E.H
. Carr's classic What Is History, 1961 |
Introduction to Historical Study "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." This course is a wide-ranging introduction to the craft of history--that is, it seeks to give you the skills to adjust to strange laws, unfamiliar languages, foreign methods of counting money, and maybe even the food of those strange places of the past. The readings and assignments are designed to familiarize you with some of the most important issues historians address: what is a historical fact, and how is it related to original sources? How can we use unreliable or biased sources in responsible ways? How do historians collect and evaluate evidence? What questions do we ask in order to present our data and interpretations? Can historians be objective? How do we create narratives for laying out our findings and narrating history? To do so, this course will focus on the history of the American revolutionary era, ca. 1760-1825--not to give you a full account of that era, but to focus our questions on a concrete place and period of time. In the spirit of "the past is a foreign country," this class highlights some of the strange, unexpected things we can learn about a comparatively familiar subject by asking new questions about the past. |
