Seminar in Historical Analysis (405-0-20)
Topic
Revolution
Instructors
Paul James Gillingham
847/467-4829
Harris Hall - Room 323
Paul Gillingham (DPhil, Oxon, 2006) specializes in politics, culture and violence in modern Mexico, and has published numerous articles and book chapters on these subjects. His most recent book is Unrevolutionary Mexico: The Birth of a Strange Dictatorship (2021). His first book, Cuauhtémoc’s Bones: Forging National Identity in Modern Mexico (2011), was awarded the Conference on Latin American History’s Mexican history prize. Gillingham is the co-editor of Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 (2014), Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico (2018), and the Violence in Latin American History series at the University of California Press. He has translated Oscar Altamirano’s monograph on Edgar Allen Poe, Poe: The Trauma of an Era (2017) and is currently writing a history of Mexico since 1511. He directs the Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives project (MIDAS), an open access collection of documents from Mexico’s security agencies at https://www.crl.edu/midas.
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
This course introduces major debates in the comparative history of revolution. The global analysis starts in France; proceeds with the spread of revolutionary ideologies in the Americas; returns to Europe for 1848 and 1917; tacks back to the Americas for peasant revolutions in Mexico and Cuba; and then migrates to China before ending in a consideration of the revolutions that never happened. En route we will explore the intellectual history of revolution in the works of Tocqueville, Marx, Lenin, James, Guevara and Scott, juxtaposing these texts with more recent scholarship to shed light on their multiple qualities: primary sources, political prescriptions and analytical frameworks.
Learning Objectives
The anatomy of the world's major revolutions, and the ideas and methods used to anatomize them.
Evaluation Method
essay, 70%; seminar presentation, 20%; participation, 10%
Class Notes
Concentration: Americas
Class Attributes
Graduate Students Only