• How to pass course:
o Read workgroup manual on Canvas
o Attend the 3 workgroup sessions (starts week 3)
o Complete assignment
• Study all course content:
o Lectures
o Course book
o Slides
o Manual workgroups
• Exams:
o 60 multiple-choice questions: 42 correct to pass
o Questions about key concepts, important people and their ideas,
important research and its results and relations with historical or
contemporary questions
o No questions about dates, exact results (numbers) or biographical trivia
Chapter 0
• Reflexivity: Refers to the human ability to become aware of, and reflect upon
one’s own activities
• Historiography: Collective term for the theory, history, methods and
assumptions of writing history
• Internalism: When historians focus on development of ideas and their
intellectual and disciplinary contexts
• Externalism: When historians focus on social and political factors (too) that
may have shaped these ideas
• Great Man Approach: In which history is told through the contributions of
eminent people whose ideas have shaped the field
o Often neglect external factors that may have surrounded individual
contributors
• Zeitgeist Approach: Takes into account the fact “spirit of the times” may
affect the ability of a certain person, along with their ideas, to take hold and
become historically significant
• Presentism: Historians viewing their subject from the standpoint of the
present, explaining today’s circumstances by emphasizing that because our
predecessors overcame mistaken assumptions, we progressed to the present
state of superior knowledge.
• Historicism: Attempts to recreate the past as it was actually experienced by
predecessors, without distortion by foreknowledge of how things later worked
out
• Sophisticated presentism: Historians arguing you can never escape the
horizon of the present when writing history and that historical study is
motivated by a desire to better understand contemporary issues.
o Read workgroup manual on Canvas
o Attend the 3 workgroup sessions (starts week 3)
o Complete assignment
• Study all course content:
o Lectures
o Course book
o Slides
o Manual workgroups
• Exams:
o 60 multiple-choice questions: 42 correct to pass
o Questions about key concepts, important people and their ideas,
important research and its results and relations with historical or
contemporary questions
o No questions about dates, exact results (numbers) or biographical trivia
Chapter 0
• Reflexivity: Refers to the human ability to become aware of, and reflect upon
one’s own activities
• Historiography: Collective term for the theory, history, methods and
assumptions of writing history
• Internalism: When historians focus on development of ideas and their
intellectual and disciplinary contexts
• Externalism: When historians focus on social and political factors (too) that
may have shaped these ideas
• Great Man Approach: In which history is told through the contributions of
eminent people whose ideas have shaped the field
o Often neglect external factors that may have surrounded individual
contributors
• Zeitgeist Approach: Takes into account the fact “spirit of the times” may
affect the ability of a certain person, along with their ideas, to take hold and
become historically significant
• Presentism: Historians viewing their subject from the standpoint of the
present, explaining today’s circumstances by emphasizing that because our
predecessors overcame mistaken assumptions, we progressed to the present
state of superior knowledge.
• Historicism: Attempts to recreate the past as it was actually experienced by
predecessors, without distortion by foreknowledge of how things later worked
out
• Sophisticated presentism: Historians arguing you can never escape the
horizon of the present when writing history and that historical study is
motivated by a desire to better understand contemporary issues.
