Summer Reading: Understanding Historical Theory (Quickly)
Heather Cox Richardson As the school year winds to a close, incoming graduate students have been asking me what they should read to prepare for the fall. That question has an obvious answer, and the answer brings up what strikes me as an oddity in the way we handle graduate education in history. Boston Public Library. Photo by Randall Stephens. It has always seemed to me bizarre that we treat graduate education as if it has little connection to undergraduate studies. A brilliant undergrad will understand facts, argument, and, with luck, historiography, as well as how to write. But one of the first things that brilliant undergrad will do in graduate school is to take a seminar in historical theory, where s/he’s supposed to converse intelligently about historical theories of which s/he has never heard. First year grad students are lost and frightened. (Except for that One Guy who throws around Foucault's name like they're long-time tennis partners.) My antidote to tha...