OVERVIEW
The Iliff dean has asked me to lead a very different and experimental type of seminar, one that I hope excites the imagination of Iliff and Joint PhD students. This seminar is designed as a research seminar, to immerse students in the actualities of doing historical research. Its success will depend upon your intentional and intense involvement throughout. It will require our full focus for an entire day, five days, meeting every other week during the Fall term.
While there will be assigned readings to help provide a baseline for your research, much of the work will consist of each participant’s own research, particularly consisting of an engagement with a broad array of primary sources. As a research seminar, you will be involved in doing actual research using both primary and secondary sources, yet even some of the latter actually become primary sources of a different kind simply as secondary sources that exhibit opinions and sensibilities of a different time than our own. You will engage a certain amount of research and reading in preparation for each seminar period, but then we will engage in deeper and more intense research in our day-long meetings with one another. We will be constantly sharing the results of our research throughout each seminar session and writing up reports of our results each step of the way.
I hope to divide the seminar into teams to engage in collegial efforts in getting at different parts of each topic we treat. Each team will be expected to bring back to the whole seminar the substance of their collegial research. Each student will be expected to write up her or his research every two weeks in short reports of two to four pages. We will post these reports on canvas, accessible to all participants, for wider seminar discussion.
An interpretive reading of the evidences is important. At the same time I am more interested in your accessing hard data. So as you write up your research (either during the two weeks between our meetings or during our day together) I want to see explicit citations (clearly annotated) that can be useful in writing interpretive history, but history with a distinct claim to accuracy. And we should acknowledge from the start that even hard data calls on us to be clear about our own interpretive standards in reading and reporting hard data!
Part of what we intend to do with the seminar is to discover how history has been written till now, and to find ways to reread the evidences to suggest alternative tellings of the historical narratives.
Let me acknowledge openly from the outset that I intend to use much of your hard data findings in writing my own interpretive history of one particular historical context—with full credit to yourself, of course.
YOUR ATTENDANCE: The course will meet for five sessions through the fall term, meeting all day on alternating Fridays, from 9 AM to Noon; and 1 to 4:30 PM. We would start the first Friday of the term and finish a week before term’s end (Sept. 18; Oct. 2, 16, 30, and Nov. 13). Meeting only five times for four units of credit ups the consequences of any missed days enormously. Each missed day will represent a full twenty percent loss of seminar contact time. That much missed time necessarily puts at risk the grade earned by the student. If you must miss a day, we will have to negotiate the significant amount of work that would attempt to make up for the lost classroom time. Needless to say, your attendance becomes a precious commodity.
Learning Objectives
:
• This is an advanced research seminar in which students will learn:
• To read history against the grain.
• To take standard histories of the euro-christian invasion of north America and to look under the surface of these accounts to discover long ignored evidences.
• To do broad readings of primary source materials.
• To engage in such archival research as our location in Denver might make possible.
• To use internet resources as creative tools for engaging research.
• To begin to read american christian history out of a genre of tragedy rather than as romance (a la David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity).
• To grasp the enormity of the pain suffered by and still being suffered by Native Peoples of north America. That is, to begin to understand notions of “historical trauma” as spelled out by scholars like Maria Brave Heart and Eduardo Duran.
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