What was/is History? The Craft of Historical Writing from Antiquity to the Present

Graduate / Professional

This graduate seminar explores the changing practices and meanings associated with historical writings across time, with particular attention to the early modern and Enlightenment periods. We examine the craft of history: the concrete practices through which historians worked—including philology, archival research, antiquarianism, chronology, narrative, and critique—and the intellectual assumptions that gave those practices authority. Throughout, we consider how historians grappled with problems familiar from the academic discipline of the history of science: evidence and testimony, credibility and doubt, method and experiment, the tension between observation and explanation. Students are actively involved in syllabus design. They are expected to propose readings from twentieth-century historiographical tradition to be included in class discussions in the second part of the semester. They also select at least one primary source dating from antiquity to 1800 to discuss along with one of the books in the syllabus. Th 1:30pm-3:25pm