Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2015.

Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, Harvard University Press, 1983.The books and articles I use change over time. I have taught this course twice, at the University of Hawai’i-Manoā (spring 2019) and the University of Pittsburgh (spring 2020). Special emphasis will also be given to sources, especially archival research, and to writing. We will read classic and newer works to demonstrate how historical practice has changed over time. The course will concentrate on four major themes: race, class, gender, and capitalism. This course is designed to introduce graduate students in a broad variety of disciplines, departments, and programs to the key theories, methods, and issues in history from below, from its origin in the 1930s, through the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, to the present. “History from Below” – also called “Peoples’ History” and “Radical History” – has been an important part of the appearance and spectacular growth of social history over the past half century and one of the most important developments in the discipline and profession of history.

By Marcus Rediker at the University of Pittsburgh

Marisa fuentes dispossessed lives