Crafting History
This course, which is mandatory for all fourth-year Honours students, has two main objectives. The first is to help you to conceptualize and write your honours thesis. We will read a range of texts selected to help us understand how historians do history and how you might approach your thesis project. These will include primary sources, which we will analyze to develop our skills at engaging with historical documents. They will also include published journal articles, through which we can see some of the strengths and weaknesses of recent approaches among professional historians. Finally, we will read honours theses completed at UBC, in order to study the genre to which you will be contributing, learning from the strengths and weaknesses of these works, too.
The second goal is to support a community of scholars. No historian works in isolation; professional historians often workshop their publications at conferences and symposia, as well as by asking friends and colleagues to read and critique their drafts. Each of you will do some of this, too. You will be asked to reflect thoughtfully on one another’s work, and to challenge one another to produce better chapter drafts and more coherent arguments. And, of course, you will have to submit your own work for review.
In the first semester, close readings of journal articles, primary sources, and UBC theses will allow you to explore the “nuts and bolts” of how writers ask historical questions, make their arguments, find and use sources, and situate their work in relation to relevant historiographies. The second semester will focus closely on your own research projects and themes, and you will workshop portions of your thesis in progress. The focus of these class meetings will be critical and constructive engagement with one another’s writing projects.