Histories from the Margins

Undergraduate / Graduate

Scholars have long been interested in the question of how to reconstruct the lived historical experiences of "ordinary," marginalized, or otherwise "unknown" people. Doing "history from below" marked an important turn in social history that generated new questions about and approaches to reconstructing the lives, histories, and cultures of people who were consigned to the peripheries of (or absent altogether from) historical records. While radical, this approach over-emphasized binary relations of power. Thinking about "histories from the margins," however, opens up new questions about how power, oppression, and marginalization cut across intersecting categories-such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and colonialism. This course will adopt a thematic and broadly comparative approach from scholarship on the Americas (including Latin American and the Caribbean) and western Europe to explore how scholars have conceptualized the social worlds of everyday people-including microhistory, capitalism, slavery, colonialism, race, class, gender and sexuality, and inequality.