The Assignment [from the 2008 syllabus]

1. Event/book analysis. (1000-1200 words, ca. 4 pages)
   Attend some of the outside events listed on the course web site (or others approved by your TA). Write a paragraph or two summarizing one of them, including what the author's intention(s) and arguments were. Do some background research on the author or topic, so that you can put it into (a historical) context. Depending on their detail and quality, 2-4 outside sources will be necessary. Use concepts and arguments from this course to analyze the film or presentation, and try to relate it to one or more of the topics of the course. What insights have you gained by applying what you have learned in this course? You should address counterarguments; however, this is not an editorial, but a balanced assessment.
• Paper: 20%; due Tuesday May 20, 12:30pm in lecture.
• Revised version: 5%; due Thursday June 5 in lecture. In this version you will incorporate suggestions made by your TA on your draft. In order to receive credit, you must attach the draft version to it! You should be able to present and discuss your essay in section.

April 10-May 3, 2008 (back to top)

• April 10, 2008 (Thu, 4pm, 6020 HSSB): Susan Buck-Morss (Cornell), "Hegel, Haiti and Universal History." This lecture connects Haiti's revolution to political universality, questioning adequacy of multiculturalism and alternative modernities as approaches to historical scholarship today. (history dept. page )
• April 10, 2008 (Thu, 7:30pm, Campbell Hall): film Conspiracy (about the January 1942 Nazi conference that organized the Holocaust), introduced by the director and followed by Q&A with Prof. Marcuse. (A&L page; Wikipedia page; imdb page)
• April 15, 2008 (Tue, 3:30, HSSB 6020): Robert Davis, "The Celebration of Slavery in the Christian-Muslim World,"
  "As Americans, we tend to identify 'slavery' with the millions of Africans brought by force to labor in the plantations of the New World. We usually overlook the enslavement of Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean. This world of slavery, like its trans-Atlantic analogue, took off after 1500, though it peaked sooner (by 1650), setting many of the norms and models that would eventually be adopted by European slave owners in the New World. This talk will introduce this 'other slavery,' discuss its extent and influence on its better-known contemporary, and then examine one distinctive aspect of it: how European Christians attempted to turn the often inescapable misfortunes of bondage into a positive sign of God's grace and Christian community."
• ***April 17, 2008 (Thu, 7-9pm, Campbell Hall): lectures and dialog by
  • Steve Coll, author of: The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century ($23 at amazon; Steve Coll's page at the New America Foundation), and
  • Robin Wright, author of Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
    ($18 at amazon; Robin Wright's website; more from A&L)
• ***April 23, 2008 (Wed., 2:30-4:30, HSSB 6020): Mick Broderick (Murdoch University, Australia) "Approaching Genocide: Representing and Negotiating Mass Trauma in Rwanda and Japan"
  • Based on field work at memorial museums in Kigali, Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
    this presentation will contrast the official, institutional narratives of traumatic violence with the testimony and reconciliation dramas created by survivors for alternative/public display. Drawing from Broderick’s own new media installation work, EXHALE, the paper will also ponder the ethics of artistic responses and aesthetic choices in attempting to represent “the unrepresentable.”
    Sponsored by the Department of Film and Media Studies, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Center for Black Studies Research, the IHC’s East Asian Cultures Research Focus Group, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, East Asia Center, and the Mbanefo Foundation Lecture Fund of the Dept.of History of Art & Architecture
• **April 23, 2008 (Wed., 6pm, MCC theater): Massacre at Nueva Linda, screening of 40 min. film followed by discussion with the director, Filiberto Nolasco Gomez.
  "Massacre at Nueva Linda documents the massacre of a community protesting in Guatemala. Over 200 families were violently evicted by over 1,000 police and armed military reserves. At the time, the massacre at Nueva Linda was the greatest human rights violation since the peace accords were signed in 1996. Since then there have been countless more violent evictions."
  (to: Nueva Linda tip, below ; sample paper on Nueva Linda)
• April 26, 2008 (Sat., 1:30 pm, HSSB 4020): Prof. Gabriela Soto Laveaga (UCSB), "The Pill Comes from Mexico?" Wild Yams, Steroids, and the Global Quest for Pharmaceuticals (Hist. dept. link) [note this is a small venue, only a few students can attend]
• **May 1, 2008: RESCHEDULED to October 19. (Thu. 8 p.m., Corwin Pavilion, free): Diane Ackerman, "The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story." UCSB Holocaust Remembrance Week Inaugural Event (more from Hist Dept; Hist 133d student review essay)

May 4-10, 2008 (back to top)

• ***May 4, 2008 (Sun, 4pm Campbell Hall, $15): Salman Rushdie & Pico Ayer (more from A&L)
• ***May 5, 2008 (Mon., 8pm, Campbell Hall, free): James Q. Wilson: "American Exceptionalism: Why America is Different" (more from A&L) [6/08: sample Wilson paper]
  This is a highly recommended event!! [6/08: turned out not to be so good after all...]
  Note: In the e-mail reminder I suggested purchasing the book. I see that it is a 700 page collection of essays by "leading scholars." Not having seen it yet myself, I think that focusing on one or a few of the essays, finding a common theme or comparing some of them might be appropriate. See:
  • Apr. 4, 2008 article about the book on the American Enterprise Institute's magazine's website, with some comments about that article at newsvine.com
  • Los Angeles Times profile with video of Wilson
  • James Q. Wilson's webpage at Pepperdine University.
  • 6-min. interview with Wilson on KCLU, May 5, 2008. Summarizes the book's goal.
  • Note 5/7: I will obtain a copy of the collection of essay's Wilson talked about, and put it on reserve at the UCSB library. It should be available by next Monday, 5/12/08.
    5/12/08: The book is now available on 2-hour reserve: SCHUCK, PETER UNDERSTANDING AMERICA: THE ANATOMY OF AN EXCEPTIONAL NATION / SCHUCK AND WILSON, 2008: E169.12 U479 2007
    
• May 6, 2008 (Tue, 3:30, HSSB 6020): Andy Kirk (professor of environmental history at UNLV), "Thing-Makers, Tool Freaks, and Prototypers: The Whole Earth Catalog and
  the Roots of Sustainability."
• *May 7, 2008 (Wed. 4pm, HSSB 6020): Talk by Dr. Berthold Molden (Vienna, Austria), "Iron Curtain Polyphonies: European Cold War History in the Global Memory Matrix."
  Dr. Molden will speak on Cold War history and identity politics in Europe, through a global perspective on cosmopolitan memory. (History Dept. event page)
  Dr. Molden is a contemporary historian with a strong affinity to Global History. His main research interests are the construction of memory and the politics of history, as well as the history of the Cold War, particularly in Latin America, Europe and the USA. The function of subcultures in critical (e.g. post conflict) periods constitutes a subject of particular investigative passion. His 2007 book on the politics of history and democratization in post-war Guatemala, entitled Geschichtspolitik und Demokratisierung in Guatemala. Historiographie, Nachkriegsjustiz und Entschädigung 1996-2005, was awarded the Michael Mitteraurer Prize for Social, Cultural and Economic History.
• **May 7, 2008 (Wed. 7:30pm, IV Theater 2): film "Screamers" (2006, 91 mins.), followed by a Q & A session with director Carla Garapedian. (6/08: sample Scr. paper)
  About the film: "Screamers is an impassioned synthesis of concert film and political expose about System of a Down's intensely personal campaign to stop genocide. Chronicling the band's efforts to persuade both the British and U.S. governments to recognize the Armenian
  genocide, Screamers also traces the history of modern-day genocide and genocide denial."
• May 8, 2008 (Thu, noon, Ellison Hall 3824), Patrick Morgan (UC Irvine Political Science), "The Puzzling Persistence of Nuclear Weapons."
• *May 8, 2008 (Thu, 8pm, Francisco Torres Fiesta Room): screening of film Tak for Alt (1999, 60 mins., Danish for "Thanks for Everything"), followed by discussion with Holocaust survivor Judith Meisel, whom the film is about. Note that the film was made by a UCSB alumna. Tak for Alt website

May 11-17, 2006 (back to top)

• **May 12, 2008, Mon. 5pm, HSSB 6020: talk "Re-claiming the Ruins of “Japan's” Imperial Antiquity: Colonial Archaeological Surveys and Heritage Tourism in the Korean Peninsula (1900-1943), " by Hyung Il Pai (East Asian Languages & Cultures and History, UCSB)
  The lecture addresses the politics of Japanese tourism and how imperialistic and nationalistic cultural policies have influenced archaeological heritage management practices, preservations and ranking of monuments, and classifications of museum objects in East Asia.
  Professor Pai's work focuses on how the politics of nationalism, colonialism and identity formation have affected the fields of archaeology, ethnography, and cultural heritage management in Korea and Japan. Website: http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/research/archaeology.html
• May 12, 2008 (Mon., 8pm, Campbell Hall): Joel Meyerowitz, Sept. 11, 2001 photos (A&L info)--not necessarily the most suitable event--but see #1 in FAQ below.
• *May 12, 2008, Mon, 8pm, Embarcadero Hall: David Horowitz, "The Jihad against America and Israel." Sponsored by the Campus Republicans (Facebook page; 5/12 Nexus article). Horowitz's Center placed a recent controversial ad in the Nexus, and has been pushing the term "Islamofascism." See also #2 in FAQ below.
• May 13, 2008, Tue, 6:30pm, MCC lounge: "Got Ph.D.? A look at Race and Advanced Degrees." Discussion with Tony Jimenez, diversity coordinator for the UCSB graduate division. (may be of special interest to students considering graduate school).
• ***May 13, 2008 (Tue, 7pm, Arlington Theater, $9): Jeffrey Sachs (author of: Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet) & Greg Mortenson (author of: Three Cups of Tea: Promoting Peace and Building Nations, One School, One Child at a Time): presentations + dialog (A&L info) Tickets are selling fast--be sure to get one in advance, the event may sell out.
  • Sachs' book searchable at amazon: from Publisher's Weekly:
    In this sobering but optimistic manifesto, development economist Sachs (The End of Poverty) argues that the crises facing humanity are daunting—but solutions to them are readily at hand. Sachs focuses on four challenges for the coming decades: heading off global warming and environmental destruction; stabilizing the world's population; ending extreme poverty; and breaking the political logjams that hinder global cooperation on these issues. The author analyses economic data, demographic trends and climate science to create a lucid, accessible and suitably grim exposition of looming problems, but his forte is elaborating concrete, pragmatic, low-cost remedies complete with benchmarks and budgets. Sachs's entire agenda would cost less than 3% of the world's annual income, and he notes that a mere two days' worth of Pentagon spending would fund a comprehensive antimalaria program for Africa, saving countless lives. Forthright government action is the key to avoiding catastrophe, the author contends, not the unilateral, militarized approach to international problems that he claims is pursued by the Bush administration. Combining trenchant analysis with a resounding call to arms, Sachs's book is an important contribution to the debate over the world's future.
  • Mortenson's searchable at amazon: after people in a remote Pakistani village saved his life, Mortenson vowed to return and build a school for the villagers. He has since built more than 50
• May 14, 2008, Wed. 6pm, MCC: film Made in LA (2007, 70 mins.) followed by discussion with the filmmaker. (6/08: sample student paper on Made in LA)
• [May 14, 2008: Willie Brown]
• [May 16, 2008, Friday (HSSB 4020): History Department Senior Honors thesis colloquium.] About a dozen honors students will be presenting the results of a year's worth of research. This is a rather late date, but may be appropriate for some students majoring in history to use for their own papers. I will post more information when it becomes available.
  • note May 12: after looking at the topics (flyers are posted in the History Dept), I don't see any as being very suitable for this assignment. However, if you are planning to attend one of the panels, you could probably brainstorm some way to do additional research on one of the topics. But it's really rather late in the game to start Friday.
• [May 16 & 17, 2008 (Hatlen Theater): performance of Plumford, Iraq]

Books (back to top)

• Books that I mention in lecture are generally suitable for the paper--you should purchase them or check them out of the UCSB or Goleta/Santa Barbara public library (if available, of course). Such books must still be approved by me or your TA, however.
• You may also suggest your own (just beware of using books you read for another course: you may run afoul of academic conduct rules)--definitely talk to or e-mail me to discusss this: marcuse@history.ucsb.edu.
• Below are some suggestions:

• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
• Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York: Penguin, 2008), 688 pages [no, I wouldn't expect you to read the whole thing!]($21 at amazon) (4/1/08 author interview with Terri Gross; Washington Post Book World transcript of on-line interview)
• Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco, 2006), 448 pages.
  • $19 at amazon
  • 4/25/06 npr interview
• I mentioned Gavin Menzies' book 1421: The Year China Discovered America as a topic possibility in lecture. I want to note that an appropriate research question for this book would NOT be "Did the Chinese 'discover' the Americas in 1421? (that is far to broad to settle with primary research), BUT RATHER something very limited, like examining ONE of Menzies' claims, like: "Were the remains of a Chinese junk discovered in the Sacramento river?" That latter question is something that you can investigate in the scope of a 4-page paper, whereas the former is the subject of countless long reviews by experts in the field, who pick apart many of Menzies' arguments one by one.
• Student e-mail: "I was wondering if I could write my second paper on Timothy Garton Ash's "The Magic Lantern." As stated in the editorial reviews, "The Magic Lantern" is one of those rare books that define a historic moment, written by a brilliant witness who was also a participant in epochal events. In this book, Ash creates a stunningly evocative portrait of the revolutions that swept Communism from Eastern Europe in 1989 and whose after-effects will resonate for years to come. As for my topic of interest, I wanted to write about the negatives of communism in Eastern Europe as a result of poverty, repression, lack of privacy, and communists' obsession with destroying the past."
  • Prof's answer: This would be an ok book, but it doesn't address the questions you're interested in. There are many other books that focus on the negatives of communism, but this one really has to do with the process of how the revolutions emerged in 5 (I think) countries. If you want other suggestions we should meet.

Advice (updated 5/6/08) [back to top]

I will include here my answers to e-mails that I've received about various events and topics.
For my answers the last time I taught this course, see my 2006 2c Events Page.

1. Here I offer some generic advice on how to write this paper:
   • Main Goals of 2nd paper assignment are to learn and develop skills in:
     • Research: Get to the bottom of "the facts"--collect information, assess its validity. Who created the information? Is it reliable? To the extent that a range of possible truth is possible, is this purported information inside or outside of that range?
     • Analysis and Interpretation of Data. Use theory--concepts and framework from the course (paradigms, including Nietzsche's categories of doing history, EIEIO, a world-historical perspective) to make sense of and derive meaning from your research.
     • Present your results clearly and convincingly in writing.
   • Four pieces of advice to produce a good paper:
     1. Keep your topic focused. It should be narrow enough to be manageable in 4 pages! Don't overdo the event description--it is just a lead-in to your paper, not the main thing. It should merely show where you got the idea to do this topic.
     2. DO NOT EDITORIALIZE! You are NOT trying to "prove" that a certain position or strategy is "right," you are trying to weigh the "truth value" of a factual question.
     3. Different topics will require different approaches. Some topics (about which little is known) will need more background information, while other (more controversial) issues will require detailed assessment of information. For example, on the numbers of illegal immigrants in the US today, while many sites merely present (widely varying) numbers, the FAIR organization discusses at length where the data comes from and how it is used to create those estimates. POINT: don't just cite a number and blindly trust that source, but examine various sources and argue which one has the most plausible estimate.
     4. Keep your questions narrow and focused on factual issues that you can resolve.
        • Example 1: do NOT ask "Is illegal immigration good or bad?" NOR "What is the best solution to the high rate of illegal immigration?" BUT "Does illegal immigration reduce wages for high school dropouts? For skilled workers? You might ask: What net effect does it have on the standards of living of various groups in the US? But that may already be beyond the scope of the paper--if you are really examining various primary data on that question.
        • Example 2: do NOT ask whether raising taxes is good or bad, BUT (for example) how much will raising taxes cost in lost production, in administrative overhead, over what period of time.
2. E-mail sent May 16:
   • After visiting several discussion sections this week, I think the vast majority of you are well on the way to writing good papers. You have grasped the fact that the authors of events, even those that at first seem purely factual, actually have one or more theses/arguments underlying what they present. And I think/hope that you understand what I said in lecture yesterday, that applying some of the course concepts is NOT the main point of the paper, but merely a means to help you come up with a question to ask about what that author presented. For example: Are they missing or ignoring an important potential cause? If they are presenting a "monumental" history, what facts are they ignoring? Or what alternative explanations can account for the same developments? If they are taking a "Western" perspective, does looking at their event from a "World" point of view open up hitherto unseen causes or effects?
   • Once you have found such questions, I think at this point the main stumbling block is understanding what "research" is, and then what conducting research entails.
   • For example, I talked with a "Nueva Linda" (the film about Guatemala) group. After describing the film and event, here are some questions we came up with: What was the nature of the 1996 peace accord? Between whom was it made? What did it say about rural "squatters" on privately owned land? Did "peace" ever ensue from it, or was there always a level of violence between 1996 and the Nueva Linda massacre in 2004? What sparked that incident? Was it reported in the press at all? In the US? Mexico? Rest of the world?
   • Once you have such questions, you would turn to the internet, databases on the internet, and the library. Here I want to point out to some powerful internet databases that you can access through the UCSB library. (If you want to access them from off campus, you need to set up your browser as a proxy server--instructions are on the library website.)
   • These are the newspaper and news media databases for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times (both since the 1880s), and Lexis-Nexis Academic (with various international news sources, but not going back as far), and for academic articles Expanded Academic ASAP. For some questions, the Latin America Data Base, or the English-language China People's Daily (since 1946), or PAIS Public Affairs, as well as many others, may be relevant (ask at the reference desk, or browse the list, reading the descriptions in the right frame, to find pertinent ones). You go to:
     http://www.library.ucsb.edu/eresources/databases/data-frames.html
     and scroll down, or click on the first letter of the database name (if you know it) to jump down.
   • Then you need to think of some keywords relevant to your topic to search for. If you come up with results that help to answer your question(s), those are your outside sources. By the way, if you are using newspaper articles as sources, it might be that several short articles from the same paper would count as "one" outside source.
   • Finally, regarding the "Wikipedia issue" and using web pages as sources, you need to evaluate the validity of the information you find there. There are many helpful guides on how to do this. The Berkeley library has one of the best. See:
     http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html
   • Good luck--I hope you write informative and insightful papers, teaching us something new while learning!
   • Sincerely,
     Prof. Marcuse
   • PS. Several people have been e-mailing me asking about topics because they have not attended an event yet. My suggestion at this point would be to get a book in the current titles section of the UCen bookstore--straight ahead on the entry level, then to the right. The are many books on relevant current topics there, and you can browse to select one in your interest, length and price range. Once you figure out the overall argument of the book (reviews and jacket blurbs help with that), you can probably focus on one chapter or issue it raises. A book with notes in the back will guide you quickly to the "outside sources" you need for the paper.