This week I met up with my fellow classmates, Jackie, Wei, and Izzy to work on our papers together over zoom. We met for an hour before class on Wednesday. I had already completed my “Baby Steps to historiography” assignment so I used this time to edit my work and begin my historiography. It was helpful to ask one another questions when needed and bounce ideas off each other.
For my “Baby -Steps” assignment, I wrote a review of Olivier Wieviorka’s, “The French Resistance”. I included how the book was organized and the argument the author is trying to make. Although the text is not about women in the French Resistance specifically, I believe it is an effective source in providing a broad explanation of the French Resistance and its importance in the Second World War. I will also explore the author’s definition of “resistance” in comparison to other expert opinions on the subject.
This is where my historiography begins…
Historiography can very simply be defined as the history of history; meaning historiography is the study of how history was written, by whom, and why it was recorded as such. Moreover, it is a look at if and how historical events have been reinterpreted by historians over time and why.
Historians are flawed, they often express bias, contradictions, and the trends of their times. Looking at how various historians approach the same topic is incredibly useful. It reveals how much scholars can learn from each other by looking at a topic through different interpretive lens’.
For my historiography I will be analyzing and comparing three texts regarding the French Resistance.
- Wieviorka, Olivier. The French Resistance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016.
- Andrieu, Claire. “Women in the French Resistance: Revisiting the Historical Record.” French Politics, Culture & Society 18, no. 1 (2000): 13-27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42843092.
- Potter, Charles. The Resistance, 1940: an anthology of writings from the French Underground. Baton Rouge, LA, Louisiana State University Press, 2016.