Course Overview
This course will introduce students to the theoretical and practical issues confronting public historians today. Readings will address questions of audience and authority in collecting and presenting history; the relationship between history and national, communal, and personal memory; public controversies involving historical interpretations; and the production and dissemination of history in diverse formats and media. These critical, methodological, and theoretical readings will provide the basis for the hands-on section of the course in which students will develop proposals for a public history project--a documentary film, museum exhibit, oral history, or website.
Texts
Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).
History 306 Course Pack
Both will be available at the University bookstore at the Sir George Williams (downtown) campus. Some readings will be available online or in class.
Assessment
Successful completion of the course depends, most basically, on regular attendance in class, evidence of preparation and application, active participation in class discussions based on close readings of the required texts, and completion of all exercises and assignments on time.
1. Class participation - 10%
2. Response Papers - 20%
3. Project Proposal - 20%
4. Final Project - 50%
Participation
Students will be graded based upon their attendance at lecture and their participation in any discussion provoked by the lecture and/or readings in class. Attendance at lecture is essential and any student missing more than 25% of the course will receive no grade for this portion of the course.
Deadlines
The penalty for late papers and projects will be 5% of the grade per day. No extensions will be granted except in cases of a DOCUMENTED emergency.
Assignments
Response Papers
Based on the syllabus, students are to write a 1-page response to an article of their choosing each week throughout the semester when a reading is assigned. These responses will be collected at two dates throughout the course of the semester:
The first batch of responses will be due in class on Tuesday, 3 October
The second batch of responses will be in class on Thursday, 9 November
These responses are meant as a means of critically engaging with the articles we read each week for class. Grading will be based upon the sophistication of responses to the articles in question, and students are encouraged to make reference to other course materials in their responses, as a means of demonstrating an engagement with the course materials in general.
Project Proposal
Write a 3-page proposal for a public history project: a documentary film, a museum exhibit, an oral history project, or a website (if you can think of a project that does not fall into any of these categories, let me know). You proposal should discuss:
1. Main subject and main historical question of the project, and why this question is important
2. The medium and genre of the project (documentary film, art exhibit, etc.)
3. Potential audiences and how you plan to address them (general public, students, etc)
4. Your sources (oral histories, documents, artifacts, photographs, etc.) and how you plan to collect these sources
5. Outline of the project (oral history questionnaire, plan of the exhibit, chapters of your documentary film, or sections of your website (I.e. if you plan to include a section for website visitors to leave comments, explain why it is useful for your project)
6. A bibliography of secondary sources relevant to your project, 2-5 sources on your subject ("Canadian's view of history" or "the blues") and 2-5 sources on your medium (oral history, museums, film, digital history).
7. An example of research material (interviews, photographs, etc.)
Project Proposal is due on Tuesday, 24 October.
Final Project
A completed public history mini-project, to be presented to the class during the lass 2 weeks of classes. You will have access to equipment and a computer lab at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling to help you complete your project. Examples of final projects:
5-minute film
3-interview oral history collection
10-object exhibit (photographs of objects with labels, exhibit script, and floorplan)
5-page website
The Final Project is due on Thursday, November 30.
Policies and Procedures
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is an affront to me and to your peers. Plagiarism is submitting work that is not your own as if it were yours. This includes copying material, even a few sentences, from published or unpublished sources, from the internet, or from another student without citing the source. It also includes presenting another person's ideas or paraphrasing the work of another person without citing the source. Plagiarism also includes handing in bought papers, papers obtained from free essay websites, or having another person write your paper for you. Anyone suspected of copying other people's work without clear acknowledgement, or of any comparable act, will be reported to the Faculty of Arts and Science for plagiarism.
Syllabus: I reserve the right to make changes to the syllabus during the year if/as necessary. Please check the online syllabus before every class.
Schedule
Unless otherwise noted, readings are from the course pack; some assigned readings are from the web. In those cases, you are expected to print out the item so that you will have it with you in class.
Week I: Introduction: What Is Public History and Why Does It Matter?
Sept. 5 Course Introduction
Sept. 7. Ludmilla Jordanova, "Public History," in History in Practice (London: Hodder Arnold, 2000), 141-171.
Week II: Power, National Consciousness, and Usable Past
Sept. 12. Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction," The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. (New York: Verso, 1983), 1-14.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 37-46.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989 (1962), 1-14.
Sept. 14. Film on reserve at the Media Center: The Valour and the Horror (Canada, 1992).
Graham Carr, "Rules of Engagement: Public History and the Drama of Legitimation," Canadian Historical Review 86 (June 2005), 317-354.
Week III: History, Memory, and Film
Sept. 19. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989),
Sept. 21. Film on reserve: Good Bye, Lenin! (Germany, 2002)
Robert A. Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film," American Historical Review 93 (January 1988), 1173-1185.
Week IV: The Western Gaze and Museums
Sept. 26. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Objects of Ethnography," in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 386-443.
Sept. 28. Jeanne Cannizzo, Into the Heart of Africa (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1989). (illustrations will be shown in class)
Mackey, Eva. "Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in a Multicultural Nation: Contests over Truth in the Into the Heart of Africa Controversy," Public Culture 7 (Winter 1995).
Recommended: 7 pm, H762. Public Lecture: Roy Rosenzweig, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.
Week V: Popular Participation and the Web
Oct. 3. Roy Rosenzweig, "Can History Be Open Source?: Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," Journal of American History 93 (June 2006), 117-146.
First batch of Response Papers due.
Oct. 5. View websites
Janet Horowitz Murray, "From Additive to Expressive Form," in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Free Press, 1997), 65-94.
Week VI: Retelling the Working Class Experience
Note: Make arrangements to see me during my office hours during this week to discuss your project.
Oct. 10. Michael Frisch, "Introduction," in A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).
Oct. 12. Guest Public Historian: Steven High
Article by Steven High, TBA
Week VII: Living History
Oct. 17. Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998).
Oct. 19. No Class - Work on Project Proposals
Week VIII: The Public Space of History
Oct. 24. Erica Lehrer, "Bearing False Witness?: 'Vicarious' Jewish Identity and the Politics of Affinity," in Imaginary Neighbors, edited by Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
Project Proposals Due.
Oct. 26. Guest Public Historian: Matthew Barlow, Walking Tour of Griffintown
Article by Matthew Barlow, TBA
Week IX: The Politics of Native Identity in North America
Oct. 31. James Clifford, "Identity in Mashpee," in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Culture, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Nov. 2. Guest Public Historian: Ron Rudin
Film on reserve: Life after île Ste-Croix (Canada, 2006).
Week X: The Public Narrative of Private Pain in South Africa
Nov. 7. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (Three Rivers Press, 2000), 79-83; 109-117; 164-5; 169-72; 207-17.
Jillian Edelstein, "The Truth Commission," Granta 66 (1999), 107-45.
Nov. 9. Film on reserve: Long Night's Journey into Day (USA, 2000).
Second batch of Response Papers due.
Week XI: Work on Final Projects
Nov. 14. No Class - Work on Final Projects
Nov. 16 No Class - Work on Final Projects
Week XII: Final Projects
Nov. 21 Presentation of Projects
Nov. 23 Presentation of Projects
Week XIII: Final Projects
Nov. 28 Presentation of Projects
Nov. 30 Presentation of Projects
Final Project due.