Fall, 1999

GRC 301 (34620) = HIS 306N (35705):

Making History: How German Scholars Invented History

Instructor: Katherine Arens


Paper Description

The paper for this course comes in two sections:


PAPER ORGANIZATON:

A paper is organized like a precis. It has:


FORMAT and SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS


GRADING

As for precis, with the addiiton of one more category of deduction:

-1 grade for violation of format and submission requirements


TOPIC

You will choose a website on a historical issue or a museum. The Class Website (http://www.utexas.edu/courses/arens) has the following museum and memorial websites live-linked. Several of them (like the Smithsonian Museum or the Library of Congress) have many exhibitions. These are generally excellent sites, but you may pick others (or museum catalogues, borrowed from the library), in consultation with the instructor.. Variety and individual project highly encouraged.

The first paper is an analysis of the website/ history/memorial you choose. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to show what its bias, strengths, and weaknesses are, gauged by the probable reactions of a specific audience (you specify, you evaluate). In other words, do a formal "publisher's review" to evaluate whether the site (or catalogue, or history) fills the purpose it ought to.

The second paper makes this analysis into a more formal critique: add the perspectives of some of the historian/historiographers to your ideas about websites (catalogues, or histories). In other words, move from the practical critique of the first draft into a more theoretical consideration. The goal of this paper is to argue the strength or weakness or particular theoretical models of history, using your website as an example of what that theoretician means, or should mean. Again, you must set a norm against which that theory is evaluated - such as "still speaks to us today," "partisan," etc.


SUGGESTED WEBSITES

NOTE: Alta Vista Search Engine off the UT home page will bring up a museum exhibition page is you type in one of these museum names.


OTHER SOURCES

Attached see a bibliography on Berlin's proposed Holocaust Memorial, found by searching the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature off the UT library link.

Most museums have catalogues that could be excellent sources.