About
History 307 Honors Research Methods
Dr. Chad Black
The University of Tennessee
Spring 2010
Class Meetings: Wednesdays, 2:30-5:30, HSS 68
Office Hours: Tuesday, 11:00-12:00, 1:30-2:30 2629 Dunford Hall
Contact Information: cblack6-at-utk.edu, 974-9871
This course is the first semester of a three-term sequence designed to introduce you to the basics of history and history-writing in theory and practice. At the end of this sequence, you will have produced your own honors thesis, but before we get there we need to learn how to read critically, write analytically, and to understand more fully what it means to be trained as a historian. Throughout the course of this semester, we will emphasize the skills and techniques used in historical research, as well as those applied to the specific needs of different kinds of historical writing. Through a series of focused assignments, aimed at exposing you to a variety of reading, thinking, and writing skills, we will grapple with the three main challenges that face all historians: identifying historical problems, deciding what methodologies are best suited to that problem, and locating and using primary sources needed for analyzing that problem.
In addition to our specific assignments, this course is designed to introduce you to historical sources readily available from Knoxville, and to help you come up with a topic for research and writing for next year. The topic should be both doable and interesting to you within the confines of our three-semester series. By the end of this semester you should, 1. Better understand what is required to undertake historical work; 2. Have a better skill set to tackle such work; and, 3. Have the core of a project to take into next year.
This course is still an introduction to research methods, and as such is not a comprehensive overview of every approach to historical work. It is not comprehensive from geographical, temporal, methodological, or subject perspectives. But, I do hope you will come away with a set of historical and historiographic problems you are interested in pursuing.
Format
N.B.: This is a participation-intensive seminar. We are a small group, and it is imperative that each of you come to our weekly meetings completely prepared. Seminar sessions are devoted to discussions of our readings and the broader issues, theoretical and empirical, raised by those sources. We will be meeting once a week, and much of your work will be done outside of class. The burden of time management is thus on you.
Required Texts
Texts ordered for the bookstore:
Iggers, Georg. Historiography in the 20th Century. Wesleyan, 2005.
Presnell, Jenny. The Information-Literate Historian. Oxford UP, 2007.
Wiener, Jon. Historians in Trouble. New Press, 2007.
Other readings will be posted on the course website.
Other Information
Please note: If any special accommodations are needed to complete the requirements of this course, please come see me at the beginning of the semester. No make-ups or incompletes will be given without medical documentation.
Absences: Multiple absences from the class meetings will be noted and will affect a student’s participation grade.
Deadlines: Assignments must be emailed to the instructor no later than the beginning of class on the day they are due, or at some other specified time established by the professor. It is important to be technologically savvy in today’s world. Much of our communication occurs through email, including the sharing of documents and other work product. Late papers will not be accepted for any reason without prior arrangement. This includes technology problems. You’re responsible for attaching your work correctly and sending it in on time.
Academic honesty. There is a UTK Academic Code of Conduct that defines and recommends sanctions against plagiarism. Familiarize yourself with it. The complete policy may be found here and here. Just follow the links on those pages. Any level of academic dishonest (such as cheating or plagiarizing) will result at minimum in the student failing the assignment, but can also include expulsion from the course and actions filed with Student Judicial Affairs.