Teaching Tuesday: Historical Methods

For the last decade or so, I’ve taught our department’s historical methods class (History 240: The Historians Craft for those of you who keep a score card!). This is probably my favorite class because it not only allows me to meet every history major in our program, but also offers a nice balance between big picture historiography and daily practice. 

As readers of this blog know, I divide the class into three courses. The first 7 weeks or so focus on the history of the discipline of history, the final 8 weeks are split between a course in the UND archives where students get hands-on experience in how archives work and a crash course how to start a research project and prepare a research proposal. My idea behind the last course of the class is that the first phase of any research project is often the most important to the outcome of the project (especially when you’re on a deadline). More than that, a good proposal usually sets the stage for good research. 

Over the last few years, there’s been some growing pressure for me to teach upper level courses in my supposed area of speciality and I suspect there’s a bit of quiet grumbling about how I teach our methods course. In fact, the department met earlier this semester for a brown bag lunch focused on the methods class and a discussion on how to make sure that it still fit the needs of the department. (Don’t call it an “intervention.”)

Among the several points raised was that my emphasis on the history of history was outmoded. In fact, several of my colleagues in the department admitted that they had never read Herodotus or Thucydides and never took a class that focused on the history of the discipline as an undergraduate. I was both surprised and a bit annoyed by this argument (to be honest). After all, there are any number of classes that I did not take as an undergraduate, but that’s hardly the basis for a curriculum. More than that, I’ve always felt that because the humanities tend to be relatively weak methodologically (and history is particularly weak; historical methods are mere suggestions compared to, say, practices in the social sciences), we tend to define humanistic disciplines on the basis of intertextual readings. In other words, we may not be able to define history, but we know it when we see it because of the tradition of historical writing. In this view of the discipline, the best way to define history is to read history historically and recognize the common features of writing associated with the discipline. It is, of course, circular and recursive to define a discipline in this way.

Once I recovered from my shock (and annoyance), I went back to my methods class determined to adapt it more closely to the expectations and experiences of my colleagues. One thing that this somewhat-grumpy revision process made clear to me is that while I understood the connection between the history of the discipline and disciplinary practice, my students (and colleagues) might not. As a result, the first course of the class might have been rather disconnected from the final course even though I try to make clear how all three courses relate to historical practices.

(As an aside, it also reminded me that my experiences as an undergraduate and graduate student studying ancient history were fairly different from those of my colleagues. I’m not prepared to say that my experiences were better; after all, I’ve spent years playing catch up by reading basic works in the discipline.)

This is a long introduction to my revised methods course syllabus. Despite my griping, it has benefited from my colleagues’ suggestion and I feel like it is both more contemporary and more explicitly connected to the kind of twentieth-century methodologies 

Course Goals:

1. Make explicit the connection between how we do history today and how historians wrote history in the past.

2. Provide students with hands-on experience both writing professionally and in the UND archives working with primary source documents.

3. Develop advance research skills in the humanities.

Books

Sarah Maza, Thinking about History. Chicago 2017. K. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. 9th edition. Chicago 2007.

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: The History of Who?

Herodotus, Histories, Book 1 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, introduction.

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?

E. Said, Orientalism, Introduction. David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 13-28.

Question: Where does your history happen? How do you define the space of historical analysis in the past and in the present?

Week 4: The History of What?

Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” American Historical Review 111 (June 2006): 660-91. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.111.3.660

Question: What is the “center” of your project? Are you writing the history of a person, an event, a thing, an impersonal force? How does changing from one focus to another change how you would approach your project?

Week 5: How is History Produced?

Caraher, “History at the University of North Dakota 1885-1970,” chapters 1 and 2. Heather A. Huyck, “Twenty-Five Years of Public History: Perspectives from a Primary Document” The Public Historian 21.3 (1999): 29-38 National Register nomination for the Baukol Addition in Grand Forks (https://www.gfpreservation.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Baukol_Historic_District-Final_Nomination-Combined.pdf)

Question: Who is the audience for your project? How does your approach to the creating history accommodate both your audience and your methods?

Week 6: Causes or Meanings?

D. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (Winter 2009): 197-222. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/596652 E.H. Carr. “Chapter 4: Causality in History,” in What is History? 97-108.

Question: How does the causality in your project shape the meaning of your project? Who or what is responsible and why does it matter?

Week 7: Facts or Fictions

Beard, Charles A. “That Noble Dream.” American Historical Review 41.1 (1935): 74–87. https://doi.org/10.2307/1839356. N.Z. Davis, “Introduction” from Fiction in the Archives. Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91.5 (1986): 1053–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/1864376.

Question: What are the assumptions that you bring to the table that shape your project?