What is History?
Leader
TBC
Cohort
Max 12 Students
Timing
Lunchtimes (TBC)
Course Overview
What does it mean to study the past — and how do historians decide what counts as evidence, truth, or interpretation? This short seminar course uses John Arnold’s History: A Very Short Introduction as a guide to some of the discipline’s most fascinating and challenging questions, inviting students to explore history not simply as a body of knowledge, but as an active process of debate, analysis, and argument.
Across seven discussion-based seminars, students will engage with striking case studies drawn from Arnold’s book — from medieval murder and ancient historiography to archives, migration, cultural difference, and the problem of historical truth. Along the way, the course will explore how historians work with sources, interpret silences, construct narratives, and explain change over time.
Rather than presenting history as a fixed record of “what happened”, the course encourages students to see it as a dynamic and contested discipline: one shaped by evidence, perspective, and the questions we ask of the past. It is designed for curious students who enjoy discussion, big ideas, and the challenge of thinking critically about how knowledge of the past is created.
Key Benefits
- Develop critical thinking about historical knowledge
- Understand how history is written and contested
- Engage directly with a leading historical text
- Strengthen discussion and argumentation skills
- Interrogate the relationship between past and present
Course Structure
This seminar-style course is built around John Arnold’s History: A Very Short Introduction, with each session centred on a single chapter of the book and the major historical questions it raises. Across seven seminars, students will explore how historians use evidence, construct arguments, interpret conflicting sources, and debate the meaning of the past.
Designed to be discussion-led and intellectually engaging, the course encourages active participation through close reading, debate, and collaborative analysis. Students will encounter gripping case studies — from medieval murder and heresy to an explosion in an archive, migration, civil war, and a massacre of cats – all the while engaging with the problem of historical truth and developing the confidence to question assumptions, test interpretations, and think more deeply about what history is and why it matters.
Indicative Session Outline
Session 1: Murder, Heresy, and the Historian’s Craft
Can a medieval murder help us answer the question: what is history?
Session 2: From Herodotus to the Renaissance — How Did History Begin?
Why did ancient historians write about dolphins, dreams, and empires in the same breath?
Session 3: Truth, Archives, and the Dream of Objectivity
Can historians ever tell us “how it really was”?
Session 4: Lost Voices, Silent Archives
What can historians know when the sources are fragmentary, partial, or silent?
Session 5: Small Stories, Big Histories
How can one life illuminate a civil war, a migration, or an entire society?
Session 6: Is the Past a Foreign Country?
How does a massacre of cats illuminate how people in the past can seem baffling — or disturbingly familiar?
Session 7: The Telling of Truth
If history is always a story, what makes it true?