The essay focuses on tumult and troublemaking, on people, situations, ideas, or issues which upset established structures and practices. It could deal with particular dissenters, subversives, scoundrels, oppressors, or uppity people. Or you might examine a destabilizing situation such as war, conquest, insurrection, economic crisis, epidemic. Ideas often prove unsettling, particularly when they force people to question established views or to view things in different ways. Whatever you choose to examine, you need to build the research around primary sources. Keep that in mind when you choose a topic.

Primary sources (*) include letters, diaries, literature, art, autobiographies, documents, treatises and memoirs from the time period. You could also analyze contrasting histories of an event, person, or issue, making the historians and their views of a troublesome issue the subject of the essay.

What follows is an EXTREMELY PARTIAL list of possible directions and sources. General works useful for background on a period or a subject precede a selection of possible primary sources.

General:

Cambridge Ancient, Medieval, Modern histories
Veyne, Paul, ed. History of private life, several volumes
Braudel, Fernand Civilization and capitalism, 3 vols, especially the first volume on Structures of Everyday Life

Dissenters and subversives

So defined by the authorities who see them as a threat.

*Ginzburg, C. The cheese and the worms: the cosmos of a 16th century miller (built on the records of Inquisition trials, this study attempts to reconstruct the miller's thinking)
*Galileo, G. Starry Messenger and *Finocchiaro, M.A. The Galileo affair: a documentary history

*Letters of Heloise and Abelard (medieval)
*Nietzsche, F., Thus spake Zarathustra; Beyond good and evil (influential challenges to religion in the late 19th century)

Scoundrels

*Fielding, Henry An enquiry into the causes of the late increase of robbers (these and the next four deal with 18th century London criminal life)
*Howson, Gerald They take general Jonathan Wild
*Defoe, D. The history of the remarkable life of John Sheppard
*Defoe, D. Moll Flanders
*Gay, J. The Beggars' Opera
*Foucault, M., ed. I Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother (early 19th century case)
*Mayhew, Henry The criminal prison of London and scenes of prison life (19th century)
*Priestley, Philip Victorian prison lives: English prison biography
Many other sources dealing with particular crimes, criminals, and criminology. The definition of crime, like dissent, depends on the time and place.

Uppity women:

Lerner, G. The creation of patriarchy; The creation of feminist consciousness
Ariès, P., Western sexuality: practice and precept in past and present
Laqueur, T. Making sex

*Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna (an interesting portrait of a contested marriage in Renaissance Florence)
*Klapisch-Zuber and Herlihy, D. The Tuscans and their families (quantitative study of Renaissance demographics and family--based on the Florentine catasto (tax report) of 1427--which is available on the Web and could be used as a primary source for a number of topics)
*Alberti, L. B. The family (instructions on marriage and the family by a Renaissance Florentine--known best for architecture)
*Kohl, R. The earthly republic (texts by F. Barbaro, On wifely duties and C. Salutati, Advice to women on the good life)

*Origo, I. The merchant of Prato (the complete letters of Datini, a merchant)
*Ozment, S. Magdalena and Balthasar (portrait of an early modern marriage based on correspondence)

*Mill, J.S., On the subjection of women (early 19th century study of the place of women)
*Mill, J.S. and H. Taylor Essays on sexual equality
*Wollstonecraft, Mary., any work (also from the early 19th century)
*Woolf, V., A room of one's own (brief examination of the sources of the secondary position of women by early 20th century novelist)
*de Beauvoir, S., The second sex (influential study of female position in time--by a novelist and philosopher close to Sartre)
*Lenin, V. The emancipation of women
*Balabanoff, A. My life as a rebel

Laboring poor: getting out from under

Chevallier., Labouring classes, dangerous classes (an interesting study of the formation of class consciousness
Wylie, L. Village in the Vaucluse France, 1870-1914 (like the Cornelisen, this is an ethnographic study. Not exactly a primary source, but based on direct observation)
Banfield, E., The moral basis of a backward society (an interpretation of the mentality of the southern Italian peasant. Could be used with Levi, Dolci, and/or Cornelisen and Wylie.)

*Guillaumin, E. The life of a simple man (19th century French peasant tells his story--modernization from the village perspective)
*Zola E. The earth (novel by a 19th century French novelist who tried record society exactly. Other works on alcoholism, prostitution, the coal mines, early consumerism.)
*Dolci, D., Sicilian lives (based on interviews--post WWII)
*Levi, C. Christ stopped at Eboli (an intellectual sent to an isolated southern town by Mussolini describes life there. See also the novels of Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine and especially Fontamara, set in lost areas of central Italy during the fascist era. Particularly powerful commentary on resistance to change)
*Cornelisen, A. Women of the shadows (a village study based on close observation after WW II)
*Helias The horse of pride (Description of growing up in the early 19th century in a small town. Could be used in combination with Levra, Padre Padrone, the autobiography of a Sardinian shepherd who became a professor of linguistics)
*Carles, E. A life of her own

*Ménétras, L. Journal of my life (a journeyman's account of his work--important insights into the structure of artisanal life)
*The French worker: autobiographies from the early industrial era
*Engels, F. The conditions of the working class in England (early industrialization by Marx's closest collaborator)
*Zola, E. Germinal (hardship in the coal mines--epic novel)
*Dickens, Hard times
*Mayhew, H. London labour and the London poor (very useful source; deals with numerous aspects of 19th century city life)
*A woman's place: an oral history of working-class women, 1890-1940

*Roberts, R. The classic slum: Salford life in the 1st quarter of the century (The following four all deal with the life of the working class and/or lower middle class before World War II in England. Well-written.)
*Orwell, George Down and out in Paris and London
*Orwell, George The road to Wigan Pier
*Greenwood, W. Love on the dole

Revolution and civic turmoil:

*Tocqueville, A. The Old Regime and the French Revolution
*Lenin, V. What is to be done?
*Luxemburg, R. Revolution or reform
*Bernstein, E. Evolutionary Socialism
*Sorel, G. Reflections on violence
*Balabanoff, A. My life as a rebel

Or investigate an insurrection, civil war, or revolution: The English or French revolutions, Revolutions of 1848, the Ciompi rebellion. Remember the emphasis on primary sources.

One possibility: medieval and Renaissance Florence
*Bornstein, D. Dino Compagni's chronicle of Florence (an account of the chaotic political life of the city which reveals a good deal about the power balance between merchants and nobles--late Middle Ages)
*Machiavelli, N. Florentine histories and Guicciardini, F. History of Florence (detailed, eye-witness accounts of the collapse of Medici rule and the conquest of Italy by foreign powers)

Warfare:

Keegan, J., The face of battle (an account of the soldier's experience in The Hundred Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, and WWI)
Ropp, T., War in the modern world

many accounts of diplomatic background, strategy and battles, particularly for World War I and II. There is a particularly rich collection of memoirs, letters, diaries, and literature from World War I. See for example, Vera Brittain (a nurse and later League of Nation activist)--three volume memoir; E. Blunden, Undertones of war; C. Carrington, Soldier from the wars returning; J.B. Priestley, Margin released; S. Sassoon--six volumes, three dealing with his soldier self and three with his poetic self, including Memoirs of an infantry officer; F. Manning, Her privates we; Barbusse, H., Under fire; Junger, E. Storm of steel, Graves, R., Goodbye to all that.

Ideas

Many thinkers, writers, and artists challenge established modes of thought and perception, and many make dissent and crisis the subject of their works. You can, then, look at ideas which changed things or at how thinkers explained or responded to change.
Scientists and social thinkers make discoveries that shook traditional views and practices. You could analyze what they said and did and what difference it made.
Inventions, too, can disrupt ways of doing things.

Issues: some historical controversies

Bainton, R., Here I stand
Erikson, E., Young man Luther
Dickens, A. Reformation and society in l6th century Europe

Weber, M., The Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitialism
Tawney, R., Religion and the rise of capitalism

Butterfield, H., The origins of modern science
Kearney, Science and social change
Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution
Foucault, M. The order of things

Berlin, I., The Age of the Enlightenment or
Cassierer, E., Philosophy of the Enlightenment
Becker, C. The heavenly city of the 18th century philosophers
Gay, P. The Enlightenment

Ashton, The Industrial Revolution or Deane, P., The first Industrial Revolution
Landes, D. The unbound prometheus
Marx, K. German ideology

*Tocqueville, A. The Old Regime and the French Revolution
Lefebvre, G., The coming of the French Revolution
Doyle, W. Origins of the French Revolution

Hampson, N., A social history of the French Revolution or Soboul, A. The French Revolution
*Burke, E., Reflections on the revolution in France
Cobban, A. The social interpretation of the French Revolution
Furet, F. Interpreting the French Revolution

Keynes, J.M. The economic consequences of the Peace (on Versailles, following WWI)
Nicolson, H. Peacemaking, 1919
Mantoux, P. The Carthaginian peace or the economic consequences of Mr. Kenyes
Mayer, A. Political origins of the peacemaking

Fay, SB. The origins of the World War, vol. 2
Fischer, F. Germany's aims in the First World War
Mayer, Dynamics of counterrevolution in Europe, ch. 6
Koch, H., ed. Origins of the First World War (especially Geiss, Joll, Remak, Schroeder)
Geiss, I. Outbreak of the First World War: Documents
plus many other important primary and secondary sources

Winter, J.,Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning
Fussell, P. The Great War and modern memory
Eksteins, M. Rites of Spring
Mosse, G. Fallen Soldiers

Taylor, A.J.P. The origins of the Second World War
Gilbert, M. Roots of appeasement
Rowse, A.L. Appeasement
Wheeler-Bennett, J.M. Munich: prologue to tragedy
Kennan, G. From Prague after Munich

Goldhagen, D. Hitler's willing executioners

Mayer, A. When the heavens darken
Todorov, T. Facing the extreme: moral life in the concentration camps
Bettelheim, B. The informed heart
Des Pres, T. The survivor