History 101 - 102

Justice Ideals and Practices in History

2001 - 2002

Syllabus, Spring Semester, 2002

Spring 2002
Fall 2001
Spring 2000
Fall 1999

History 102
Justice: Ideals and Practices in History:
Community Based Learning and Historical Inquiry

Course Description

This is a full-year course of inquiry that uses several episodes in European and American history from the middle ages to the present, as well as engagement with contemporary movements and controversies, to ask what "justice" has meant to women and men, how people have tried to achieve and institutionalize their aspirations toward a just world, and how and why both goals and practices have changed over time. Among the most important goals of the first semester is an understanding of how "the rule of law" became a central feature of modern western notions of justice, and how changes in law, justice, and the nation state may be connected to transformations in people's work, in the organization of their productive activities, and in relations between women and men.

In 2001-2002, episodes for analysis and investigation will include a peasants' revolt in 1381, radical initiatives towards a "constitution" for England of the 1640s, Nat Turner's rebellion against slavery in 1831, and the "Bread and Roses" Strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

During the second semester, students will undertake two projects: One will be further investigation and analysis of the conflicts studied during the first semester, and deeper interpretation of the practices and ideals of justice at play in those conflicts. The other project, a little less traditionally "academic" will be active but critical engagement with an off-campus agency, organization, or movement explicitly committed to the achievement of justice in the Pioneer Valley today. "Participatory" or "community-based learning" is not common in history courses, but we shall seek to use such learning to deepen historical understanding on the one hand, and to bring historical insight, imagination, perception to bear on analysis of contemporary issues on the other hand.

At the end of the academic year, students will be asked to explain (1) how, or whether, historical inquiry and analysis may deepen and clarify understanding of contemporary legal institutions and of movements dedicated to individual rights or social justice, and (2) how, or whether, participation in current struggles over justice may strengthen understanding of the ways that people make history.

Some Introductory Observations

During the fall semester, you will be taking apart evidence from several periods in the past, sometimes reading what historians have said about those periods, often writing about inferences directly from original sources, and talking seriously with each other about what you have read and written. I don't expect final answers to the questions posed in the course description; but by the end of the semester, we may understand a little more clearly how people before us thought and talked about justice, and what they did about it. I should also like to think that the imaginative leap necessary to understand earlier thought and action will give us new insights into our own ideals and conduct.

This course will require your readiness to articulate your findings, insights, surmises, and judgments in writing and in class discussion. Writing, and writing clearly and persuasively, will be one of your most important goals during the semester. You should plan to write often, and I shall encourage you to regard your writing not simply as a product, but as a process of learning. Or to put the point a little differently, I hope that you will use writing assignments to strengthen your understanding of materials and issues, not only or perhaps not even primarily to demonstrate your knowledge. Thanks to the marvels of electronic technology, you will be able to present your insights, inferences, conclusions, speculations, and questions about material to your colleagues by way of the course webboard. After explaining the relatively easy process of posting messages to the course webboard, I shall expect you to provide me and your colleagues with a commentary or informal essay, based on current reading assignments, on the dates indicated in the syllabus below.

The length of your commentaries or essays may vary, but I suggest that you plan on writing an average of two pages or so every week, or every other week. Don't worry initially about the precise format in which you articulate your ideas or questions; simply concentrate on using the evidence at hand to say something both substantive and interesting about people in the past. Several times during the semester, I hope to meet with you individually, to discuss rewriting informal commentaries or essays, to make your argument more rigorous and your prose more effective and elegant. At least twice during the semester, you should re-fashion ideas articulated in your weekly writings into systematic analyses and arguments-that is, into more-or-less "formal" essays, using original evidence to make a point about the people and issues that are examining together.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that this course depends on your active participation in class discussion, and the course will work only if each of you is willing to work with colleagues both in and out of class. To increase opportunities for teaching, and for learning from, each other, we shall organize three workgroups, one each for 1381, 1647, and 1831. (In light of further work we shall undertake in the spring semester on struggles of laborers in the 20th century, we shall not devote a workgroup to 1912 this semester.) Each workgroup will undertake additional reading on its period. By the final two weeks of the semester, each workgroup should be prepared to offer tentative generalizations about the "hows" and "whys" of conflict and change in its period; each workgroup should also be ready to identify issues and questions that deserve further inquiry and thought. Finally, each workgroup will prepare, by the final classes of the semester, a proposal for further investigation of one of the moments examined this semester. Were you able to devote another semester, or even another month or two, to your inquiry, what questions would you ask, what sources would you examine, what scholarship would you investigate, in order to explain more fully a given historical moment, and its implications for our understanding of change and continuity in history? Whatever the specific focus of your workgroup, I hope that you and your workgroup colleagues will take advantage of it as a forum to debate reading assignments, paper topics, unresolved issues raised in class -- indeed, anything that you think appropriate and helpful to your learning. The principal purpose of workgroups is simply stated: I want you to learn that you can teach each other.

In addition to further investigation of four "moments" that will occupy much of our attention this semester, your research between now and January should also include some time devoted to contemporary institutions, practices, and notions related, in one way or another, to our own aspirations towards justice, both "social justice" and justice for wronged individuals. In order to prepare now for informed decisions next spring about local projects beyond the campus, please give some effort to finding out something about one of several aspects or dimensions of justice, or struggles towards justice, in the neighborhood of the college. We'll reach together in class some agreement on who will look for what kind of information; but I foresee four major areas for concentrating the search for material relevant to a choice of institutions, groups, or issues to which you will devote time next spring. Crudely described, your choices will include 1) the criminal justice system in Western Massachusetts; 2) governmental or quasi-governmental initiatives against discrimination based on racial, sex, age, or physical ability categories; 3)groups or movements challenging the existing distribution of wealth and economic power in society, including labor unions; 4)groups or movements that focus on protective, remedial, or compensatory measures for women. I will be glad to mention later some specific groups or movements or institutions that might well provide the site for your "community-based learning" next semester, but I hope you will begin your own investigation immediately, by simply paying close attention to what is happening locally-which means reading local newspapers and glancing through announcements and posters on local bulletin boards from time to time.

Books and Reading Assignments

Many of the readings in the syllabus are part of multilithed readings which will be available for purchase, after the first week of classes, from the History Department Office. The following books should be purchased at the Odyssey Bookshop:

Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics.

Judith M. Bennett, A Medieval Life. Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c.1295-1344, McGraw-Hill College, 1999.

Andrew Sharp, The English Levellers, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought).

The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, ed. by Kenneth S. Greenberg, The Bedford Series in History and Culture, Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996

(optional)Western Civilization. the Continuing Experiment, ed. by Thomas F.X. Noble et al., Volume B, 1300-1815, Houghton Mifflin Company, most recent edition. Only a few copies of this textbook were ordered, in the expectation that you can share access to it as needed.)

Also at the Odyssey, you will find copies of Ann Raimes, Pocket Keys for Writers, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. This handbook will be used in this course--and in other courses at MHC that focus attention on writing effectively and skillfully--as an aid to clear, strong, well-organized, and engaging prose. You should find it valuable not only during this course, but also on other occasions when you want help in writing persuasively and powerfully. Glance through the table of contents as soon as possible, so that you will know where to turn when you encounter specific difficulties or uncertainties about your prose this semester.

I. AN INTRODUCTION TO ISSUES AND MATERIALS
Does "Justice" Have a History? Explorations of an Abstraction,
and the Present as Past.

Sept.10. "The St. Alban's Charter of 1381," Liberty and liberties, and first encounters with interpretative issues, analysis of evidence, and each other.

II. SIX CENTURIES OF DOING JUSTICE: A SWEEPING SURVEY

Our early classes together are designed to introduce (howbeit indirectly), the "crises" of 1381, 1647, 1831, and 1912; in them, I shall ask you to do seemingly contradictory tasks. On the one hand, read the assigned documents, all original sources, closely and attentively; on the other, speculate broadly and argue imaginatively about social and ideological change over several centuries of European and U.S. American history. In order to survive cheerfully these seemingly contradictory instructions, you will have to put aside temporarily your anxiety about skills that you have not used before, and about what you don't know; instead, concentrate your energies on using what you have at hand, making the most of what you find in the documents. For these classes, please, impossible as the request may seem, put aside what you know and believe that you know about both medieval European history or modern U.S. American history.

You major goal for each class is to use an original source to venture an imaginative but responsible re-construction of the world in which these words were spoken or written. What kind of people, with what assumptions about themselves and their society, produced the document at hand? What did they not need to say, because it could be taken for granted? In what kind of society would people articulate the needs, hopes and fears that we find in the document? Ask yourself such questions of each of the sources, and decide what you can say, more or less confidently, about the authors, audience, or ideas of each source. Then choose a passage which, in your judgment, illuminates one aspect of the people who produced it or for whom it was intended, or an aspect of the society or culture of its time. On the basis of that passage, comment informally (1-2 pp.) on the evidence and its implications for our historical understanding of the period in which it originated. Limit your comments on the passage to one point that can be made and supported by the evidence at hand; but be sure, when you have finished your commentary, that it provides a reasonable response to anyone who might say to you, "So what?" Note that these commentaries should be submitted in hard copies, not posted to the webboard. For September 12, prepare a commentary, but you need not submit it to me.

Sept.12. Some 14th century evidence, and a glimpse of lords and peasants: "The St. Alban's Charter of 1381" (again) and "Manor Court Rolls" in Translations and Reprints (The Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, no date).

Sept.17. Some 17th century evidence, and a glimpse of subjects practicing citizenship: Title page of Richard Brathwait's "The English Gentleman" (1630) and EITHER "The Grand Remonstrance, 1641" from Seventeenth-century England: A Changing Culture, vol. I, ed. Ann Hughes (1980), 75-80 OR "An agreement of the people for a firm and present peace. . . (1647), no. 7 in Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 92-101. Commentary due in class.

Sept.19. Some evidence from the 19th century, and a glimpse of "free" laborers and their bosses: "Commonwealth v. Hunt & others," March 1842, from Reports of Cases argued and determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, vol. IV (1864). Commentary due in class.

Sept. 24. More evidence from 19th-century U.S. America, and a glimpse of the folk who made the "Industrial Revolution": Lucy Larcom, "Among Lowell Mill-Girls. A Reminiscence," Atlantic Monthly 48:281 (Nov 1881). Commentary due in class.

Sept. 26. Taking stock. So, what have you learned in the past four classes? Even if our survey of evidence from several moments over six centuries has been quick and obviously limited, have the courage to venture ideas about change and continuity over these six centuries, and talk over your ideas with other members of the class. And either collectively or individually, post a generalization or two on the course webboard before class today.

III. A CLOSER LOOK AND FURTHER INVESTIGATION

In the classes that follow, we shall look again at the periods we just covered, but at a slightly more leisurely pace. As before, the emphasis will be on analysis of evidence and inferences from sources, but you will also do some thinking, writing and talking about historians' interpretations of evidence. We shall, moreover, give some time to discussions of research, or at least to what questions for research should be pursued, had we more time to deepen an understanding of these moments in the history of Euro-American ideals and practices of justice.

A. 1381

Oct. 1. "Evidence from Manor Court Rolls," Essex and the Peasants' Revolt, compiled by W.H. Liddell and R.G.E. Wood (Essex Record Office Publication no. 81, 1981) and Part I, "The Background to the Peasants' Revolt" from Dobson, The Peasants' Revolt of 1381. If you can't cover all of this record material thoroughly, select one item for concentrated attention and analysis. Don't panic if these documents resist easy translation into modern terms; remember that one purpose of historical inquiry is imaginative engagement with the "otherness" of the past. For a concise survey of the Revolt of 1381, read "The Events of the Rising" from Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free. Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York: Viking Press, 1973) . For an additional treat, you may also consult Janet Backhouse, The Luttrell Psalter (London: The British Library, 1989), on the web.

Oct.3. Judith M. Bennett, A Medieval Life. Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock,c.1295-1344 (McGraw-Hill College, 1999). Please note that this assignment offers you a change of pace. Instead of exercising your own analytical and interpretative skills directly on evidence from the 14th century, you will be bringing your critical judgement to bear on the way another historian has used evidence to make visible the life of a medieval peasant woman. The historian, by the way, is a graduate of Mount Holyoke. For a somewhat different perspective on conflicts and violence in the 14th century, you may want to read Nigel Saul, "Murder and Justice, Medieval Style. The Pashley Case, 1327-8," History Today 34 (Aug. 1984) .

Oct. 10. Part VII, "Interpretations of the Peasants' Revolt" from Dobson, ed., The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 , especially. items 67-69 and 71. Why did peasants revolt in 1381? Given the articulated responses of literate Englishmen to the revolt, what lessons did rulers likely draw from these events? What do these and other documents that we have read about lords and peasants tell us about the fit between daily life of peasants and mobilization for change in medieval England? A 2-page essay, focused sharply on fourteenth-century evidence, should be posted to the webboard by class today.

B. 1640s

Oct. 15. "Documents Related to the Assizes of 1642," Appendix I of Somerset. Assize Orders, 1640-1659, ed. J.S. Cockburn (1971), and also the document assigned for September 17 which you did NOT read earlier. Among other aspects of English political and legal structures revealed in these documents, pay particular attention to ways in which Parliament, a legislative body, is also a judicial institution, while the assizes, ostensibly court proceedings, resemble executive agencies in modern governments. More generally, what do these documents reveal about matters worrying members of the ruling elite in England in years preceding whole-scale civil conflict, in contrast to the concerns articulated by folk a rung or two below the nobles and gentlemen? How are the various political actors revealed through these documents different from those we noticed while reading documents on rebellion and political conflict in the years around 1381?

Oct. 17. "Toleration justified and persecution condemned. . . 1646"; "A remonstrance of many thousand citizens and other breeborn people of England. . . 1646"; "At the General Council of the Army, Putney, 29 October 1647": "An agreement of the free people of England. . . 1649"; and "The Young men's and the apprentices' outcry, 29 August 1649," numbers 2, 4, 8, 12, 13 in Sharp, The English Levellers Please also read the introduction to the collection edited by Sharp, as well as any other documents that catch your eye. Can we, in the language of any of these documents, find an explanation for why, at this point in English history, some of the king's subjects had the nerve to assert not simply a claim to justice under law, but responsibility for law itself?

Oct. 22. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform or, True Magistracy Restored, ed. Robert W. Kenny (1941, 1973). Whom does the rule of law serve, according to Winstanley? What does Winstanley's take on the relationship between "law" and "freedom" enable us to understand, not only about the way in which these concepts took shape in the 17th-century, but also about the complex implications of these terms in our own world? Why, for Winstanley, are both law and freedom impossible to discuss apart from property? A 2-page essay, drawing upon Winstanley and the Putney Debates of 1647, should be posted to the webboard by class today. In writing this essay, push yourself to explain why, in 17th-century England, some people gave new answer to the old questions, " Who should govern, and how?"

C. 1831

Oct. 24. "Part One. The Document" in Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents. Give some thought, as you puzzle out the relationships embedded in the published confession of Nat Turner, to the possible similarities and differences between a 14th-century serf and a 19th-century slave, and to the developments between the late middle ages and the modern era which ended serfdom in western Europe even as they brought into being chattel slavery on a global scale.

Oct. 29. "Introduction. The Confessions of Nat Turner: Text and Context" and "Part Two. Related Documents" in Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents. Despite uncertainties which accompany any argument about Turner's motives based on his "confession," does it offer us insight into either sources of or obstacles to resistance to slavery prior to the U.S. American Civil War? Turner may well be an atypical individual, but does his explanation-if it his explanation, and not Grey's-shed light on either the persistence or demise of slavery in U.S. American history? A two-page essay, drawing upon Turner's essay, should be posted to the webboard by class today.

Oct. 31. Comparisons between "Commonwealth v. Hunt & others," March 1842, from Reports of Cases argued and determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, vol. IV (1864) and documents in Greenberg, TheConfessions of Nat Turner. The Hunt case, chronologically very close to Nat Turner's revolt, gives us a different perspective on labor and ways in which work, social order, and political stability were imagined by people who lived in a nation that still took for granted slavery. Precisely what does distinguish "free wage labor" from "slavery"-then, and now?

D. 1912

Nov. 5, "Bread and Roses" and "Solidarity Forever" from Songs of Work and Freedom , and "Introduction and Summary" to Report on Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Mass (U.S. Senate Document, 1912). What distinguishes conditions of work in factories from conditions of work on medieval manors? Does industrialization make much of a difference to the choices that most people can make? Does working in factories, instead of working in manors or on plantations, make more than a superficial difference to the values that guide choices of individuals, or motivate groups to collective action? .

Nov. 7. Appendixes to Report on Strike of Textile Workers ; selections from Hearings before the House Committee on Rules, The Strike at Lawrence Mass (1912) ; and for background, Melvyn Dubofsky, "Satan's Dark Mills" in We Shall Be All (Chicago: Quadrangle Book, 1969)

Nov. 12. Selections from Justus Ebert, The Trial of a New Society (I.W.W. Publishing Bureau, 1913) Ebert's very pro-labor and pro-Wobbly book offered its readers a very different perspective on the strike in Lawrence from the interpretation offered by owners and managers of the mill, or by civil authorities in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. management or the civil authorities What contrasts, and, of equal importance, what similarities and common premises, do you find in the interpretation of the strike and its meaning advanced within Ebert's book, and the explanation for Lawrence's troubles put forward by the Citizens' Association of Lawrence ("Lawrence As It Really Is-Not as Syndicalists, Anarchists, Socialists, Suffragists, Pseudo Philanthropists, and Muckraking Yellow Journalists Have Painted It," included in Hearings before the House Committee on Rules, The Strike at Lawrence Mass (1912), pp. 414-418.) A 2-page essay should be posted to the webboard by class today.

IV. ONCE MORE, WITH A DIFFERENCE:
Justice and the Transition from medieval to modern.

Nov. 14 and 19. An opportunity to tie up lose ends from previous discussions. to prepare for final reports from workgroups in classes after the Thanksgiving break, and to begin thinking about your final essay for this course. Please select eight passages, two from readings for each of the four moments with which we have engaged, which you regard as particularly illuminating or provocative. Were you, that is, to choose passages to serve as your sole remainders of the evidence about 1381, 1640s, 1831, and 1912, which would most effectively enable you to recall and to think about issues over which people at those moments were struggling, and what kinds of perspectives and understandings they brought to the issues and their struggles? Try to keep passages of manageable lengths-let's say, a page or less each? Please post your passages by 5:00 p.m. on Nov. 14.

Thanksgiving Break. Please note that, after your return from Thanksgiving Break, we shall be managing several tasks more or less at the same time: 1)oral presentations on 1381, 1640s, and 1382; 2)construction of final reflections and arguments on materials and issues examined this semester; 3)preliminary consideration of fieldwork projects for next semester; and 4)a speculative but serious discussion of origins of law and judicial process, centered on a Greek tragedy. We shall be juggling a lot of tasks at the end of this semester, but I am confident that we'll manage to keep most balls in the air.

Nov. 26.. Presentations of workgroups, to provide additional insights, new perspectives, and proposals for further investigation, analysis, and interpretation, all of which should deepen our understanding of events in 1381, 1647, and 1831 and of their relationship to a larger history of "justice" and "liberty" and "freedom" in Anglo-U.S. American history.

Please note that, along with oral presentations from your workgroup in these classes, you should also submit, on Nov. 28, a written research "proposal," prepared either collectively or individually. Each proposal should include a description of your hypothesis or tentative thesis about ideas and practices of justice in your period, and a thoughtful discussion of the questions that you would like to answer in pursuing your hypothesis, and the sorts of evidence that you would look for in asking such questions. I am well aware that you are not experienced historical researchers, and you will probably have to rely a lot on guesswork; but on the basis of the what you have already encountered and considered, what directions for further inquiry appear desirable and possible?

Nov.28. Completion of oral presentations on 1381, 1640s, and 1831. Also today, we shall begin discussions of your choices for fieldwork next semester. If you have not already begun to collect information about local organizations, agencies, or movements identified with efforts to achieve justice (however defined), now is the moment to do so.

Dec. 3. Further discussion of possible fieldwork projects. Bear in mind that your choice of an off-campus activity should, in the long run, contribute to a deeper understanding of the choices, witting or unwitting, made by past peoples, and to a clearer perception of the historical limits and opportunities within which we choose, or think that we choose.

Dec. 5. Please sketch out for class today, in writing, points that you may address in your final essay, along with notes how your selected sources may be used to make your points. We may be able to continue our discussion of possible choices for fieldwork next semester. In any case, I shall ask you to give me a few sentences in writing, indicating your hopes for what you want to do and achieve next semester, either in class, or by way of e-mail sometime on Dec. 5.

Dec. 10. Discussion of The Eumenides in Aeschylus, The Orestia, trans. by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1977). Euripides' explanation may not work for us, in accounting for our convictions that justice, law, and courts are somehow fundamentally connected; but at the least, it will get us talking about connections that many of us today seldom question, and about why we may take such connections for granted. Does the history, or do the histories, that we have been considering, help us account for the modern association of justice with law on the one hand, courts on the other?

Dec.12. Some final thoughts and reflections; or, back to the 1990s. Should we revise earlier interpretations in light of readings and discussions since September? Are definitions accepted and positions taken at the beginning of the course still satisfactory? Is "Liberty, Equality, and the Rule of Law" a western achievement, a modern myth, or maybe both? We shall use today's class to discuss once again theses and arguments likely to appear in your final essays.

Final Essay

By the end of the examination period, you should write a brief essay (10 pages maximum) in which you either venture an answer to questions posed by the course description; analyze the significance of our present practices of justice in the context of our readings, discussions, and research on 1381,1640s, 1831 and 1912; or, tell a "story," using selections from evidence examined this semester, that helps us understand changes in ideas and practices of justice on the one hand, and the organization of people's work on the other, between the middle ages and the present day. (If none of these approaches to a final essay strikes you as a satisfying way to organize your reflections on what you have learned and understood this semester about either the course topic or historical inquiry, propose an alternative; I'll give it serious thought.) Whatever approach you may choose, treat your essay as an opportunity to give temporary closure to a semester that has probably raised more questions than it has provided answers. I fully appreciate that ten pages may prove too short for your purposes; but you can take advantage of the limited space to decide what, if time were to erase all memory of this course except the contents of this essay, you would want to have said about ideals and practices of justice since the middle ages. I recommend strongly that you prepare for the essay by choosing four to eight (short) passages from the sources which you have read this semester, one or two for each period.(See above, Nov. 14 and 19 .) Then use these passages to construct and support an argument on continuity, change, or both, in either practices or notions of justice in England and America between the 14th and 20th centuries. In our final classes together, you will have some to try out theses and arguments for your final essays, and in our last class on December 12, I shall ask you to present, in no more than three or four sentences, your (tentative) conclusion to the essay due by the final day of exams. While writing your final essay, you will, I hope, give some thought to how your own view on justice changed as a result of examining the attitudes and conduct of others over several centuries of Anglo-U.S. American history.

Spring Semester 2000: Note, two books are available for purchase at the Odyssey: Judith M. Bennett, A Medieval Life. Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c.1295-1344, McGraw-Hill College, 1999, and Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Harvard University Press. Other readings below will be available, either in multilithed copies or on electronic reserve. Copies of your papers from last semester will be distributed in the first class.

During the spring semester of "Justice: Ideals and Practices in History," the focus of attention shifts from analysis and interpretation of historical sources in the past several centuries to the ways in which historical inquiry and understanding sharpen understanding and deepen judgement of values, choices, and actions of individuals and groups in our present moment. We shall not abandon the practice of analysis and interpretation of evidence, nor shall we cease trying to deepen our understanding of what moved people of the 1380s, the 1640s, the 1830s, and the early twentieth century to conflict over differing goals for justice. We shall, however, use what can be learned from engagement in contemporary conflicts over justice to deepen and refine interpretations of the sources of conflict and change in the past; and conversely, we shall apply insights gained from analysis of past struggles to our explanations of current efforts to change existing institutions, movements, or ideas about the how the world "ought" to be.

During January, we shall meet ordinarily twice weekly as a whole, and probably once weekly in smaller groups, in order to accomplish three purposes:

1. To review and revise arguments, and to strengthen prose and rhetorical power, of final essays of the fall semester. .
2. To widen our perspective on each of the moments examined last semester, by reading work by scholars that throws further light on either events or issues raised in our encounters with primary sources last semester.
3. To learn more about possible projects for this semester, and to decide where each member of the class will commit her time and energy to a current site of conflict and struggle towards "a more just world."

During February, in workshops with Jennifer Willsea and in conferences with me, you will, I hope, clarify your arguments about change and continuity over the several centuries covered last semester. Although a final revision of your essay is not due until the end of this semester, I shall ask for a initial revision, in which you make even clearer and more powerful your major point, strengthen the supporting analysis and explanations, and develop a more elegant and persuasive prose, by the beginning of March.

By the first of March also, decisions about projects should be made and your exploration off-campus should being. Common class meetings are likely to be much fewer in number, probably no more than once weekly during the six weeks or so that you are spending time off-campus with the institution, organization, or activity to which you have committed yourself. (Although the precise number of hours that you commit to your community project will vary, I am assuming that you will devote at least 8-10 hours to the course each week, including class time. Reducing class meetings to once a week will allow more time for your off-campus activity. The college does, I should add, promise to assist with transportation, but details will have to be worked out once we know to what locations individuals or teams will be travelling.) I hope, however, that you will meet often (over meals, perhaps?) with colleagues who are engaged in the same or similar activities, to compare notes about what you are doing and learning, and to give each other advice about ways you might more effectively use your experience to understand how and why people are fighting for or against. . .well, for or against whatever they seem to be fighting for or against. Kathleen Brennan, will be available for regular consultations, with individual students or groups, to help you place your experience in a larger social, political, and historical context, and to help you participate more effectively in the group or movement or agency which you have chosen to explore through participation in its goals and actions. During the six weeks of your activity off-campus, I shall ask you to provide at least once a week a brief posting to the course "forum," keeping all of us informed about your project, about what you are doing and what you are learning.

Possible Projects, March through Mid-April

On the basis of both past experience and your discussions with me last semester, Kathleen and I are proposing several projects, chosen by us to balance diversity in choice with coherence and focus in class discussions. We want you, that is, to bring to discussions a range of experiences that allows comparisons and contrasts, but we wish to avoid so many different projects that comparisons and contrasts become unwieldy. If you are not pleased with the choices that we are proposing, let me emphasize, you are encouraged to discuss possible alternatives; we shall be as flexible as possible, given that the academic year as well as other commitments impose limits on our time and energy.

The projects, or perhaps more accurately, the sites of work and struggle, include one about which you have already learned something, from the very full description of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination that Yun Sadowski provided you at the end of last semester. Yun will talk with you more about it this semester, but I strongly encourage you to consider it, as an excellent place from which to view contemporary ideals and practices of "equality under law"-or, to view what people think constitutes such equality, and how practice and ideals may fit together in bizarre fashion on occasion.

Several of you have expressed a strong conviction that the key to greater justice in the future lies in education of children and young people. Kathleen Brennan has been working with Dawn Fontaine, who teaches at the North Star Charter School in Springfield, to develop a collaboration between faculty and students there, and some members of our class. The final form such collaboration might take is still unclear, but observation of classes for these inner-city youth (many of whom would be likely drop-outs in the regular school system) , interviews with them and faculty about objectives of the school, and, ideally, some classes which you would offer based upon your own learning of last semester, are likely ingredients of projects based at North Star. Can such a school make a difference in how fully inner-city young people enjoy the supposed benefits of U.S. American economic and political opportunities? What do students there learn about the way U.S. American justice works, or doesn't work? What ideals and practices of civic participation are likely to emerge in such an environment? How will such an educational environment shape students' view of what they can accomplish, and how-individually or collectively-they should go about accomplishing their goals? You may well have other questions; I mention these only to suggest the range of issues those choosing this site of struggle may want to consider.

A more traditional forum for looking at and thinking about the practice of justice is a District Attorney's office, and we are fortunate that the District Attorney for Hampshire county is an MHC alumna. The administrative head of her office, David Angier, worked with two MHC students last spring, and both felt that he had enabled them to gain an unusually clear and full view of that arm of the state most obviously responsible for enforcing justice against "criminals." Choosing the DA's office probably means that you would be observing more than "doing," but David makes sure that interns in his office have access to lots of information, and he encourages them to think hard and creatively about the kinds of problems brought for some kind of solution or at least response by the principal local office for prosecuting wrong-doing in this part of the world, or at least wrong-doing which falls under state jurisdiction.

Less easy to describe is participation in planning for a conference of the Women's Institute for Leadership Development (W.I.L.D.), organized by Dale Melcher at the University of Massachusetts labor Center. Since the conference is scheduled for the second weekend of March, people interested in this project would need to get started a little early, and I suspect that you would be more involved in the follow-up to the conference than in its planning and execution. Still, it would enable some members of the class to address directly both issues of labor justice at the beginning of the new millennium and issues of equality for women in positions of leadership. ( Dale has also pointed out that an issue of enormous significance for laborers in the Valley is the trend towards privatization or out-sourcing of services at local colleges, including Mount Holyoke. I am pretty sure that Dale's ability to help us find ways to look at women and labor, organized and unorganized, is not limited to the conference in March. In any case, people who choose to work with Dale, or on women and labor, may be recruited to help plan a coming focus of the Weissman Center for Leadership at Mount Holyoke. The first stages of planning for a major set of lectures and conferences on Women and Social Justice will be underway this spring, and we are looking for students who want to be involved in planning and bringing off a semester long concentration on "The Legacies of Frances Perkins: Social Justice in the 21st Century" in the spring semester of 2000-2001. Anyone interested?)

One further possibility that Kathleen can tell us more about: Womanshelter/Companeras, in Northampton, a shelter for battered women. In brief, volunteering for this activity would afford and opportunity to work as hotline volunteers, or in one of the following special programs: Legal Emergency Assistance Program (LEAF), Teen Dating Violence Awareness, Community Education, and Resource Development. Some training is required of volunteers, as is a four to eight month commitment to the shelter. Only those of you who might wish to continue your commitment beyond the course expectation should choose this option, and Kathleen will need to clarify whether the four to eight months needs to be continuous, or could be satisfied by a commitment to return to the shelter next fall. In any case, we shall have more information on this possible community project to give you in class, if it strikes you as worth pursuing.

I should mention one other possibility that arose shortly after the New Year, when I attended, out of interest in the Massachusetts Labor Party, a meeting of opponents to the MCAS tests for secondary and high school students in the state. Within a couple of years, high school students who fail a test set at the state level will no longer be entitled to a high school diploma, regardless of their performance otherwise. The tests have provoked considerable anger from students, parents, and some teachers, and a major campaign is underway to resist imposition of the tests. This campaign is related to efforts by the Labor Party to develop an agenda for education that achieves far more radical change in educational processes and objectives than anything yet proposed by the more mainstream political parties. If any of you are interested, I shall be glad to give what information I can, and I shall in any case invite Preston Smith or Michelle Stephens, two of my colleagues at MHC, to talk to us about the Labor Party. (You are unlikely to know much about it at present; it doesn't begin to compare in funds or power to either Republicans or Democrats, but it does provoke some intriguing questions about how people can achieve new means to make themselves heard, and how people can revise the agendas that are usually offered to them on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.)

I have listed several projects or "sites" of conflict (and hence, sites of learning for us), but I remind you that I am open to proposals for other activities. I know that some of your particular interests may not seem to fit immediately any of the above, and I admit that I wasn't able in every case to imagine precisely how to fit your descriptions of interests with projects or placements readily accessible to us. I will, however, do my best to figure out with you some way to ensure that you have the opportunity you seek to think creatively, analytically, and responsibly about history (how things and people have been), contemporary struggles (what people and things are) , and moral commitment (how things and people might yet be), in our world, and in your own life.

Writing Assignments

I shall be asking for two major essays from you this semester, one of which will be a radically revised version of your essay for the first semester. At the end of your work or project in the community-around mid-April, that is-you should have ready for the class to read and discuss a paper in which you describe your experience, analyze the objectives and methods of the institution, movement, or activity in which you have been engaged, and offer a critical assessment of those objectives and methods. After working in a setting where individuals and groups are working or fighting to make the world a little more just, what do you think of their objectives, of their ways of seeking those objectives, and of the implications of their work and struggle for the rest of us? If you were in a position to change anything in the setting of your project, what would you wish to change, why, and how would you go about it? At the end of the semester, I shall ask you for a revised version of your first-semester paper, revised in light of what you learned from working in the community. How, that is, does your hands-on experience alter or revise your reading of Anglo-American history, the changes that have taken place in people and people's consciousness and actions since the 1300s, and the sources of such changes or the processes by which change occurred, or occurs? Between the beginning and end of the semester, I shall, however, ask you to post to the course forum several shorter pieces on particular issues and topics, as well as weekly reports on your project once you are working outside the college. The tentative schedule of class meetings below identifies readings on which you should write a couple of pages before we meet to discuss it. In each case, I want you to figure out and explain to your colleagues the principal point or argument of each author or authors whose work we are discussing, and I want you also to offer, whatever your complaints about lack of information and inadequate context, a critical evaluation of the point or argument.

Tentative Schedule of Class Meetings

Jan. 27. Reunion, and discussion of the shape of things to come.

Feb. 1 Yun Sadowski: further introduction to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, as well as further information from Kathleen Brennan on North Star Academy.

Feb. 3. Critical discussion of Judith M. Bennett, A Medieval Life. Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c.1295-1344, McGraw-Hill College, 1999. Judith, a graduate of MHC, offers insight not only into manorial life in fourteenth-century England but also into women's place within the structures of power that characterized the agrarian, pre-capitalist, pre-national state society of that century. Does her excavation of one women's life give us a different view of conflict and change in the pre-modern world than what we achieved through analysis of documents on the peasants' revolt of 1381?

Feb. 8. Michelle Stephens, Assistant Professor of English, MHC, or Preston Smith, Associate Professor of Politics and African-American Studies, on how to organize workers but also how workers can organize for political change.

Feb. 10, Feb. 15, and Feb. 17.. Critical discussion of Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Harvard University Press, especially the first 9 chapters; Jean de Coras, "A Memorable Decision of the High Court of Toulouse," trans. by Jeannette K. Ringdold and Janet Lewis," Tri-Quarterly no. 55, Fall, 11982, 85-110; Robert Finlay, "AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre. The Refashioning of Martin Guerre," American Historical Review 93:3, June 1988, 553-571; and Natalie Zemon Davis, "AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre. 'On the Lame,' " American Historical Review 93:3, June 1988, 572-603. Once again, we shall be reading about peasants, and about peasant women. But this time, the region is France, and the period is the sixteenth century, between the peasants' revolt of 1381 and the English Civil War of the 1640s. Concentrate on the argument between Natalie Davis and Robert Finlay, about what is the most responsible interpretation of evidence on this case of an imposture, in which a woman's judgement turned out to be exceptionally important-or so some of us think. What are Davis and Finlay arguing about, who has the best of the argument, and why does it matter? Your response to these questions should be posted by Feb. 16.

Feb. 22. Meeting with David Angier, to discuss the work of the District Attorney's office and the handling of crime and wrong-doing and wrongs in the local community.

Feb. 24 and Feb. 29. Critical discussion of Robert Brenner, "Bourgeois revolution and transition to capitalism," in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in honour of Lawrence Stone, Past and Present Society, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 271-304, and Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Albion's Fatal Tree. Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, ed. by Douglas Hay et al., Pantheon Books [Random House]: New York, 1975. Read one or the other of these articles, each of which throws light on the transition towards centralized institutions of authority and justice-towards the nation-state, that is-and the social and economic changes which accompanied the shift from ("unfree") peasants in manors to ("free") workers in factories. Although these articles are most likely to broaden your understanding of what was at stake for royalists, parliamentarians, levellers, and diggers in the struggles of the mid-seventeenth century, they should also sharpen your thinking about modern distinctions between public authority and private property, and about our reliance on categories of thought that separates politics and governance from economics and work; they should, that is, help us appreciate the complex relationship between state authority and industrial conflict in 1912 and since.

Mar. 2. Discussion of Community Projects, and review of objectives, for individuals, and for the class as a whole.

Mar. 7. Open

Mar. 9. Critical Discussion of Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review no. 181, 1990, 91-118. The title itself tells you that this article is designed to help us understand better how and why slavery emerged alongside "free" labor in the transition from manorial, feudal society to the capitalist economy of the nation-state in the modern era. It should provide a larger context in which to think about Nat Turner and the significance of his rebellion; it should also lead us to think more carefully about how people's perception of reality is shaped by, and in turns shapes the reality, in which people live and work. We take a lot of things for granted; what accounts for what we consider "natural"? Is common-sense always good sense?

For the next month or so, we shall probably meet no more than once a week as a class; around the second week of April, we may want to resume twice-weekly meetings, as we prepare for final arguments and judgements on the history of "justice" within one of the histories that has brought us to our present-or is it indeed "our" present, or even a single "present"?

SYLLABUS, Fall Semester, 1999

Some Introductory Observations

During the fall semester, you will be taking apart evidence from several periods in the past, sometimes reading what historians have said about those periods, often writing about inferences directly from original sources, and talking seriously with each other about what you have read and written. I don't expect final answers to the questions posed in the course description; but by the end of the semester, we may understand a little more clearly how people before us thought and talked about justice, and what they did about it. I should also like to think that the imaginative leap necessary to understand earlier thought and action will give us new insights into our own ideals and conduct.

This course will require your readiness to articulate your findings, insights, surmises, and judgments in writing and in class discussion. Writing, and writing clearly and persuasively, will be one of your most important goals during the semester. You should plan to write often, and I shall encourage you to regard your writing not simply as a product, but as a process of learning. Or to put the point a little differently, I hope that you will use weekly writing assignments to strengthen your understanding of materials and issues, not only or perhaps not even primarily to demonstrate your knowledge. Thanks to the marvels of electronic technology, you will be able to present your insights, inferences, conclusions, speculations, and questions about material to your colleagues by way of a class "bulletin board", on TIN. After explaining the relatively easy process of "posting" messages to the course newsgroup, I shall expect you to provide me and your colleagues with a commentary or informal essay, based on current reading assignments, each week. The length of your commentaries or essays will vary from week to week, but I suggest that you plan on writing an average of 500 words or so. Don't worry initially about the precise format in which you articulate your ideas or questions; simply concentrate on using the evidence at hand to say something both substantive and interesting about people in the past. Several times during the semester, I hope to meet with you individually, to discuss rewriting informal commentaries or essays, to make your argument more rigorous and your prose more effective and elegant. At least twice during the semester, you should re-fashion ideas articulated in your weekly writings into systematic analyses and arguments-that is, into more-or-less "formal" essays, using original evidence to make a point about the people and issues that are examining together.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that this course depends on your active participation in class discussion, and the course will "work" only if each of you is willing to work with colleagues both in and out of class. To increase opportunities for teaching, and for learning from, each other, we shall organize three workgroups, one each for 1381, 1647, and 1831. (In light of further work we shall undertake in the spring semester on struggles of laborer in the 20th century, we shall not devote a workgroup to 1912 this semester.) Each workgroup will undertake additional reading on its period. By the final two weeks of the semester, each workgroup should be prepared to offer tentative generalizations about the "hows" and "whys" of conflict and change in its period; each workgroup should also be ready to identify issues and questions that deserve further inquiry and thought. Finally, each workgroup will prepare, by the final classes of the semester, a proposal for further investigation of one of the moments examined this semester. Were you able to devote another semester, or even another month or two, to your inquiry, what questions would you ask, what sources would you examine, what scholarship would you investigate, in order to explain more fully a given historical moment, and its implications for our understanding of change and continuity in history? Whatever the specific focus of your workgroup, I hope that you and your workgroup colleagues will take advantage of it as a forum to debate reading assignments, paper topics, unresolved issues raised in class -- indeed, anything that you think appropriate and helpful to your learning. The principal purpose of workgroups is simply stated: I want you to learn that you can teach each other.

In addition to further investigation of three "moments" that will occupy much of our attention this semester, your research between now and January should also include some time devoted to contemporary institutions, practices, and notions related, in one way or another, to our own aspirations towards justice, both "social justice" and justice for wronged individuals. In order to prepare now for informed decisions next spring about local projects beyond the campus, please give some effort to finding out something about one of several aspects or dimensions of justice, or struggles towards justice, in the neighborhood of the college. We'll reach together in class some agreement on who will look for what kind of information; but I foresee four major areas for concentrating the search for material relevant to a choice of institutions, groups, or issues to which you will devote time next spring. Crudely described, your choices will include 1) the criminal justice system in Western Massachusetts; 2) governmental or quasi-governmental initiatives against discrimination based on racial, sex, age, or physical ability categories; 3)groups or movements challenging the existing distribution of wealth and economic power in society, including labor unions; 4)groups or movements that focus on protective, remedial, or compensatory measures for women. I will be glad to mention later some specific groups or movements or institutions that might well provide the site for your "community-based learning" next semester, but I hope you will begin your own investigation this semester by simply paying close attention to what is happening locally-which means reading local newspapers and glancing through announcements and posters on local bulletin boards from time to time.

Books and Reading Assignments

Most of the readings in the syllabus of classes and readings which follows are part of multilithed readings which will be available for purchase, after the first week of classes, from the History Department Office. . Two reading assignments are from books available for purchase at the Odyssey Bookshop: Aeschylus, The Oresteia (including The Eumenides), trans. by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1977) and The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, ed. by Kenneth S. Greenberg (Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996).

Also at the Odyssey, you will find copies of Diana Hacker, a Pocket Style Manual, (Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin's Press). This handbook will be used in this course--and in other courses at MHC that focus attention on writing effectively and skillfully--as an aid to clear, strong, well-organized, and engaging prose. You should find it valuable not only during this course, but also on other occasions when you want help in writing persuasively and powerfully. Glance through the table of contents as soon as possible, so that you will know where to turn when you encounter specific difficulties or uncertainties about your prose this semester.

Does "Justice" Have a History? Explorations of an Abstraction, and the Present as Past.

Sept.9. "The St. Alban's Charter of 1381," Liberty and liberties, and first encounters with interpretative issues, analysis of evidence, and each other.

Sept.14, 16 .The Eumenides, in Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics, 1977).
This text from ancient Greece may seem very far removed from the contemporary debates and struggles about we have been talking; it is, indeed, far removed even from the historical epochs to which we shall shortly turn our attention. But this play about the origin of courts of justice may help us think about issues no less important to us than to the ancient Greeks, issues that we shall have to confront more than once this semester. Prepare for class by writing a brief statement about one point of debate or argument in the play that can still provoke controversy, or at least discussion, in the 20th century. Think also, however, about ways in which the terms and premises of debate over that issue have changed since the period of the play. You might, for example, want to ask how we, in contrast to people over two millennia ago, answer the questions, Why do we have laws, or why do we have courts? By Sept. 16, please prepare a 500-word commentary on a difference which you discern in ancient Greek understanding of justice, and our own. NO research is required, expected, or desired; work entirely with the play that we have discussed for your data on ancient Greek notions of justice, and with your existing knowledge of contemporary life for comparisons between the present and the Greek past

II. SIX CENTURIES OF DOING JUSTICE: A SWEEPING SURVEY

The next few classes provide a preliminary, and somewhat indirect, introduction to the "crises" of 1381, 1647, 1831, and 1912 on which we shall concentrate for the bulk of the semester. I shall be asking you in these classes to do seemingly contradictory tasks: on the one hand, to speculate broadly and imaginatively about social and ideological change since the middle ages; on the other, to read closely and attentively several items of evidence. In order to survive this contradiction, you will have to put aside temporarily your anxiety about what you don't know, and concentrate your energies on using what you have at hand.

So, use each original source assigned below to venture an imaginative re-construction of the world in which these words were spoken or written. What kind of people, with what assumptions about themselves and their society, produced the document at hand? What did they not need to say, because it could be taken for granted? In what kind of society would people articulate the needs, hopes and fears that we find in the document? Ask yourself such questions of each of the sources, and decide what you can say, more or less confidently, about the authors, audience, or ideas of each source. Then choose a passage or passages which, in your judgment, illuminates one aspect of the people who produced it or for whom it was intended, or an aspect of the society or culture of its time; and on the basis of that passage(s), comment, via TIN, on the evidence and its implications for our historical understanding. Limit your comments on the passage or passages tone point that can be made and supported by the evidence at hand; but be sure, when you have finished your commentary, that it provides a reasonable response to anyone who might say to you, "So what?".

Sept.21. Some 14th century evidence, and a glimpse of lords and peasants: "The St. Alban's Charter of 1381" (again) and documents from Part I, "The Background to the Peasants' Revolt" of R.B. Dobson's The Peasants'Revolt of 1381 (2nd ed., 1983) . Scan all of the documents in Part I but concentrate on items 5 and 8B. For additional "background" to the Peasants' Revolt, I recommend Nigel Saul, "Murder and Justice, Medieval Style. The Pashley Case, 1327-8, " History Today 34 (Aug. 1984).

Sept.23. Some evidence from 17th-century soldiers with some extraordinary ideas about making governments: "The Agreement of the People Presented to the council of the Army, "1647.

Sept.28. Some evidence from the 19th century and the era of slavery: Part One, "The Document: The Confessions of Nat Turner" in Kenneth S. Greenberg, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press: Boston, 1996). Please, resist the temptation to read the "Introduction" to this volume now; you will have an opportunity to read it in a few weeks.

Sept. 30. Some evidence about labor in an industrializing society: Lucy Larcom, "Among Lowell Mill-Girls. A Reminiscence, " Atlantic Monthly 48:281 (Nov 1881).

Oct. 5, 7. Taking stock and getting ready for independent investigation
The class has two objectives for this week: to reflect on implications of material and issues hastily surveyed during the introduction to the course, and to explore avenues of information and insight available through the library and the internet.
So, ask yourself what have we learned in the past four classes? Even if our survey of evidence from several moments over six centuries has been quick and obviously limited, have the courage to venture ideas about change and continuity over these six centuries, and talk over your ideas with other members of the class. And either collectively or individually, post a generalization or two on TIN by the end of this week.
Probably on October 7, a member of the Reference Staff in the Library will introduce you to effective and exciting use of electronic information systems. With the information and approaches learned in this and later meetings with our excellent reference librarians, you should be able, often on your own initiative, to track down sources, find information, and explore ideas relevant to the several historical moments that we are trying to understand and explain this semester. (One result of gaining and improving investigative skills, I hope, will be your greater independence of my preferences, choices, and prejudices.)

III. A CLOSER LOOK AND FURTHER INVESTIGATION

In the classes that follow, we shall look again at the periods we just covered, but at a slightly more leisurely pace. As before, the emphasis will be on analysis of evidence and inferences from sources, but you will also do some thinking, writing and talking about historians' interpretations of evidence. We shall, moreover, give some time to discussions of research, or at least to what questions for research should be pursued, had we more time to deepen an understanding of these moments in the history of Euro-American ideals and practices of justice.

A. 1381

Oct. 14. "Manor Court Rolls" in Translations and Reprints (The Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, no date) ; "Evidence from Manor Court Rolls," Essex and the Peasants' Revolt, compiled by W.H. Liddell and R.G.E. Wood (Essex Record Office Publication no. 81, 1981) ; Barbara F. Harvey, ed., Custumal (1391) . . . of the Manor of Islip (Oxfordshire Record Society Publications, 1959 ) ; and Part I, "The Background to the Peasants' Revolt" from Dobson, The Peasants'Revolt of 1381 (again). If you can't cover all of this record material thoroughly, select one item for concentrated attention and analysis. Don't panic if these documents resist easy translation into modern terms; remember that one purpose of historical inquiry is imaginative engagement with the "otherness" of the past. For a concise survey of the Revolt of 1381, read "The Events of the Rising" from Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free. Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York: Viking Press, 1973) . For an additional treat, you may also consult Janet Backhouse, The Luttrell Psalter (London: The British Library, 1989), on the web.

Oct.19. Part II, "The Outbreak of the Peasants' Revolt", and Part VI, "Suppression and Survival", from Dobson, The Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Don't be surprised if we have little time for discussion today. I plan to offer some background observations on lordship and law in the 14th century which may help you cope with the alien and sometimes mystifying material that confronts you. Again, let me remind you that you should not worry about what you don't know; focus on what you can teach yourself from the information and evidence which you have.

Oct. 21. Part VII, "Interpretations of the Peasants' Revolt" from Dobson, ed., The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 , especially. items 67-69 and 71. Why did peasants revolt in 1381? What , if anything, did they accomplish and what, if anything, did they or their betters learn from this revolt?

B. 1640s

Oct. 26. Title page of Richard Brathwait's "The English Gentleman" (1630); "The Grand Remonstrance, 1641" from Seventeenth-century England: A Changing Culture, vol. I, ed. Ann Hughes (1980), 75-80; "Documents Related to the Assizes of 1642," Appendix I of Somerset Assize Orders, 1640-1659, ed. J.S. Cockburn (1971). Among other aspects of English political and legal structures revealed in these documents, pay particular attention to ways in which Parliament, a legislative body, is also a judicial institution, while the assize courts, ostensibly a court, is part of the government itself. More generally, what does these documents reveal about matters worrying members of the ruling elite in England in years preceeding whole-scale civil conflict? How are the actors revealed through these documents different from the actors that we discovered in documents on rebellion and political conflict in the years around 1381?

Oct. 28. "The Agreement of the People Presented to the Council of the Army," (1647) and "The Putney Debates" (1647) from The Good Old Cause. The English Revolution of 1640-1660, 2nd ed., by Christopher Hill and Edmund Dell (1969); "The Whitehall Debates and Elizabeth Poole's Examination" (1648-1649), from Puritanism and Liberty, 2nd ed. by A.S.P. Woodhouse (1974); and "An Agreement of the Free People of England" (1649; this is the third and final version of the Levellers' constitutional proposals.) Can we, in the language of any of these documents, find an explanation for why, at this point in English history, some of the king's subjects had the nerve to assert not simply a claim to justice under law, but responsibility for law itself?

Nov. 2. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform or, True Magistracy Restored, ed. Robert W. Kenny (1941, 1973). What does Winstanley's take on the relationship between "law" and "freedom" enable us to understand, not only about the way in which these concepts took shape in the 17th-century, but also about the complex implications of these terms in our own world?

C. 1831

Nov. 4. "Introduction. The Confessions of Nat Turner: Text and Context," as well as "Part One. The Document" (again) in Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents. Give some thought, as you puzzle out the relationships embedded in the published confession of Nat Turner, to the possible similarities and differences between a 14th-century serf and a 19th-century slave, and to the developments between the late middle ages and the modern era which ended serfdom in western Europe even as they brought into being chattel slavery on a global scale.

Nov. 9. "Part Two. Related Documents" in Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents.

Nov. 11. "Commonwealth v. Hunt & others," March 1842, from Reports of Cases argued and determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, vol. IV (1864). This case chronologically close to Nat Turner's revolt gives us a different perspective on labor and ways in which work, social order, and political stability were imagined by people who lived in a nation that still took for granted slavery. Precisely what does distinguish "free wage labor" from "slavery"-then, and now?

D. 1912

Nov. 16 Melvyn Dubofsky, "Satan's Dark Mills" in We Shall Be All (Chicago: Quadrangle Book, 1969) ; also, "Bread and Roses" and "Solidarity Forever" from Songs of Work and Freedom , and "Introduction and Summary" to Report on Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Mass (U.S. Senate Document, 1912) What distinguishes conditions of work in factories from conditions of work on medieval manors? Does industrialization make much of a difference to the choices that most people can make? Does working in factories, instead of working in manors or on plantations, make more than a superficial difference to the values that guide choices of individuals, or motivate groups to collective action?

Nov. 18. Appendixes to Report on Strike of Textile Workers ; selections from Hearings before the House Committee on Rules, The Strike at Lawrence Mass (1912) ; and selections from Justus Ebert, The Trial of a New Society (I.W.W. Publishing Bureau, 1913)

Nov. 23 "Lochner v. New York," (1905), 198 U.S. 292; "Protective Legislation for Women Workers" (Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412, 1908), and "A Radical View of Women's Emancipation" (Emma Goldman, 'The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation' ), both from Modern American Women. A Documentary History, ed. Susan Ware (Chicago: The Dorsey Press) . Give some thought today to whether labor's struggle with capital was also a struggle to achieve justice for women? Or does the reading for today provide grounds to suspect that "justice for labor" might very well entail only a fresh form of subordination for women?

IV. ONCE MORE, WITH A DIFFERENCE:
Justice and the Transition from medieval to modern.

Nov. 30 An opportunity to tie up lose ends from previous discussions. to prepare for final reports from workgroups in classes next week, and to begin thinking about your final essay for this course. Please select four passages, one from readings for each of the four moments with which we have engaged, which you regard as particularly illuminating or provocative. Were you, that is, to choose four passages to serve as your sole remainders of the evidence about 1381, 1640s, 1831, and 19112, which would most effectively enable you to recall and to think about issues over which people at those moments were struggling, and what kinds of perspectives and understandings they brought to the issues and their struggles? Try to keep passages of manageable lengths-let's say, a page or less each?

Dec. 7, 9. An occasion to reflect on each of the "moments" that we have previously examined, and for workgroups to present additional ideas and information, as well as proposals for further investigation, analysis, and interpretation.

Please note that, along with oral presentations from your workgroup in these classes, you should also submit a written research "proposal", prepared either collectively or individually. Each proposal should include a description of your hypothesis or tentative thesis about ideas and practices of justice in your period, and a critical discussion of both sources and secondary scholarship that you would use, were time available, to investigate and test your preliminary thesis. Each person should contribute at least one original source, beyond those on the syllabus, and at least one item of modern scholarship, either an article or a book, that throws light on the questions which you would like to see answered. Ideally, your "proposal" should have, as an appendix, selections from the source that you have identified as potentially relevant to your investigation.

Dec. 14 Some final thoughts and reflections; or, back to the 1990s. Should we revise earlier interpretations in light of readings and discussions since September? Are definitions accepted and positions taken at the beginning of the course still satisfactory? Is "Liberty, Equality, and the Rule of Law" a western achievement, a modern myth, or maybe both? We shall use today's class to discuss possible theses for your final essay. I have a hunch that our discussion will prove most helpful, were you to prepare ahead of class a list of quotations from sources read this semester, perhaps two or three quotations pertinent to each of the four moments that we have examined. Such a list would help ground our discussion, and it would give you an opportunity to try out different ways of fitting together specific evidence and broad generalizations about Europe and the United States since the 14th century.

Final Essay

By the end of the examination period, you should write a brief essay (10 pages maximum) in which you either venture an answer to questions posed by the course description; analyze the significance of our present practices of justice in the context of our readings, discussions, and research on 1381, 1560, 1831 and 1912; or, tell a "story," using selections from evidence examined this semester, that helps us understand changes in ideas and practices of justice on the one hand, and the organization of people's work on the other, between the middle ages and the present day. (If none of these approaches to a final essay strikes you as a satisfying way to organize your reflections on what you have learned and understood this semester about either the course topic or historical inquiry, propose an alternative; I'll give it serious thought.) Whatever approach you may choose, treat your essay as an opportunity to give temporary closure to a semester that has probably raised more questions than it has provided answers. I fully appreciate that ten pages may prove too short for your purposes; but you can take advantage of the limited space to decide what, if time were to erase all memory of this course except the contents of this essay, you would want to have said about ideals and practices of justice since the middle ages. I recommend strongly that you prepare for the essay by choosing four to eight (short) passages from the sources which you have read this semester, one or two for each period. Then use these passages to construct and support an argument on continuity, change, or both, in either practices or notions of justice in England and America between the 14th and 20th centuries. In class on December 14, we can try out possible thesis sentences for a final essay, so think about what you might want to say in your paper before we have our last meeting of the semester. And before writing the final essay, ask yourself how have your own view on justice changed as a result of examining the attitudes and conduct of others over several centuries of Anglo-American history?