Historical Discourse

Throughout the twentieth century the notion of the “Everyday” came to describe a fundamental category of modern existence. This class will engage with the histories and theories of everyday life. It will do so by introducing you to the main approaches to this field: the writings of the historian and ethnographer Hubert Howe Bancroft, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the historian and religious scholar Michel de Certeau, Italian microstoria, the British History Workshop movement, and German Alltagsgeschichte.

 

The course will combine lecture, discussion, and seminar elements. In addition we will make field trips to Bancroft library, where you will also have the chance to work with archival material from the original Bancroft collection on the history of the material and popular culture and everyday life in California.

 

Your final project will be an applied analysis of some aspects of the history and theory of everyday life, read through archival materials of the Bancroft collection; this archive is one of a kind and is the home of the most exiting stories about the American West (for more information see: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info/history.html).