Sources and References

• Sarah Maza, Thinking about History (University of Chicago Press, 2017) — primary textbook; a thematic introduction organized around the big questions of whose history, where, what, how, and why.
• E. H. Carr, What is History? (1961)
• Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (1997)
• Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (1954)
• Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (2004; 2nd ed. 2008)
• Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (2014)
• John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (2002)
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)
• Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983)
• Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976; trans. 1980)
• Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001)
• Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (2000)
• Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2000)

Chapter 1: What is History? The Problem of Definition

Everything has a history, including history itself. The discipline we call history is neither a neutral record of everything that ever happened nor a direct window onto the past. It is a craft — a disciplined practice of asking questions of surviving traces, constructing arguments about what they mean, and writing those arguments into narrative form for a reading audience. To begin a course called What is History? is therefore to recognize that the answer is itself historical: what has counted as history has varied enormously across time, place, and institutional setting.

1.1 The past, history, heritage, and memory

A useful opening move, developed in different forms by David Lowenthal and by Sarah Maza, is to pry apart four words that in everyday speech collapse into one. The past is everything that has already happened — an inaccessible totality that no one can recover whole. History is the critical, evidence-based, self-aware reconstruction of parts of that past by researchers who submit their claims for scrutiny. Heritage is a celebratory relationship with selected bits of the past, harnessed to present-day identities: a flag, a commemorative statue, a family lineage, a UNESCO site. Memory — whether personal or collective — is the lived sense of continuity with earlier events, often transmitted through ritual, image, and story rather than footnotes.

These categories overlap, but they answer to different rules. Heritage is allowed to be one-sided; history is not. Memory is allowed to be emotional and partial; history must be corrigible in the face of new evidence. One of the first things historical thinking teaches is how to tell which mode one is in, and how to respect the integrity of each without confusing them.

1.2 History as an academic discipline

In its current institutional form, history is an academic discipline organized around peer review, professional training, conferences, and journals. This professional shape is surprisingly recent. Before the nineteenth century, “history” could mean a moralizing narrative, a compendium of exempla, a family chronicle, a religious providential story, or an antiquarian collection. The idea that writing history requires systematic training, seminar apprenticeship, footnotes keyed to archival sources, and explicit argumentation is a product of the nineteenth-century German university and its worldwide imitators.

Chapter 2: From Antiquity to the Modern Discipline

2.1 The ancient historians

The Greek word historia meant “inquiry,” and Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, used it to describe his sprawling investigation into the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus gathered stories from informants across the Mediterranean, weighed them against one another, and admitted when he could not decide. Thucydides, also fifth-century BCE, narrowed the focus to the Peloponnesian War and insisted on eyewitness testimony, political analysis, and the exclusion of myth. Between them, the two Greeks set up a tension the discipline has never resolved: capacious cultural curiosity on the one hand, and austere political-military rigour on the other.

Roman historians — Livy, Tacitus, Polybius — added the idea that history should instruct the reader morally and politically. In the medieval Christian world, the dominant form was the chronicle, a year-by-year annal usually compiled in a monastic setting, placed inside a providential framework in which God was the ultimate cause. Islamic historiography, meanwhile, developed its own sophisticated traditions, from the biographical dictionaries of the hadith scholars to Ibn Khaldun’s fourteenth-century Muqaddimah, one of the earliest works to theorize historical change in terms of social and economic forces.

2.2 Ranke and the nineteenth-century revolution

The decisive break into what is often called “modern” history came in nineteenth-century Germany, above all through Leopold von Ranke. Ranke famously insisted that the historian’s task was to show the past wie es eigentlich gewesen — “as it actually was.” He taught his students to base every claim on archival documents, to criticize sources for authenticity and reliability, and to write political history from state papers. The graduate seminar — closed, apprenticeship-based, dedicated to source criticism — became his enduring institutional legacy. By the late nineteenth century, Rankean methods had spread to France, Britain, North America, and Japan, and history had established itself as a university discipline with chairs, degrees, and journals.

Chapter 3: Sources, Archives, and Evidence

3.1 Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources

Historical thinking begins with the typology of sources. A primary source is a trace produced within the period under study: a letter, a tax roll, a parish register, a diary, a court deposition, a photograph, a potsherd, a pop song, a server log. A secondary source is a later interpretation of such traces — a scholarly article, a monograph, a textbook chapter. A tertiary source digests and summarizes the secondary literature: an encyclopedia entry, a reference handbook, a Wikipedia article.

The categories are relational rather than essential. A 1960s history textbook, written as a secondary source, becomes a primary source for a scholar studying Cold War educational culture. A chatbot transcript is a tertiary synthesis for one researcher and a primary object of study for another who is writing the history of large language models. The key question is always: primary for what question?

3.2 The archive and the archival turn

For most of the twentieth century, “going to the archive” was almost synonymous with doing history. The archive — whether national, municipal, ecclesiastical, corporate, or family — was treated as a neutral storehouse out of which the patient researcher drew facts. The so-called archival turn of the 1980s and 1990s, catalysed by thinkers like Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, challenged that innocence. Archives are not neutral. They are built by institutions with agendas, they preserve some records and destroy others, they classify people in categories that reflect the power of the classifier, and they are silent precisely where power wishes silence.

3.3 Colonial archives and their silences

Nowhere is this clearer than in colonial archives. A district officer’s report on a peasant rebellion is a meticulous document, but it was written to justify repression and framed the rebels in the vocabulary of the regime. To use such a record is not to refuse it but to read it “against the grain” — to ask what it assumes, what it excludes, and whose voice has been ventriloquized in whose interest.

Chapter 4: Interpretation, Argument, and Causation

4.1 How historians argue

Historical writing is not just description. A good monograph advances a thesis — an interpretation that the author defends with evidence against rival interpretations. Arguments in history rarely take the form of deductive proofs; they are more like legal cases, weaving together sources, context, and counterexamples into a narrative that the reader is invited to find most plausible. The quality of such arguments depends on how honestly the author confronts evidence that cuts against the thesis.

4.2 Explanation and causation

Historians often distinguish short-term “triggers” (the assassination at Sarajevo) from medium-term “structural” conditions (the system of European alliances) and deep long-term forces (imperial rivalry, industrial capitalism, demographic change). The French Annales historian Fernand Braudel formalized this distinction in his notion of three historical time-scales, the slowest of which he named the longue durée — geographic and environmental structures that change across centuries rather than years. Causation in history is almost always multiple, and a persuasive explanation shows how factors at different scales interacted.

4.3 Counterfactuals and contingency

What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if the Ottoman Empire had not entered the First World War? Counterfactual reasoning is controversial — critics call it parlour-game speculation — but as John Lewis Gaddis argues in The Landscape of History, disciplined counterfactuals can clarify which causes did real explanatory work and which were incidental. They are a way of taking contingency seriously without abandoning evidence.

Chapter 5: The Twentieth-Century Schools

5.1 Marxist history

Marxist historians, from the early twentieth century through the postwar British school of Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and E. P. Thompson, insisted that class relations and modes of production were the deepest engine of historical change. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a landmark of what became known as social history or “history from below” — a determined effort to recover the experiences and agency of workers, artisans, and the poor, who had been largely absent from political narratives dominated by kings and statesmen.

5.2 The Annales school

In France, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale in 1929, inaugurating what became the most influential historiographical movement of the twentieth century. Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft, written in hiding during the Nazi occupation and published posthumously after his execution by the Gestapo, remains one of the finest short statements of what it means to think historically. The Annales historians rejected event-driven political narrative in favour of the slow movements of geography, demography, climate, prices, and mentalities. Fernand Braudel’s magnum opus on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II modelled the three-level structure of time.

5.3 Cliometrics and quantitative history

In the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the United States, some historians turned to statistical methods and large datasets — an approach known as cliometrics after Clio, the muse of history. Robert Fogel’s controversial work on the economics of slavery showed both the power and the limits of the method: quantitative rigour could settle some questions while bypassing moral and experiential ones.

Chapter 6: The Cultural Turn and Microhistory

6.1 The linguistic turn

From the 1970s onward, the intellectual weather changed. Influenced by structuralist and poststructuralist theory — Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida — many historians took what is often called the linguistic turn. They began to treat language not as a transparent window onto reality but as a system that structures the very categories available for thinking and acting. Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) went further, arguing that historians emplot the past in basically literary forms — tragedy, comedy, romance, satire — and that these narrative choices carry ideological weight. The argument was deeply unsettling to historians who wanted to preserve a clear line between history and fiction, and it provoked the strongest defence of empirical method by Richard J. Evans in In Defence of History.

6.2 Cultural history and microhistory

Cultural history, as surveyed by Peter Burke in What is Cultural History?, shifted attention from economic structures to practices, rituals, symbols, and meanings. One of its most compelling forms was microhistory: the intensive study of a single village, family, trial, or individual, used not as illustration but as an analytical probe into an entire culture.

Chapter 7: Expanding the Field — Gender, Race, Empire, Globe

7.1 Women’s and gender history

From the 1970s, women’s history moved from recovery — making forgotten women visible — to a full rethinking of the categories in which history had been written. Joan Wallach Scott’s 1986 essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” argued that gender was not only about women but about the way relations of power were constituted through ideas of sexual difference. Gender history reshaped political history, labour history, the history of science, and the history of the body.

7.2 Postcolonial and Black Atlantic histories

Postcolonial historiography refused to treat Europe as the privileged site from which modernity radiated outward. The Subaltern Studies collective in South Asia, led initially by Ranajit Guha, sought to recover the agency of peasants, tribals, and workers who had been written out of both colonial and nationalist narratives. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic reframed Black diasporic culture as a transnational formation that cut across national histories. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe argued that European categories — the secular public sphere, the rights-bearing individual, capitalist rationality — had been treated as universal when they were in fact provincial, and called on historians to decentre them.

7.3 Global and world history

Parallel to these moves, global history grew as a self-conscious project to cross national boundaries and look at connections, comparisons, and flows. Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence controversially argued that Western Europe and the Yangzi delta were roughly comparable economies until around 1800, and that Europe’s industrial takeoff owed as much to coal, colonial resources, and contingency as to any internal cultural superiority. Lynn Hunt’s Writing History in the Global Era offers a recent survey of how and why the nation-state has lost its self-evidence as the default container for historical inquiry.

Chapter 8: Memory, Digital Futures, and Historical Thinking

8.1 Public history and the politics of memory

The past is not only studied in universities. It is fought over in statues, street names, museum labels, school curricula, truth commissions, and heritage sites. Public history — the practice of doing history for and with non-academic audiences — has grown into a major subfield. Controversies over monuments to slaveholders, residential school commemoration, and national history curricula are reminders that historical interpretation is always a political act in addition to a scholarly one. Trouillot’s insistence that silence is produced, not natural, has become one of the most-cited lenses for reading these disputes.

8.2 Digital history and new ethical challenges

Digital history encompasses several distinct things: digitized archives that put millions of documents on researchers’ screens; computational text analysis, network analysis, and geographic information systems (GIS) that can reveal patterns invisible to a reader working one document at a time; online public history projects; and, most recently, the use and critique of generative artificial intelligence. Each brings genuine opportunities — corpora of a size previously unthinkable — together with new obligations: to document the provenance of digital sources, to be transparent about computational methods, to respect the privacy of recently created records, and to avoid letting the confidence of a statistical display disguise the fragility of the underlying evidence.

Generative AI adds a further layer. Large language models can produce fluent, confident text that looks like historical prose but that fabricates citations and events. They can, however, genuinely help with translation, brainstorming, drafting, and summarization — provided the user understands that any factual claim and any source reference must be checked against the primary evidence. In a course that thinks about history, honest disclosure of AI use is part of the same commitment to transparency that asks human authors to footnote their sources.

8.3 Is history true? Postmodernism and its critics

Is history just one story among many? The question sharpened after the linguistic turn. At one end, strong constructivists argued that historical narratives were essentially literary artifacts whose truth claims could not be adjudicated. At the other end, Richard Evans and others defended a critical-empirical core: historians can be wrong, their interpretations are always partial, but evidence still constrains what can reasonably be said. Most working historians today occupy a middle position. They accept that the questions asked are shaped by the historian’s situation, that language is not transparent, and that narratives impose form on the past — while also insisting that not all accounts are equally defensible, that forged documents can be detected, that Holocaust denial is not a legitimate interpretation, and that accountability to evidence is the discipline’s non-negotiable floor.

8.4 Historical thinking as a skill

How, concretely, does one do this? Sam Wineburg, in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, argues that historical thinking is genuinely difficult because it cuts against our default cognitive habits. He proposes a small set of moves that distinguish expert from novice readers of sources: sourcing (asking who made this, when, and why before reading the content), contextualizing (placing the document back into the world of its moment), and corroborating (cross-checking claims against other independent sources). A fourth move, close reading, attends to word choice, rhetorical strategy, and what is not said. These habits feel unnatural because modern information culture encourages us to treat texts as disembodied content. Historical thinking reattaches every statement to a situated author and asks what the statement was trying to do.