HIST 102 Historians and Modernity
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
How have historians divided up the past? Do accepted historical categories – such as “the Renaissance,” “the Enlightenment,” “the Progressive Era” – reflect real periods that have beginnings and ends? What methods do historians use to recover and relate the past, and how reliable are their sources and their narratives? Are different media – text, film, website, museum – equally suitable for the transmission of historical narrative and analysis? This seminar will consider these and other associated questions about the relationship between present and past, causation and change, history and myth, through the study of the development of historical writing. We will be particularly concerned with the construction of a notion of “modern times” in the work of important, and provocative, historians and theorists.
