Questions in Global History syllabus (FU Berlin, summer term 2024)

Syllabus LV 13314 SE Questions in (Global) History Dr. Frederik Schröer Summer Semester 2024, Mondays 16:00-18:00, Room A121 FMI Koserstr. 20 Fragment of a 1st-century manuscript of Thucydides “History of the Peloponnesian War” Cutout from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War#/media/File:P._Oxy._16.jpg Questions in (Global) History Dr. Frederik Schröer, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin [email protected] Global history emerged as an intervention in the discipline of history, asking new questions and contributing new answers to older debates. The diversifying landscape of global history today reflects and builds upon a plethora of movements, “turns” and interventions that reshaped the study of history since the nineteenth century. Its approaches, methods and theories—the kinds of questions it asks, how it asks them and how it goes about answering them—are indebted to this heterodox heritage. As much as global history today thrives on the diversity of the disciplinary backgrounds of its practitioners, its rooting in the peculiarities of the discipline of history can be a challenge for students coming from other fields. This seminar is geared towards students who might feel unfamiliar or uneasy with the “who is who” and “what is what” of history. Designed as a safe space for the puzzled and the curious, the seminar focuses on three interrelated sets of larger questions in historiography: questions of theory, questions of sources and questions of writing. We will encounter different ways of doing history, their heuristics, stakes and historical contingencies. We will discover different types of primary sources, their archives and how scholars have worked with them. And we will explore what it means to write historically and how to go about formulating historical questions. Syllabus 1. 15.04.2024 Introduction This is the introductory session of the seminar. Everyone will have a chance to introduce themselves. We will go over the general topics, aims, and organization of the seminar, and discuss the course requirements. 2. 22.04.2024 The Global History of History We begin with an introductory approach to history as a curious discipline, and as one with a long and global history. Apart from Daniel Woolf’s introductory chapter, we will also read an excerpt from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ chronicle of the Peloponnesian War and discuss it as an example of early historiographical writing. Readings: • • ‘Introduction’, in: Daniel Woolf: A Global History of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 1-21. Thucydides, ‘Pericles’ Funeral Oration’ in: Peloponnesian War, transl. Richard Hooker. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html Assignment: Formulate (at least) three questions that the primary source (i.e., Thucydides) seeks to answer. Further Reading: • Koselleck, Reinhart. "On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History." Translated by Kerstin Behnke. In The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, 1-19. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. 3. 29.04.2024 Writing History “just like it happened” We turn to the foundation of history as a “scientific” discipline in the 19th century. The German historian Leopold von Ranke, (in)famous for his maxim of writing history “just like it happened” (wie es wirklich gewesen), quintessentially exemplifies this approach. From the perspective of today, his writing is both fundamental to our discipline and a primary source that needs historicizing itself. Readings: • • Georg G. Iggers, “Foundations of ‘Scientific History’,” in Daniel Woolf and Andrew Feldherr (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 4: 1800-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 41-58. Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History: Edited with an introduction by Georg G. Iggers (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 85-87 and 93-95. Assignment: Write a reading response essay (300-500 words) on the two texts, in which you discuss their main arguments and give your own evaluation. What kinds of questions did historians like Ranke seek to answer? How did these differ from the questions of older historians we have encountered last week? 4. 06.05.2024 The Annales School and the longue durée This session turns to the French Annales school of historical writing. Historians of this group, such as Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, or Fernand Braudel, saw themselves breaking with older traditions of historiography and stressed the importance of social history, the use of social scientific methods, and the attention to long-term developments and long periods of time – in French: the longue durée. Readings: • • Peter Burke, “Introduction,” in his The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 1-12. Braudel, Fernand. “History and the Social Sciences.” In Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe: Essays from Annales, edited by Peter Burke, 11-42. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Assignment: Formulate (at least) three questions that historians of the Annales group sought to answer. 5. 13.05.2024 Microhistory This week, the pendulum swings the other way: while last week’s historians like Fernand Braudel were interested in the very large and the very long in history, this week we turn to the opposite movement: Microhistory, which emerged as an intervention to the dominance of the Annales school and large-scale historiography more generally. Readings: • • Ginzburg, Carlo, John Tedeschi, and Anne C. Tedeschi. "Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It." Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 10-35. Zemon Davis, Natalie. The Return of Martin Guerre. Harvard, London: Harvard University Press, 1983, chapters 3 and 4 (27-41). Assignment: Write a reading response essay (300-500 words) on today’s readings, reflecting on the approaches of microhistory and the history of everyday life in contrast to last week’s discussion of the Annales school and the longue durée. Further Reading: • • • • • • Revel, Jacques. “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social.” Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. In Histories: French constructions of the past, edited by Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, 492-502. New York: The New Press, 1995. Paul Steege, Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Maureen Healy, and Pamela E. Swett, ‘The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter’ in: The Journal of Modern History 80/2 (2008), 358-378. Struck, Bernhard, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel. "Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History." The International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 573-84. Aslanian, Sebouh David, Joyce E. Chaplin, Ann McGrath, and Kristin Mann. "AHR Conversation How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History." The American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1431-72. Porst, Luise, and Patrick Sakdapolrak. "How Scale Matters in Translocality: Uses and Potentials of Scale in Translocal Research." Erdkunde 71, no. 2 (2017): 111-26. De Vito, Christian G. "History without Scale: The Micro-Spatial Perspective." Past & Present 242, no. Supplement 14 (2019): 348-72. 20.05.2024 Public Holiday No class today 6. 27.05.2024 “Unarchived Histories: Subaltern Studies and beyond” Special Session with Prof. Gyanendra Pandey For this session we are joined by Dr. Gyanendra Pandey, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor at Emory University and a founding member of the Subaltern Studies project. Professor Pandey will speak to us on the question of what has counted as history and archive since the establishment of the social and human science disciplines in the 19th century, and suggest how critical oppositional movements— feminism, anti-colonialism, borderland studies, and minority histories of colored, subordinated, conquered and stigmatized people generally—have challenged the colonialist character of much of this inheritance. For sharper focus, he will use the South Asian Subaltern Studies project, and his own work in it, to illustrate what he believes are much wider patterns at work in the rethinking of archive, history, and knowledge production. Readings: • Chatterjee, Partha, and Nivedita Menon. "A Brief History of Subaltern Studies (1998)." In Empire and Nation. Selected Essays, 289-301: Columbia University Press, 2010. Assignment: Based on our discussions over the previous weeks and this week’s overview reading on Subaltern Studies, prepare questions to ask professor Pandey in class. Further Reading: • • • Guha, Ranajit. "Introduction." In A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995, edited by Ranajit Guha, ix-xxii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Pandey, Gyanendra. "In Defence of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today." Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 11/12 (1991): 559-72. Pandey, Gyanendra. "Men in the Home: Everyday Practices of Gender in Twentieth-Century India." Feminist Studies 46, no. 2 (2020): 403-30. Term Paper: For students who need to write a term paper, this session concludes the thematic issues they are supposed to reflect on in their first essay on the topic of “scale in history.” The essay of 1500 words (plus/minus 10 percent) is due by June 16th 2024. 7. 03.06.2024 The Linguistic Turn This session discusses the so-called “linguistic turn” and what its implications were for the discipline of history. We will also use this as a springboard for discussions of “turns” in disciplines more generally, and as an entry into the second half of the seminar, which focuses more on methodologies that seek to tap different archives and answer different questions in history. Readings: • • Judith Surkis, ‘When was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy’, in: American Historical Review, 117/3 (2012), 700-722. Rob Carson, ‘The Linguistic Turn and the Cultural Turn’, in: Bruce R. Smith (ed.), Shakespeare and the Critics (Cambridge: CUP, 2016), 1754-1761. Assignment: Formulate one tweet (or more) that summarizes the intervention of the linguistic turn in 250 characters maximum. Further Reading: • • Koselleck, Reinhart. "Social History and Conceptual History." Politics, Culture, and Society 2, no. 3 (1989): 308-25. Pernau, Margrit, and Dominic Sachsenmaier. "History of Concepts and Global History." In Global Conceptual History: A Reader, edited by Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier, 127. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 8. 10.06.2024 Oral History This week, we turn from written to unwritten sources and to the subdiscipline of Oral History. We engage with a classic of the field, Alessandro Portelli’s book The Order Has Been Carried Out, of which we will read and discuss both the introduction and chapter 6. Readings: • • Portelli, Alessandro. ‘Introduction’, in: The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, 1-20. New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Portelli, Alessandro. ‘Chapter 6: Via Rasella’, in: The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, 133-71. New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Assignment: Write a reading response essay (300-500 words) on the sections from Alessandro Portelli’s book that we’ve read for today—what kinds of questions does Portelli ask, and how does he go about answering them? More generally, how does Oral History differ from ways of doing history that we have discussed so far? Further Reading: • • Thomson, Alistair. “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History." The Oral History Review 34, no. 1 (2007): 49-70. Sheftel, Anna, and Stacey Zembrzycki. "Who’s Afraid of Oral History? Fifty Years of Debates and Anxiety About Ethics." The Oral History Review 43, no. 2 (2016): 338-66. 9. 17.06.2024 History of Emotions This week, we engage with a recent subfield of history: the history of emotions. What does it mean to historicize emotions? How do look for emotions in history, and what can they tell us? Our readings give us an overview over the field, as well as an example of a specialized methodology, namely Monique Scheer’s approach of combining the history of emotions with practice theory. Readings: • • Boddice, Rob. “Introduction” and “Chapter 1: Historians and Emotions,” in The History of Emotions: Second Edition, 1-46. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. Scheer, Monique. "Introduction: Enthusiasm as an Emotional Practice," in Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany. Emotions in History, 1-34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Assignment: Formulate (at least) three questions that the history of emotions seeks to answer. In addition, come up with (at least) one suggestion for an archive or type of source that might be consulted to answer each of your questions. Further Reading: • Pernau, Margrit, and Imke Rajamani. "Emotional Translations: Conceptual History Beyond Language." History and Theory 55 (2016): 46-65. 10. 24.06.2024 History of the Senses We stay with approaches to writing history in close connection to the human, the body, and its experiences. The history of the senses seeks to historicize the very sensorium of the human body, through which we engage with the world. To that end, we will read works that focus on one sense in particular, namely the sense of smell. Connecting closely to last week’s engagement with the history of emotions, we will use the readings to discuss what kinds of questions we can ask when we historicize the senses, and what archives and sources can be used to write such histories. Readings: • • Tullett, William. “Introduction: On being nose-wise” and “Chapter 1: Noses,” in Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives, 1-44. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Lee, Joel. "Odor and Order: How Caste Is Inscribed in Space and Sensoria." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 3 (2017): 470-90. Assignment: Write a reading response essay (300-500 words) that considers the topics and readings of this week and of last week—do you see connections between the history of the senses and the history of emotions? How would you go about writing histories that historicize human experiences and the human sensorium? Can you think of particular case studies, archives, or sources inspired by your undergraduate studies or your areas/themes of interest in Global History? Further Reading: • Lichau, Karsten. "Secularising Silent Bodies: Emotional Practices in the Minute’s Silence." In Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations, edited by Monique Scheer, Birgitte Schepelern Johansen and Nadia Fadil, 141-56. London, Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2019. 11. 01.07.2024 Objects in History From the human experience of the world through feelings and the senses, we turn to the world itself and more precisely this week: the world at hand, in objects. Through this week’s readings, we will discuss how to historicize objects and what the history of certain objects can tell us about their roles in history and their influence on humans, the common agents of historiography. Readings: • • Susan Broomhall, “Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest: An Affective Archaeology of VOC Objects in Australia.” In: Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (eds) Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, pp. 175-191. Oxford: OUP, 2018. Bajpai, Anandita. "Material Lives of Cold War Radio Pasts in India." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 44, no. 1 (2023): 86-119. Assignment: Formulate (at least) three questions that historians can ask and answer about and with objects in history. Further Reading: • • Beaven, Lisa, and Matthew Martin. "The Stuff of Snuff: The Affective and Sensory Connotations of Snuffboxes in Eighteenth-Century Culture." Emotions: History, Culture, Society 7, no. 1 (2023): 95-118. James, Paul, and Timothy Erik Ström. "Objects of the Anthropocene: Mapping MaterialEmotional Culture from Human Beginnings to the End Times." Emotions: History, Culture, Society 7, no. 1 (2023): 145-70. 12. 08.07.2024 Environmental/Nonhuman History Having turned from humans to the world via the interface of objects, we continue in this direction and engage with environmental and nonhuman history. What does it mean to write history beyond the human? Can we, as humans, even write histories of the nonhuman? We will read a more theoretical reflection on this issue, and compare it to Amitav Ghosh’s recent work on nutmeg and its role in the colonial history of Southeast Asia. Readings: • • Domańska, Ewa. "Posthumanist History." In Debating New Approaches to History, edited by Marek Tamm and Peter Burke, 327-52. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Ghosh, Amitav. “Chapter 1: A Lamp Falls” and “Chapter 19: Hidden Forces,” in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, 5-19 & 245-257. London: John Murray, 2021. Assignment: Write a reading response essay (300-500 words) on writing history without taking anthropocentrism for granted. What kinds of questions can we ask about the nonhuman and its histories, including objects as well as materiality and environments more generally? How can we go about answering such questions? Further Reading: • O'Gorman, Emily, and Andrea Gaynor. "More-Than-Human Histories." Environmental History 25, no. 4 (2020): 711-35. • Hollinger, Veronica. "Historicizing Posthumanism." In After the Human: Culture, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century, edited by Sherryl Vint, 15-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 13. 15.07.2024 Final Discussion In our final session of the seminar, we take a retrospective view over the topics we have covered and the discussions we have had. One final reading, a classical piece by Carlo Ginzburg, works to kickstart our own discussion on the roles of the historian and what it means, can mean, or should mean, to write history. Reading: • Ginzburg, Carlo. "Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian." Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991): 79-92. Assignment: Come to class one last time :)