HIST 3808
HISTORICAL THEORY AND METHOD
Winter Term, 2004

A.B. McKillop

This course, which combines lectures and tutorials, offers the opportunity to engage with the way historians have written about the past, how they have done history, and how they have conceived of the discipline. The course also provides a point of departure for students to develop their own approaches to historical theory and method.

In the Fall Term, 2003, the course is offered by Professor J.H. Taylor, who will survey the developments in historical writing in western cultures from the Ancients to the Enlightenment. Students should consult Professor Taylor's syllabus for the course for details concerning course requirements for this term.

Professor McKillop will offer the course during the Winter Term, 2004 looking closely at developments in historical theory and method in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These two centuries witnessed major movements in ideas and culture that shaped the nature of historical understanding and practice. A major strand in the thought of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century promised a progressive future and forms of truth of universal validity, as did nineteenth century science. Counter-movements, such as that of Romanticism, challenged such notions. The writing of history, once the domain of the gentleman amateur, came also to be practiced by professional historians who viewed "history" as part of the academic research enterprise. History became "professionalized."

The Winter Term of "Historical Theory and Method" examines the nature and consequences of this transformation. Its context is that of philosophies of history and forms of historical practice derived from assumptions about the nature of truth and evidence, and different views of the significance of facts and narration. Is the practice of history fundamentally an attempt to tell a story or to solve a problem? Is there such a thing as historical "truth"? Or is there, instead, a plurality of "truths"? Is the past scientifically discoverable or is it contingent on such matters as time and circumstance or the mind of the practicing historian? Does history serve the realm of timeless values or present circumstances? In order to address these and other questions, the course approaches the history of historical theory and method as one element of the intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.