21H.931 | Spring 2004 | Undergraduate

Seminar in Historical Methods

Course Description

This course is designed to acquaint students with a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the twentieth century. The books we read have all made significant contributions to their respective sub-fields and have been selected to give as wide a coverage in both field and methodology as possible …
This course is designed to acquaint students with a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the twentieth century. The books we read have all made significant contributions to their respective sub-fields and have been selected to give as wide a coverage in both field and methodology as possible in one semester’s worth of reading. We examine how historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytic discussion of their topic, and what are the advantages and drawbacks of their various approaches.
Learning Resource Types
Lecture Videos
Written Assignments with Examples
A black and white print with red tinting of people on a hill over-looking a city with aurora above it.
Artist’s rendering of a medieval aura, originally from NASA’s Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska. (Image courtesy of NASA.)