Honours Common Course: Historiography and Methods
The history honours common course is a history course, but it is different from the other history courses you have taken. It is not about a particular place, period, or people. Nor is it about a particular theme. Instead, it is about history itself: what it is, why we do it, and how we do it.
Our guide in our quest to understand history itself will be John Tosh’s The Pursuit of History (available at UniBooks and also in the Barr Smith Library). This book provides a clear, useful, and sympathetic, if Anglocentric, overview of major issues in the modern theory and practice of history.
Questions, sources, and connections
The central premise of the course is that there is (or ought to be) a close connection between the questions historians ask and the material upon which they draw to answer those questions. Where we look for answers has a great deal to do with what we want to know. This means that part of our task during the semester will be to look at ways historians have asked and answered questions.
Department: Discipline of History
University: University of Adelaide
Years offered: 2008