This seminar provides a broad overview of the discipline of History. Beyond examining influential works that continue to shape how we write, teach, and think about history, it familiarizes students with important subfields of the discipline, and seminal thinkers who helped shape them. Though the course probes no topic or approach in depth, it does aim to facilitate a working knowledge of a range of methods and theoretical vocabularies with which historians should be conversant. Students must take this course in their first semester.

History as an academic discipline has its own methods. But does it also have its own epistemology, a theory of history? In this course, we will seek an answer to this question while discussing basic concepts which define our diverse discipline. We will explore these ideas alongside reflections on sources, asking how choices about sources and methods connect to questions about theory. Themes may include histories of time and temporality, the tensions between close reading and quantification, and the challenges of working across different places and periods, whether in fields like environmental history or in comparative studies. We will also consider why we study what we study, debating the promise and peril of using the past as an argument about our present. This is a required course for new students.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.