DEBORAH A. SYMONDS
Associate Professor of History
email: deborah.symonds@drake.edu
Courses Offered:
Passages to the Modern World, 1500-1775
Passages to the Modern World, 1750 to the present
Introduction to Women's History, 1200-1945
Marxism
Sex and Power in European Peasant Society
Nineteenth-Century Europe
World War One
Women Intellectuals in the Western Tradition, 950 BCE to 1978
My field is early modern Europe, which is Europe from the late middle ages (about 1400) to 1800. This period includes the formation of centralized states, the development of agricultural capitalism -- which people nowadays might call big business farming -- and Europe's contact with other continents. In Europe, it is a period which includes a lot of stress, from economic changes, new intellectual and scientific ideas, and political struggles -- it culminates in revolutions, in France and in Britain's North American colonies, and the birth of new social, economic, and political models. I deal with the nasty stresses of change, before it finally took shape for people as "revolution." The witch hunts were one of those symptoms of change, anger, fear, and frustaration -- increasing rates of infanticide were another.
My own research has been in criminal court records, in Scotland:
Biographical Statement: I come from a small, mostly working-class textile mill town in western Massachusetts, a town that was full of first generation immigrants and their children in the 1950s. I think I became a historian because the state was still dominated, visibly, by its dark and bloody and very WASPy past: Even as a child I understood that the roadside marker that said "King Philip's Stockade," and the brooding statues of Puritan forefathers meant that many people had come and gone before me, and I wanted to know what had happened.
Philosophy of Teaching: Teaching is hard work; learning is hard work. Both require constant attention, talking, and reflection. History cannot be learned through memorization, because it is a reflective and analytical discipline; it cannot, however, be learned or practiced without knowing the facts, such as they are, of what has happened. And it cannot be learned from books alone. I would like to see advanced students working with instructors on research, and in the classroom.
History as a Area of Study: History encompasses everything that human beings have done on this planet, and through it we learn, as James Burke has so aptly put it, to make connections, to see patterns, and to see ourselves as part of a social-political whole, much as ecology forces us to see ourselves as part of a natural whole.
For further information on my life and times and interests, click on the following links:
PUBLISHED WORK (ON INFANTICIDE)
SCOTTISH STUFF
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Last Modified: 2/28/00
Created by: Deb Symonds