HIST 601 syllabus/p.1
The Catholic University of America
Department of History
HISTORY 601:
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS AND METHODOLOGY
Professor Jerry Z. Muller
Wednesdays, 5:10-7:10pm
McGivney Hall 005
Fall, 2013
Office: Marist Hall 226
Office Hours:
T, 2:15-3:00 pm
W, 3:00-4:00 pm
and by appointment.
Phone: (202) 319-5484
e-mail: mullerj@cua.edu
This course introduces graduate students to perennial issues and contemporary
trends in the academic study of history. It examines the issues of bias and
objectivity, the relationship of ideology to social science, and the fructification of
historical writing by borrowing from other social sciences. It explores the
relationship of theory, generalization, and historical practice. It examines the use
of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence. The course aims to make its
participants more analytically acute readers and writers of historical works.
Requirements: A seminar of this type depends upon the thoughtful
participation of those involved. Each student is therefore expected to read and
think about the assigned readings before the relevant class, and to be prepared
to discuss the theses, methods, strengths and weaknesses of the assigned
works.
Beginning with the session of September 25, each class will begin with a
student offering a ten-minute presentation on the most important issues raised by
the week’s reading, as well as an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of
the assigned readings.
There are eleven writing assignments. Students may write from eight to
ten of them, and the best eight grades will count toward the course grade. Each
assignment should be about three pages in length, and is due at the beginning of
the class at which the work in question is discussed. The paper should be well
structured, and clearly written and argued.
In addition, each student has the option of writing a review-essay of
approximately fifteen pages on a single historian, historiographical approach, or
substantive historical problem, drawn either from topics covered in the course or
from other topics. Students are encouraged to use the paper to survey the work
of one historian as it developed over the course of his or her career, to trace the
development of ideas and the relationship between the work and the historian’s
HIST 601 syllabus/p.2
own historical context. Good subjects, some of whom have produced their own
autobiographies, include: Hugh Trevor-Roper, George Mosse, Fritz Stern,
Richard Pipes, Bernard Lewis, and Gerda Lerner, but students are free to choose
any historian they prefer. Topics and readings should be discussed with Dr.
Muller no later than November 6, and the review-essay must be handed in by
November 27. This review-essay will count in place of two writing assignments.
There will be three departmental colloquia during the semester, on
Wednesdays from 5:15-7:00pm. All grad students are expected to attend and to
read the papers in advance. On those evenings, we will hold our class after
the conclusion of the colloquium, beginning at 7:15pm, at a location tba.
Grades will be based on the assignments, oral presentations, and on
contributions to class discussions. Assuming that participation and the
presentation have been neither outstanding nor disastrous, students can
presume that their final grade will be no more than one-third of a grade above or
below the average of their assignment grades. That is, with an assignment
average of an A-, a student can normally expect the final grade to range between
an A and a B+. Nonparticipation in discussion, however, could drop the final
grade considerably. The university grading system is available at:
http://policies.cua.edu/academicgrad/gradesfull.cfm#iii
HIST 601 syllabus/p.3
Schedule of Classes and Readings
W August 28: Introduction:
Read in advance: Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931),
pp. 1-89.
And consider this question: What does Butterfield mean by “the Whig
interpretation of history,” and why is his critique significant beyond the immediate
context of British history?
Recommended:
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (written 1940), frontmatter, pp. 3-47; 138-144.
Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to
Historical Methods (2001), pp.1-79.
Jerry Z. Muller, “Style is Not a Luxury: Reflections on the Prose of the Profs,”
AHA Perspectives, March, 2006, at
http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2006/0603/0603vie1.cfm
W Sept. 4 Library session with Ms. Anne Lesher, Mullen Library
W Sept. 11:
The Historical Discipline as Organized Skepticism: Two Case Studies
a. Christopher Hill, “Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,” in Hill, Continuity
and Change in Seventeenth-Century England (1974) (on Blackboard)
J.H. Hexter, “The Historical Method of Christopher Hill” in his On Historians
(on Blackboard)
b. Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud – American
History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis and Goodwin
(2204) (on Blackboard)
Joyce Lee Malcolm, Review of Arming America, Texas Law Review, 79 (May
2001), pp. 1657-76 (Blackboard)
Assignment 1: What are Hexter’s main criticisms of Hill? How effective is his
critique?
Recommended:
Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Present Standpoints and Past History,” Journal of
Philosophy, Vol. 36, No. 18 (August, 1939), pp. 477-489.
Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (1997)
David Lowenthal, “How we know the past?” from The Past is a Foreign Country,
(Cambridge, 1985), pp.185-238
HIST 601 syllabus/p.4
Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, “Pattern, Bias, and the Great Systems,” from
The Modern Researcher, fourth ed. (New York, 1985), pp. 193-215.
Max Weber, "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," in Dallmayr and
McCarthy (ed.), Understanding and Social Inquiry, pp. 24-37;
David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical
Thought (New York, 1970)
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory ed. Lewis Coser (Chicago, 1992)
Robert K. Merton, “The Perspectives of Insiders and Outsiders,” in Merton, The
Sociology of Science (New York, 1973), pp.99-136; slightly abridged version in
Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science ed. Sztompka (Chicago,
1996), pp. 241-63;
Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, Revised
edition (New York, 1972)
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988)
Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians/.
John Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (New York, 1992)
Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History
(California, 1994), esp. ch. 1 and 2.
Th Sept. 12 – Lecture by Professor John Connelly, location tba
- read in advance:
Forum on Connelly, From Enemy to Brother in Catholic Historical Review,
Volume 98, Number 4, October 2012, pp.751-766, and Jerry Z Muller, review of
From Enemy to Brother, Central European History, Vol. 46, #2 (2013), pp. 439442.
HIST 601 syllabus/p.5
W Sept. 18: Archives, and More Organized Skepticism
Exercise:
A. Go to an archive or rare book room in the Washington DC area in order to
read a manuscript or rare book on a topic of interest to you. Suggested
facilities include: The Folger Library, the Rare Book Room at Mullen
Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the archives of the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum, or the American Catholic History
Collection at CUA. Be prepared to discuss your excursion in class.
For guidance, consult:
http://archiveswiki.historians.org/index.php/US_States
and here is some useful advice on contacting archives:
http://blog.historians.org/2013/06/summer-tips-for-visiting-archives/
B. Spend some time using an online archive. Be prepared to discuss your
experience with the class.
Some examples of archives online:
Founders papers:
http://founders.archives.gov/
Hannah Arendt papers at LC:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/
Leo Baeck Institute archives:
http://www.lbi.org/
C. Bring to class an example of a scholarly book (or one that gives the
appearance of a scholarly book) that you believe does not meet the
standards of historical objectivity. Be prepared to explain why.
Recommended: Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and
Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1990)
Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies
(Cornell, 2007)
Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus
Copernicus (2005)
Wayne C. Booth, et al., The Craft of Research, 3rd Edition (Chicago, 2008)
Thomas Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research (Oxford, 2005)
Mary George, The Elements of Library Research (Princeton, 2008)
HIST 601 syllabus/p.6
W Sept. 25: Analytic history as integrated history
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, Foreword, Introduction, skim 3-38, read pp.
39-92, 103-175, 219-230, 281-331, 345-58, 441-53.
Assignment 2: What are the key characteristics of the model of feudal society as
put forward by Bloch? Please bring 11 copies of this essay to class, as it will be
shared with your classmates. Also please bring 11 copies of the notes that you
took on Bloch with you to class, also to be shared.
Recommended:
Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89,
Chapters 1-3
Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics;
Bloch, The Historian’s Craft
Bloch, The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England
Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1941
For a brief biography and character sketch see Eugen Weber, “About Marc
Bloch,” in Weber, My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Harvard, 1991), pp.244258;
Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge UP, 1991) by Carole Fink, is a more
extensive biography
Reynolds, Susan, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted
(Oxford, 1996) is an important re-examination of some of issues raised by Bloch.
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II with J. H. Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien…”
Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 480-539
HIST 601 syllabus/p.7
W Oct. 2 Total History from the Ground Up/Family/Women
S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: Vol. 1, Frontmatter, pp.1-42 (can be read
online through ACLS Humanites E-books, available through Aladin),
and selections from Vol. 3: The Family (also available online, but you will find it
easier to read from the book, which you should bring to class), pp. Frontmatter,
pp. 1-65, 118-135, 160-189, 205-212, 223-240, 312-359.
Assignment 3: How does Goitein bring detailed research together with broad
historical and social scientific perspectives to illuminate otherwise hidden areas
of historical experience?
Recommended:
S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society 6 volumes. The one volume abridgement,
edited by Jacob Glassner in 1999, has a useful Foreword and Addendum about
Goitein and Geniza studies; on Goitein, see also Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole,
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2011).
Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962).
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
(French original, 1975).
David Herlihy, Medieval Households (1985)
David Herlihy, Opera muliebria: Woman and Work in Medieval Europe (1990)
Mary Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of
the Western Past (1984).
HIST 601 syllabus/p.8
W Oct. 9: First Colloquium – Prof. West, "’The Stupendous Folly of the 15th
Amendment:" Debates over the Repeal of a Constitutional Amendment, 19001909’”
(Class follows colloquium)
Class topic: Intellectual History
David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013), pp.1216.
Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” History
and Theory 8 (1969), pp. 3-53.
Assignment 4: To what extent would Skinner approve of Nirenberg’s book? If
you anticipate that Skinner would have criticized some aspects of Nirenberg, are
those criticisms merited, or can you mount a defense on Nirenberg’s behalf?
Please bring 10 copies of this essay to class in order to share them.
Recommended:
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for
Capitalism before Its Triumph
Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European
Thought
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936)
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967;
revised edition, 1992)
J.G.A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method
(2009)
Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the
Constitution (1996)
Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979)
Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (1989)
Donald Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (2002)
Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition (1999)
James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (1994)
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1992)—at the intersection of intellectual
history and philosophy
Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas
(2000)
HIST 601 syllabus/p.9
W Oct. 16:
The Macro and the Micro/Historical Sociology
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (2 volumes) (German original, 1939)
Vol. 1, The History of Manners, start with 221-223, then Preface, then pp.51-218
(in the revised edition, pp. 449-451; then Preface, then, 45-182)
Vol. 2, Power and Civility, pp.1-12, 229-250 (in the revised edition 187-194; 363381)
There is a more recent, revised edition: The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and
Psychogenetic Investigations (2000), but the differences are minor, and the print
is smaller. So feel free to use the older edition.
Assignment 6: How does Elias connect large-scale processes with the
transformation of the psyche of individuals?
Recommended:
Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in
Early Modern Europe (2003)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de
France 1977—1978.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
(2011)
W Oct. 23:
Military History
John Keegan, The Face of Battle (1976)
Assignment 7: What are the strengths and limits of Keegan’s form of military
history?
Recommended:
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the
West, 1500-1800 Second Edition (Cambridge UP, 1996).
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 16881783 (1989)
Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006)
John A. Lynn, “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History” Journal of
Military History 61.4 (1997): 777-789.
Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995)
Russell Weigley, The American Way of War (1973)
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
David Bell, The First Total War (2008)
HIST 601 syllabus/p.10
W Oct. 30 The History of Religion
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 14001580, Preface to the Second Edition, pp. 1-206 377-423.
Exercise: Using Dr. Muller’s technique for skimming an academic book, spend
an hour looking through the Duffy. Write a paragraph summarizing the main
points of the book. Then read the entire selection and write a short reflection. To
what extent did you, through skimming, capture the main ideas of the book?
Assignment 5: What are Duffy’s key arguments? What is the position he is
attacking, and how is it related to what Butterfield called “the Whig interpretation
of history”? Does Duffy provide an account that surpasses the Whig
interpretation, or merely reverse its biases?
Recommended:
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-2)
John Tracy Ellis, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life” Thought 30 (1955)
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of
Food to Medieval Women (California 1988) [For a stark contrast, see Rudolph M.
Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago 1987)]
Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity
(Chicago, 1982)
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in
Early Christianity (Columbia 1988)
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1970)
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
(2010)
HIST 601 syllabus/p.11
W Nov. 6 Departmental Colloquium: Simon Ditchfield (University of York),
Chapter on “The Catholic Reformation” for the forthcoming Oxford Illustrated
History of the Reformation”
class follows colloquium
Class topic: Marxist history
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Preamble and Part I
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to
the Modern, 1492-1800 (1997, republished 2010), Introduction, and chapters
1, 8, 9, 12, Epilogue.
Assignment 8: Based upon this book, what are the strengths and weaknesses of
Marxist historiography?
Recommended:
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the
Third World (2001)
Walter L. Adamson, “Marxism and Historical Thought” in A Companion to
Western Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza
*“Marx and History,” in Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1997); as well as
the rest of the volume
Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Polity Press, 1984), chapter five a sympathetic study;
Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The ‘Group’: British Marxist Historians,” in her The New
History and the Old (Harvard UP, 1987), pp.70-93- an unsympathetic study
Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (combined volume: Norton, 2008)
Chris Wickham, “Memories of Underdevelopment: What Has Marxism Done for
Medieval History, and What Can It Still Do?” in Marxist History-Writing for the
Twenty-First Century
HIST 601 syllabus/p.12
W Nov. 13
Economic History/Environmental History
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991),
Preface, 1-151; 207-end.
Assignment 9: In what senses is this a work of economic history? What does a
focus on the environment add to economic history? Why is a focus on economic
processes central to environmental history?
Recommended: J. D. Hughes, What is Environmental History (Polity, 2006, 780745631899)
Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011)
John McNeill, “Reflections on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History”
History and Theory 42:4 (2003): 5-43.
William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (1996)
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism
Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic
World (2005)
Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (1949, 2nd ed.
2010)
Mark, Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997)
David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making
of Modern Germany (2006)
John McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean,
1620-1914 (2010)
There is a useful roundtable on William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness:
Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” in Environmental History (1996)
Carolyn Merchant, “Gender and Environmental History,” Journal of American
History 76 (1990): 1117-1121
HIST 601 syllabus/p.13
W Nov. 20 – Lecture by Prof. Tentler on effects of Vatican II on American
Catholics
Class follows lecture
Class topic: History of International Relations/ Political History/ Contingency and
History
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, pp.1-241.
Recommended:
Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method
(Princeton, 2006).
Assignment 10: Discuss the range of sources used by Clark.
W Nov. 27 – Thanksgiving – No Class
W Dec. 4 – Final Class
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, pp.242-563 (skim ch.5 and 9).
Recommended:
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
D.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1938)
Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (1959)
A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (1954)
David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (1994)
Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power (1996)
Assignment 11: Discuss the issues of agency and intention on one hand, and
structure on the other, in Clark’s account of the origins of the First World War.
HIST 601 syllabus/p.14
The required books are recommended for purchase, and should be available in
the CUA bookstore as well as on Amazon. They may also be borrowed from the
WRLC library system.
Journals that deal frequently with historiographical issues include:
American Historical Review
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Historically Speaking
History and Theory
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Two non-professional journals that publish historical reviews of a high order are The
New York Review of Books and The New Republic.
Stimulating works which touch upon a variety of issues dealt with in this course
are Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History; David Hackett Fischer,
Historians' Fallacies (New York, 1970); Oscar Handlin, Truth in History (Cambridge, MA,
1979); J. H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisals of some the masters of modern history
(Cambridge, MA, 1979); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old
(Cambridge, MA, 1987); Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present, Peter Novick, That
Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge, 1988); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth
Century Europe (1975); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacobs, Telling the
Truth about History (New York, 1994).