History 715: Research Methods in Local History
Instructor: Michael Gordon
Thursdays, 4pm-6:40 PM, Holton 341
This course offers training in methodologies that are vital for any individual interested in historically oriented work in museums, historical societies, historical preservation, genealogy, and documentary film. The course is required for students pursuing an MA in public history and is of interest to graduate students in history and other disciplines including architecture, anthropology, geography, sociology, and political science. Students will read five examples of local histories—a frontier town (Jacksonville, Illinois), a mid-nineteenth century changing urban neighborhood (New York’s Five Points), a late nineteenth and early twentieth century urban working-class neighborhood (Chicago’s stockyards area), a city and its environmental context (Seattle, Washington), and a new ethnic community (Los Angeles’s Mexican American neighborhoods). Workshops will explore methodologies and sources. Students must write critical reviews of two assigned books, do assignments learning how to write for popular audiences, and, as a final class project, conceptualize a local study of a small Wisconsin town or city during the Depression of the 1930s in the form of a proposal for a master’s thesis or seminar research paper. History 715 is the required research methods course for UWM public history students. Other students are welcome to enroll.
Dr. Michael Gordon mgordon@uwm.edu led UWM’s Public History Program until his retirement in 2011. Author of The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 (Cornell U. Press, 1993), His work intersects with the fields of public, oral, labor, and Wisconsin history.