At RU there is a three-semester U.S. history sequence in which we typically read cutting-edge books and articles for class and write a few short reviews of classics (or works with less traditional methodologies). Then (often) you do a three-hour mock comp or a longer historiographical essay. So there are quite a few weeks when you do read two books per class session. Of course, no one reads those “extra” books all that carefully, but in my first semester I swallowed American Slavery, American Freedom and Good Wives, Nasty Wenches the same week. Other favorites included The Whiskey Rebellion and Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions. Unfortunately, tear-it-down discussions were rampant.

Curricular approaches for other classes vary by professor, but even in the most out-there courses there is almost always a short book review, a long historiographical essay, and an in-class presentation.

Primary source analysis is typically saved for research seminars.

The teaching methods class that Ann Fabian mentioned is a 1.5-credit semester-long joke. They say it’s required to graduate and/or teach your own class, but I know people who’ve never taken it. On the other hand, it forces you to lecture in front of 100-200 people and get two syllabi ready to go. If you pay attention, you might be able to spit out some bullshit on pedagogical philosophy in a job interview. So not a total waste of time.

Reading these comments, I’m thankful for what I got from RU.

Thanks for the reflections — I have riffed a bit on them at http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2009/01/graduate.html

First, while I had some really great cutting edge exciting grad courses, historiography was not one of them. Historiography was the core intro class all grad students had to take, but nobody wanted to teach it. I took it twice (once for the MA program and then when I started a PhD at another school). Both classes were pedagogical afterthoughts and fobbed off on the old silver backs in the department. Now, the codgers did try to engage the ‘post structuralists,’ gender, and the like, but both profs were social and political historians of the old school. So when it came to explaining the significance of Foucault and other people they had lumped into the po-mo category, the profs were downright uncomfortable. What could have been stimulating was stultifying. Now don’t get me wrong, when these guys were on their home turf, they were great and the class was very helpful, but the last few weeks of each semester was painful.

Second, I would say that the time I appreciated historiography the most, was after my dissertation was done. After spending several years ‘in the weeds’ and doing my own research, I really valued the way other scholars were able frame their projects as part of a larger debate. So maybe there needs to be a historiography class for students starting and another one for freshly minted PhDs. Nothing would be more stimulating than to go look at that literature again and to think about the direction of the whole discipline.

I’m not saying we don’t need to know the historiography — after all, that’s why we have to read a shitload of books for comps. But I do think it tends to be more integrated into our coursework. My advisor’s seminars almost always had us spending about half the time reading monographs, half sources. He would typically divide 3-4 monographs among us, and then give us questions that forced us to weigh and analyse the different arguments. By the time we got to comps, it was pretty clear that we were supposed to be able to identify major theories and arguments, and we did. Historiography by osmosis, really.

And I use those skills for the lit reviews I do for every project, whether or not I intend to publish that part of it. But with a few notable exceptions, I can’t think of when it’s been that important to use the historiography in anything except a contextual way. That’s why I think that, for pre-modernists (and more and more the earlier you go), there are other things that take priority in coursework.

But doing historiography when you don’t know the basic chronology/issues is really hard. Which is often an issue outside of the US history fields, unless it’s a really big grad program which can offer lots of seminars. The best sequence I had in grad school (before there was a common first semester course) was a pro-seminar/research seminar sequence: I was lucky that it was in my field. THe first semester we read two books a week, setting up the arguments right off the bat. The second semester we all did research papers. If you’d done the first semester, then you could build your research paper off your historiographical paper. Mine was an argument for why you should study women. (ok, I’m old.)

It seems to me that the point of seminars is to give student the tools — interpretive, historiographical, theoretical, and methodological — to enter the conversation of historians. And historiography is part of that. (Though I also agree with Ruth, that a lot of the lit review is CYA rather than really substantial. But of course, I read footnotes and get really cross when I should be cited and am not. CYA wouldn’t be bad for those authors!)

And yes, “recent” versus “modern” is so very subjective. I remember declaring in a grad seminar that I lumped all books into two categories: those written before I was born, and those written after I was born. In some ways I still go by that rule–I think I assigned one item written before I was born last time I taught our grad proseminar–but I shudder to think what implications this rule will have when I begin to teach grad students born after my first publication. (We’re still a ways away from that, that god…)

I was asked to read Ivy Pinchbeck and Alice Clark in one class (early 20th C historians of early modern English women’s history) and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, while in another class that same term it was all Butler, Foucault, Mary Douglas, etc. Meanwhile, I was big into the Marxist historians like Lyndal Roper and Marcus Rediker that term, too–and it was great to be forced to make sense of those clashing titles and historical eras.

I think you’re right too about methodology and theory–although strangely, it seems like the stuff I was reading in the early 1990s is still the stuff that grad students are reading today (Judith Butler, toujours Foucault, and I even hear the names Bordieu and Bakhtin thrown around too.) Then the whole “return to narrative” and “return to biography” happened, and historians happily reverted to less theoretical models of scholarship. (But, you’d have to have some historiographical background to know this!)

Ruth–I agree with you on the limited value of lit reviews that just summarize historiography. But I always ask my grad students to interject their informed opinions–what have scholars done right in this field, and what opportunities have they missed? Who is doing it right, and whose work is deficient, etc.? I’d pass out from boredom if students (or anyone) wrote up summary after summary without editorializing!

As for the comments on teaching historiography to undergrads (by JJO, Squadratomagico, and others)–I guess I do, although I don’t call it by that name. I just mention that there are (for example) different interpretations of family life in colonial America, or that historians have different interpretations of Native American history and its importance in early American history. I don’t drop names, because they won’t mean anything to undergrads who haven’t read the relevant books, but I use those moments to help them see what the author we’re reading this week is up to with her book, and (in part) the broader background that might explain why she’s trying to answer these particular questions in this article or book.

I think that if you’re interested in questions about power–as are most of us trained in the 1990s and reared on a steady diet of Foucault and his Fine Feminist Friends–then you probably are fascinated by historiography because of what it has to say about power and prestige operating in the historical profession.