Thinking History: Debates and Developments in Historiography from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Twenty - First Century
Course Organiser: Professor Ciaran Brady
Duration: Oct-Dec
Contact hours: 1 hour
Weighting: 5 ECTS
This is a course that proposes to take an historical approach to the difficult but fascinating subject of Historiography. Its aim is to provide students with a survey of the principal movements and debates which have shaped historical research and writing over the past eighty years or so. Though the approach will be largely chronological, a principal aim of the course is to introduce students at once to the major theoretical and methodological problems which continue to confront historians in their everyday work, and to present them with the opportunity of examining some of the classic texts of modern historical writing.
What is Historiography?
historiography n. 1. the writing of history. 2. the study of history-writing.
History is a complex and misleading word. It connotes both the past that the historian studies and the exercise of investigating analysing and writing about that past. This complexity is sometimes lost on us, and in practice we frequently neglect the artificial, creative nature of history writing. We mistake the art for the fact, and forget that the historical past, however straightforward it may seem, is not plain truth, but is always ‘constructed’ by the person who writes about it. For these reasons historians often use the term historiography specifically to denote the conscious act of writing history and of thinking about how history is written.