Historical Methods

This course provides history majors with an introduction to the techniques of the historian, including the reading of historical texts, research methods, historiography (the history of history), the various analytical frameworks used by historians today, and the writing of analytical historical prose. We will attack all of these goals by focusing on the history of one particular moment—the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and its immediate aftermath, including the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.