{"id":1326,"date":"2021-05-25T15:26:14","date_gmt":"2021-05-25T22:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/devuwcps\/course\/hstcmp-590-topics-in-history\/"},"modified":"2021-05-25T15:26:14","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T22:26:14","slug":"hstcmp-590-topics-in-history","status":"publish","type":"course","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/uwcps\/course\/hstcmp-590-topics-in-history\/","title":{"rendered":"HSTCMP 590 Topics in History"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Thinking through Things:\u00a0 Objects, Desire, and the Birth of Globalization”
\nThis seminar takes a simultaneously traditional yet insistently innovative approach to the study of the past.\u00a0 On the one hand, history has been broadly understood through and commonly embodied by objects, an approach that has guided churches and temples, courts and collectors, for ages:\u00a0 to grasp an object from the past has been, in a fundamental way, to grasp the past itself.\u00a0 On the other hand, professional historians have been preoccupied over the last few centuries (since the Renaissance, in fact) with the texts of the past\u2014with the words recorded in Assyrian inscriptions and Egyptian papyri, in Greek and Latin “classics,” in Chinese and Sanskrit documents, in state and local archives, and so on\u2014and scholars have, by and large, privileged writing as a gateway to historical research.\u00a0 Recently, however, history has taken a material turn.\u00a0 By deploying new techniques and methods, and by approaching their subject from fresh and previously unexplored perspectives, historians have lately endeavored to study the past through its material remnants\u2014not so much archeological remains (which have always been and will continue to be a viable source for history) as the very “things” that have come down to us over time.\u00a0 This has afforded a more nuanced and wider ranging history, one that extends beyond the text.\u00a0 This has also granted historians a terrific narrative opportunity, as things tell marvelous stories in ways that can be richer, more layered, and more rewarding than mere text.
\nThe things of history span an enormous range of material artifacts.\u00a0 They might fall under the rubric of high “art,” derive from religious practices or pertain to the business of the state, or simply reflect the myriad things pertaining to everyday life.\u00a0 Things from the past, furthermore, mark not only a moment and “history” situated in time and space; they can also mediate history.\u00a0 They can serve as vital go-betweens for cultural, commercial, and colonial transactions (to name just a few possibilities).\u00a0 And they can be global, since material objects can also move:\u00a0 from the past to the present, from producers to consumers, from distant cultures to imperial museums, and so on.\u00a0 It is precisely these material mediations, these global itineraries, and these distinct moments that furnish us with the “things” of history:\u00a0 the stuff that we, as historians, try to investigate and interrogate to recover the past.\u00a0 This seminar introduces students to a range of things from a variety of media.\u00a0 It also introduces a number of key archives that house these artifacts\u2014libraries, collections, museums.\u00a0 And it tries to tease out stories from these archives and artifacts\u2014from curious things and their histories.\u00a0 The ultimate goal of the seminar is for its participants to identify, research, and compose a history of an artifact of their choosing.\u00a0 In doing so, it is the hope that we will collectively learn not only how to analyze the objects of history, but also how to question the things that have reached us and to narrate some of the many stories they convey.
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