GEOG 4040: URBAN HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY
Assignment 1
Due: Submit on or
before Monday, November 2, to the
Department of Geography office by
Worth: 20%
Assignment: Do one of the three essay choices given below.
Length: 6-8 pages, double-spaced, no less than 6 pages and more than 8 if you prefer. Set no more than 1.25 inches as the left- and right-hand margins. The covering (title) page does not count as part of the overall tally. All references must be properly cited.
ESSAY GUIDELINES:
PLEASE READ
Essays must be submitted
in word-processed format. They must be accompanied by a bibliography and foot-
or endnotes conforming to established academic conventions. (For
choosing your style, see http://www.library.yorku.ca/ccm/Home/ResearchAndInstruction/citationmgmt/;
an example is also given at the end of this document). The text should also indicate that you
have actually read the works that you cite.
Evidence of inadequate proof reading (such as repeated
typographical errors, incomplete sentences, failure to use your spell-checker,
etc.) will have a negative impact on the mark given to the essay. The best approach is to read over your work
in a concentrated manner – in fact, reading it out loud to yourself is a good
idea – before handing it in.
All work must come with a
covering (title) page including the following information:
Name
of student, Student ID number, course title and code, and title of work/essay question
Upon reading the essay questions
above, as well as attending class in the coming weeks and doing the assigned
readings in the usual manner, you will quickly get a sense of how the course
readings of those weeks relate to the essay questions. But you should be clear that I do not
want your essay to simply be a regurgitation of these readings. The points they make, and the ideas they
elicit are obviously significant, but I want you to go further.
Further reading is an
essential part of any course such as this and will deepen your understanding
and enjoyment of the periods discussed as well as the subfield of historical
geography in general. It should also
give you a sense of what sort of themes you’d like to pursue in your
research-based assignment for later in the year as well as the cities that grab
your imagination. Use the
assigned readings for this course in your preparation (and consider as well the
supplementary list given below), and include a bibliography of items you have
used (including any that you have discovered in your researches that are not
part of the course readings or the supplementary reading list) at the end of
your essay.
How to ‘do’ further
reading? The footnotes and
bibliographies of the assigned book chapters and articles are two sources of
further reading; the search-features of the
The essay choices suggest
that you write about Western (i.e. North American and/or European) cities and
towns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And while this gels with the stated focus of
the course, anyone with a keen spirit to explore the relevant themes for a city
in another part of the world for their essay is welcome to, but should consult with
me in advance and, if possible, present some readings they would like to do for
that city.
How many
readings/bibliographic references do you need?
There is no ideal number, but I am expecting at least five pieces
of work to make it into your bibliographies.
I am not including websites in this tally, but if, for example, you find
a book that happens to be available online, give the full reference followed by
the web address (if you access it through the York library, there is no need to
include the web address). A website
that, for example, contains representative works of a given artist, should be
referenced in your bibliography along with the date you accessed it.
I have no wish to see
references to Wikipedia in your
bibliographies. I am not against
Wikipedia as such, though there are still question marks about its
reliability. It could, however, be
useful in gaining additional references/reading about, say, a particular
writer, artist, building or city. But
use it strictly as a way of helping you either get basic and well-known information
about somebody or something, or information that takes you to a book, article
or more scholarly website somewhere else.
Likewise, essays in an advanced undergraduate course should never
reference lectures given or lecture slides shown either in that course or
any other at the university (they never should be referenced, period, but this
sometime happens in first and second year essays).
What follows from here is therefore merely a guideline to
some additional reading for the period that most of you are likely to cover in
your essays. It is admittedly biased by
my own reading about a small number of cities, and so students are encouraged
to look beyond this list.
SOME USEFUL
Arscott, C. (2000) ‘The representation of the city in the
visual arts’ in M. Daunton, ed, The Cambridge
Urban History of Britain Volume
Assael, B. (2003) ‘Music in the Air: Noise, Performers and
the Contest over the Streets of the Mid-19th century Metropolis', in H. Shore
& T. Hitchcock (eds.), The Streets of
Atkins, P. J.
(1993) ‘How the West End was won: the struggle to remove street barriers in
Victorian London’, Journal of Historical
Geography 19, pp. 265–77
Brosseau, M. (1994) ‘Geography’s literature’, Progress in Human Geography 18, pp.
333-53
Brosseau, M. (1995) ‘The city in
textual form: Manhattan Transfer’s
Dennis, R. (2000) ‘Morley Callaghan and the moral geography of
Dennis, R. (2006) ‘Buildings, residences and
mansions: George Gissing’s ‘prejudice against flats’’ in Spiers,
J. (ed) Gissing
and the City, pp. 41-62 [this is
an e-book available through
Fisher, P. (1994)
‘The novel as newspaper and gallery of voices: the
American novel in
Freeman, N.
(2007) Conceiving the City:
Gilbert, D.
(1999) '
Gilbert, P. K.
(2002) ‘The Victorian social body and urban cartography’, in P.K. Gilbert, ed, Imagined Londons, pp.
11-30
Ginn, G. (2006) ‘Answering the ‘Bitter Cry’: Urban
description and social reform in the late-Victorian
Hales, P.B.
(1984) Silver Cities: The Photography of
American Urbanization, 1839-1915, especially chapter 4, ‘The
hidden hand: Jacob Riis and the birth of reform photography’, pp. 161-217.
Hapgood, L. (2000) ‘The
literature of the suburbs: versions of repression in the novels of George
Gissing, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Pett Ridge,
1890-1899’, Journal of Victorian
Culture 5, pp. 287-310
Harley, B. (1988)
‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds, The Iconography of Landscape, pp. 277-312
Hitchcock T. and
Shore, H. (2003, eds) The Streets of
Johnson, E.D.H.
(1973) ‘Victorian artists and the urban milieu’ in H.J. Dyos
and M. Wolff, eds, The
Victorian City: Images and Realities, pp. 449-74
Keating, P. (1984) ‘The metropolis in literature’,
in A. Sutcliffe, ed, Metropolis 1890-1940,
pp. 129-45.
Mayhew, H.
(1861), London Labour
and the London Poor (reprinted 1968,
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MayLond.html
McLaughlin, J.
(2000) Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading
Empire from Doyle to Eliot, University Press of
Moretti, F. (1998) Atlas
of the European Novel, 1800-1900, ‘Introduction: Towards a geography of
literature’, and Chapter 2: ‘A tale of two cities’, pp. 1-10 and 75-140.
Nead, L. (1999)
Victorian
Nead, L. (2004) ‘Animating the
everyday:
Newland, P.
(2008) The Cultural Construction of
Phillips, L.
(2007, ed.), A
Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of
Rappaport, E.
(2002) ‘Art, commerce or empire? The rebuilding of
Rendell, J.
(1998) ‘Displaying sexuality: gendered identities and the early
nineteenth-century street’ in Fyfe, N. (ed.) Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space,
Routledge,
Riis, J.A. (1890)
How the Other Half Lives (numerous modern and online editions, but you
might look particularly for the edition introduced by David Leviatin
(1996))
Schwartz, J.M.
(2003) ‘Photographs from the edge of Empire’, in A. Blunt et al, eds, Cultural Geography in Practice, pp. 154-71
Schwarz, L. D.,
(1982) ‘Social class and social geography: the middle classes in
Shapiro, T.
(1984) ‘The metropolis in the visual arts:
Stange, Maren (1989) Symbols of
ideal life: social documentary photography in
Tallack, D. (2000) ‘City sights: mapping and representing
Walkowitz, J. R. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of
Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
Walkowitz, J. R. (1998) ‘Going public: shopping, street
harassment and streetwalking in late Victorian London’, Representations, 62, pp. 1–30.
White, J. (2007)
‘The unsentimental traveller: the
Wolff, M. and
Fox, C. (1973) ‘Pictures from the magazines’ in H.J. Dyos
and M. Wolff, eds, The Victorian City: Images and
Realities, pp. 559-82
SOME EXAMPLES OF
NINETEENTH
Theodore Dreiser (1900) Sister Carrie
John Dos Passos
(1925)
George Gissing (1886) Demos (1889) The Nether World, (1891) New Grub Street
Virginia Woolf (1925) Mrs Dalloway
Arthur
Morrison (1895) Tales of Mean Streets (1896) A Child of the Jago
William Dean Howells (1890) A
Hazard of New Fortunes [apartment
life in
Wyndham Lewis (1954) Self
Condemned [an apartment hotel in a
Canadian city]
H.G. Wells (1898) War of
the Worlds [destroying the
suburbs!] (1897) Tono-Bungay
Joseph Conrad (1907) The Secret Agent
Charles Dickens (1854) Hard Times (1853) Bleak House (1848) Dombey and Son
(1837-39) Oliver Twist
Jack London (1902) People
of the Abyss [non-fiction]
EXTENSIONS
The
Department aims to ensure fair and equal treatment in the assessment of all
students and that no student is unjustly denied or unfairly granted the
benefits of continuous assessment. Accordingly essay extensions will be granted
in accordance with the following rules:
·
Extensions must be sought before the essay deadline. While an
extension cannot be granted after an essay deadline is past, the Course
Director may recommend the reduction or elimination of any penalty when made
aware of appropriate extenuating circumstances. Students
who find themselves in such a circumstance, are therefore strongly encouraged
to contact the Course Director as soon as they are able to.
·
Extensions are granted only where students have encountered exceptional
or unforeseen difficulties, or are subject to long-term episodic illnesses, or
are affected by any relevant impairment, in the period during which they are
expected to prepare the essay. Doctor’s
notes will be required in the case of medical issues.
Many
Departments set essay deadlines at similar points during term and, therefore,
students should both begin essay preparation in good time and budget their
preparation time for essay writing appropriately. Hence, just in themselves, mere lack of
availability of texts and pressure of other essay deadlines alone are not
grounds for extension. Again, however, if there are any circumstances which
mean that these issues might constitute a real barrier to you then, again, the
best advice is to contact the Course Director as soon as you are able to.
In
a seminar course with no TA support, the timely submission of work is essential. Therefore, any work submitted beyond the due
date (without an approved extension)
will be penalized according to the
following schedule: one grade class per day (an essay worth a B+, for example,
would end up with a B if submitted a day after the deadline).
SOME REFERENCING CONVENTIONS
END/FOOTNOTES
Why bother referencing? Simply put (and as in life generally), you
must give credit where credit is due. Quotations, paraphrases, statistics,
interpretations, and significant phraseology taken from books and articles must
be carefully and correctly cited in footnotes or endnotes. On the other hand
obvious facts on which all authors would agree need not be footnoted. Footnotes may be placed either at the bottom
of the page or at the end of the paper. One acceptable form for footnotes is
indicated by the following examples:
Standard entry:
W. H. McNeill,
Multi-volume work:
M. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus: A
History of
Article within a book:
L. Stone, ‘The English
Revolution’, in R. Forster & J. P. Greene, eds., Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore,
1970), 57.
Article in a journal:
E. W. Monter, ‘Witchcraft in
In citing a work for which
the publication data has been given in an earlier footnote, it is not necessary
to repeat the same data in full. Simply
write the author’s surname, an abbreviated title and the page number. If the
work was cited in the immediately preceding footnote, you do not even have to
write the surname; simply write ibid.
and the page number. The following sequence should make these practices clear:
6J. P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution 1603-1688. Documents and Commentary
(
7Ibid., p.2.
8J. Stoye,
9Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 207.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Your paper should also
include a bibliography. Bibliographies should be arranged in alphabetical order
by author’s surname. If citing a whole book do not include page
numbers. If citing an article in a book
or journal, give the page numbers of the whole
article, as follows:
McNeill, W. H.,
Monter, E. W., ‘Witchcraft in
Stone, L., ‘The English
Revolution’, in R. Forster & J. P. Greene, eds., Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore,
1970), 55-108
Plagiarism is the use, without
adequate acknowledgement, of the intellectual work of another person in work
submitted for assessment (see the appended pages that follow). While I expect you to now be cognizant of
what is and what is not plagiarism, any queries about the over-referencing of
any source can be taken up with me, should you be unsure about the possibility
that you have excessively represented others’ work as your own. Aside from this, all cases of suspected plagiarism
will be reported to the relevant Departmental and University officers.
My role is not simply to
teach, but to advise and help. Students who are having difficulty with their
work for whatever reason, or who require any assistance or information are
welcome to consult with me on any aspect of the course. This can be done either
by making a specific appointment via the Departmental Office (416-736-5107) or
by e-mail: wjenkins@yorku.ca.