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Historical Methods and Craft
Amy Chazkel and Manan Ahmed
Fall 2021

Course Rationale and Learning Goals:

This course brings together all first-year students in the doctoral programs in History, History- EALAC, and History-SMS programs to discuss foundational questions of historical thinking and practice. The course is co-taught by two faculty instructors who collaborate on the readings.

This course aims to give students:

  • Familiarity with the “what,” “how” and “why” of History--from the distinct perspectives of Latin America and South Asia;
  • Orientation to fundamental practices of a historian including archival work, ethnographic or oral history methods, data or quantitative analysis, visualization or presentation modes;
  • An appreciation for how the archive itself--its organization and the nature of the institutions and agencies that generated the documents, and the human beings who recorded it--structures knowledge of the past;
  • Orientation towards the profession by faculty specialization, this course will expose students to major journals, professional organizations, major historiographic innovations or debates, and public history;
  • An opportunity to consider how historical scholarship gets assembled into fields and how these fields establish their boundaries and develop a particular periodization, using as examples the fields in which the co-instructors of this course specialize;
  • An understanding of the conceptual process of inventing an object of historical research, through mediating between the necessary (why this story needs to be told) and the possible (are there empirical data to reconstruct and document this history?);
  • An opportunity to reflect collectively on the ethics and principles of being a historian, including collaborative work, diversity and inclusion.

Course Description:

This course focuses on what you will need to know as an author of historical scholarship and as a careful and serious reader of the work of others, and as an ethical, fair and thoughtful member of the community of professional historians. We will read and discuss scholars’ reflections on historical method, noteworthy works of scholarship and essays that consider how we know what we know about the past. Through these discussions, some exercises completed in and outside of class and a final project, students will gain a deep understanding of how one moves from an initial idea and set of intellectual proclivities to a finished work of history, ready for public consumption.

We have divided the course into three parts. Our first task will be to look under the hood, so to speak, of a piece of historical scholarship, to examine its component parts, to spread out in front of us some of the tools that historians use, and to pick up some of those tools and experiment with using them. Second, we will turn to examining how works of history coalesce into fields of scholarship. We will take a dive into each of the two principal fields of scholarship of the co-instructors of this course: Latin American and South Asian history. What, we will ask, goes into defining a field and what constitutes a contribution to it? How does historians’ work both define and defy geographical and chronological boundaries around fields of study? In keeping with our earlier discussions about archival research, we have selected monographs whose authors have paid special attention to the archive not just as a source of empirical data but also as, itself, the subject of scholarly analysis. Finally, we conclude the semester by reflecting on the ethical choices that historians make in the course of our work, by considering the ways we confront our sources, address our readers and connect and collaborate with each other.

Assessments:

In addition to completing all of the reading for each week and attending class prepared to discuss them, each student’s required work for this class includes the following:

  • 10 pts: Participation Activity
  • 20 pts: Post reflections (on Courseworks) on the readings/topic 500-800 words (due prior to class)
  • 10 pts: Group Exercises** for Weeks 1-3 (See Appendix I, II, IV)
  • 10 pts: Serve as a co-facilitator for week 6-11 readings
  • 20 pts: Research Notes Exercise due Week 6. See Appendix III
  • 30 pts: For G1s: Submit an annotated bibliography for a MA seminar-level paper.
  • Group work: We aim to work collectively and collaboratively in this class. Much of the exercises will be done in groups (2-3). Collaboration, equity, and inclusion are central tenets of our collective approach in this class.

Required Texts:

The required texts for this class will be available for purchase at Book Culture (536 112th Street, NY, NY). You will also find all of these texts on reserve at Butler Library.

  • Romila Thapar. Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (Columbia UP, 2011)
  • Shahid Amin. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992 (UC Press, 1995)
  • Durba Mitra. Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton UP, 2020)
  • Kathryn Burns. Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Duke University Press, 2010)
  • Yuko Miki. Frontiers of Citizenship: Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
  • Kirsten Weld. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorships in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014)

Land Acknowledgment:

As members of Columbia’s Morningside campus, we acknowledge that those of us located in Manhattan are on the territory of the Lenape and Wappinger peoples. Indigenous people from many nations live and work in this region today. Some of us are in other parts of the American subcontinent. Many indigenous communities have lived in and moved through this place over time. I ask you to research the indigenous histories of your land and share it with our class. Our digital infrastructure is also grounded in the same theft of land and resources under colonialism. We acknowledge and pay respect to the native elders past and present, and recognize their active presence and their futurity, reposed in the generations present and those to come.

Class Schedule:

1. Skills & Approaches

Week 1, September 15: Historical Scholarship and its Component Parts

For instructions, please see Appendix I. Groups will participate in workshopping Piece A or B. Everyone must read the main articles (Cohn+Morss) but the other readings are only to be done according to group designation.

A: Anatomizing Bernard Cohn’s “The Command of Language and the Language of Command”

    1. Bernard S. Cohn, "The Command of Language and the Language of Command," Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1985), pp. 276-329.
    1. Michel Foucault. “The Order of Discourse” (1970)
    1. Sir William Jones’s “Preface”, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London: 1771)
    1. John B. Gilchrist’s “Advertisement and Introduction”, A New Theory and Prospectus of the Persian Verbs. (Calcutta: Thomas Hollingbery, Hircarrah Press, 1801)

B: Anatomizing Susan Buck Morss’ “Hegel and Haiti”

    1. Susan Buck Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26:4 (Summer 2000)
    1. Jean-Jacques Dessalines Declaration of Independence (1804)
    1. Deborah Jensen, “Hegel and Dessalines: Philosophy and the African Diaspora,” New West Indian Guide vol. 84, n. 3-4 (2010).
    1. Excerpt on the master-slave dialectic from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
    1. Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (London: J. Cundee, 1805), Chapter 2 (pp. 95-108), and 361-364. Please also scan the Table of Contents and list Appendices (pp. xxi-xxii) to get a sense of the scope and aims of Rainsford's book.

Week 2, September 22: The Secondary Source in Historical Scholarship

For instructions, please see Appendix II. Groups will do either Radical History Review or History & Theory. Everyone has to read the methodological essays below:

Methodology of Reading:

    1. Greg Dening, “'P 905 .A512 x 100': An Ethnographic Essay,” The American Historical Review, July 1995
    1. LaKisha Michelle Simmons, “Introduction: Black Women Authors in the Journal of American History,” Journal of American History (2021)
    1. Alex Lichtenstein, “Year One of Decolonization” (Feb 2019) and Michelle Moyd, "Goodbye Note" (Oct 2020)

Week 3, September 29: Archival Workshop/ Center for Puerto Rican Studies, CUNY, 2180 Third Avenue, NY, NY

For instructions, please see Appendix III.

    1. Amy Chazkel, “Research Notes from the Underworld: The Entry Logs of the Rio de Janeiro Casa de Detenção, 1860-1969” Latin American Research Review (2011)
    1. Manan Ahmed Asif, “Idols in the Archive,” Journal of Asian Studies (2014)
    1. Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (1977)
    1. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe (2008)

Week 4, October 6: Data, Maps, Graphs

For instructions, please see Appendix IV. Groups will do either (https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58)[Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America] or (https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=45&project_id=0)[Tenement Housing in Rio de Janeiro, 1870s-1880s].

Readings (to be done by all):

    1. Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (1991): Introduction+Chp 3 “Map Generalization”+ Chp 9 “Data Maps”
    1. Gerd Gigerenzer, “Mindless Statistics,” The Journal of Socio-Economics vol 33 (2004): 587-606
    1. Jennifer Morgan, Chp 1 “Producing Numbers: Reckoning with the Sex Ratio in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1500–1700” in Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke UP, 2021).

Week 5, October 13: Oral History and the Material and Visual Worlds (9/11)

Class Visit: Mary Marshall Clark Director, Columbia Center for Oral History Research

South Asia: Text, Memory, Society

Week 6, October 20

  • Romila Thapar. Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (Columbia UP, 2011)

Week 7, October 27

  • Shahid Amin. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992 (UC Press, 1995)

Week 8, November 3

  • Durba Mitra. Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton UP, 2020)

Latin American and Caribbean History: Epistemologies and Fuzzy Boundaries

Week 9, November 10

  • Kathryn Burns. Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Duke University Press, 2010)
  • Alejandra Osorio, “Of National Boundaries and Imperial Geographies: A New Radical History of the Spanish Habsburg Empire,” Radical History Review 130 (January 2018)

Week 10, November 17

  • Yuko Miki. Frontiers of Citizenship: Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Week 11, December 1

  • Kirsten Weld. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorships in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014)

Ethics, Diversity, Inclusion and the “Historian’s Craft”: How we work and whom our work addresses

Week 12, December 8

    1. Sara Ahmed, “Making Feminist Points.” Feministkilljoys. http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/
    1. Katherine McKittrick, “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor)” in Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke UP, 2021): 14-35.
    1. Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébard, "Acknowledgments and Collaborations," in Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard UP, 2012)

Tuesday, December 14: Presentation + Conclusions

APPENDIX I: Historical Scholarship and its Component Parts

Exercise: Anatomizing a Work of historical scholarship

Aim: At the beginning of any project, especially a major one, we are encouraged to break everything down into constitutive parts: The Research Question, the Archive, the Methodology, the Theory, the Bibliography, etc. These parts are further divided and those sub-divisions further classified. It is a necessary exercise to make us think clearly and to ensure that we can articulate our own thoughts precisely and with forethought. What is assumed, however, is that these parts (though linked) will somehow magically cohere together in our final output - seamlessly binding evidence and analysis in a well-formulated whole. That is a big assumption.

What: In this exercise, our task is to 1) Identify the main components of an essay 2) See how primary source material, theoretical framework, analysis and argumentation fit together 3) examine more closely the components and 4) attempt to re-assemble the constituent parts

Each of the articles are paired with their primary sources and their theoretical engagements. Prior to class, please read carefully and closely the essay for your group assignment. Next, label each relevant para of the essay with: 1) The Primary Source/Archive 2) The Theory 3) The Analysis 4) Argument. Next, you should read the other readings carefully.

How: This is a group exercise with each group reading either A or B files. However, it is highly encouraged that everyone read both articles (at least skim the article of A/B).

In Class Workshop: We will begin the workshop with a short discussion of the article and the ways in which it is structured. Next, on a white-board, we will list out all the paras labelled (1-4) Now, comes the fun part: we will attempt to REASSEMBLE the essay but this time making a choice as to which bits of data from the primary texts or theoretical texts you may want to add/subtract from the essay.

Each group will then present their re-assembled article to the class (10 mins max).

Appendix II: Journeys through the Journals

Exercise: To get a sense of a journals print-run as an exercise in intellectual history

Aim: One key aim of our training is to prepare for a “unique” contribution to a research field. The guides for this training are generally our advisors or teachers but as well historiographic surveys, review essays, monographs that make critical interventions into a field etc. We want to be able to however also look at where the field sediments are located and how intellectual genealogies and ‘conventional wisdom’ are put into practice. Our focus will be on both that which is present and that which is missing.

What: Take the last 20 years of print-runs of a journal and find critical themes/authors/questions that are remarkable (to your group) and those that are missing.

How: Read the essays by Dening, Williams and Moyd and think through the journals collectively. (10 mins presentation with powerpoint)

Appendix III: Research Notes Exercise

Discovering, reading and interpreting archival sources is at the heart of the study of history. Our work as historians involves our critical inquiry into much more than just the actual content of the documents; the practice of historical reconstruction and analysis requires that we also pay close attention to the organization of the archive, to the ways in which the people who curate the content of archives intervene in the formation of collective historical memory, and to the inconsistencies of what gets recorded and what does not in the first place.

A genre of historical writing to which some historical researchers turn when they find a particularly compelling story from the archive is a “Research Notes” essay. Generally more concise than a traditional monographic research article (like those you will find listed in the Table of Contents under “Articles” in each issue of the American Historical Review), a Research Notes essay might focus on an entire archive or one set of documents. Whatever the scope, this type of essay pries loose deeper layers of meaning in recordkeeping itself as part of what we study as historians. There is also a public service aspect to a “research notes” piece; researchers sometimes use this genre of writing to call attention to an unknown collection of documents, or to draw public funding or emergency assistance to an archive that is at risk of physical destruction due to political suppression, natural disasters or neglect.

Your “Research Notes” essay: As part of this class, we are planning a site visit to an archive (details TBA), and your Research Notes essay should draw on the collections that we will examine as part of that exercise. Alternatively, if you are immersed in your own archival research and would like to use your ongoing research as the basis for this paper, you may do that with prior approval; please let us know by October 1st if that is your intention. You will work collaboratively during our archive site visit, but please note that each of you should submit your own, individual Research Notes essay.

Your essay should be an analytical piece of writing, rather than simply a description of what the archive contains. We are including on our class’s Courseworks site two research notes-type articles: Manan Ahmed Asif, “Idols in the Archive” and Amy Chazkel, “Research Notes from the Underworld.” While we hope that these published pieces give you a sense of what this type of writing can look like, you do not need to conform to the style and approach that each of us have taken here and should feel free to experiment with finding your own voice for addressing your reader.

Submission guidelines: Your “Research Notes” essay should be between 3,000 to 5,000 words in length(including footnotes). Although you should feel free to choose a nontraditional “voice” or approach for your essay, this is still a work of scholarship, and you must cite all of your sources (use Chicago Manual of Style). As with all formal submitted writing, you should make sure your essay is double-spaced and paginated, and that it has decent margins (one inch all around is usually good). Don’t forget to give your essay a title! Upload your article on Courseworks by 12 pm on October 13th,.

Appendix IV: Lies, Lies and Damned Lies

Exercise: To critically review a history database and analysis

Aim: This exercise it to create modes of thinking critically about data, maps and visualizations. How do we think of the underlying data for a digital project? Distortions? Omissions? Biases? What methodologies are made apparent by the creators/authors? How do visual presentations skew or enhance our understanding?

What: Drawing upon the readings, we will examine two DH projects which also present their Data. Take a thorough overview of the DH archives and do a review presentation of your critical and analytical take on the archive.

How: 10 mins presentation with powerpoint.

APPENDIX V: Final Assignment

For G1s: Submit an annotated bibliography for a MA seminar-level paper. This can be an early foray into what you expect will be your dissertation project; alternatively, it can be a parallel project that is not your dissertation, or a fictitious research project that you are interested in but have no concrete plans actually to bring to fruition.

Your annotated bibliography should include no fewer than twelve entries, of which at least two must be primary sources. (List primary sources first, then secondary sources after.) Your secondary sources may include monographs, scholarly journal articles, chapters in edited volumes and doctoral dissertations. For each source provide a full citation and write a 150-300-word critical analysis, as follows:

For primary sources, describe and evaluate: • what the primary source is, when it was created, and who created it • any relevant details about the author, including the person's role in events • circumstances under which the source was created (intention, audience, purpose) • what the source says about events, the author's perspective, including the tone and language • if the source is unique in content or perspective, and if it corroborates or contradicts others • the value of the primary source to this research project For secondary sources, describe and evaluate: • the content of the secondary source, essentially its scope and narrative (what it's about) • the thesis, interpretation, or approach; how it converses with other works • the primary sources that the author uses • the effectiveness of the author's argument and the use of evidence to support it • any relevant details about the author's affiliation, position, specialty, or previous scholarship • the value of the secondary source to the research project Please note that although the topic of the research project (real or fictitious) that this annotated bibliography is supposed to be a part should be historical, all of these sources that you include in your bibliography need not be written by historians; if you include works from scholars in other disciplines, you should consider taking the disciplinary perspective into consideration and explicitly discussing it in your citation.

For G2s: Write a draft research prospectus. You are expected to make an appointment with one of the instructors by Nov 1st to go over your plan for this final project. This should be around 5000 word with sections covering your research question, relevant historiography, methodology and/or theoretical considerations, chapter outline and timeline of research with a bibliography.") It should be a narrative blueprint for a work of historical scholarship --- one that you may or may not actually carry out. The idea is to practice thinking about all of the parts of a research project and to practice making the case for that project's importance, relevance and feasibility, and to consider research design, and to project how the final project will be structured. You should be intentional about the scope (chronological and geographical) of the project that they are proposing, and to include a brief explanation for those choices in the prospectus.