SIMMONS COLLEGE
GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE/
DEPT. OF
HISTORY, COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
Spring Term 2009
HIST. 527/LIS 443 Archives, History, and
Collective Memory
Friday 9:30am-12:30pm.
Jeannette
Bastian: Rm. P 204G; phone 617-521-2808; jeannette.bastian@simmons.edu
Office
Hours: Mon. 3:30 – 5:30. and
by appointment.
Laura
Prieto: Rm. C-319C; phone 617-521-2253; laura.prieto@simmons.edu
Office
Hours: Mon. 10am-noon and by appointment
Course Outline
This course explores the
social construct of collective memory as it is shaped through historical events
and recorded through archival records.
Taking the view that the synergy between history and archives is at
least partially expressed through the construction of collective memory, this
course will examine the relationship between these two disciplines and the
impact that each has on the other in the process of memory construction, public
history display, commemoration, the writing of history, and the formulation of
political and national identities.
Focusing on nineteenth
and twentieth century events, this course will consider such historical and
archival issues as the use or misuse of archives to shape political myths, and
the use of documents to influence a shared historical consciousness. Using a wide range of case studies, the
class will touch on video testimonies, museum displays, archival collections,
public monuments, the role of technology in historical preservation, and the
place of history in public discourse, as well as political struggles over the
notion of a “shared” heritage.
Course Outcomes:
Students will understand
the theoretical relationships between history, archives and memory.
Student will read and
write analytically.
Students will engage in
meaningful and analytical discussion.
Students will work with
colleagues in group and will create group presentations.
Students must satisfactorily meet all the
requirements described in the syllabus. Extenuating circumstances or other
valid reasons for not making up the course assignments will be considered by
the instructor, but the student will be required to provide evidence of the
severity of the circumstances preventing the student from completing the
assignments. Unexcused late submissions of assignments will lead to a half
reduction in your grade each day the assignment is late.
If
you have a disability for which you are requesting an accommodation or have a
medical condition, you are encouraged to contact the instructors; Em Claire
Knowles, Assistant Dean, if you are a GSLIS student; and the Academic Support Center (ASC) as early
as possible. ASC is located in Suite 303, 617-521-2474. Please contact Todd
Herriott, ADA Compliance Officer/Disabilities Coordinator. Information about
Disability Services at Simmons is available at http://my.simmons.edu/services/disability/index.shtml.
Reading
available for purchase:
Paul
Connerton, How Societies Remember
(Cambridge UP, 1989)
W.
Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These
Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (UNC Press, 2000)
Barbie
Zelizer, Remembering to Forget (U
Chicago, 2000)
Art Spiegelman, Maus I (1986)
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993)
Readings and Films on Reserve:
Jeannette
Bastian, Owning Memory
David
Blight, Beyond the Battlefield
Antoinette
Burton, ed. Archive Stories: Facts,
Fictions and the Writing of History
Paul
Connerton, How Societies Remember
John
Gillis, ed., Commemorations
David
Glassberg, A Sense of History
Maurice
Halbwachs, On Collective Memory
John
Hersey, The Wall
An-My
Le, Small Wars
Primo
Levi, If This Is a Man
Deborah
Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust
David
Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country
Pauline
Maier, American Scripture
Nelson
Mandela Foundation, A Prisoner in the
Garden
Merrill
Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory
Kendall
Phillips, ed., Framing Public Memory
Sarah
Purcell, Sealed with Blood
Roy
Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will
Carl
Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years
Michael
Shaara, The Killer Angels
Gerald
Sider and Gavin Smith, eds., Between History and Histories
Susan
Sontag, On Photography
Susan
Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Carolyn
Steedman, Dust
Alexander
Stille, The Future of the Past
Alan
Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs
Alice
Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Barbie
Zelizer, Remembering to Forget
Nuit
et Brouillard (Night and Fog)
Schindler’s
List
Assignments
Discussion
Participation 25%
of final grade
Response
Papers 25%
Book
Review (due March 16) 25%
Group
Project (var. due dates) 25%
Participating
in Discussion: Lively, informed discussion is crucial to a successful
seminar. Therefore a large percentage
of your grade in this course will reflect the level of your participation and leadership in weekly
discussions. Of course,
regular attendance is expected. Beyond this, we expect active participation
each week.
Participation in discussion means that you should contribute ideas,
understandings, and questions about class topics that help to clarify or
advance the subject under discussion.
What you say in class should reveal a well-informed engagement with the
readings and other course materials.
You should also be respectful of your peers to encourage the full
involvement of all class members in our conversations.
Leading
Discussion:
On specified days, for which you will sign up during the first class meeting,
you and two classmates will open and lead discussion on the week’s required
readings. This is an opportunity
for you to practice intellectual leadership among your peers, to hone your oral
communication skills, and to make your
perspectives and critiques of the reading central to the course. You should
compose a list of about 10 discussion questions in collaboration with your
fellow discussion leaders for the week. Since there are multiple readings each
week of the seminar, the discussion questions should include some that
synthesize the week’s assignments in terms of common themes or problems, as
well as other questions that are specific to particular readings. You should
meet (ideally, as a whole group) with at least one of the professors in advance
of the class in order to finalize your questions and to devise a strategy for
leading discussion.
Response Papers:
Due by noon on the day before each class.
Since much depends upon your active
engagement in discussions during class time, you should not only read the assignment but also think about what you have read and how
it relates to the course.
Then, write a 1-page response
to the readings and post it on the class Wiki by noon on Thursday, the day
before class meets. Writing the responses – which will form a collective
reading journal by the end of the semester – will help you come to class
prepared with comments, queries, and informed opinions on the readings and the
larger issues they invoke. Each paper should succinctly explore a common theme
or argument from the week’s readings. Response
papers must be limited to one page only, single or double-spaced. No response paper is required on the
weeks you are leading discussion.
Book Review/Analytical
Essay: Due March 16.
Students
will complete an analysis (8-10 double-spaced, typed pages) of a book from a
list compiled by the instructors that engages the concept of collective
memory. Your paper will discuss
how collective memory is defined (explicitly or implicitly) and used in the
book you select. This assignment allows students to assess critically the
theoretical assumptions in a wider range of scholarship across disciplines and
genres.
Book List for
Analytical Essay:
David
Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War
Antoinette
Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in
Late Colonial India
A.S.
Byatt, Possession
Martha Cooley, The Archivist
Travis Holland, The Archivist’s Story
Jill Lepore, In the Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American
Identity
Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum
Emily Rosenberg, A Day Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory
Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through
the Cookbooks They Wrote
Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution
Katherine Weber, Triangle
Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media,
and the Shaping of Collective Memory (1992)
Group Project:
Deadlines: Post
topic and components on Wiki by February 23. Wiki is at http://gslis.simmons.edu/wikis/lis443lis527
Post outline and working bibliography on Wiki by
April 3
Post
completed project on Wiki by April 24
Final
presentations in class on May 1 or May 8.
For
the group project, students will be assigned to specific working groups based
on your special interests within the course. These working groups will meet and work together throughout
the semester. We are aware of and
sympathetic to the scheduling demands of the seminar participants and will
provide some built-in time within the seminar structure for the groups to meet,
coordinate, and work together.
Each group is also required to check in periodically with a specific
faculty member.
In consultation with the instructors, the
group (3-4 students) will choose a historical event, social movement, cultural
movement, historical figure or issue and examine how it has been remembered
over time and how it is currently being remembered and made accessible to the
public. In examining the collective memory of this event, person or movement,
students will exam all aspects of how it has been remembered including its
archives and artifacts, web sites/physical sites, primary and secondary
sources. In addition to presenting the different perspectives on the subject,
students will analyze the way it has been remembered, draw conclusions about
its collective memory and the impact of different types of remembrance.
Group
Projects should cover some of these issues.
1. Does the
historical meaning and/or significance of the event change over time?
2. What is the
relationship between the archives and records of the event and the memory of
the event?
3. How do
different media shape the memory of the event?
4. Who is the
intended audience for each representation of the event? What is the anticipated reception?
5. Do political
demands or needs shape a historical or memorial narrative?
6. What is the
role of the community and/or individual on the shaping of historical meaning?
7. Do different
types of documents help to shape different historical interpretations? In turn, how do they shape public
understanding of the past?
8. Are there
competing claims to history or memory?
If so, how does this contestation of memory continue to shape an
over-all memory?
9. Does the
introduction of new “texts” and/or new interpretations alter and reconfigure
meaning of the past?
10. How do
individual memories interact with constructed “collective” memories?
The
student groups will post their presentation on the class wiki and lead the
class in a brief discussion of their topic. All student presentations can make use of video, the web,
power point, etc. The group will
be graded on the project’s clarity, organization, originality, depth of
research, and analysis of materials.
Quick Reference Tools: Students need to become
familiar with history, archival and public history organizations, journals, and
web sites (many which have extensive links to other pertinent sites).
American Historical Association: http://www.theaha.org/
Publishes American Historical Review and the newsletter Perspectives.
Organization of American Historians: http://www.oah.org/
Publishes Journal of American History and
The OAH Magazine of History.
National Council on Public History: http://ncph.org/
Publishes The Public Historian.
American Association of Museums: http://www.aam-us.org/
Publishes Museum News.
Society of American Archivists: http://www.archivists.org/
Publishes American Archivist.
Association of Canadian Archivists: http://archivists.ca/home/
Publishes Archivaria
Humanities and Social Sciences Online: http://www.h-net.org
Encompasses many discussion networks,
book reviews, and other resources.
CLASS SCHEDULE
Email list of ideas and areas of interest for Group Project
to LP & JB by 9am Wed. 2/4
February
6. What is
Collective Memory (LP and JB)
· Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember.
· Maurice Halbwachs, On
Collective Memory, chapters 3, 4 and 5
February 13. Archives and Collective Memory (JB)
· Jeannette A. Bastian, Owning Memory, How A Caribbean Community
Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. chapter 1.
· Francis X. Blouin,
“Archivists, Mediation, and Constructs of Social Memory,” Archival Issues, v. 24, n. 2. (1999)
p. 101-12
· Alice Yaeger Kaplan,
“Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies, no. 77 (1990):
103-116.
·
Carolyn
Steedman, Dust, The Archive and Cultural History, chapter 6, “What a Rag Rug Means.”
JB Sample Presentation
February 20. Historians and Collective Memory (LP)
·
John
Gillis, “Memory and Identity” in Commemorations, 6-20.
·
Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, No. 69 (Winter,
2000): 127-150.
·
David
Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, chapter 5.
·
Jay Winter,
Remembering War: The Great War between Memory
and History in the 20th Century, ch. 1.
LP Sample Presentation
February 27.
The Revolutionary Heritage in America (LP)
·
Sarah J. Purcell, Intro. and chapter 1 in Sealed
with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America
·
Anne Sarah Rubin, “76 and 61: Confederates
Remember the American Revolution” in Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow
· Roy Rosenzweig, Chapter 3 in Eight
Hours for What We Will
· Pauline Maier, Introduction and Chapter 4
in American
Scripture
Students Meet in Groups
March 6. The Place of Slavery in Civil War
Memory (LP)
·
David Blight, “A Quarrel Forgotten or a
Revolution Remembered,” in Blight, Beyond the Battlefield
·
Kathleen Clarke, “Celebrating Freedom:
Emancipation Day Celebrations and African-American Memory in the Early
Reconstruction South” in Brundage, Where These Memories Grow
·
and one of the following options:
·
Photography / 1860s: view Mathew Brady
photographs on web <memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml> and read chapter 2, "Albums of War," pp.
71-118 in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs
·
Monuments / 1880s: visit the Shaw memorial in
Boston; read “The Shaw Memorial in the Landscape of Civil War Memory,” in David
Blight, Beyond the Battlefield
Film / 1910s: watch The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith) and read Jay Winter, “Film and the Matrix of Memory,”
·
Biography / 1920s-30s: read chapters 10, 11, 26,
29, 39, and 57 Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the
War Years and chapter 6, “From Memory to History” in Merrill D.
Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory
·
Fiction / 1960s-1970s: read part 1, “Monday,
June 29, 1863,” in Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974) and
“Fictional History and Historical Fiction” in C. Vann Woodward, The
Future of the Past
·
Documentary / 1980s-1990s: watch episode 1 of The Civil War (dir. Ken Burns) and read
“Watching the Civil War,” in David Glassberg, A Sense of History
REMINDER:
Book Reviews due 3/16
· Hans
Medick, “The So-Called Laichingen Hunger Chronicle,” in Between History and Histories,
ed. Sider and Smith, 284-299.
· Michel-Ralph
Trouillot, “Silencing the Past: Layers of Meaning in the Haitian Revolution,” Between
History and Histories, ed. Sider and Smith, 31-62.
· Kenneth
E. Foote, “To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture,” American Archivist 53 (Summer
1990), 378-392
· An-My
Le, Small Wars (2005) [exhibition
catalog]
· Nelson
Mandela Foundation ,Prisoner in the
Garden, 2006 TBA
March 27.
Fiction, Memory and History (JB & LP)
·
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
·
Laurent
Dubois, “Maroons in the Archives: The Uses of the Past in the French
Caribbean,” in Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from
the Sawyer Seminar, edited by Francis X. Blouin and Williams G.
Rosenberg.
Book
Discussion
April 3. Memory
and Place (JB & LP)
·
Robert T. Hayashi, “Transfigured Patterns:
Contesting Memories at the Manzanar National Historic Site,” Public Historian 25:4 (Fall 2003)
·
Sarah Purcell, “Commemoration, Public Art, and the Meaning of the Bunker
Hill Monument,” Public Historian 25:2
(Spring 2003)
·
Scott Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The
Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory,
1939-63” Journal of American History
1993
Film: The Last Conquistador
April
10. Remembering
the Holocaust (JB)
·
Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivors Tale, (New
York : Pantheon Books, 1986)
·
Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New
York, Plume,1994), ch. 1 and 8.
·
Greg Bradsher, “Turning History Into Justice:
The National Archives and Records Administration and Holocaust Era Assets,
1996-2001,” in Archives and the Public
Good, 177-204.
Read, view, or visit and report on one
of the following options:
Photography: Barbie Zelizer,
Remembering to Forget, Holocaust Memory
Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
Non-fiction: Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (1945)
Fiction: The Wall by John Hersey (1950)
Documentary: Night and Fog (1955)
Biography: Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz) (1956)
Film: Schindler’s List (1993)
Monuments: physically visit The New England Holocaust Memorial and online visit
the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993)
April 17. Visual Memory (JB)
· Joan Schwartz,
“‘Records of Simple Truth and Precision,” Photography, Archives and the
Illusion of Control,” Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000): 1-40.
· Susan Sontag, On Photography, pp. 3-24 and 153-180.
· Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others . Ch. 2.
· Farrell,
Thomas B., and Tamar Katriel. "Scrapbooks
as Cultural Texts: An American Art
of Memory." Text and
Performance Quarterly 11 (1991): 1-17.
· Barbie Zelizer,
“The Voice of the Visual in Memory,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. By Kendall R. Phillips, pp. 157-185.
April
24. Gender, Race and Memory (LP)
·
Stephanie E. Yuhl, “Rich and Tender Remembering:
Elite White Women and an Aesthetic Sense of Place in Charleston, 1920s and
1930s,” in Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow
· Holly Beachley
Brear, “We Run the Alamo and You Don’t” in Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow.
·
Cheryl
McEwan, “Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory, and
Citizenship in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Southern African
History 29:3 (September 2003)
·
Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’
Gardens,” and “Looking for Zora,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
REMINDER:
Group Projects due to be posted to Wiki
May 1. Student Presentations Part I
May 8. Student Presentations Part II, Wrap Up