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a
100-level course recommended for all beginning students, and
particularly for those seeking an introduction to the social
sciences
"Why
should anyone bother learning about things that happened far
away and long ago?" asks the eminent historian William McNeill.
Some eighty years ago, Henry Ford declared: "History is more
or less bunk."
Americans today seem to show an unprecendented interest in
history. Political speeches are full of references to (or
misinterpretations of) history. Historical museums and sites
attract large numbers of visitors. The market for antiques
and historical memorabilia is soaring. Nonetheless, most of
us have very little concrete knowledge of our own national
history, not to mention, the histories of other nations and
cultures. Above all, Americans encounter difficulty in reasoning
historically and making distinctions between historical situations.
It is therefore particularly disturbing that, even as historical
scholarship becomes ever more sophisticated, professional
historians write about ever smaller topics—and moreover
in leaden prose. Whereas the great historians of the past
two centuries found a wide readership, their successors seem
to write only for a handful of colleagues.
This course will introduce students to some of the ways of
thinking and writing about the past and the present (for history
is not only about the past). In so doing, it will ask participants
to think about the form as well as the content of effective
history-writing.
We
will draw mainly upon examples from early modern and modern
European history (roughly, the period since the fifteenth
century), although we will consider, at least in passing,
US history, as well. The course is divided into three parts.
In the first portion of the semester, we will consider the
current crisis of historical education and see how historians
themselves explain what they do. Next, we will read excerpts
from some of the "classic" historical works on ancient and
early modern history written between the American Revolution
and the aftermath of the First World War. It was really in
the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, that a "modern"
critical historical consciousness evolved. It was only in
the nineteenth century that history, along with other scholarly
and technical fields became professionalized. In the third
unit, we will examine representative works of recent scholarship.
The
reading list changes from year to year, but classic texts
include selections from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, Macaulay's History of England, Engels's
history of the English working class, Burckhardt's Civilization
of the Renaissance in Italy, and Huizinga's Waning
of the Middle Ages. Topics
covered in recent works have included: the history of Renaissance
women, commodities and daily life, the Holocaust, and the
evolution of masculinity.
The
course is intended to provide participants with intensive
training in the skills of reading and writing. Students
who complete the course successfully will come away with both
an understanding of historical method and an overview of European
history from the Middle Ages to the present.
go
to the course
website
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