DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY –  Fall 2025

HIST*1050*03 – Invitation to History

Course Format: 2 * 1.5 hour seminars per week

------------------------------------------------------------------

Course Synopsis

This course introduces students to the basics of the historian's craft, including interpreting primary sources, locating and critically analyzing secondary sources, and writing for history.

Each course in a semester focuses on a specific topic: this seminar explores tourism and travel history, with a focus on Scotland, using historical postcards as a principal primary source base.

Learning Outcomes

Through engagement with primary and secondary source material, by the end of this course you will be able to:

1. critically interpret the nature of sources generated about, and preserved to document, the past; the hierarchies of value in which they are placed; the ways in which they are framed as ‘useful’ and ‘useless’; and ways we generate traces of our own lives, wittingly and unwittingly;
2. evaluate the transience of things – and the ways in which that transience can be challenged through new thinking about historical research and object value.
3. develop communication skills, and think reflexively about your own arguments as you assess those to which you are introduced in readings and class presentations; and
4. apply research skills based on the continuous evaluation of specific materials in collaborative dynamic work.

Presentation skills will be continuously employed through in-class small-group exercises, and through the semester-long development of final research projects, which will be exhibited and discussed within the class.

Methods of Evaluation and Weights

Texts and/or Resources Required:

All readings are available online.

Please note:  This is a preliminary web course description only.  The department reserves the right to change without notice any information in this description.  The final, binding course outline will be distributed in the first class of the semester.