Thread by @LarryGlickman

Here’s a thread on my History of US Capitalism graduate seminar, prompted by the response, both critical and positive, to my tweet last week, which showed some of the books that we will be reading. (Warning: this is a long thread.) 1/

https://twitter.com/LarryGlickman/status/1032093846375677953

Here's more of an explanation of how I conceive of the course and the field. My photo is like a partial list of ingredients. I’d like to share more about the recipe., to move from the historical version of "Chopped" to "Iron Chef" (or, you might think, "America's Worst Cooks") 2/

First some institutional context. The course is Cornell specific, responsive to the quirks of our graduate program. Because of our small Americanist cohort, we don’t offer “field seminars,” as some of the bigger programs do. Most grad classes have to serve dual purposes. 3/

Mine aims to be both an introduction to the History of Capitalism & an overview of some key works in US historiography in the 19th & 20th centuries. There are also recommended readings which students can read for their final paper and to help build their comps lists. 4/

Then there is the dirty little (not so secret) secret that I, like almost everybody lucky enough to teach graduate students, use seminars as an opportunity to force myself to read books and articles that I have not had a chance to fully engage. 5/

I think a few autobiographical points are also relevant. I came of age as a scholar before the new HoC emerged, roughly a decade ago. Before I arrived at Cornell in 2014, I didn’t see myself as an “historian of capitalism.” I am now a big fan but I am a bit of an outlier. 6/

At the same time, I have my critiques of what I see (perhaps idiosyncratically) as some of the directions HoC has taken. Some participants in the JAH’s 2014 “Interchange” (which we will read for class this week) suggest that HoC needs to reject the “cultural turn.” 7/

As a grad student at UC Berkeley, I was profoundly shaped by the “new cultural history” and I think its methods offers important perspectives for HoC. Take Mike O'Malley's recent book, for example 8/
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

I don't think I'm the only person who has noticed that the field seems to have clustered (and very productively so) on a few topics and periods (pre-Civil War and later twentieth c). 9/

I'd like to see it expand backward in time (where early Americanists and Atlantic World scholars have been doing relevant work in this area for a long time) and also to the less studied Reconstruction, Gilded Age and Progressive Era periods,, where great work is coming out. 10/

My mentor (and Mike O'Malley's), the late Larry Levine, famously argued that intellectual/cultural history should be understood not just as the history of “thought” but of people "thinking." I included several works that I see as taking this approach. 11/

My own scholarly trajectory notwithstanding, I certainly have no desire (or qualifications) to be a gatekeeper for what counts as History of Capitalism. Like Samuel Gompers, my philosophy in this regard is…. “more.” 12/

The contours of the field are changing and, judging from the two fabulous HoC conferences, we have held here at Cornell (2014 and 2016), I know that there is much great and diverse work in the pipeline. 13/

While I am in favor of a broad approach, I respect those who have a more well-defined sense of the field. Having said this, I reject the idea that HoC should be only or primarily about economic history, or even that economic history should have pride of place in this field. 14/

This last point proved to be one of the more controversial elements of the readings I selected. Whereas I see them as representing a broad array of topics, others saw them as narrow or took the minimization of economic history as "ideological" (which I did not mean it to be.) 15/

I think economic history is incredibly important, but not necessarily more so than other approaches to understanding “capitalism.” 16/

“Capitalism” emerged use by its critics & was only embraced by capitalists in the late 19th/early 20th c. (Braudel says something like, “capitalism came late.”) It has been a political term, not coterminous with “the economy.” (Another complicated term as @Tim_Shenk shows.) 17/

But it's great that HoC seems to be re-establishing dialogue among economists, economic historians, business historians, labor historians, etc. is a great thing, even if those conservations can be frustrating on both sides. 18/

I admire the work of @KeriLeighMerrit @RebeccaSpang @vanessahistory to mention three superb historians, who are engaging economic history productively and teaching the rest of us ia great deal n the process. 19/

I also find the @TheBHCNews to be a place where productive dialogues are taking place, thanks to people like @RrjohnR, who reads and takes an interest in everything and makes a point of introducing cultural historians to economists, and vice versa.

Finally, the History of Capitalism “boot camp” at Cornell run by my friend and colleague @louishyman has helped launch or reorient many great projects, with its quantitative emphasis but disciplanary openness. /21

Getting back to my course: I decided to highlight a few themes that are of particular interest to the profession, to me, and, I hope, to my students, at the moment. They are: neoliberalism, racial capitalism, the meaning of the “market,” and the New Deal order." /22

In trying to achieve the coherence of a thematic approach, I wound up leaving out or minimizing many, many topics that I consider important, including intersections between HoC and the history of consumption, environmental history, STS & technology, and, yes, economic history./23

I should note that these are all topics we treated when I last taught a graduate HoC course (with my friend and former colleague, Victor Seow, now at Harvard.) In emphasizing certain subjects, I didn't mean to slight the significance of others. /24

Re: the books I selected, I wanted to mix some surveys (Kocka), with “classics” (Polanyi and Braudel), some older monographs that seem like important HoC precursors (Amy Dru Stanley, Howard Brick), along with many newer works, some so new that they didn't make the photo. /25

Given the themes I highlighted, I also wanted to include works that traversed business, intellectual, gender, and African American history, as well as the history of conservatism. /26

It should go without saying that putting a book on a reading list does not equal an endorsement. The late Jim Kettner, who taught many of us colonial American history at Cal, used to include what he called a “target” book or article each week. /27

This was a work that Professor Kettner included because he found it problematic in interesting ways. I didn’t explicitly choose "target" readings, but we will be exploring controversies surrounding some of the readings, reading roundtables and critical reviews. /28

As an aside relevant to nobody but me: I am amazed to look back at my smoky 1st semester of graduate school, shortly before smoking was banned in university offices. Jim chainsmoked in his office & my other prof that semester, Charlie Sellers, smoked a pipe throughout class. /29

To take one example, I don’t disagree with Kocka’s assessment that Polanyi’s book “rests on a weak empirical foundation" but, like Kocka, I still think it is a landmark book, well worth teaching. /30

On this note, I am excited that @PatrickIber Iber will be coming to @CornellAMST to talk about both Polanyi and neoliberalism, about which he has also written brilliantly. Amy Dru Stanley will also be speaking to our colloquium on HoC related issues./31

I'd love to hear other people's views about this but my sense, based on some of the responses to my photo of course books, is that historians are less likely to claim that one or more flaws (even major ones) in a book disqualify them from reading lists in graduate seminars. /32

I accept the claim of one commenter, for example, that Dan Rodgers gets some things wrong and missed some key sources in his interpretation of “supply side” economics. But I don’t think that makes him “a poor guide…to the history of capitalism.” /33

I should also say that I wish this was a two-semester class, so that I could have included so many of the works that it pained me to exclude, including the groundbreaking @NMaggor book, which I hope to teach in my SHGAPE class: /34
hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…

Like everyone who has ever constructed a syllabus, it pained me to leave out so much great work. One book I was hoping to include was Alice Echols, Shortfall, which strikes me as a promising attempt to merge narrative history with HoC. /32
thenewpress.com/books/shortfall

I also regret not including the groundbreaking book by @NMaggor, which focuses precisely the period that I think has been under covered in HoC work /33
hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…

Thanks to everyone who responded with suggestions and also to Andrew Seal for kicking this whole thread off with his excellent post at @ideas_history. /34
s-usih.org/2018/08/asking…

Gosh, I'm exhaused, and I have to get ready for our first seminar meeting tomorrow. Not sure how @KevinMKruse does like six of these a day! Anyway, thanks for indulging me and I look forward to continuing the conversation on these issues, both in class and here. Fin /35