Family Stories as History

Catalog description

Do you have a family story that you want to understand more deeply and broadly? Perhaps you have family memories of ancestors who faced great challenges or violence, stories of movement, departures or arrivals, challenges of adaptation, personal stories of triumph or failure, scandals, secrets, or extraordinary achievements, individual experiments in living. Narratives, stories, and sometimes enigmas play crucial roles in the dynamics of family life and formation of personal identity. Yet, even the most personal story intersects with a broader history. To explore that intersection, students will develop research projects that create historical accounts from personal family history. The seminar will give students an opportunity to bring their academic interests quite literally home, while also opening possibilities for experimentation in forms of historical writing. The first part of the course will introduce some examples of family history and consider relevant methodological skills, including oral history. We will explore scholarship on trauma, intergenerational memory, and the evolution of the modern family. Above all, we will explore the intellectual and creative challenges of writing about one’s own family within a scholarly framework. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of transforming family stories into historical understanding? How do private lives intersect with publicly shared histories? What ethical and interpretive questions arise when scholars turn the lens inward? The bulk of the semester will be devoted to original research and writing. Each student will craft a research paper centered on their own family, selecting a “story” that illuminates a pivotal experience or process, such as migration, social mobility, cultural transformation, or the reverberations of historical trauma. In principle, every family story has the potential to yield valuable…