Over the semester, we're going to examine some broad categories that historians study.  In this section, I'm introducing all of the categories to be dissected.  While there will be lots of theory in the readings you will have (and again, I will walk you through that since we're not quite there yet), what makes this section unique from our large section on theory is that these categories very often cross theoretical boundaries.  At the end of these two weeks, you should be able to:

  1. Students will be able to recognize, define and trace the genealogies of basic categories of historical analysis such as class, race, gender, nation, space, etc.
  2. Students will identify some of the intellectual tools historians have used to help make sense of these categories.
  3. Students will demonstrate how these categories of historical inquiry can cross theoretical and disciplinary boundaries.

I really think that this section will be more fruitful for you to understand when we get to the end of the term and begin working on the historiography papers, so for now we're going to simply take each of the readings on their own terms and analyze how they construct their categories of historical analysis.  This week we will read the concept of material space—how to understand the ways in which the world around you function as historical memory and evidence. Later in the term we will explore gender and then race & nation.

When we write a paper for history, or think about historical topics, we don't merely create arguments around events or people, there are broader links around those events and people that make them historically significant.  If historians are in the business of constructing stories, we need to have major themes and concepts squarely situated.  This is where conceptual categories are important.  They help to guide our inquiries.  We need to define our subjects based on where they are in time and in space (temporally and spatially).  We do this by looking at a number of conceptual frameworks.  When we talk about conceptual, we mean, "ideas or thoughts"—so they're large ideas that help us to think about historical and theoretical issues.

SPACE—histories of geographic space fall under conceptual categories because it builds on a materialist framework.  Walter Benjamin (pronounced Ben-ya-meen), a theorist of the early twentieth century, suggested that the material world can take on a life that surrounds the human body; that the streets and lights and makeup of a city all contribute to a history.  Others have followed his lead; for example, Christine Stansell's City of Women about nineteenth-century NYC, suggests the same framework for working women of the city.  The excerpt you have, from Miles Ogborn's history of early-modern London, argues that the changing geography of the city—its streets, its gardens, its taxes on hearths and windows—contributed to the construction of a modern metropolis.  This is our first conceptual category because it transcends and crosses multiple theoretical boundaries, though in many respects it's wedded to materialism—what's more tangible than a city street?