Led by: Andrew Robertson (Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Course Number: AMHI 698
Semesters: All semesters
Image: Title page from Mercy Otis Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805 (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC04719)
Historiography is the study of the history and theory of historical writing. Students enrolled in this course will journey through American history guided by Professor Andrew Robertson and seven other professors (Zara Anishanslin, University of Delaware; Ned Blackhawk, Yale University; Kristopher Burrell, Hostos Community College; Sarah King, SUNY Geneseo; Lauren Santangelo, Princeton University; Nora Slonimsky, Iona College and the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies; and Wendy Wall, Binghamton University).
Students will read and discuss historical interpretations of the American past as they have changed over time in specific chronological periods: colonial/Revolutionary history, the early nineteenth century to Reconstruction, the Gilded Age to the Cold War, and the 1960s to the present. This course will also present lectures on the evolving historiographies of African American history, Native American history, and women’s history by scholars specializing in those fields. The historical methods portion of the course will teach students to interrogate primary sources and to read secondary sources with a critical eye.
Lecture 1: “Introduction to History and Historiography”
Andrew Robertson, Professor of History, Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
Andrew W. Robertson is associate professor of history at the Graduate Center and Lehman College, CUNY. From 2011 to 2017 he was deputy executive officer and then acting executive officer of the History PhD Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2017–2018, he was Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He has also served as NEH Distinguished Professor of History and as A. Lindsay O’Connor Visiting Professor of American Institutions at Colgate University.
The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.