HI 460 Cross-Cultural Encounters

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A few reminders and deadlines as we wrap up the semester.
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This unit is all about scholarly argument, storytelling, and polishing your writing – which is appropriate given you are now in revision mode. Continue reading →

During this (short) unit, please read and study the remainder of Storey’s book, especially as you put the final version of your paper together for its due date on Thurs, Nov 6. Notice (and trust) what Storey has to say about narration, structure, and argument and the clear flow of logical thought, as well as follow his suggestions for the mechanics of citation and to observe the conventions of historical writing.
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During this unit, we’ll do less as a group with content & discussion and more with working (together and individually) on beginning your research in earnest. Continue reading →

We are winding up our first unit (Very Recent History, A Crash Course) which has included an introduction to some of the methodological issues involved in dealing with recent history including archives, sources, privacy, ethics, and chronology; a well-crafted journalist’s account of America Unwinding; and some exploration with an “archives” of our own making. We now have 6 teams (they are updated under the Teams tab, above) to help organize our next unit on Research Strategy, which starts after Thursday’s class.

By way of follow-up to our discussion today of fair use and copyright, I spotted this link today – a flowchart about plagiarism – worth a look.

For the Journal #4 due on Thurs 10/2, please write a 600-700 word journal post that lays out your topic as it currently stands AND your anticipated primary source base. The latter is not hypothetical or what you HOPE to find, but should be actual sources you’ve already looked at and know that they exist and are open to you. Bring laptops to class ready for a writing exercise.

For Tues 9/30, we will discuss both the essays from Doing Recent History on archives, and also speculate on what could/should be added to our “Documents from Now” list – so bring your ideas.

What did I miss in the list? What would future historians love to have access to? As we “build” our own archive, how might the contemporary archival challenge raised in these essays apply to our own work?

For our discussion of George Packer’s The Unwinding on Tuesday Sept 23, please prepare by reading all the “year” pages, and the chapters covering your assigned main character (Dean Price, Jeff Connaughton, or Tammy Thomas), and then your assigned other profile (celebrity or place). Think about how the thesis posed so elegantly in the prologue plays out in these assigned sections. Pay attention not only to content but to form – i.e. not just what the story is, but how Packer tells it by what he says – and does not say. Be ready to provide a short capsule summary of your assigned sections, and to explain what we learn about the recent past from studying these places or people. Continue reading →

Thursday’s class will introduce a new book, George Packer’s The Unwinding, a literary nonfiction book about America’s recent past. He’s making an overall argument (that the American promise has begun to unwind, and that we can date the start of that process to about the late 1970s), but it’s certainly not a scholarly book. Rather, The Unwinding is written by a talented journalist (he’s a New Yorker staff writer) for a popular audience through interwoven biographies of both famous and ordinary Americans. I think Packer captures well the zeitgeist of the era and it makes for compelling reading and is a lovely model of innovative “recent history” writing; don’t just take my word for it, the book won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2013 (PS: you can also find him visiting The Daily Show and the Colbert Report to pitch the book’s release).

For Thursday 9/18, please read the Prologue, and bring the book with you to class. Continue reading →

Reading for Tuesday, Sept 16th: please read, and prepare to discuss, Potter/Romano, Doing Recent History, p. 1-44. Continue reading →