HISTORY UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENTAL SEMINARS
The History Department does not seek to make professional historians of undergraduates who major in history, but it does attempt to acquaint them with the discipline of history in the course of increasing their knowledge of the past. The senior essay enables students to research and write some history themselves. The history departmental seminars, two of which must be completed by each major, provide vital preparation for this. For the history majors enrolled in a seminar, it constitutes the primary curricular commitment of the term.
Our departmental seminars are more than merely small classes in which students have an opportunity for extensive discussion. They represent the most challenging teaching assignment in the department, since they must perform a number of tasks simultaneously. Our departmental seminars provides students with a deeper knowledge of an area of the past than can be achieved in a lecture course. But at the same time it should familiarize the students with the tools of the historian and with how professional historians use those tools. These include, at a minimum, the following:
The substantial paper(s) written in each departmental seminar should engage original source materials in some substantial form; without this engagement, a student could approach a senior essay with no experience in the frequently quixotic, sometimes difficult, task of using original sources. A seminar paper certainly can engage historiographical and interpretative issues, but a seminar paper that did so without engaging primary sources in some substantial if limited way would shortchange students preparing directly and subtly to write senior essays.
1. Bibliography. Seminar instructors should make certain that students learn how to locate all publications relevant to the field under examination. The Reference Department of Sterling Library provides tours which can, by prior arrangement, be oriented to the subject matter of a particular seminar. In addition exercises in the use of bibliographical finding aids are advisable.
2. Historiography. History seminars should convey to students the nature of historical dialogue and sense of how historical knowledge is advanced through disciplined debate among historians. It is therefore desirable to expose students frequently to conflicting, or at least differing, interpretations of relevant topics. It is also essential to make students aware of the various genres of historical writing - journal research articles, reviews, monographs, syntheses, surveys - and of their functions. In some seminars a historiographical essay will be an appropriate assignment.
3. Sources. It is vital that seminar participants learn to distinguish among the various kinds of source materials and their relative value. Since they will be seeking senior essay topics in the field of their seminars, it is important to provide them with as much information as possible about primary source materials available at Yale.
4. Philosophy of History. History seminars provide the only opportunity most majors have to encounter theoretical approaches to the study and writing of history. The Department prescribes no particular works of this sort, so that each seminar instructor is free to select those that seem most illuminating. Experience indicates that such works are most fruitfully discussed toward the end of a seminar, when the participants have a common knowledge of a sizable body of historical scholarship.
5. Writing History. For most students, our departmental seminars provide the first opportunity to write more than short, derivative syntheses based on secondary sources. They learn that it’s not enough to read several publications on a topic and summarize the points of agreement among these.
They find out what is involved in writing research papers and critical historiographical essays that identify the differences as well as the similarities in secondary work. Each seminar participant should write at least 20 to 25 pages of finished, polished prose. In some seminars, one long paper will be appropriate; in others, two or more shorter papers will be preferable. Optimally, these papers will be revised versions of preliminary drafts subjected to critical scrutiny by the instructor.