Receiving his B.A. from Gonzaga in 1977, Field did his graduate work at UCLA, where he received his M.A. in 1979 and Ph.D. in 1985. As Postdoctoral Scholar at UCLA, he served as Lecturer from 1985 to 1987. From 1987 to 1989, he held a Henry R. Luce Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Yale and, after a Lectureship at Yale, accepted an Assistant Professorship at the University of Mississippi, where he is now a Professor.

His publications include On the Communion of Damasus and Meletius: Fourth-Century Synodal Formulae in the Codex Veronensis LX, with Critical Edition and Translation Studies and Texts 145 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004); My Response to T.D. Barnes: Positivistic Straw Arguments Do Not Review Books (University, Miss.: J.D. Williams Library, 2002, 2nd ed. 2009) and Liberty, Dominion, and the Two Swords: On the Origins of Western Political Theology (180-398) Publications in Medieval Studies 28, ed. John Van Engen (Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

Recently, Field has also published important essays in Plenitude of Power: The Doctrines and Exercise of Authority in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Robert Louis Benson, ed. Robert C. Figueira, Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2006) and Reassessing Reform: An Historical Investigation into Church Renewal, 50 Years After Vatican II and Gerhart Ladner’s The Idea of ReformEnergized the Catholic Conversation about Reform, ed. Christopher M. Bellitto and D. Zachariah Flanagin (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010). Respectively entitled “Christendom Before Europe? A Historiographical Analysis of ‘Political Theology’ in Late Antiquity” and “My Debt to Gerd: His Legacy as Teacher of History and Historian of Ideas, Fifty Years after The Idea of Reform and in Light of Present Research,” these essays not only address the “substantive questions” mentioned in My Response to T.D. Barnes ( barn3.pdf ) but also function as prolegomena for a book-length project entitled “Political Theology” in Late Antiquity: A History of the Modern Concept and Its Historiographical Application to Pre-Modern Christianity.

Professor Field
Office hours: MWF 12:00-1:00 and by appointment
Bishop 330
915-5667
hsfield@olemiss.edu

FALL 2009

Methods, Theories, and Practices of History
History 550
Bishop 326
4:00-6:30 W
Professor Lester Field

Course Description and Pedagogical Objectives

 
Is historical knowledge possible? If so, how? Is history a past truth? If so, how is it (still) true? How does it survive?  Is it a present truth about the past? If so, what validates the present truth as anything more than an ulterior interpretation? These questions--or the emergence of their changing answers--within history as a narrative and as a discipline provide the focus of this course.

This seminar examines the methods employed by historians as they practice their craft. In other words, this seminar examines how historians do history and how their techniques vary or coalesce over a wide variety of fields. In this seminar, these “fields” receive temporal, spatial, or topical definition as periods, regions, or genres, but this heuristic arrangement crosshatches the theoretical foundations as well as practical applications that variously shape all historiography. The theories and the practices that have historically defined or qualified one another across chronological or regional spectra receive special attention.

In most meetings, a guest historian will either analyze methodological issues especially pertinent to his or her field or will apply methodologies in a way that will prompt examination and discussion by the seminar.  All guest historians have assigned readings incorporated into the course syllabus, and, with each historian’s presentation, these readings will provide the basis for the seminar’s discussion.  For each session, students should have prepared questions on their readings and should be prepared to engage each guest-historian’s presentation with more questions and discussion. The instructor of record may also assign students special topics for short presentation in the next class.

This course and the research that accompanies it should instill a sense of the diverse methodologies that now define history as a science, discipline, and profession. Since these methodologies themselves emerged in history and so, even now,  remain functions of the past that produced them, the course should also sensitize students to the possibilities and limitations of all historical enquiry.

Research and Paper

The course culminates in a research paper that treats the theory or practice of a particular method employed by historians, whether past or present.  By the third week, students should have started the prospectus of this paper or should have come with questions concerning their methodological interests and emerging topic. The paper prospectus is due on the sixth week. The instructor of record will therefore guide and grade the progress of the research as formulated in many redactions, from prospectus through final paper, which is due the last day of the seminar.

Percentages of Final Grade

25% Discussion and special presentations
25% Prospectus
50% Final paper

Required Reading

Available at Bookstore:

Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield (Eds.), Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline  (New York: Routledge 2004)

Available at Graduate Reserve, web-links, JSTOR, Ebook or Academic Search Premier (in Library’s databases):

Marleen Barr, “Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting a Woman’s Diary Without the Danger of Separatism,”  Biography 8 (1985) 12-24

Kathryn Barrett-Gaines,  “Travel Writing, Experiences, and Silences: What is Left Out of European Travelers’ Accounts: The Case of Richard Dorsey;” History in Africa: A Journal of Methods 24 (1997) 53-70

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Archiving White Memory,” in The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 105-137.

Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) 67-91

Jane Daily et al. (Eds.), Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) introduction-chaper 5, chapter 11.

H. O. Danmole and Toyin Falola, “The Documentation of Ilorin by Samuel Ojo Bada,” History in Africa 20 (1993) 1-13

Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime  (Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1982) 20-40
 literary_underground.pdf

Belinda Davis, “Experience, Identity, and Memory: The Legacy of World War I,” The Journal of Modern History 75 (2003) 111-31

Peter Duus, Feudalism in Japan Studies in World Civilization, ed. Eugene Rice (New York: Knopf, 1969)  3-12, 81-107.

Leon Edel, “Transference: A Biographer’s Dilemma,” Biography 7 (1984) 283-91

Lester L. Field, Jr., “Christendom before Europe? A Historiographical Analysis of ‘Political Theology’ in Late Antiquity,” Plenitude of Power: The Doctrines and Exercise of Authority in the Middle Ages. Essays in Memory of Robert Louis Benson, ed. Robert C. Figueira, Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2006) 141-70

Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (New York: Zone Press, 2007) 17-53

Edith Belle Gelles, Portia: the World of Abigail Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,  1992 or ebook)  xv-23

Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: The Invention of Tradition,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 1-14.

Joshua H. Howard, Workers at War: Labor in China's Arsenals, 1937-1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)  1-15, 169-192, 259-326.

Patrick Hutton, History as Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H.: University of Vermont Press, University Press of New England, 1993) 1-10.

Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 3-60

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press,  1957)  3-6,  496-506

Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127-150 [JSTOR]

Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1959, 2nd ed. New York: Harper Torchbooks 1967)1-35, 425-42
John Lobur,  “Festinatio (Haste), Brevitas (Concision), and the Generation of Imperial Ideology in Velleius Paterculus,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 137 (2007) 211-30 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/transactions_of_the_american_philological_association/v137/137.1lobur.pdf

Arnaldo Marcone, “ A Long Late Antiquity? Considerations on a Controversial Periodization,” Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008) 4-19

H.C. Erik Midelfort, “Historical Problems: Sin, St. Vitus, and the Devil,” A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999) 25-79.

Robert A. Nye, “Western Masculinities in War and Peace,” American Historical Review 112 (2007) 417-38

Charles M. Payne,  I've Got The Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 103-131, 458-462 (ebook)

Michael J. Sauter, “Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin,” American Historical Review 112 (2007) 685-709 (JSTOR)

Thomas G. Smith, “Beyond the Pale: The Exclusion of Blacks from the National Football League, 1939-1946,” Journal of Sport History 15 (1988) 255-81
 jsh1503d.pdf

Sean Stilwell, Ibrahim Hamza, and Paul Lovejoy,  “The Oral History of Royal Slavery in Sokoto Caliphate: An Overview with Sallama Dako,” History in Africa 28 (2001)  273-291.

Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan:  Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1984), pp. xiii-xxi, 3-22

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York:  Knopf 1990 = New York: Vintage Books 1991) 1-35, 72-101

J. Vansina, “Oral Tradition and its Methodology,” General History of Africa 1: Methodology and Prehistory, ed. J.Ki-Zerbo (California 1981) 142-165

Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History,  Res gestae divi Augusti, with an English translation by Frederick W. Shipley, Loeb Classical Library (London, New York: Putnam, 1924)  3-329
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_Paterculus/home.html

Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands:  Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 1-16.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Women’s History and Social History: Are Structures Needed?” Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press 2001)  3-16.

Jay Winter, “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies,” Raritan 21 (Summer 2001) 52-66.  [EBSCOhost]

Seminar and Reading Schedule

1. Classical Antiquity, with John Lobur (26 August).                              Readings: Lambert 1-120, Lobur, Velleius
2. Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, with Lester Field (2 September). Readings: Lambert,  121-240, Field, Ladner, Kantorowicz, Marcone
3. Renaissance, Reformation, and Early Modermity, with Jeffrey Watt (9 September).

Readings: Lambert 241-89, Midelfort, Sauter, Wiesner-Hanks

1. Enlightenment to Revolution: From Early to Late Modernity, with Marc Lerner  (16 September).                            

            Readings: Lambert 241-89, Israel, Chartier, Darnton

1. Science, with Theresa Levitt (23 September).                                       Readings: Galison
2. Early-American Biography, with Sheila Skemp (30 September).

Readings: Ulrich, Gelles, Edel, Barr
Prospectus for paper due.
      VII.       Japan, from “Feudalism” to Modernity, with Noell Wilson (7 October). Readings: Duus, Toby, Walker

1. Memory and History, with John Neff (14 October)

Readings: Hutton, Hobsbawm, Winter, Klein, Brundage

1. Modern Africa, with Bashir Salau (21 October).                                    Readings: Vansina, Barrett-Gaines, Danmole, Stilwell
2. Gender, Identity and Twentieth-Century War, with Susan Grayzel (28 October).                                                                                                Readings: Davis, Nye
3. Race and African-American History, with Charles Ross (4 November)

Readings: Smith, Payne

1. Modern China and Labor History, with Joshua Howard (11 November)

Readings: Howard

1. American South, with Charles Wilson (18 November) .                                 Readings: Daily
2. Students’ Final Presentations and Seminar’s Conclusions, with Lester Field (2 December)

            Final paper due.