Course Description:

Students develop bibliographic, analytical, and interpretive skills for dealing with primary source materials published in print and those made available in databases or online archives, including letters, speech texts, and audiovisual recordings in their historical contexts. This course is designed to help students become skillful library users, situate a research problem in context, and analyze primary historical materials. The course takes a rhetorical approach to historiography to help students reflect on how ideas of history structure knowledge as well as how research methods produce the historical information they seek to discover. Students will undertake the practice of historiography in a thorough, independent research project.