What is a Historical Monograph

What is a historical monograph?

A historical monograph is a book-length treatment of a particular topic through the lens of history. It is a secondary source, although all secondary sources are not monographs (let alone historical monographs). You can contrast the historical monograph with surveys of periods or places or textbook introductions to a topic.

For this assignment you would like to read an important historical monograph that makes a clear argument about the topic at hand. Reading the introduction, you should be able to understand: the topic of the book, the sources it is built upon, the author’s method, the argument, and where it fits into the larger historiography.

How do I find an important historical monograph?

Some techniques:
  • Look for: works referred to by other historians, published by university presses (or major publishers), with titles that clearly advertise their offerings, written by important historians
  • Read through the bibliographies of important surveys: Ian Kershaw, Robert Paxton (available under handouts)
  • Search CONSORT using search terms – and then browsing by Subject and browsing by call number
  • Go to the library and browse the shelves around important books
  • Search JSTOR book reviews. Use advanced search and limit your search to reviews in history journals
  • Note that JSTOR and EBookCentral and ProjectMuse have many monographs available through electronic access – you can usually find these works through CONSORT
  • Ask the professor for suggestions!

A few examples of important historical monographs for our period (organized chronologically)

On the popular culture of imperialism in late nineteenth-century Europe:
  • Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa (2011)
On modernism in France in the years before World War I:
  • Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France – 1885 to World War I (1955)
On the road to war:
  • Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2014)
  • Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I (1997)
On the experience of the First World War:
  • Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (2007)
On work and gender
  • Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalwork, 1914-1939 (1995)
On gender in the aftermath of war:
  • Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (1994)
On efforts to define and understand fascism:
  • Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2005)
On women in fascist Italy:
  • Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (1992)
On Jews in fascist Italy:
  • Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (2003)
On the rise of Nazism in one town in Northern Germany:
  • William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945 (rev. ed., 1984)
On women in Nazi Germany:
  • Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (1986)
On international bankers and their response to the financial crisis of the Depression:
  • Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009)
On the Spanish Army in Morocco and the Civil War:
  • Sebastian Balfour, Deadly embrace : Morocco and the road to the Spanish Civil War (2002)
A microhistory from Paris in the 1930s
  • Sarah Maza, Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (2011)
On collaboration during the Holocaust:
  • Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2002)