Course Content

This is a historiographical and theoretical course. This means that we will examine both the philosophical bases for understanding the past and the ways in which ‘history’ has been (and currently is) practised. The course is intended to strengthen your grasp and understanding of history and its different methodologies. We will also consider new and exciting developments in studying recent challenges to Western historiography and ‘alternative’ ways of knowing and remembering the past. More particularly, the course is intended to familiarise you with the foundations and underlying principles on which the intellectual activities of historians are based. It will not, however, teach you the ‘craft’ of the historian, such as how to conduct research, locate sources, and judge the veracity of evidence.

In this course, we define historiography primarily as the examination of historical study, its methodology and practices (‘the history of history’). Historiography can also refer to a specific body of historical writing (‘medieval historiography during the 1960s’, which means ‘medieval history written during the 1960s’). We also take the term ‘historiography’ to mean historical theory more generally, that is, the study of historical memory, and a meta-level analysis of descriptions of the past. We will be asking two fundamental questions in this course: What is history? And what is the relationship between historical theory and historical practice? We will also examine the following problems:

• What is the ‘goal’ of history?
• What constitutes an ‘historical event’?
• How do historians produce statements of ‘truth’ and ‘fact’?
• How does the medium of history (book, film, novel and so on) influence its meaning?
• What sort of epistemological challenges does archive-based history present?
• How does the historian establish their own objectivity or come to terms with their own subjectivity? Is objectivity possible?

Some of the topics we will consider include:

• Empirical history
• Marxist history
• Psychohistory
• The Annales School
• Ethnohistory
• ‘Big History’
• ‘Great Man History’
• Gender history
• History from below
• Metahistory
• Microhistory
• Oral history
• Deconstruction
• Postcolonial histories
• The challenges of poststructuralism and postmodernism

Assessment:

Internal assessment 100%: one seminar 15%, one essay proposal 25%; one long research essay 60%

Recommended Readings

There is no one set text for this course. Students are advised to commence background reading as soon as possible. Suggestions include:

• Jenkins, K., and Munslow, A., The Nature of History Reader, London and New York, 2004
• Gaddis, J.L., The Landscape of History, Oxford, 2004
• Jenkins, K., and Munslow, A., Rethinking History, London, 2003
• Tosh, J., The Pursuit of History: Aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history, Harlow, 1984, revised 3rd edition, 2002
• Jenkins, K., Why History?, London and New York, 1999
• Green, A., and Troup, K., The Houses of History: A critical reader in twentieth-century history and theory, Manchester, 1999
• Fay, B., Pomper, P., and Vann, R.T., History and Theory: Contemporary readings, Malden, 1998
• Iggers, G., Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge, Hanover, 1997