This seminar is an introduction to some dimension of the history of a nation, region, people, culture, institution, or historical phenomenon selected by the respective instructor. Students will come to understand, and develop an appreciation for: the origins and evolution of the people, cultures, and/or political, economic, and/or social institutions of a particular region(s) of the world. They may explore how human encounters shaped individual and collective identities and the political, economic, and social orders of the region/nation/communities under study. Instructors prioritize critical reading, engaged participation, and focused writing assignments.

“History” refers to a body of knowledge (the knowledge historians have), a mode of writing (the way historians write and represent), and an object of study (the history that actually happened, the past itself). The question is how these three meanings of history—the past, our knowledge of it, and our representation of that knowledge in writing—hang together. In this class, we will examine the epistemological and methodological foundations of historical scholarship by reading important texts in historical theory. These will include writings by prominent historians, of course, but also those by social scientists and activists and philosophers who have thought about history in depth. Their questions are wide ranging. What is the relationship between history and the social sciences, such as the dream of discovering objective social knowledge and even causal laws of social change? What is the relationship between history and fiction, given the fact that so many historians conceive of their ideas in narrative forms? And how have implicit answers to these questions of theory and method been deployed in prominent works or schools of history, from medieval chronicles to the great nationalist histories, social scientific history to Marxism, “structuralism and post-structuralism” to feminist histories and the post-colonial? This class is a once-a-week seminar focused on weekly reading and student discussion. It presumes no prior knowledge, and is open to anyone interested in history, especially historians who wonder about the meaning of their own discipline.

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Requirements class fulfills