Violence: A World
Historian’s Perspective

CHSTU213 History of Violence

Autumn 2005

Professor Jeffrey Burds

269 Holmes Hall

(617) 373-2079

Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 1:35-2:40 p.m.

Office Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays 2:45-4:00

j.burds@neu.edu

Course Description

An intellectual quest is about unencumbered inquiry--the interrelationship between method and sources, the use of the mind to ferret out ideas. The Random House Dictionary definition is relevant here:

quest: n.

1. a search or pursuit made in order to find

or obtain something.

2. an adventurous expedition, as by knights

in medieval romances.

v.i.

3. to search; seek: to quest after hidden

treasure.

4. to go on a quest.

v.t.

5. to search or seek for; pursue.

[1275-1325; ME queste < OF < L quaesita, fem. ptp.

of quaerere to seek]

Beginning the course with virtually no knowledge or experience of advanced historical research or methods, new students in the History Major will sojourn through a mixture of primary and secondary readings to discover the challenges and delights of historical research.

Students will write two drafts of a semester paper (or at least two versions of a semester project) and make at least one oral presentation. The papers or projects will analyze research performed by individual students, under the strict guidance of the seminar instructor. Students may integrate materials read and discussed in class, though students are also expected to bring into the course a substantial body of outside reading and research. Papers will be at least 10-12 typed, double-spaced pages in length, though semester projects may be prepared in another format (video presentation, WEB project, creative writing or performance, etc. to be negotiated with the instructor). I expect these projects to represent your best work. All papers in the course should conform to the History Style Guide, and all written work should be checked closely for spelling and grammatical errors. Sloppy work will receive at least one full grade reduction.

Attendance

Regular attendance and informed, active participation are required parts of this course.

Surprise quizzes

To encourage students to keep up with the reading, I will offer at least six “surprise quizzes” during the quarter, generally corresponding with the major readings in the course. Students are obligated to take all six quizzes, which will account for twenty percent of the final grade (i.e., the equivalent of two letter grades). Any student who fails to pass any quiz will be required to write a three-to-five page take-home paper on the quiz question, due within one week of the quiz date. No student who does not have a passing grade on all quizzes (or makeup papers) will pass this course. The point? Keep up with the reading in this course.

Final Project

Students will conduct individual research projects under the guidance of the seminar instructor. Any theme which falls under the general rubric of the history of hate crime or violence is appropriate. Preliminary topic statements are due in class on September 29. Bibliographies are due in class on October 17. All students must meet with Professor Burds one-on-one at least twice in the semester. First drafts of papers/projects are due in my office by 3:30 p.m. on November 17. All papers will be returned with extensive comments and suggestions in the week before Thanksgiving recess.. All students will make a 15-minute oral presentation for the class during the final four sessions. All revised drafts are due with earlier drafts and comments no later than Thursday, December 8.

Grades

The challenge is to engage course material in a diligent way. Any student who works hard will do well in this course.

Regular class attendance and informed participation 30 percent

Surprise quizzes (5 of 6) 20 percent

Project presentations 20 percent

Final Projects 30 percent

Books

-Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

-Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

-Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

-Judith Herman, M.D. Trauma and Recovery The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992, 1997).

-Deborah Navas, Murdered By His Wife: An Absorbing Tale of Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).

-Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a name, Cell without a number (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). [OUT OF PRINT--try ABE.COM or use internet version linked to syllabus]

Week 1 Introduction

Wednesday 9/6 Introduction to the course.

Violence as a social construct.

READ (in class): Jeffrey S. Adler and Thomas W. Gallant, “What Do Historians Have to Say About Violence?” The Harry Frank Guggenheim Review Volume 4, Number 1 (Spring 2000), pp. 45-51.

Thursday 9/7 Inquisitions: The Age of Religious Torture

See documentary film, Inquisition [History Channel, 1999, 120 minutes (History’s Mysteries)]

BEGIN READINGS: Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 1-90. [Discussion in Week 5]

Week 2

Monday 9/11 Inquisitions, Part Two

See second half of documentary film, Inquisition [History Channel, 1999, 120 minutes (History’s Mysteries)]

Wednesday 9/13 IN THE NAME OF GOD

Institutionalized Anathematization: Patterns of Terror in the Inquisition

READ: Henry Charles Lea, “The Inquisitional Process” and “The Stake,” in A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1888), pp. 405-429, 534-561.

Samples of Work in previous Quarters

Autumn 1999 Project - Jared McBride: Torture in Early Modern England

Handout

Autumn 1999 WEB-page Project of Adam Ellsworth:

The Legend of Count Dracula

Winter 2000 WEB-page Project of Adam Ellsworth & Kevin Voyvodich:

Stalingrad [Eastern Front in World War II]

Related Sites

Anupama Rao, “Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture, Suffering, and Colonial Incarceration.”

Conference Papers: Investigating and Combating Torture: Explorations of a New Human Rights Paradigm, The University of Chicago Human Rights Program, 4-7 March 1999

Thursday 9/14 The Witch Craze: Patterns of Organized Misogyny

HANDOUT: Selections from Witchcraft Trial Transcripts

Malleus Maleficarum (1486) [The Witch Hammer]of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger Unabridged online version of the Inquisitor’s handbook

READINGS: Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination, pp. 91-171.

Week 3 Violence as Pornography & Art

Monday 9/18 Lab 1 Research Methods

Wednesday 9/20 Forbidden Knowledge

HANDOUT: The Legend of Doctor Faustus

READING: Selections from Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge [Sade Samples] WARNING: This reading is explicit and painful. If you prefer to read something else, please see Professor Burds.

For Further Information:
See an on-line museum tour at Carnegie Mellon University entitled "Banned Books On-Line." The tour enables you to study not only the history of banned books, but also to look at the full-on-line versions of the original texts. This site has been awarded the Free Speech Online Blue Ribbon.

Banned Cartoons--Between 1928 and 1950, America's premiere animators across the Walt Disney Corporation, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Merrie Melodies, Looney Tunes and R.K.O. Radio Pictures painstakingly assembled brilliant and offensive animated vignettes. Hundreds of reels, thousands of cartoons, millions of individual frames sketched and watercolored by handsome with content which directly ridiculed the behavior and appearance of blacks, homosexuals, southerners, the mentally ill, Arabs, Canadians, Eskimos, Italians, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Germans, Russians, Australians, Indians, the Scottish, the French, the Irish - and even Martians.

The Censored Cartoons Page A guide to the cuts and edits which have been rendered to the classic cartoons of when broadcast on television. Gags that are deemed inappropriate for children, racist, violent, etc. are simply edited out of the cartoons. Here is a guide to these "lost" moments.

For a partial list of banned cartoons and Public Domain Cartoons Online

Thursday 9/21 The Sensual Art of Violent Storytelling

FOR DISCUSSION

HANDOUT: Selections from Little Red Riding Hood

Related Sites

Edgar Allen Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Edgar Allen Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum

DISCUSSION: Bondage: Torture as Pornography

Atrocity Exhibitions: The Darker Side of Photography

Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

ASSIGNMENT FOR THURSDAY: Find and study three sites on violence on the World Wide Web. Be imaginative! The goal is not so much to find intellectual discussions of violence, but rather sites prepared by individuals or groups celebrating or advocating violence. Bring in a printed copy of a page from each site.

Week 4 A Popular Culture of Violence?

Monday 9/25: Library Tour

Wednesday 9/27 Murder in Colonial America: Lessons from the Spooner Case

Deborah Navas, Murdered By His Wife: An Absorbing Tale of Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).

Thursday 9/28 The Harvard Murder

One-page paper topic statements are due in class.

A Popular Culture of Violent Crime? Investigate the relationship between comic books and violent juvenile crime

Week 5 Popular Cultures of Violence

Monday 10/2 Lab 2 What Social Scientists Have to Say about Lynching

Wednesday 10/4 DISCUSSION: Murder Most Foul

READINGS: Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination, pp. 172-end.

Thursday 10/5 No class

Walking Tour: Harvard Murder [Students will receive guides, and are expected to complete the two-
hour walk on their own]

Week 6 Lynch Law

Monday 10/9 Columbus Day. No Class. University closed.

Wednesday 10/11 The Sociology of Lynching in America

HANDOUT: Lynching in America, 1890-1930

Review In advance of this class, please review the photos and text of WITHOUT SANCTUARY: Lynching Photography in America

READ: Captain Frederick Marryat, “Lynch Law,” Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions (New York: Wm. H. Colyer, 1839), pp. 240-247.

READ: Durward Pruden, “A Sociological Study of a Texas Lynching,” Studies in Sociology Volume 1, Number 1 (1936), pp. 3-9.

READ: Leon Litwack, "Hellhounds," Chapter Six in Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 280-325.

HANDOUT: FESTIVALS OF VIOLENCE: The Causes of Lynching (Socio-Economic Patterns)

Of Related Interest

Neil Evans, "Red Summers 1917-19," History Today Volume 51, Number 2 (February 2001): 28-33.

Infamous Lynchings

Betty Lapucia, "Migration North to the Promised Land," Background on the African-American northern migration provided by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.

Maurio Mazón, “The Symbols, Imagery, and Rhetoric of the [Zoot-Suit] Riots,” in The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), pp. 78-94.

Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Random House, 1980).

Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made

Related WEBsites

Black History Pages on Lynching in America

Thursday 10/12 No class

Week 7 Perpetrators

Monday 10/16 Lab 3 Problems with Aggregate Data: A Postwar Soviet Crime Wave?

Short typed bibliographies of one to three pages are due for semester project.

Wednesday 10/18 Hitler’s Willing Executioners’: the challenges of investigating a mass hate crime

For this class, please review in advance the online exhibition:
The Undeniable Holocaust: A Pictorial Archive of Nazi Depravity

HANDOUT: Perspectives on the Holocaust: Alternative Paradigms

HANDOUT: Soviet Atrocities

HANDOUT: “Picture of the Week” from LIFE Magazine, 22 May 1944

Related

Complete on-line text of Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery allegedly documenting the world Jewish conspiracy prepared by a Russian Orthodox monk--Nilus--in 1905. This text is the most notorious piece of hate literature in the 20th century, an inspiration to countless generations of anti-Semitic groups.

From Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943), pp. 307-308:

". . . To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. The best criticism applied to them, however, is reality. Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken."

Thursday 10/19 The Psychology of the Perpetrator

Orwell's Room 101

READ

David Chandler, “Documenting Torture in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison.”

Lori A. Allen, “Why Position Abuse? How Israeli Torture of Palestinians Makes Sense”

John Conroy, “A Profile of Two Torturers”

RELATED MATERIALS

Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. 1975-1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press,1996).

Dith Pran, Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields

Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence