Historian's Craft Spring 2024 HI 200 syllabus

2023

Course Description: This graduate seminar introduces major trends and critical issues in historiography and historical thinking, primarily focusing on developments that shaped the discipline during the twentieth century. Its principal aims are: (1) To survey important conceptual and methodological landmarks in the development of "History" as a kind of knowledge, discipline, rhetoric, and practice (2) To become familiar with critical theoretical approaches that have significantly impacted the writing of history and contributed to major historical "turns." (3) To point to often implicit and unexamined assumptions about historical research and presentation that precede our trips to the archives and hours of writing (4) To promote a sense of intellectual community among incoming graduate students in history with different areas of concentration. The seminar will put a special emphasis on scholarly debates regarding the above questions. Among other things, we will inquire into the history of certain basic historical concepts often thought not to have a history, including the past itself. We will trace how academic history came to be seen as a "science," rival conceptions that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over what exactly this meant, and the challenge posed by postmodern theory to classifying historical knowledge as "objective." We will look at some of the different ways historians have tried to explain the purpose of their work while also probing the tension between academic and popular uses of history. We will explore debates over how broadly or narrowly historians should delimit their subjects (micro versus macro scales), as well as what weight they should ascribe to particulars or universals, persons or collectives, individual events or large-scale structures, dominant or subordinate groups, narrative or analytical presentation, hermeneutical or causal explanation, ideas or discourses or material factors in the understanding of historical experience and change. We will pay close attention to how historians conceptualize their questions, use evidence, and develop their interpretations, arguments, analyses, narratives, and explanations. Finally, we will examine how historians have assimilated (or not) insights and models from other disciplines, including philosophy, the natural sciences, social and economic theory, literary and critical theory, and anthropology.

2019

2004

This was part of the original manuscript of a novel called The History-Project, part of a larger project also called The History-Project, written on the typewriter in the period 2001-2004. It is about a handful of public intellectuals banding together to work on a collaborative, large-scale, contemporary, interdisciplinary art-research project, again, also called The History-Project. It is reflective and engages in a great deal of metafiction, in the form of writing about writing and authorial insertion and other methodologies.

Chief Editor Purushottam Singh, Kanpur India Assistant Editors & Referees Akhtar Hussain Sandhu, Lahore Pakistan Atul Kumar Shukla, Banda India Rafida Nawaz, Multan Pakistan Umakanta Mishra, Cuttack India Farzand Masih, Lahore Pakistan J. Shunmugaraja, Madurai India Ajmal Mueen M A, Mokkam, Calicut India Enayatullah Khan, Aligarh India Fatimatuzzahra Rahman, Dhaka Bangladesh Mumtaz Alam, Fiji islands

Observetory on History Teaching in Europe, 2024

This research paper won the call for applications for the 4th OHTE Annual Conference in Strasbourg, France in 2024. In recent decades, the Humanities have often been cast aside as disciplines that are 'trivial' or have become 'economically irrelevant' and, therefore, do not serve society as practically as the sciences, law or engineering. Already in the 1960s, J.H. Plumb in his book Crisis in the Humanities highlighted that the disciplines in the Humanities, such as History, are presented as being of little use to our science and technology-based society. While studying History may be less impactful than the sciences, law and engineering, it is still critical to the basic functioning of society. This short essay will analyse why History, as a discipline, is still relevant to society and why it should be given importance in the basic school curriculum. This will be done by focusing on two areas, the first being the modern-day realities of teaching the discipline, and the second, being my own experiences of studying and working in the sphere of the historical discipline.

 Chronology: A study with context of time is termed as chronology.  Comparative history: Historical analysis of cultural entities and social entities is studied under comparative history.  Contemporary history: Contemporary history is the study of historical actions that are applicable to the present times.  Counterfactual history: Counterfactual history is the study of all the historical events which take place in varying casual circumstances.  Cultural history: The study of an ancient culture is termed as cultural history.  Digital history: Digital history is the latest branch of history under which the history of computers and advanced technologies are studied.  Economic history: The study of the economic structure, incidents and changes of the past is termed as economic history.

This is not the syllabus--rather it is a course description that also indicates prerequisites and requirements, and also indicates four required books. (Two or three more will likely be added later.) I expect a draft week-by-week syllabus to be available soon. Allan Megill

New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship, 2021