Please note that you are responsible for ensuring that your paper, if
delivered late, makes
its way into my hands. I will accept hard copies of papers
only, and they can be delivered to me personally, put in my
mailbox, or
slid under my office door.
OPTION A : Syllabus
project
For this assignment, you will devise a mock college or high school
History
course syllabus on
a
historical
subject area of your choice. You
must use a minimum of eight sources/readings from the class,
which may include Carr, Wilson, and Howell and Prevenier, plus any
readings from Von Ranke forward. Your syllabus should cover
roughly
an
8-10-week term, assuming the class meets at least once per week, but
may
be
longer (or "meet" more frequently)
if necessary. As this is a somewhat unusual assignment, I will
leave plenty of time in class to discuss expectations and answer your
questions. I will also furnish a sample of previous student work
to help give you an idea of what I'm looking for. Please read these
guidelines carefully.
How to proceed:
1. Start by picking a general historical subject area: “U.S.
History, Colonial Period to 1850,” “History of Oregon,” or something
similar--pick a subject that interests you,
perhaps the one you chose for the library research assignment.
You may also produce a syllabus on
a particular historical theme or idea (say, “Race and Ethnicity in
Modern Europe,” "The History of Imperialism," or "Gender in the Ancient
World"), but should avoid overly
narrow subject matter (e.g.,
no “History of Golf”-type syllabi) as this does, in my experience,
make conceiving the syllabus very difficult. In general, the
topic should
look like a lesson plan/syllabus one would expect to find in
conventional high school or university classroom. However,
you do not need
to include assignments or paper topics, devise a grade scale,
or furnish any of the traditional "technical" info (office
hours, etc.)
unless you want
to. The point here is to develop course content, historiography,
and methodology, not to spend time laying out plagiarism policies,
office hours,
and the like. But you are welcomed and encouraged to have fun
with it.
Stumped? If you need inspiration, have a look at the History
Department's curriculum in the annual PSU Bulletin, or look at the
curricula of other university programs, for ideas about courses.
Next:
2. Sketch out the subject matter and order for each class
session, as well as the content you will cover. You should try to
think
about what types of sources you might assign as readings.
Consider how you will lay the course out:
chronologically/diachronically,
thematically, or some combination of the two. Next, isolate which
topics you will deal with. So, in its initial form, the syllabus
should resemble a skeletal outline of a particular topic, identifying
aspects of the subject you will cover in your mock course. Remember:
You are not being asked to become an expert on a given subject, and you
have complete freedom to invent fictional kinds of sources, and even
fictional historical figures, if you like.
After that:
3. Once you’ve got the idea sketched out, it's time to include
the methodological and historiographical elements of the project and
your rationalization for their inclusion, and to build an assigned
reading
list using the Library Subject Guides and other databases at
Millar Library. In a paragraph or two for
each week or section heading, explain why you have included the types
of materials and subject
matter you've selected, and above all what you expect students to learn
about historical methodology and historiography from including the
material in your syllabus. You must frame your justification and
explanation in terms of HST 300’s own themes
and content. In other words, you should refer to the texts we’ve
read
to explain how, for example, a particular selection of readings or a
particular methodology fits into
broader historiographical debates about the intellectual canon,
approaches
to the method of history, or how it represents a particular
historiographic
tradition, say post-modernism, Marxism, the Whiggish tradition, and so
on.
Also, your syllabus
should have a general introduction: why have you selected this course
content, why have you chosen this general
approach, where your historian’s bias lies—in other words, what
approach
to interpreting history do you prefer, and why, and how does this
course
illustrate a broader “thesis” about the past? This would be the
place to express your own philosophy of history.
Your course should be as
representative as possible
of the different historiographies and methodological issues we've
discussed this term.
The goal here--a main goal--is both to show historiographical
diversity
in your subject area and to show that you have mastered a basic
understanding
of the different historiographical traditions we've covered. As a
result,
your syllabus will look highly contrived, with short subject headings
offset by longer explanatory paragraphs.
As an example, let’s say you focus on “Oregon History, Pioneer Age to
Present.” For one week’s scheduled readings, let’s say on
"Pioneer Life,"
you choose as a possible subject/theme:
Native American/European settler
relations in Oregon to 1870
You might then include the following information:
A. Readings. No specific titles are required here, just kinds of evidence and kinds of
texts, as many as you want, for example:
a. Diary accounts of early
pioneers (male and female authors)
b. Transcribed histories of
Indian peoples
c. Newspaper reports of
hostilities
d. Forms of exchange: treaties,
contracts, and so on
B. Next, provide a written explanation along the guidelines above about
how each would fit into the course. Using our same example:
1. Diary accounts - would be used
to demonstrate first-hand perception of frontier life from highly
subjective perspectives; students would learn how to identify:
authorial bias, limits of this kind of
historical evidence for describing period, as well its benefits, and so
on (= methodology, cite pg. from Howell and Prevenier).
Historiographical
focus would be microhistorical, approach favored by offshoot of
Annalist tradition of 1970s and 1980s. Microhistorical
perspective captures the paradigmatic experience (citing Montaillou) of
particular settler or community of settlers; leaves out native
perspective, and so on (= historiography)
2. Transcribed histories of
native peoples – (etc.)
4. You are also required to
"assign" at least 6 pertinent readings of secondary or tertiary sources
you've accessed via PSU's history-oriented databases. It's
time to put your newfound familiarity with our electronic
resources into practice. The readings you use should be journal
articles, encyclopedia articles, monographs, and
the like. YOU MUST CITE THE
DATABASES FROM WHICH YOU GET THE MATERIAL, AND THEY MUST COME FROM
PSU'S SUBSCRIPTION DATABASES (I.E., NOT VIKAT-SUMMIT or WORLDCAT).
Include these works on your Works Cited page and note the database from
which you got the material. Added note: I do not expect you to actually
read the articles and other bibliographic items you find on the
databases.
Finally, a reminder:
5. Remember to cite specific pages from the readings in
support of your explanation and justification of sources and methods in
the
syllabus.
OPTION B : 8-10 page paper
For this paper, you will, as with the syllabus assignment above, need
to identify a general historical period or subject area on which to
focus (see Option A, above, for examples). Using a wide range of
sources, you should explain how historians following different
historiographical and methodological approaches to the period/subject
you've chosen would write its history. What kinds of sources,
methods, and modes of inquiry would your hypothetical historian use to
describe the period in question, and why? What kinds of questions
would each different approach illuminate, and what sorts of questions
and sources might it ignore or minimize? To answer this question, you must use a
minimum of eight sources/readings from the class, which may
include Carr, Wilson, and Howell and Prevenier, plus any combination of readings
from Von Ranke forward.
In addition to your essay, you should include a bibliography of all
readings used, cited appropriately, as
well as at least 6 pertinent readings of secondary or tertiary sources
you've identified as relevant to your subjects using PSU's databases.
See Option A, no. 4, for the precise guidelines. Note that you do
not need to READ all of these database materials.