TAR 107 - History Methodology

This course offers an introduction to the various stages of historical research and methods of analyzing the sources. It also aims to guide the first grade students of History Department to the most essential aspects of writing an academic text and paper. Generally, this course offers a guide to the most useful of the techniques and the methods that historians have developed for analyzing sources. This course will help to work with the enormous wealth of knowledge and sources of the past that we encounter as researchers and students. As such, it is devised to offer a critical approach to history writing and a critical engagement with the sources in order to produce useful knowledge about the past. Thanks to this approach and awareness, the student will become more familiar with the various methodologies of historical research. Therefore, this course aims to introduce the students to the methods of historical criticism, which has a comprehensive and respected tradition.

This course is designed to acquaint the students with a variety of approaches to the past used by historians in writing history. During the first weeks of the course, the aspects of writing an academic text will be treated in order to improve the student's academic writing skills: what criteria should be followed in writing an academic text? What is a citation, reference, footnotes and bibliography and how are they used in academic writing?

The following lessons will treat rather theoretical topics, such as the ways how the various historians have constructed and perceived the past over the centuries; how history has developed as an autonomous discipline of the social sciences;  how historians conceive their object of study, how they make use of the primary sources and how they structure their interpretation of the past; the correlation between the construction of the past and the various political views and philosophical movements; the nature of historical knowledge; etc. All these theoretical issues will be exemplified in the course with concrete cases of application. The method of historical criticism, which has an extensive and respected tradition, will be useful not only for history students but also for students in many fields of social sciences in general.

Martha C. Howell & Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources. An Introduction to Historical Methods (Cornell Un. Press, 2001).