Ideas of History I

Catalog description

Why read or write history? How can we know about the past? What can historians' work tell us about the period in which they wrote? This course is designed to address these questions, which are fundamental to the discipline of history, by studying a selection of historians from antiquity to the Renaissance. Although we will see that these historians are often very different in their approaches to historical scholarship and historical narrative to contemporary historians, by examining their assumptions and practices, we will develop a privileged perspective on history writing today. Prerequisite(s): HIST 1101 or permission of the instructor.