Module Leader:
Richard Major
Year/Term:
2015-2016 Summer
Level:
Focus
Division:
Arts and Humanities
Credit:
8
How should history be written? How should history be read? History, the controlling discipline of all the social sciences and humanities, can be shaped in many different ways, and in this course we study critically eight of the main approaches, meanwhile asking ourselves: what are history’s proper methods? What is its epistemology? What do we think of Constructivism, the role of memory, the significance of Great Men, metaphysical schemes, periodisation? Each week we will read extracts from the great historians; in the final essay students will have to commit themselves to ideas of how the art and science history can (and cannot) be performed.