HIST 301
Approaching the Past: The Historian's Task Fall 2022
Division II

What is the historian’s task? In this seminar we will consider a variety of answers to this question by looking at how historians have practiced their craft from antiquity to the present. In the first half of the course, we will read historians from across the globe to see how the study of the past has differed across human societies from antiquity until the nineteenth century. What do their approaches have in common, and what distinguishes them? In the second half of the course we will investigate the modern historical tradition from the early twentieth century to the present, including the Annales school, economic and environmental history, microhistory, and subaltern studies. Throughout, we will discuss what lessons we can draw for our own practice as historians. Authors to be read include Herodotus, al-Mas’udi, Ranke, Bloch, Guha among others.