Historiography Ancient and Modern
How does “history” become “History”? This reading-intensive seminar explores what historians do when they turn the past into written narrative. For the Greeks and Romans, historiography was a genre of literature; since the nineteenth century, professional historians have worked on a spectrum from the literary to the social scientific. We will read classical and modern theoretical analyses and parts of the narratives of Herodotus (Greek) and Livy (Roman) to investigate and assess different approaches to historiography.