Course Overview

History 3926W History and Historians: Ideas and Methods

History 3926W introduces students to the history, theory and practice of historical research. This course has several objectives: to acquaint students with the basic techniques of the discipline, including the nature and evaluation of sources, methods of library and archival. Secondly, the course presents a brief survey of historical thought and the philosophies which have been used to explain historical change, beginning with the classical era up to the twentieth century. Thirdly, the course introduces students to historiography by presenting a survey of selected schools of thought that pertain to the study of history in the twentieth century. The focus here will be on the disintegration of the traditional/positivist model of historical writing, which dominated the discipline in the nineteenth-century, and the emergence of rival approaches to understanding the past.

The aim of this critical analysis of history and of historiography is practical as well as theoretical. The problems examined in this course have an immediate bearing on how one does historical research. For example, how a historian selects and interprets sources, or assigns relationships between cause and effect, or claims to be objective, are all issues faced by every researcher who ventures into the past. Lectures, in-class discussions and written assignments will assist students with problems in research and writing by stressing how the critical analysis of historical methods bears upon the practice of history.