Course Description
History investigates the profound and surprising differences between past worlds and our own and evaluates the common ground between them. Students will learn to read critically, handle complex evidence with subtlety and skepticism, and speak and write with concision and force.
Athena Title
What is History Honors
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in HIST 3910
Prerequisite
Third year student standing and permission of Honors
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
- Students will be able to arrive at conclusions through gathering and weighing of evidence, logical argument, and listening to counter argument.
- Students will be able to write stylistically appropriate papers and essays. Students will analyze ideas and evidence, organize their thoughts, and revise and edit their finished essays.
- Students will be able to identify how the history of the discipline of History shaped diverse social and cultural attitudes toward past and present, objectivity and bias, and ethics and ideology and encouraging them to understand diverse worldviews and experiences.
- Students will be able to apply appropriate methodological approaches to their analysis of primary sources and to organize their evidence to show historical continuities and discontinuities.
Topical Outline
- Introduction and Course Mechanics
- What is History?
- Conceptualizing History and Research
- Historical Mindedness
- Historical Explanation
- Historical Evidence
- Objectivity and Causation
- Logic and Critical Reasoning
- Assessing and Constructing Arguments
- Quantitative History
- Psychohistory
- Marxist History
- The Annales School
- Microhistory
- Post-Modernist History
- The Purpose of History
