Download Syllabus - posted - University of Virginia

[ 8-19-2013 ]
Corcoran Department of History
University of Virginia
HIST 2001
Many Worlds: A History of Humanity Before ca. 1800
(Fall 2013)
Course # 16172
4 credits
INSTRUCTOR: JOSEPH C. MILLER
E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]
Telephones: 924-6395, 924-7146
Instructor # 2333
COURSE MEETS TUESDAYS, THURSDAYS –2:00 - 3:15 PM
Location – NAU 211
Office: Nau 435 – South Lawn
Hours: Tuesdays 3:30-5:00 pm; Wednesdays 2:30-4:30 pm
[and by e-appointment]
HIST 2001 sketches the many and distinct worlds of historical experience all around the globe before
approximately the middle third of the nineteenth century. Since then, the numerous worlds of meaning in
which people once lived have become embedded in new, modern networks of awareness and action of
much larger, even global, proportions. These earlier eras of multiplicity were qualitatively different as
times and places to live from our modern perspective of a single world, of universal humanity and human
rights, and statistically measurable and highly normative standards. This course is an exercise in thinking
outside that “box” of modernity, of seeing others’ many radically different worlds on the terms in which
they understood themselves.
HIST 2001 thus endeavors to present the worlds of Native America, ancient Egypt, Hinduism, Korea,
Africa, medieval Europe, and other remote times and places – even, arguably, Jamestown, or Mr.
Jefferson’s Monticello – and translate their apparent exoticism into terms readily recognizable to students
today at the University of Virginia, though without reducing them to pale anticipations of ourselves. The
course uses a resolutely historical method to make these connections across time, space, and cultures.
“History”, in the rigorous sense that the course elaborates, means much more than just “the past” or
“change”. We start from universals of the human experience – with emphasis on ephemerality, or time
itself, our far-from-perfect awareness of the surroundings (our historical contexts) in which we all, always
act, our limited access to the resources needed to accomplish what we think we want, and our elemental
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
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need for the security of belonging and of being respected by those around us. From these experiential
universals, we understand the constant dynamics of change basic to history’s narrative style as
consequences (often unintended) of human initiatives. Impersonal abstractions – “the economy”,
“religion”, “the state” – have no place in this logic. Hence historical understanding does not contemplate
ethics – what people should have done – or valorize what modern Americans celebrate themselves for
doing (as distinct from what we actually do). Rather it uses the evidence we have of what people, for all
their human limitations, ended up doing, for better (at least for some) and – all too often – (for others) for
worse. Including ourselves.
The tenacious historical framework of HIST 2001 constitutes an implicit critique of most of the existing
literature in world history. The field has always been focused fundamentally not on the people acting,
who interest us, but rather on sociological abstractions (e.g. “empires”, “nations”), most of them selfcongratulatory ideas created only in the very recent, modern era. These ideas of ours are not those of the
people who made the world’s histories. In the earlier eras studied in this course all of them – including
people in North America – had other motivations and other means of acting. The course is intended to
leave students with heightened insight into the human experiences shared in the many conceptual
frameworks of the world’s histories and heightened critical awareness of the historical abnormality of
much of what they thought they understood as human universals.
The course will develop these perspectives along four ongoing parallel tracks.
Most basic will be world geography as the environmental contexts of resources that people
have optimized and altered in order to act efficaciously, and thus historically.
The most familiar is a world-historical textbook narrative of the usual suspects,
“civilizations” and the like, which exhibits more than a few of the modernist limitations that
the course will critique.
The most relevant will be the lectures that will introduce and elaborate the alternative
historical perspective at the heart of the course.
The most challenging, and the most important, will be the students’ efforts to integrate these
three.
The process of learning in the course (a.k.a. “requirements”, offered as productive exercises, not as
periodic humiliations) will build on enough basic world geography to understand both lectures and
readings analytically. Against this background the lectures will consistently challenge the approaches in
the text to illuminate assumptions underlying the limits of the ways that world historians have thought,
and contrast those with how they might think historically (since so few of them actually do). We will
read a recent and innovative world-history text (Armesto, The World: A Brief History, rev. ed.), touted for
its departure from the Western-centered narrative framework conventional in the subject that intends (but
routinely fails) to transcend it – however self-contradictingly. We will also read technical articles on
concepts and processes integral to understanding historical thinking.
The instructor will stop lecturing well before the end of each class meeting. Students will then use the
remaining time to write and hand in one-paragraph “take-home points” (THPs) analyzing each day’s
proceedings in the developing context of the course, including the readings for the week, and its historical
logic. The instructor (and TA) will read, grade, and return comments on these reflections at the
succeeding class meeting, so that students receive ongoing assessments of their understanding of the
course and substantive suggestions to improve it. Out of approximately 30 class meetings only the best
25 THPs will count toward final marks.
Since It would obviously be pointless to attempt to reflect on the historical processes that are at the core
of the course without the basic geographical framework in which people created them weekly, short (tenquestion) map quizzes given in the discussion sections. Students will not be graded on their performance
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
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on these quizzes, but they must achieve an average score of 7 (out of 10) on their best 10 (of 15) quizzes
in order to write the final exercise for the course (Monday 16 December < 5:00 pm).
Other written requirements will include periodic short (two-page) “position papers” reflecting on the
course content as it develops. With the take-home points, examinations are unnecessary; there will be
none. A final exercise (no more than five pages, submitted digitally) will ask students to integrate the
three streams of course content in the form of a response to a single question:
“Having spent a semester looking through resolutely historical lenses at the many
worlds in which people lived before the modern era, how do you now view, and
account for, their similarities as well as their many differences? How would you
contrast, and account for, all these earlier worlds with our modern world?
Remember: there are two analytically relevant components of the subject of this
course: ‘world history’.”
Student writing will be considered intensely throughout the semester. You must be prepared to put in the
time and concentration necessary to learn to write (a) clearly and (b) coherently.
Discussion sections will open with the weekly map quizzes, which students will correct
themselves under the guidance of the teaching assistant, Justin McBrien. They will then consider
course concepts and issues in the readings as they emerge during the weeks in question.
Participation in discussion will be graded as: (A) active, informed, relevant leadership, (B)
consistent contributions, (C) regular presence but only occasional responsiveness, (D) silence,
however attentive, and/or irregular presence, and (F) repeated absence or inattention. The only
basis for creditable participation is careful preparation, guided by advance alerts that you will
receive for plans for each week’s section meeting.
Course # Section
Instructor
Time
Location
16173
101
Justin Mcbrien
Th 4:00PM - 4:50PM
Gibson Hall 341
16174
102
Justin Mcbrien
Th 6:00PM - 6:50PM
Nau Hall 142
16175
103
Justin Mcbrien
Fr 8:00AM - 8:50AM
New Cabell Hall 209
Teaching assistant –
Justin McBrien < [email protected] >
Office Hours – 11:00 am-1:00 pm Thursdays,
in the Nau-Gibson atrium (a.k.a. Starbucks)
COURSE GRADING –
Final grades will approximate students’ “highest consistent performance”. I do not need
to remind you that grading is not an exact science – hence no calculations of percentages.
Since no numerical reckoning holds a slow start or an isolated low mark against you, the
occasional valiant effort gone wrong cannot cause you to miss a higher final grade by
0.1% (or any other meaningless margin). The costs of making a mistake or two are thus
low compared to what you can learn from putting yourself on the line by offering an
imaginative insight. Make-ups are never necessary, though extra work contributes to
consistency. You can blow, or blow off, a given class owing to the inevitable distractions
of life, but recurring absences will, obviously, significantly disrupt “consistency”.
“Consistency” also emphasizes – and rewards – steady improvement throughout the term.
The instructors’ eventual assessment of your “highest consistent performance” allow you
to come up to speed in an unfamiliar approach to the subject, to think for yourselves in
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
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disciplined, historical ways, based on the materials presented in the course, to obtain
instructors’ supportive interim reactions to your initial efforts, and to move beyond the
limits or assumptions or blind spots that these early ventures identify. You learn only by
doing, including making mistakes. The course does not hold them against you.
For the course - (A) grades will recognize consistent, creative and integrated engagement
with the overall logic of the course, (B) signifies comprehensive awareness of
components of the course but incomplete, imprecise, or irregular integration of them, (C)
is for viable, but selective (and thus intermittent), comprehension, (D) connotes
occasional relevant misunderstanding, and (F - a grade that I do not expect to have to use)
would be clueless lack of participation.
HONOR SYSTEM
HIST 2001 proceeds in the spirit of the University’s Honor System, particularly its premise
of the prevailing “Community of Trust”; students implicitly “pledge” their written work
accordingly. The System’s potential sanctions are distinctly secondary to the collaborative
spirit that it establishes for us all to proceed to learn together.
TEXTS -Newcomb Hall Bookstore will make the following titles available for purchase. In the meanwhile,
Clemons Reserve will place every large work assigned in the syllabus on two-hour reserve. Shorter
assignments will be available for down-loading at a COLLAB site for the course, which you access at
https://collab.itc.virginia.edu/portal.
WORLD HISTORY TEXT – Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The World: A Brief History
(combined volume) (Upper Saddle River NJ: Pearson Education, 2008). (ISBN 13: 978-013-600921-4) $74.67 [pb]
WORLD HISTORY INTERPRETATION – David Christian, Maps of Time: An
Introduction to Big History (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
(California World History Library, 2) (ISBN: 9780520271449) $23.95 [pb]
To be added -Topical readings on technical aspects of issues that develop throughout the semester
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HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
5
CLASS MEETINGS
Week 1 – Organization and Backgrounds
27 August – Introduction to the course
Introductory Map Quiz 1 to be taken in class
29 August – Introduction to history
Reading - David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
(Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), chs. 1-3.
Discussion sections – Getting acquainted; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 2
HISTORY – THE CONSOLIDATION OF COMMUNITY
Week 2 – Open grounds and the invention of community (~ 50,000-10,000 bp)
3 September – Backgrounds to History (< ~ 100,000 bp)
5 September – “Out of Africa” (~ 50,000-15,000 bp)
Reading - Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The World: A Brief History (Upper Saddle River
NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2007), ch. 1.
Patrick Manning, “Homo sapiens Populates the Earth: A Provisional
Synthesis, Privileging Linguistic Evidence,” Journal of World History, 17, 2
(2006), pp. 115-56. [COLLAB]
Discussion sections – What is history?; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 3
Recommended reading
William H. McNeill, Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (5 vols.)
(Great Barrington MA: Berkshire, 2005).
H-WORLD (http://www.h-net.org/~world/)
The World History Association (http://www.thewha.org/)
Recommended reading – other texts (not exhaustive)
Craig A. Lockard, Societies, Networks, and Transitions: A Global History (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
Jerry Bentley and Herbert Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters, 4th ed. (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2008).
Robert Strayer, Ways of the World: A Brief Global History with Sources, (Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011 [2008]).
John McKay, Bennett Hill, John Buckler, Patricia Ebrey, Roger Beck, Clare Crowston,
and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, A History of World Societies, 8th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin's, 2009).
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
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Robert Tignor, Jeremy Adelman, Peter Brown, Benjamin Elman, Xinru Liu, Holly
Pittman, and Brent Shaw, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton,
2011).
Richard Bulliet, Pamela Crossley, Daniel Headrick, Steven Hirsch, Lyman Johnson, and
David Northrup, The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, 5th ed. (Boston:
Wadsworth, 2011).
Peter Stearns, Michael Adas, Stuart Schwartz, and Marc Gilbert, World Civilizations: The
Global Experience, 6th ed. (New York: Longman, 2011).
Week 3 – Key Concepts for a Plural World History
11 September – Backing into History I – Languages (~ 50,000-15,000 bp)
13 September – Backing into History II – Community (~ 15,000-7000 bp)
Reading - Christian, Maps of Time, chs. 4-5.
Discussion sections – Strategies for writing THPs; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 4
Week 4 – Demographic success, and climate challenges (~15,000-4000 bce) - I
17 September –Strategic Foraging (~ 15,000-7000 bp)
19 September – Aquaculture as an Extension of the Familiar (~ 8000-5000 bp)
Reading - Christian, Maps of Time, chs. 6-7.
Miller and Blier manuscript?
Discussion sections – Reading maps; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 5
Recommended reading – atlases (not exhaustive)
Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997).
Geoffrey Barraclogh, Geoffrey Parker, The Times Atlas of World History (4th ed.,
1993). 5th ed. – as Hammond Concise Atlas of World History (Hammond World Atlas
Corp., 1999)
Patrick Karl O’Brien, Atlas of World History (New York: Oxford University Press
US, 2002).
Rand McNally Historical Atlas of the World (Skokie IL: Rand-McNalley, 2005).
The Prentice Hall Atlas of World History, second ed. (Upper Saddle River: Pearson,
2009).
Longman Atlas of World History (Santa-Barbara: Maps.com, 2009)
Week 5 – Demographic success, and climate challenges (~10,000-4000 bce) - II
24 September –Clinging to Mobility – Pastoralism (cattle and horses)
26 September – Cultivation (Americas, Africa) and agrarianism (Asia)
Reading - Fernández-Armesto, The World, ch. 2.
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
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Christian, Maps of Time, ch. 8.
Discussion sections – TBA; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 6
Recommended reading
TBA
MILITARIZATION, AND ITS COSTS
Week 6 – Military Strategies, and Costs ( ~4,000-500 bce)
1 October – Military “revolutions” (Asia)
3 October – Prophets and the problem of succession
Reading - Fernández-Armesto, The World, chs. 3-4 (“state cycle”).
Christian, Maps of Time, chs. 9-10.
Discussion sections – TBA; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 7
Recommended reading
TBA
Week 7 – Seas as Centers: Maritime commercial integration (ca. 1500 bce – 500 ce)
8 October – China Sea and Indian Ocean, Southwestern Asia and the Mediterranean basin
10 October – The lower valley of the Nile River and the Americas
Reading - Roderick J. McIntosh, “Western Representations of Urbanism and Invisible African
Towns,” in Susan Keech McIntosh, ed., Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity
in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 56-65. [COLLAB]
Discussion sections – TBA; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 8
Recommended reading
TBA
Week 8 – Costs of, and alternatives to, commercial consolidation (ca. 1000 bce – 500 ce)
15 October – FALL BREAK
17 October –Containment - Trading diaspora, secret societies, and social therapy in Africa
Reading - Fernández-Armesto, The World, ch. 5.
P. F. de Moraes Farias, “Silent Trade: Myth and Historical Evidence,”
History in Africa, 1 (1974), pp. 9-24. [COLLAB]
Philip D. Curtin, "The Lure of Bambuk Gold," Journal of African History,
14, 4 (1973), pp. 623-31. [COLLAB]
Discussion sections – TBA; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 9
Recommended reading
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
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Robert Van de Noort, “An Ancient Seascape: The Social Context of
Seafaring in the Early Bronze Age,” World Archaeology, 35, 3 (2003), pp.
404-15. [COLLAB]
Maria A. Masucci, “Marine Shell Bead Production and the Role of Domestic
Craft Activities in the Economy of the Guangala Phase, Southwest Ecuador,”
Latin American Antiquity, 6, 1 (1995), pp. 70-84. [COLLAB]
AN UNEASY BALANCE: MILITARISTS AND MERCHANTS
Week 9 – Consequences of, and Alternatives to, Commercial Consolidation (ca. 1000 bce – 500 ce) –
II: Wary Collaboration
Prepare a two page-paper characterizing the world, according to Armesto,
in relation to many worlds according to HIST 2001.
Due by e-mail (attachment) Monday 28 October.
Format: 12-pt font, double-spaced, normal margins, title; no formal
apparatus.
22 October – Monarchy in the eastern Mediterranean
24 October – Literacy and “world religions”
Reading - Fernández-Armesto, The World, chs. 6-7 (axial age).
Discussion sections – Thinking through a paper; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 10
Recommended reading
TBA
Week 10 – Political strategies: Alternatives (and supplements) to “empires” (~500 bce - 1500 ce) I:
Compositional
Monday 28 October – Two-page-paper due, by e-mail attachment, before your
“close of business”; send to both McBrien and Miller.
29 October – Composite polities – Africa and Americas
31 October – Composite polities – Asia
Reading - Fernández-Armesto, The World, chs. 8-11.
Discussion sections – TBA; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 11
Recommended reading
TBA
Week 11 – Political strategies (~500 bce - 1500 ce) II: Militarized
5 November – Islamic world
7 November – Christian Europe
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
Reading - Fernández-Armesto, The World, chs. 12-15.
Christian, Maps of Time, ch. 11.
Discussion sections – TBA; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 12
Recommended reading
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History, tour of the world in c.
1400.
Max Nelson, The Barbarian's Beverage, A History of Beer in Ancient Europe (New
York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1-44.
Paul H. Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 1-49, 104-45.
CONSOLIDATION OF THE MILITARY-MERCHANT COMPLEX
Week 12 – Commercial openings (ca. 1500-1800 ce) – I: Finance
12 November – Atlantic (including Americas)
14 November – Asia
Reading - Fernández-Armesto, The World, chs. 16-19.
Discussion sections – TBA; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 13
Recommended reading
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D.
1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Philippe Beaujard, “From Three Possible Iron-Age World-Systems to a
Single Afro-Eurasian World-System,” Journal of World History, 21, 1
(2010), pp. 1-43
Week 13 – Commercial integration (c. 1500-1800 ce) – II: Militarization
Prepare a two page-paper highlighting the major historical strategies and
resulting processes that you have found useful in understanding the human
adventure, follies and all.
Due by e-mail (attachment) Monday 26 November.
Format: 12-pt font, double-spaced, normal margins, title; no formal
apparatus.
19 November – Maritime Europe – early modern fiscal-military monarchies
21 November – NO CLASS
Reading – Fernández-Armesto, The World, chs. 20-21.
Christian, Maps of Time, ch. 12.
Discussion sections – Further thoughts on short papers; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ
14
9
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
10
Recommended reading
TBA
Week 14 – Commercial challenges (c. 1500-1800 ce) – II: Consequences
Monday 25 November– Two-page-paper due, by e-mail attachment, before your
“close of business”; send to both McBrien and Miller.
26 November – Africa
Reading – Fernández-Armesto, The World, chs. 22.
Discussion sections do not meet
Recommended reading
TBA
THANKSGIVING BREAK
THE WORLD OF MODERNITY:
THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Week 15 – Limits: Anxieties of the Abstract (19th century)
3 December – The nation state as a state of mind
5 December – Other modern, but a-historical, categorizations (race, class, gender)
Reading - Christian, Maps of Time, ch. 13.
Discussion sections – Preparing for the final exercise; be prepared to take MAP QUIZ 15
Recommended reading
Christian, Maps of Time, chs. 14-15. [For the curious]
HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
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FINAL EXERCISE DUE – at/before 5:00 pm, Monday 16 December
Submit (digitally) a four-five-page essay responding to the following
question:
“Having spent a semester looking through resolutely historical lenses at the many
worlds in which people lived before the modern era, how do you now view, and
account for, their similarities as well as their many differences? How would you
contrast, and account for, all these earlier worlds with our modern world?
Remember: there are two analytically relevant components of the subject of this
course: ‘world history’.”
You will be graded on how clearly you focus on the question and on how
well you use the materials presented during the semester (lectures, readings,
discussions – and not all of them congruent) to offer apt, accurate specifics
for the general points you offer.
Reasonably accurate but unintegrated impressions will earn a C; precise
development of selected aspects (themes) of the course will earn a B; the A
standard is stated above.
Inaccuracy and/or irrelevance will obviously fare worse.
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