Disciplines of History

(9 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Disciplines of History, the general paper in Finals, has one broad and two specific aims. It is in part a mechanism for drawing together all your work over three years and reflecting on it from different perspectives. To this extent it functions partly as a revision tool which will widen and deepen your understanding of all your individual papers. Specifically, you learn the art of historical comparison, so that material from different societies becomes mutually illuminating; and you add a layer of comprehension to the reading you have done throughout the course by contextualizing it in the history and theory of historical writing. The paper is divided into two sections: Making Historical Comparisons and Making Historical Arguments. Comparison offers a tool for thinking about why societies differ. Choosing examples that are widely disparate from each other in time and space can make it more challenging to find meaningful points of comparison, but equally might produce more unexpected conclusions. The rubric of this section asks you to compare historically distinct societies, separated by either time or space.