Week 1: Introduction (terminology, purpose, and methods). What prompts the concern with history. The central importance of the temporality of humans.

Week 2: The historiography of the Greek world: discontinuity of time in epic history; the problems of continuous time (chronology); the importance of prose for historiography; the experience of war (Herodotus, Thucydides); the issue of oral vs. written history; Hellenism and historiography in a multicultural setting; elite and native histories, and the link to Rome

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 1-3
• Kelley 23-46, 48-49, 62, and 65
• Robert Louis Fowler, “Gods in early Greek historiography,” in The Gods of Ancient Greece. Identities and Transformations, edited by Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 318-334
• Katherine Clarke, “Polybius and the nature of late Hellenistic historiography,” in Polibio y la Península Ibérica, edited by  Juan Santos Yanguas and Elena Torregaray Pagola (Vitoria:  Universidad del País Vasco, 2003), pp. 69-87

Week 3: Historiography of the Roman Republic and the Empire: the issue of the founding myths (Trojan and Greek), the link between Roman life and historiography, the building of a systematic Roman historiography, fate and “progress”, the “old” and “new” Rome dichotomy; the Roman sense of history in a multicultural empire; scholarships vs. public history, the sense of decay vs. the idea of eternal Rome.

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 4-6
• Kelley 70-72, 77, 80, 93-95, 101-102
• Tim J. Cornell, “Universal history and the early Roman historians,” in Historiae mundi. Studies in Universal History, edited by Peter P. Liddel (London: Gerald Duckworth, 2010), pp. 102-115
• John H. G. W. Liebeschuetz, “Pagan historiography and the decline of the Empire,” in Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity (Fourth to Sixth Century AD), edited by Gabriele Marasco (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 177-218

Week 4: A paradigm change–Christian historiography: the Jewish legacy and the role of the covenant, messianism, and history as a coherent, divinely guided story; the linearity of time in Christian historiography, periodization, the centrality of the text and text interpretation, history vs. chiliasm; the relation to the Roman Empire, universal history, and the issue of periodization (ages and empires).

Read:

• Breisach, chapter 7
• Kelley 118-121, 123, 126-131, 141, 151, 155-156
• Peter van Nuffelen, “Theology versus genre? The universalism of Christian historiography in Late Antiquity,” in Historiae mundi. Studies in Universal History, edited by Peter P. Liddel (London: Gerald Duckworth, 2010), pp. 162-175
• Teresa J. Morgan, “Eusebius of Caesarea and Christian historiography,” Athenaeum 93 (2005), no. 1, 193-208

Week 5: Medieval historiography:  historiography as  a tool of dynastic legitimization, the historiography of the medieval Empire, crusades, the role of the individual in history (biography and hagiography), forms of medieval historiography (gesta, annals, the special position of the chronicle); the monastic chronicle (authors, reasons for writing, style, historiography and contemptus mundi, chronological problems)

Research paper topic selection deadline

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 8-9
• Kelley 164-165, sections 43-46, 48, 50-52
• Gabrielle Spiegel, “Structures of time in medieval historiography,” Medieval History Journal 19 (2016), no. 1, 21-33
• Ian Wood, “Universal chronicles in the early medieval West,” Medieval Worlds 1 (2015), 47-60
• Elizabeth Lapina, “Crusader chronicles,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, edited by Anthony Bale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 11-24

Week 6: The West from 1300 to 1750–searching for structure in history: historiography and the problem of change, Renaissance historiography, chorography and the collective identity, the concept of decay, history as the struggle between necessità and virtu, the paradox of Protestant historiography (historical search for a “pure” church), historiography and the new national identities, ordering schemes (golden age theories), the struggle over the right historiographic example (Tacitists and Livyists), the formulation of ars historica (historiography as narration, teach or entertain, the question of truth [verax or verum], the Trattatisti); advocates of proximity to sources (erudites)

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 10-12
• Kelley sections 59, 61, 62; pp. 221, 227-231, 239-246, 254-258, 264-265, 270-272, 315-316, 354-358, 361, 373-376, 382-387; section 91 (92 is optional)
• Brett Edward Whalen, “Joachim the theorist of history and society,” in A Companion to Joachim of Fiore, edited by Matthias Riedl, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, 75 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017), pp. 72-88
• Silvia Manzo, “Francis Bacon: freedom, authority, and science,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (2006), no. 2,  245-273

Week 7: Second paradigm change: the French historiography of progress (the new principle of universal history, the propellant of progress, the aim of history), Rousseau and Vico, the historians of the German Enlightenment, historicism (Herder), English/Scottish Enlightenment historiography

Read:

• Breisach, chapter 13
• Kelley 425, 433-434, 443-449, 451-452, 474-477
• Stern 35-45
• Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 21-121

Week 8: The historiography of two modern revolutions: historians of the American Revolution, historians of the French revolutions, the issue of national identity, the American sense of history

Read:

• Breisach 224-227, 238-247
• Stern 90-107, 108-119
• Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: the Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 59-98

Week 9: Historiography of the 19th-century national states: Prussian renaissance and historiography (the formulation of Geschichtswissenschaft, philosophical and religious foundations, the issue of German unification), the English Empire (politics and historical scholarship, reflective products), the American response (the historiography of the Manifest Destiny, the confirming of the American sense of history)

Research paper outline due (together with a minimal bibliography)

Read:

• Breisach 228-238 and chapter 16
• Stern 46-62, 71-89
• Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800-1953 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 66-91

Week 10: Third paradigm change–modernization and the issue of historical knowledge: historians of the “real” order (Comte and the positivists, the scientific historians, the neo-positivists and the Covering Law theory, cliometrics, econometrics), historians of the conceptual order (German historicism, relativism, psychohistory, narrativists)

Historian analysis due

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 17, 18, 22, and 26
• Stern 120-144, 170-177, 209-226
• Joseph F. Cambpbell, “Psychohistory: creating a new discipline,” Journal of Psychohistory 37 (2009), no. 1, 2-26
• Jürgen Pieters, “New historicism: postmodern historiography between narrativism and heterology,” History and Theory 39 (2000), no. 1, 21-38

Week 11: Third paradigm change–modernization and the issue of structure: economic interpretations (Marx and non-Marx), institutional history, the Annales school, social history, the American social history (Progressive history)

Draft of research paper due (at least four pages)

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 19, 20
• Stern 145-169, 197-208, 246-266, 403-429
• Ellen F. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory. Writing America’s past, 1880-1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 51-97
• Matt Perry, Marxism and History (Houndmills/New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 9-46

Week 12: Third paradigm change–the issue of world history: progress and Christian interpretations, sequence of cultural models, world system theories

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 21 and 30
• John Farrenkopf, “Hegel, Spengler, and the enigma of world history: progress or decline?” Clio 19 (1990), no. 4, 331-344
• Michael Lang, “Globalization and global history in Toynbee,” Journal of World History 22 (2011), no. 4, 747-783

Week 13: Historiography and totalitarianism: historiography and the Soviet regime; historians and fascism in Italy, Hungary, and Romania; history writing under the Third Reich

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 24 and 28
• Stern 329-346
• Alter L. Litvin, Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia. A View from Within (Houndmills/New York, 2001), pp. 3-37 (available on Canvas)
• George G. Iggers, “Refugee historians from Nazi Germany: political attitudes towards democracy,” Monna and Otto Weinmann Lecture Series (September 14, 2005; available on Canvas)

Week 14: Two case studies: German history since 1945 (Sonderweg theory, Historikerstreit, Alltagsgeschichte), American history since 1945 (consensus history, New Left history, emancipation histories, the implications of cultural pluralism). Historiography, post-modernity and prospects: turbulent political context and historiography, visions of a postmodern future, the New Cultural history

Read:

• Breisach, chapters 25, 29, and 31
• Stern 256-266
• Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp.  124-148
• Mark Peacock, “The desire to understand the politics of Wissenschaft: an analysis of the Historikerstreit,” History of the Human Sciences 14 (2001), no. 4, 87-110
• Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History. The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 193-208

Research paper due