Day 14 was more nothing, and I apologize for that. I can’t control the course content but I didn’t even go to office hours either so that makes for less content to write about. What I will say is that I did order a copy of my professor’s book, it was a used copy I found on amazon. It was quite pricy too but whatever. For me, I wanted to get it so I could share with everyone what the contents are, especially the citations. The book hasn’t been delivered yet but it should be by Friday. I’ll make sure to let everyone know once it gets here. I’m not using this to attack my professor either, while I have had my issues with him I don’t think he’s a bad person and I do actually get along well with him. I do find his methods of sourcing information incredibly suspect and the way he takes things at face value is off putting as a student (as another comrade said, he is supposed to be a nerd about research), but one on one he is a good professor and I do feel supported all things considered (if you read the past entries you are aware that we have moved past the email and paper fiasco).

While I still feel anxious opening up explicitly about my “leanings” (which is relevant to the content, its not just me debating politics) I still do it anyway and haven’t faced much push back. I hope my rambling is making sense. I’m sure you’re all confused as hell as to why I am even still confiding in this professor, but the thing is he’s the only one I really know. None of my other history professors have had me before so I’m still getting to know them, I also haven’t utilized office hours as much with them as I have with this professor. Although, I will be seeing my modern Europe professor next semester so I am trying to talk to her more as well. With her I was able to talk about my Communist Manifesto paper and she told me she’s happy to have a student that is enthusiastic about Marx because she tends to experience a lot of push back when she assigns the manifesto. When she told me that I felt comfortable enough to talk about other Marxist works (Marx and other writers) and how I was disappointed in how certain academics seem to misread him all the time (referencing that Brodie piece posted a while ago) because they only seem to read the manifesto and not his other works. She sympathized with me quite a bit, and it was nice, I hope to talk with her more about this stuff.

Sorry about the tangent but it is way more interesting than what was covered is Historiography. This week is all about the Annales School which is a French style of historiography that developed after WWI when Germany was delegitimized in academia. The Annales is not an actual physical school, but a school of thought and they focus less on historical events and large figures (top-down) but rather they are more interested in the average person and their lives divorced from politics. It’s related to social history, if that makes sense. We had to read an incredibly dry piece by Fernand Braudel, I just had such a hard time reading him because it just felt so boring. I realize history itself is pretty boring to many people, fact-spewing is also uninteresting, but we all know that it can be written in an engaging way that keeps readers hooked without delving into fiction. The main thing I got from this class was that rather than men making history, history makes men.