How can historians tell different stories about the same event? "Exploring Historiography" empowers students to become discerning readers of history and active participants in the conversation about the nature of history. Students explore how and in what contexts historical accounts are crafted, theories, methods and debates that historians use to construct narratives about the past, and the contemporary intellectual, political, and social impact of these interpretations. They analyze the foundations of historiographical thought from early romantic and empirical approaches, and learn about progressives and revisionists, influences on historians of psychology and anthropology, transformative perspectives of postcolonial, feminist and postmodern historians, recent approaches in microhistory and “big” history, public history and the exciting realm of digital history and, finally, speculation about how AI might influence the crafting of historical narratives. Case studies are featured, including the contested narrative of the Indo-Aryan controversy, the ever-evolving historiography of the American Revolution, a trio of pivotal video series on the history of Africa, the historiography of global slavery, a recent set of studies on collective memory in Chile, and contemporary controversies over historical monuments.
By reading, discussing and writing about pivotal texts themselves, students develop skills in historical inquiry: analytical and comparative thinking, contextualization, source evaluation, and the ability to engage with diverse and complex historical perspectives and methods. A seminar style course, students read texts carefully, develop their own interpretations and engage in critical conversations with their classmates during every class meeting. By the end of the course, students have a deeper appreciation and heightened awareness of how history is constructed, debated, revised, and shared in our world today.