HIST 10: A History of the Present

M/W, 10:30-11:45 AM, plus one-hour section TBD

Profs. Maya Jasanoff, Jill Lepore, Kirsten Weld

Welcome!

Not your high school history class! History 10 offers a new way to start--or keep--thinking about historical events, historical change, and historical context.

Read more about the history and goals of History 10 in The Crimson!

Enrollment is open: there are no pre-requisites and there is no cap for this course. Everyone’s welcome! The course is not required for History concentrators--but whether you're considering a history concentration, are already a concentrator, or are looking to fulfill your Social Science distribution requirement, we hope you'll find much in here to interest you. 

Course description

The past isn’t over; it’s everywhere. And history isn’t something dead—a body of evidence locked in a box. It’s a living thing—an ongoing investigation. This team-taught course will raise your historical consciousness by excavating the origins of key and contested concepts in the world today using a wide range of cases and kinds of evidence. Lectures will be interactive, modeling debate and disagreement. Students will acquire a richer sense of context for present-day issues, and of how to deploy historical thinking in making sense of the past, present, and future. Climate change? It has a history! Artificial intelligence? It was created long ago. Everything’s got a history, and if you want to understand a thing better, it’s always a good idea to figure out where it came from, and how it got to be the way it is. Especially if you’d like to change it.

The faculty for this course specialize in different times and places and deploy different methods of historical investigation and analysis. We’ll also be arguing a lot, and discovering together.

Meet your instructors (R to L):

Maya Jasanoff, X. D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences, Coolidge Professor of History, e-mail: mjasanof@fas.harvard.edu (Course Head; contact for questions about enrollment etc.)

Maya Jasanoff is a historian of the British Empire, with wide-ranging geographical interests (as befits an imperial historian). She’s currently writing a book about the human preoccupation with ancestry from prehistoric times to the DNA tests of today. Her perspectives on global history have been informed by experiences including sailing from China to England on a container ship, learning Hindi in middle age, and driving 10,000 miles around the US during the pandemic. She wrote something about Queen Elizabeth II that made fans of the royal family mad. 

Jill Lepore, Kemper Professor of American History and Professor of Law, e-mail: jlepore@fas.harvard.edu

Jill Lepore is a U.S. historian who teaches American political and legal history and is also super interested in the history of technology, if not in actual technology. A staff writer for The New Yorker, she’s written about everything from quarantines to insurrections, from breast pumps to mainframes. She’s currently writing a book on the history of (failed!) efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution. She also raises sheep. And she once wrote a book called The Secret History of Wonder Woman that, she swears, is really about American political history.

Kirsten Weld, Professor of History, e-mail: weld@fas.harvard.edu

Kirsten Weld is a historian of modern Latin America, with a focus on 20th-century revolutions and counterrevolutions, and how they’re remembered. She wrote a book about how Guatemalan activists used secret police archives to rewrite the history of their country’s civil war. She grew up in Canada, a place that also has a history, though nobody in the United States seems to know anything about it. [Except Prof. Jasanoff!] Here’s a piece she wrote about how historical thinking helps us understand the rise of the far right in Latin America.

Course format:

Lectures

The course is divided into three units or modules, each led by a different member of the faculty. For each module, students will be introduced to a historical perspective on a key concept of our times. This semester, the modules are Ancestry (Jasanoff), Rights (Lepore), and Memory (Weld). The following activities will recur within all three modules:

Question Box 

For the first fifteen minutes at the start of every Monday class session, the three faculty members will address at least one question submitted anonymously by students using the Google Form. Questions should be posted by midnight on Sunday. They don’t have to be related to the theme of the week’s readings, though they certainly can be. A question will be selected at random at the start of class.

The Headlines

For the first fifteen minutes, at the start of every Wednesday class session, the three faculty members will riff on items that caught their interest in the week’s news. 

Show and Ask

During one course meeting within each module, the faculty members who are not leading the module will bring in something in and pose a question about it.

Triangulation

The final session of each module will be a discussion-and disagreement–among the faculty and students speculating about the future of this concept, addressing a question posed by the module’s faculty leader. 

Sections

Sections meet once a week and will give you a chance to go deeper into the week’s readings and debates. Sections may also involve field trips to Harvard and other local sites, including archives. You will also complete one group activity per module in section, culminating in a group presentation in lecture in the week of December 2.

Grade Breakdown and Assignments

Listening, Talking, and Collaborating. (30%) Your most important work for this course is engaged participation in lecture and section. Attendance in both is obligatory. You’ll also complete three group activities in section, culminating in a group presentation in lecture (each section will present its findings). 

Thinking and Writing. (70%) You’ll complete three individual assignments, culminating in a final report. You’ll get to devise and frame your own project. What’s something in the present-day world that you wish you understood better? This is an opportunity to gain that understanding. Early in the semester you’ll pick something to investigate. Then you’ll complete three small assignments, and a final capstone:

1. Place the object of your curiosity in historical time. (800 word essay, 2-3 pages; 10%) 

How is your subject the product of history? Identify a point of origin or turning point that will organize your inquiry. Before when did this look meaningfully different? What changed? Why did it change in this direction? How could it have gone differently? How would you go about discovering its history? What do you need to read to understand the relationship between the past and the present? In this short essay, you should move from having a general topic of interest to articulating a researchable historical question. 

2. Identify and analyze your sources. (20%)

• Now that you’ve got a researchable historical question, where do you look for sources to answer that question? If you had to explain this issue to somebody, what would be the sources about it you’d want to put in their hands, and why? Why these sources, and not others? Why these materials, and not others? Who can you talk to who could give you perspective / a different perspective on that problem? [5%]
• Pick one of your sources and analyze it closely. (1000 word essay, 3-4 pages [15%]) What have you learned and what does it tell you? What does it not tell you? Does it offer an answer to your question? What can you explain? What can you not explain? 

3. Refine your questions and analyze another source. (15%)

You’ve now begun to find answers to your question, but would you get the same answers if you looked at another kind of evidence? Choose another kind of source–from another moment in time, or in another genre (quantitative vs. qualitative, visual vs. written). As with 2b above: Pick it and analyze it closely. (1000 word essay, 3-4 pages; 10%) How do historians deal with conflicting evidence?

Capstone assignment: present a report that assembles what you’ve found into a working explanation or theory. (25%) This should include the following components:

• Annotations on your first three assignments (1-2 paragraphs each, or literal annotations in the margins) noting places where you might have a different interpretation now, where you might ask different questions, seek different sources, or understand your materials in a different way. [10%]
• A synthetic piece of writing (1000 words, 3-4 pages) that reports on your findings and develops your explanation for its history. What new questions has your investigation raised for you? If you were continuing this inquiry, what steps would you take next? What are the advantages and limitations of historical methods for understanding your problem/phenomenon? What are the implications of this theory for the future? [15%]

N.B. If you are interested in submitting this report in another medium (e.g., audio or video) or format (e.g. a white paper, a legal brief, a documentary film treatment) we are very open to working with you to make an arrangement to do so, but you’d need to make a case for it.

Schedule of Lectures and Readings

[Complete details of readings and lecture schedule will be posted in August. You can expect ~75-100 pages of reading per week, a mix of primary and secondary sources.]

Ancestry

Everyone comes from somewhere. How does ancestry define who we are, as individuals, groups, even a species? This module will start with a discussion of the genetic ancestry tests (23andMe, AncestryDNA etc.) which 26 million people have taken to get fresh insight into their personal origins. We’ll then go back to consider the ancestry of ancestry: how, since antiquity, it’s been layered with religious, material, and legal meaning. We’ll conclude by considering the implications of this history for the genomic age, and thinking about what a society that didn’t organize itself around ancestry might look like.

Rights

This module will consider the history of the idea of rights. We’ll start with a near-contemporary debate (likely one or two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions), situating it within the post-Second World War context of rights discourse; then we’ll move back in time to the early modern era and its revolutionary ideas about natural rights; finally we’ll move back to the present, with an eye to the future, by considering the related arguments made by people proposing rights for nature and rights for robots.

Memory

When thinking about the history of the present, we’re necessarily thinking about the relationships between the present and the past – between now and what came before it. How did we get here? To answer that question, we tell stories – about who “we” are, about where “here” is, and about why it matters; why we should care. Often, those stories are told in the register of memory – the discrete, specific memories of individuals and families, and/or the broader, “collective memory” of peoples and societies. As the neuroscientist Eric Kandel put it, “We are what we remember.” But the past doesn’t just exist; it has to be invoked, i.e. recalled, remembered, and represented.

In this module, we’ll explore how the concept of memory has its own history, as do the major techniques or strategies that we use to “do” memory – to engage in what we call remembering, which is often as much about creation than it is about recall, and as much about the future as it is about the past. Memory has as much to do with forgetting as it does with remembering – in fact, as we’ll see, remembering relies upon forgetting – and any history of the present is necessarily going to leave a lot on the cutting-room floor. So what makes it in, and what gets left out? And who decides?