Scottish revolt of 1640

Researching the English Civil Wars, 1640–1649History Tutorial, Spring 2010, Bard CollegeTuesdays at 7 pm in Ludlow HallJane Smith: 119 Preston Hall, jesmith@bard.edu, 845 758 7892 (office) Your blogshttp://lenosaurus.wordpress.com/http://ariellikesstreets.wordpress.com/http://largactyl.wordpress.com/http://virginiaofthreekingdoms.wordpress.com/Communalbloghttp://mistrisparliament.wordpress.com/. Check often and contribute regularly. This is our forum—a place for summarizing discussions, raise questions and follow up on them, post links to useful sites and resources, share intriguing or amusing discoveries.... Required textsChristopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, 1984Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain, 2006Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars: 1640–1660, 2009Recommended sources about the conduct of researchWayne Booth et al, eds., The Craft of Research,1995The “Research Tools” page of mistrisparliament.wordpress.com.David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically(there are several editions; used, older ones—like the 5th--can be got cheaply online )Plan for the semesterI think this revisedplan will help us in at least a couple ways. First off, the new, chronological structure—focused more narrowly on the extraordinary developments of the 1640s—will help us get a firmer hold on what happened when. Which is pretty important, given that religious and political change seemed to happen overnight. Knowing the chronology better will also help us see and raise questions about the relationships between events and shifts in religious and political thinking. Second, this plan is a lot more flexible in terms of content and reading, andallows our work to proceed more organically. The plan will follow where you lead. The basic (and short!) selections from Purkiss and Hill everybody needs to read are indicated below, but I’ll select readings as we go, based on what you—collectively and individually--want and need to know more about. After all, see the description of the overarching goal of this course below...

2Purposeof the tutorialThe overarching goal is to help you become an even more confident, curious, and independent thinker, researcher, and writer. More specifically, the course is meant to help you negotiate the complicated business of situating historical texts within the culture that producedthem. To accomplish these goals, the course is designed to ...1.Make you irremediably fascinated with the wonderful and terrible history of the English Civil Wars.2.Give you experience using digital research tools that just plain didn’t exist as recently as ten years ago. Thanks to massivedigitalization projects like ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and EEBO (Early English Books Online), you can sit down at your computer and summon up very old texts from the ether with only a few clicks: an elegy for Charles I, say, or a Act against “the detestable sins of incest, adultery, and fornication.” For researching the English civil wars, EEBO is a godsend: the database contains nearly every text printed in England or in English between 1470 and 1700—about 125,000 documents in all. And it’s searchable. Though discovering the right search methods for your particular purposes is more than a challenge, even a crude search for, say, “cunning woman” (a sort of early modern therapist/white witch), can turn up sources you’d never otherwise have known about, possiblyeven sources that no one has given the slightest bit of attention since they were first published. With EEBO, it’s possible for talented undergraduates to produce doctoral-level work.3.Provide an opportunity for you to do inductive historical research. You’ll discover what research process works for you, but we’ll talk about blueprints that can be very useful. The basic idea is to start by finding artifacts—i.e., a set of primary texts that really fascinate you, for whatever reason. Then you devise a significant question or questions to ask about their relationship to the culture that produced them. Next you come up with a research strategy that will help you find possible answers to your question(s). Finally, you get to write about what you’ve learned and argue for what you believe to be the most compelling possible answer(s) to your question(s). Keeping in mind that all history writing is partial and preliminary.4.Give you opportunities to use writing to generate ideas and questions, to use a blog for scholarly purposes (a growing trend among academics), and to write compellingly, persuasively, and (historically) carefully about the relationship between primary texts and the civil wars. This is good training for graduate school.GradesYour grade will be based on the following activities. Instead of traditional grades for each assignment, I’d rather tell you what you did well and then ask questions to help you ratchet things up a notch. Evidence of ratcheting things up as we progress through the semester iswhat most matters to me. But if you want more concrete feedback (i.e., check plusses or minuses or something), just let me know.

3Grades continuedTo do well in this tutorial, you need to...Be engagedRead and think about the texts assigned for each meetingKeep a notebook full of your own outlines, questions, observations... (I notice these things. Can’t help it.)When we meet, raise good questions, but also don’t be afraid to ruminate out loud and voice tentative or unformed ideas. Whenwe seem to be reaching consensus, introduce another way of looking at the issue. In addition, listen actively be encouraging and respond withhelpful questions that press deeper into the issue Help your peers take their writings up a notch when we have mini draft workshopsDo more work than the minimumShow upHave fun and be fearless!Complete research projects with thoroughness and rigor (research projects include things like timelines, summaries, finding texts on EEBO, learning to use various digital scholarship tools...)Demand a high standard of excellence of yourselfSubmit projects on timeWriteTake pride in your blog. Fill it with as much—and as varied—content as you can. Be as informal as you like, but don’t accept writing devoid of real contentfrom yourself. Ata minimum, post 500 words a week. Respond to other blogs (both within and outside our group) with thoughtful questions and contributions. (We haven’t done thisyet: stay tuned.)Write increasingly sophisticated analyses of primary texts that concern a question or puzzle that really intrigues you. For Ariel and Laura only: produce two feeder papers that will inform a final research paper (15 pages?). We can decide on a reasonable length for feeder papers and how you think all three should be weighted inyour final grade.Note: We’ll agree on a reasonable way to weight these categories in your official grades. The 2-credit folks and the 4-credit folks can choose to weight the categories differently.