ClassInfo

(Re)Imagining History, (Re)Searching for Truth

"To say that the United States is a story is not to say that it is fiction: it is, instead, to suggest that it follows certain narrative conventions. All nations are places, but they are also acts of imagination." - Jill Lepore

"Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake." - Robert Penn Warren

We look for the truth in history. History offers us a lens through which to view ourselves, both our personal and national identities, as well as our imagined futures. But history, far from being a neutral realm of truth-telling about a series of events, is itself a product of the human imagination and culture. In the context of the United States, for example, contested histories provide us glimpses of diverging ways of defining American identity; we see these tensions within historical knowledge play out in a variety of contemporary conflicts. Is Colin Kaepernick unpatriotic or patriotic -- or all those terms even adequate? Is the changing of the word "slave" to "immigrant" or "laborer" in Texas textbooks a problem? Your answer to these questions will be dependent on how you have been taught to read history. Does it change how we view the ideas of Henry David Thoreau, the same man who wrote Walden alone in a cabin (a book considered foundational to the rugged individualism ascribed to American identity), if we include into the historical record the fact that his mother and sister brought him food and did his laundry while he preached the virtues of self-reliance?

To read history is to study how we have imagined ourselves and to ask how we might reimagine ourselves. To that end, some of the questions we'll take up together are:

¨ How do our perceptions of the past inform our present sense of nationhood and selfhood (the majority, but not all, of our readings will discuss the American context --

in your own research, you are free to pursue questions of nationhood outside of that context)? And what implications does this have for our sense of what is true about

ourselves and others?

¨ How do different media and genres - from textbooks to photographs to memoir to Ancestry.com - work as producers of historical knowledge and our sense of truth?

¨ What would it mean to reimagine history and to consider ourselves as part of an ongoing project of producing historical knowledge and not just a static receptacle for

historical facts?

This class will provide you with opportunities to not only research and analyze historical knowledge production in areas of interest to you, but to be producers of historical knowledge yourself. In other words, you will get an opportunity to construct your own personal/family/national histories, while gaining practice in both academic and creative writing.