Readings for W Aug 27

Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was a highly prominent Dutch historian, and you are reading a new English translation of one of his most famous works, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, originally published in 1919. The book portrays life in late medieval (14th- and early 15th-century) Europe, especially France and the Netherlands. For Huizinga, what mattered about this period was not the Renaissance, but the full flowering of medieval life and thought. In other words, the 14th and 15th centuries did not mark a new era in Europe so much as the culmination of an old one.

For a full-color reproduction of the Velázquez painting that Huizinga discusses, go to this site. The dwarf that Huizinga describes is the second figure from the right.

Readings for W Sep 3

Both Wolf and Crosby thinks about history in broad terms. They talk about large areas of land and long swaths of time (longue durée). Think about what we might learn from this kind of approach. How do their approaches differ from Huizinga’s? Merriman’s?

UT American Studies professor Alfred W. Crosby became famous for his argument in his 1972 book, The Columbian Exchange, that European conquest of the Americas depended much more than we had previously realized on the ecological exchange of animals, plants and diseases. In his more recent book, Ecological Imperialism (from which you are reading an excerpt), Crosby added the concept of “Neo-Europes.” Neo-Europes are those areas of the world—like parts of North America, southern South America, Australia and New Zealand—that have temperate climates like Europe itself, and which thereby became especially popular places for European colonization.

Readings for W Oct 24

Goffman refers to an area called the Levant. What is it? Click here for a brief explanation, courtesy of the Encyclopedia Britannica on-line.

1. The Prussian absolutist monarchy's interests threatened the nobility's power and assisted the interests of the peasantry and a new middle class.

2. The historians that Mooers cites on his first two pages are wrong to say that Prussia failed to leave behind feudalism.

3. The shift toward absolutism in Prussia (including the building of its military and bureaucratic apparatus) developed out of powerful class rivalries.

4. The Prussian absolutist monarchy didn't make bureaucracy meritocratic just because it was the "progressive" thing to do.

The growing capacity of European governments to control, or at least tap, the wealth of the community, and from it to create the mechanisms – bureaucracies, fiscal systems, armed forces – which enable them yet further to extend their control over the community, is one of the central developments in the historical era which, opening in the latter part of the seventeenth century, has continued to our time. In the eighteenth century, this process was to gather increasing momentum, but until then it was a very halting affair. Its progress can be traced as clearly as anywhere else in the gradual acquisition of state control over the means of making war... over that violent element in European society which... had in the early seventeenth century virtually escaped from control and was feeding itself, so that the historian has to speak not so much of “war,” or “wars” as of... a melee.