Thursday, January 06, 2011

Teaching History

If everything goes as planned I will start teaching history as opposed to politics at the end of January. One of the many advantages history has over disciplines like IR and various "studies" is that its basic methodology lends itself to clarity rather than obfuscation. Instead of focusing on abstract theories history anchors itself in a coherent narrative of what we think happened in the past on the basis of the best available evidence. This also makes history generally less pretentious than a lot of other academic subjects. We do not pretend to be a science like political science, sociology or economics. History is instead a craft like fine cooking or boat building.

2 comments:

Sam Tranum said...

You're sounding a bit pretentious about the craft of history, Otto.

J. Otto Pohl said...

Okay, you got me. ;-)