History Today: Debates and Practices

A colleague’s visit a decade ago to Carlton College’s “Junior-year Colloquium” initiated discussions about creating a historiography course to introduce students to the craft of history and provide better preparation for the required senior research seminar. Although developed collectively, members of the department use different approaches in teaching this class. “History Today”  examines how the discipline of history has changed over the past century and some of the debates generated as various schools of historians have reinvented study of the past with new questions, new analytical categories, new approaches, and new schools of historical interpretation. The course examines the interdisciplinary nature of history by assessing how successfully historians apply theories and models from the social sciences, humanities, and sciences to their study of the past. Finally, it considers general issues of the historian’s craft concerning evidence, objectivity, causation, time, scale, and narrative in history writing; the political contexts shaping professionalization of history; and recent controversies over professional ethics and historians’ audiences.