History 138a: WEEK 2

Readings for 2 July :
Medieval Religious Persecution and Early Modern State-Building

Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, eds., The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990)

"On cases from antiquity," pp. 58-64

George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002)

Ch. 1, "Religion and the origins of racism," pp. 17-47

Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Introduction, pp. 1-13
Ch. 2, “The ‘other’ within Christian Europe: state-building in early modern Spain,” pp. 55-82
Ch. 3, “State building in early modern France: Louis XIV and the Huguenots,” pp. 83-123

Robin Clifton, "'An Indiscriminate Blackness?' Massacre, Counter-Massacre, and Ethnic Cleansing in Ireland, 1640-60," in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, eds., The Massacre in History (NY: Berghahn, 1999), pp. 107-26

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In Rae, concentrate on the main arguments, rather than the historical details. (Note, however, that certain events qualify as more than details -- the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, for example, or the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 -- and it would be good to keep track of these and a general sense of historical context.)

What does Frederickson have to say about some of these same phenomena and events? How does he compare and contrast medieval European "persecuting society" with modern racism?

What does Clifton see as the general causes and the particular factors leading to the massacres in Ireland?

What do Clifton's and Chalk and Jonassohn's observations suggest about the nature of historical evidence and popular understanding of massacre and ethnic cleansing in the past?

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