Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines the conceptual problems involved in the historian's attempt to apprehend the past. Focuses on the nature of historical knowledge and explanation, and to the broad systems and patterns in which history has been conceived.

COURSE DETAILS:

What is history?

"History is philosophy teaching by examples." Attributed to Thucydides (ca. 460-395 BCE) by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ca. 60-after 7 BCE)

"History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon, 1776

"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was." Leopold von Ranke, 1824

"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." Frederick Jackson Turner, 1891

“We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.” Ezra Pound, 1938

"History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past." A.J.P. Taylor, 1978

"History is how the secular world attends to the dead." Saidiya Hartman, 2007

"History plays an important role in reconciliation; to build for the future, Canadians must look to, and learn from, the past." Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015

As these quotations demonstrate, there is no universally accepted definition of what history is and thus of what historians study. Historiography takes as its subject, not the past, but the ways in which historians have researched, reconstructed, and written about the past. This course will offer an introduction to some of the theoretical and practical dimensions of historical research and writing and will evaluate the intellectual and ethical responsibilities that historians regard as critical to their profession. We will survey a variety of approaches to the past that historians have taken, engaging questions of scale, causality, methodology, theoretical frameworks, and the very organization of the discipline.

Course format

This course is being offered as a “blended” one, combining both remote and in-person learning. Each week, there will be about one hour of content to be consumed asynchronously online before our Tuesday meeting when we will meet in person for three hours.

Please note this is a preliminary syllabus: reading materials and assignments are subject to change.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Upon the successful completion of this course, you will:

• Be familiar with several major approaches to historical thinking and writing from ancient societies to the present;
• Develop your critical thinking and analytical skills as a reader of historical argument, interpretation, methodology, and debate;
• Develop your writing skills through a variety of different types of writing assignments;
• Work on your oral communication skills through group discussion and seminar presentations.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: