History 243 - Colloquium: Reconstructing Historical Communities

How much can historians learn about the daily lives of the mass of the population in the past? Can a people’s history recapture the thoughts and deeds of subjects as well as rulers? Critical examination of attempts at total history from below for selected English and French locales. The class re-creates families, congregations, guilds and factions in a German town amid the religious controversy and political revolution of the 1840s. Enrollment limited to 18.