The history of writing, or the winner writes the chapter.

[curses]

Per liv's request, this will be the thread where I impart my new found learnin's on this online class. The first module started yesterday and is pretty much just a course overview and background on what historians actually do. There are some links to material that is outside the course itself so I will share those, otherwise it'll be thoughts and points on the lectures themselves. There are no outside reading materials, everything is provided online.

I will post again as soon as I have a chance to watch the material and take notes.

[curses]

OK, so this is a 15 week course, here's the breakdown:
The first 2/3s will be dealing with historiography, the culture of the writers and the philosophies of history writing.

The last 1/3 will be history in practice, or how to use what we've learned.

Here's a link provided to us with a huge list of history journals for your perusal.
AHA Directory of History Journals: Browse

I'm just about to chew through the following radio show here: The Hunter’s Evidence: Carlo Ginzburg | Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon

[curses]

The Hunter's Evidence is about 30 minutes long and it's an interesting discussion between Carlo Ginzburg (the so called father of microhistory), David Kertzer, author of Amalia’s Tale, and Christopher Lydon, an instructor.

What fascinates me the most about micro history (or writing history on a village level as Ginzburg puts it) is how much more accessible it becomes to those of us who are more casual historians. I love how it puts a face to an otherwise seemingly sterile event.

At one point Kertzer talks about a book review in a London paper and how it attacks him for suppositions like "Amalia gets up from the table and opens the door." At what point does analytical history like this become fiction? Should authors be allowed to flesh out people's lives that they've taken from court documents and medical records, or is that the arena for historical fiction?

This is a quote from the page of the radio program:

The triptych of saints over the altar of micro-history, as Carlo Ginzburg recounts, represent Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud and Giovanni Morelli, the 19th Century art historian and sleuth. The trick, as Freud put it, is to divine “secret and concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observations.” The skill required (Ginzburg’s words again) is “the flexible and rigorous insight of a lover or a horse trader or a card shark.”

They use the three saints (love that phrasing) to illustrate their different investigative methodologies and how they would be applied to history. That was a bit difficult to follow as I got a slew of email in and had to pause and restart and it screwed up my flow.

They sum up by explaining the benefits of putting history under the microscope. Ginzburg comments at the beginning that the micro in microhistory should also be considered putting things under a microscope as well as its traditional meaning being focused on the peasants and working class, the every day and the mundane.