Thinking Historically: A History of History Writing

Philosopher George Santayana famously warned that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Ten years later, industrialist Henry Ford perhaps even more famously dismissed that notion: “History is more or less bunk.” What we mean by history and how we construct and use it are essential questions in all societies. Thinking Historically explores how we view and employ the past. The course examines major ways of interpreting the past through a survey of historians and methods and studies how history is produced, used, and misused, by professionals as well as by the public.