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I just finished a
graduate course in Historical Methods at Arizona State University online.
The week before the course started, I presented a paper at the American
Historical Association annual meeting. My advisor was also there
presenting a paper on historic representations of the Virgin Mary in Peruvian
culture. After the conference a journalist from ASU interviewed me for an
article in ASU
Now. (<---Click to read that article). I'm honored to be
chosen to promote the M.A. in history program at ASU online, but my goal is not
to get another degree as the journalist assumed. I enrolled in the ASU
program in order to learn historical methods to improve my writing as a
historian. The course I took was an overview of the historical
methods used by Western European historians since 500 BC. I discovered
that historical methods are not any different from those used in educational or
theological research and they developed in much the same way over the
years. What I am looking for is a new theoretical framework for
historical research that builds on a postmodern understanding of space and
time, feminist critical method and contemporary mystical perspectives of the
nature of God and divine intervention in human history. Such a method
does not seem to exist yet, and I want to develop this idea further. We
read five full-length texts and a dozen or so 30-60 page journal articles
dealing with historical methods from various perspectives. The basic text
for the course was The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions
in the Study of History, 6th edition by John Tosh. The introductory
lecture covered the early years of history from
Herodotus to Saint Augustine up to Hegel and Ranke, the major historians of the
modern era. Over the course of eight weeks we studied postmodern theories
addressing issues of race, culture and gender and questioned the possibility
of pure objectivity in the search for the truth. There were about thirty
people in the course, men and women from all over the country. We
contributed comments to the community forum, participated in weekly discussion
boards and submitted observations and reflections on the readings. The
course helped me to grow in understanding how historians have thought about the
craft of writing history over the centuries, and it gave me some new ideas
about selection and interpretation of source material. Although I will not be
continuing on to get the M.A. in history at ASU, I would definitely
recommend the program to anyone seeking a graduate degree. In the
following posts I will share some highlights from the course I took and excerpts
from my reflections.
