HIST 217-01, The Age of Extremes: European Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century, Fall 2009

Abstract

Successful historians must be able to master a specific body of factual knowledge, so I will stress learning important terms and key concepts. How-ever, historians also practice a way of thinking about and ana-lyzing that factual information in order to make sense of what it means. We don‟t simply memorize facts. Rather we try to understand the relationships between those facts and the larger flow of history. There-fore, this course will also intro-duce you to history as a way of thinking so that you can devel-op your analytical and histori-cal thinking skills. I will ask you to engage in the kind of discussion that historians have with one another on a regular basis -- asking questions, ana-lyzing documents, and inter-preting events within their his-torical contexts.