HIST 516

Historical Time

Jay Smith

History 516 is not about history in the usual sense (i. e., things that happened in the past and what those things meant for the people who lived them), but about the many ways in which time itself has been and continues to be converted into history.  Most historians would agree that the central object of historical study is change over time—when changes occurred, why they occurred (or failed to occur), how they occurred, the speed with which they occurred, and the implications of those changes for individuals, communities, nations, or the globe.  Anyone who has constructed a timeline understands, however, that any narrative of historical change omits some “facts” and highlights others.  The choices required by the act of narrative inevitably reveal the narrator’s ingrained assumptions about the essence of history—for example, the mechanism of cause and effect, the relationship between individuals and the world around them, the function of “events,” the nature of experience, and the patterns that structure change.  This course explores some, though not all, of the many ways in which historians and other students of the past, particularly in the modern western world (since ca. 1750), have conceptualized historical time.  The chief objective of the course is to increase awareness of, and enhance students’ abilities to identify, the biases and hidden assumptions (not necessarily bad) that underlie all historical narratives and accounts of change over time.

The course is built around discussion of exemplary or provocative texts.  The readings represent a mix of theoretical or prescriptive texts (“this is the way you readers ought to think about history”) and actual case studies (“here’s what happened in history”), and though the texts are treated in a rough kind of chronological order, they are not to be understood as representing stages in historical thought since the 1700s.  Instead, students should see these various ideas about historical time as competing frameworks of thought, each with its strengths and weaknesses, each requiring close analysis of its presuppositions.  Students will turn in reaction papers and short essays, and participate in a group project that “plots” historical time in different ways.