There are also several readings that are available either on Electronic Reserve on
Blackboard [ER], on reserve at Gelman [GR], or at the indicated URL. Additional
articles may be assigned over the course of the semester.
Schedule of Classes:
I.
Introduction
W
Sept 1
Historiographic Traditions in the West

Peter Burke, “Western Historical Thinking in a Global
Perspective—10 Theses” [ER]

Georg Iggers, “What is Uniquely Western about the
Historiography of the West in Contrast to that of China?’
[ER]
W
Sept 8
NO CLASS—Rosh Hashanah
W
Sept 15
Philosophical History and the Enlightenment

Voltaire, “The New Philosophical History,” in Stern, ed.
The Varieties of History, pp. 35-45 [ER]

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
vol. 1, chs. 1-3, 15; vol. 2, ch. 16; vol. 4, ch. 38, part 6
(“General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in
the West”)
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/g#a375

Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century
Philosophers (New Haven, 1964), “The New History,” 71118 [GR]

Peter Gay, The Bridge of Criticism (NY, 1970), “On
History,” 29-63 [GR]

Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Historical Philosophy of the
Enlightenment” [1963], in History and the Enlightenment
(New Haven, CT, 2010), 1-16, 277-278 [ER]
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II.
The Beginnings of “Scientific” History
W
Sept 22
W
W
Sept 29
Oct 6
“Scientific” History (I): Classical Historicism

J.G. Herder, This, too, a Philosophy of History, excerpted
in On World History: An Anthology, Hans Adler and Ernest
A. Menze, eds (New York, 1997), pp. 35-43 [ER]

Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the Task of the Historian,” in
Rolf Sätzer, ed., German Essays on History (New York,
1991), 36-52 [ER]

G.W.F. Hegel, “Introduction,” Philosophy of History
(1837),
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hegel%20%20Philosophy%20of%20History.htm

Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History,
ed. and trans. G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke
(Indianapolis, 1973), esp. vii-lxxi, 33-59, 61-101, 135-38,
139-59, 160-64, 169-187 (“History of the Popes”) [GR]

Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The
National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to
the Present, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT, 1983), pp. 1-89—
[GR]
“Scientific” History (II): Positivism

Excerpts from Auguste Comte and J.S. Mill in Philosophies
of History, Robert Burns, ed. (Blackwell, 2000) [ER]

Henry Buckle, The History of Civilization in England
(1857-61), from General Introduction, in Fritz Stern, ed.,
The Varieties of History, pp. 120-37 [ER]

Hippolyte Taine, Introduction to the History of English
Literature (1863), from introduction:
http://www.bartleby.com/39/46.html
The Crisis over Method

Johann Gustav Droysen, “Outlines of the Principles of
History” from Historik (1857) [ER]
5

Wilhelm Dilthey, “Pattern and Meaning in History” (1910)
[ER]

---, “The Dream,” in The Philosophy of History in Our
Time, ed. H. Meyerhoff (New York, 1959), 37-44 [ER]

Wilhelm Windelband, “History and Social Science,
Rectorial Address, Strasbourg” [1894], trans. Guy Oakes,
History and Theory 19 (1980): 165-185 [JSTOR]

Heinrich Rickert, selections from The Limits of Concept
Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to
the Historical Sciences, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge,
1986), excerpted in Burns, ed., Philosophies of History
[ER]

Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social
Policy,” in E.S. Shils and H. Finch, eds., Max Weber on the
Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 1949), 50112 [ER]

Iggers, The German Conception of History, pp. 90-173
[GR]
III.
Toward the Social Sciences
W
Oct 13
The “New Historians”
(America)

Frederick J. Turner “The Significance of the Frontier in
American History” [1893]
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22994/22994-h/22994h.htm

James Robinson, from The New History [1912], in Stern,
Varieties, 256-266 [ER]

Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian” (1931)
http://www.historians.org/info/aha_history/clbecker.htm

Charles A. Beard, “That Noble Dream” [1935], in Stern,
Varieties, 314-328 [ER]

Thomas Bender, “Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and
the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Bender, ed., Rethinking
American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 16
20
http://www.ucpress.edu/content/pages/9525/9525.intro.pdf

W
W
Oct 20
Oct 27
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity
Question’ and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge, 1988), selections
The Annales School (France)

Lucien Febvre, “A New Kind of History,” in A New Kind
of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, ed. Peter
Burke (New York, 1973), 27-43 [ER]

Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences” and
“On a Concept of Social History,” in On History, trans.
Sarah Matthews (Chicago, 1980), 25-54, 120-31

---Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Phillip II (Berkeley, 1996 [1949]), 2
vols. Vol. 1: “Preface to the First Edition,” 17-22, Part 1,
chs. 4-5, Part 2, ch. 1, section 3 (“Is it possible to construct
a model of the Mediterranean Economy?’), 231-354, 41861; Vol. 2: Part 2, ch. 4, Part 3, ch. 4, section 1 (“The Battle
of 7th October, 1571”), and Conclusion, 704-56, 901-903,
1088-1106, 1238-44 [GR]
Cultural Marxism and “History from Below” (Britain)

Karl Marx, Selected Writings, Lawrence H. Simon, ed.
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994)



Theses on Feuerbach (98-101)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (187-208)
“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (209-213)

Antonio Gramsci, “Hegemony, Relations of Force,
Historical Bloc,” in The Antonio Gramsci Reader, ed.
David Forgacs (New York, 2000), 189-209 [ER]

E.P. Thompson, selections from The Making of the English
Working Class (1963) and “The Moral Economy of the
English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (1971), in
Dorothy Thompson, ed., The Essential E.P. Thompson
(New York, 2001)
7
IV.
The Cultural and Linguistic Turn and Beyond
W
Nov 3
W
W
Nov 10
Nov 17
T
Nov 23
(Make-up)
Anthropology and History

Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Towards an
Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of
Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 2000 [1973]), 3-32
[ER]

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other
Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984)
Microhistory

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos
of a Sixteenth-Century Miller [1980] (Baltimore, 1992)

---, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things I Know about It,”
Critical Inquiry 20/1 (1993): 10-35 [JSTOR]

---, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues,
Myths, and the Historical Method, tr. John and Anne C.
Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1992), 96-125
http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/legacy/teaching/av1012/Ginzburg
,%20Clues.pdf
Power and Discourse

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison [1975] (New York, 1995)

---, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York, 1984), 51-75 [GR]

Timothy Mitchell, “After We Have Captured Their
Bodies,” in Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley, 1991), 95-127
[ER]
History as Fiction

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural
Criticism (Baltimore, 1985), chs. 1, 5, 11.

---, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in
Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
8
‘Final Solution’, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA,
1992), 37-53 [ER]

Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in Probing, 82-96
[ER]
W
Nov 24
NO CLASS—THANKSGIVING
W
Dec 1
Gender

Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical
Analysis,” AHR 91,5 (1986): 1053-75 [JSTOR]

Joan Hoff, “Gender as a Postmodern Category of
Paralysis,” Women’s History Review 3:2 (1994): 149-68
http://www.cas.sc.edu/hist/faculty/edwardsk/hist783/reader
/hoff.pdf

Bonnie G. Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific
History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the
Nineteenth Century,” AHR 100, 4 (1995): 1150-76
[JSTOR]

Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of
Representation,” in Representations 14 (1986): 1-41
[JSTOR]

Joanne Meyerowitz, “A History of ‘Gender’,” in AHR
Forum 113, 5 (2008): 1346-56 [JSTOR]
F
Dec 3
TERM PAPER DUE IN MY MAILBOX IN PHILLIPS 335 BY 5 PM
W
Dec 8
Imperial and Colonial Studies; the New Global History

Ranajit Guha, “On the Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in
Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford, 1988), pp.
45-86 (Bb)

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and European Difference (Princeton, 2000),
Introduction (“The Idea of Provincializing Europe”), ch. 1
(“Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History”) [latter an
abridgement of “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History:
Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?’, in Representations 37,
Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories
9
(Winter, 1992): 1-26 [JSTOR]], Epilogue (“Reason and
the Critique of Historicism”)

Andrew Zimmerman, “A German Alabama in Africa: The
Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the
Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers,” in
AHR 110, 5 (December, 2005): 1362-1398

“AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” in AHR
111, 5 (December, 2006): 1440-1464
10