How Historians Understand and Explain

This module will provide you with some understanding of the diverse approaches that historians and philosophers have taken to understanding the past. We will focus primarily on different ways of constructing the relationship between the present, the past and the future, and on the structure of the explanations given for the differences observed.

Preliminary Reading

Collingwood, R. G. 1993. ‘The historical imagination’ and ‘Historical evidence’, The Idea of History.Oxford: Clarendon.

Lowenthal, David. 2005. ‘Wanting the past’, The Past is Another Country, Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

White, Hayden. 1978. ‘The historical text as literary artefact’, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Taught: Lent Term

Assessment: A critical bibliography (1500 words @30%) and one essay (3500 words @70%)