Historical Thinking

Catalog description

This course introduces foundational methods, approaches, and conceptual frameworks for doing history. Students practice constructing historical narratives and explanations grounded in analyzing primary sources, critically reading secondary works, and communicating historical knowledge to various audiences. Students evaluate evidence from primary sources and contextualize it using secondary works. Students analyze how social power shapes and reflects the construction of archives, evidence, narratives, and public history education. Students reflect on their own perspective as a historian, and consider their distinctive intellectual assets and specific forms of community accountability. Students consider some ways of knowing characteristic of the discipline of history, and analyze secondary works by historians to identify various approaches to gathering evidence from primary sources. Students assess gaps in historical narratives and archives; read scholarly works that have used creative approaches to gather evidence toward rectifying historical silences; and put their historical imagination into practice by creating signature work. This course meets the General Education requirement for Community and Cultural Contexts.