History 792E - S- European Historiography

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to a variety of the best recent historical writing on modern Europe. The topics range from the French Revolution to recent debates over German history in relation to the Holocaust and global-history perspectives on Europe's past. Included are classic questions such as explaining the French Revolutionary Terror and the rise of the Nazis as well as new inquiries into the history of private life, gender, and collective memory. Besides participating in weekly discussions, each student will write a book review and a review essay, present a commentary on the readings to the class, and write a paper on a historiographical methodology or style. Students who are not concentrating in European history may learn much that could be useful from the approaches and methodological thinking of leading European historians. Students taking this course at the 700-level will need to write an
original research paper using primary source documents.