Teaching Thursday: Revising History 240

For the last decade or so, I’ve taught History 240: The Historians Craft every semester in my regular rotation. I generally enjoy this class and look forward to mentoring a new group of students each semester. Teaching it every semester not only cuts down on regular prep time, but also gives me a chance to make little tweaks to what I do without having to wait two or three years to see whether they’ve made the class better. In fact, teaching the class every semester gives me the sense of confidence that I need to improvise and experiment. I like to imagine that this makes the class better.

As I teach this class now, I focus on three thing. The first third of the class focuses on the history of history. This is big picture historiography. I tend to teach it in a more or less linear way even while stressing that the development of the discipline is anything but linear. I do this for about five weeks.

The second and third parts of the class run simultaneously and focus on exposing students to work in the archives (in collaboration with our Department of Special Collections) and working with students to produce a proposal for their own research project.

In general, this class as three outcomes. First is to give the students a sense of the breath and depth of the discipline. Second to give students an opportunity to work with historical documents and understand how archives function. Finally, it is a class that introduces students to the fundamentals of historical writing and argumentation. Each outcome aligns with part of the class.

Earlier this semester, I joined my colleagues in the History Department for a frank exchange of views regarding the current arrangement of History 240. Since this is one of only two classes required for all history majors, it makes sense that the department has input into what the class looks. Consensus was that “historiography qua historiography” was perhaps not the most useful element to this class. Instead, the course should perhaps emphasize methods and historical thinking.

This seems reasonable to me, although I had hoped that historiography offered a window into the range of historical processes, methods, and forms in the past and the present. Next semester, I’m going to modify the class. Five years ago (!), I read and appreciated Sarah Maza’s Thinking about History (Chicago 2019) for various reasons I never had a chance to incorporate the book in my class. 

The book has six chapters (well, seven counting the introduction) which situation key questions in historical thinking in their mostly contemporary disciplinary context. It lends itself, then, to dividing the class into six sessions each one focused on a chapter.

Week 2: The History of Who?

Question: On whom will your history focus? Is it an individual or a group? How does the focus of your history shape the kinds of questions that you ask?

Week 3: The History of Where?

Question: What is the spatial scale of your history? Does it focus on the region, the nation, or even the globe? 

Week 4: The History of What?

Question: What kinds of things shaped the history that you want to study? Does it focus on ideas, trends, objects, or systems? 

Week 5: How is History Produced?

Question: What kind of audience do you have in mind for your history and how does this audience shape your methods and approaches to understanding the past? 

Week 6: Causes or Meanings?

Question: What do you think caused the events that you plan to study to happen? How does recognizing these causes help us to understand the past more broadly?

Week 7: Facts or Fictions?

Question: How much does do you know about your topic with certainty? How much do you have to supply as the historian? 

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The goal of the first seven weeks of the semester is to get students thinking about the past without getting too tangled up the nitty-gritty of historical research, citation practices, and even writing history. I have this romantic idea that focusing on certain essential questions about how we think about the past will push students to not only engage more thoughtfully with the historiography of their topic (when they write their proposal), but also in their future history classes.

There is an added bonus by scaffolding the class around Maza’s book. It feels like it is pitched just slightly above the level at which my students are usually comfortable. This will invariably frustrate some students, but for most of the class, it gives them a chance to build their advanced reading skills.