Historiography & Historical Practice This course focuses on US
history to examine current permutations of historiographical
interests, practices, and methodologies. Over the last few
decades, US history has been a particularly fertile ground for
rethinking the historical, although many of these topics are
applicable to the study of other nations and societies. American
history has been largely rewritten by a generation of scholars
who experienced the 1960s and its aftermath and have viewed
America�s past as a field of inquiry and contest of great
political urgency. Identity politics, the culture wars, and
other forms of organization and debate have also endowed history
with unprecedented public resonance in a culture that has been
notoriously amnesiac. We explore major trends and controversies
in American historiography, the multicultural moment in
historical studies, the emergence of race and gender as cardinal
categories of historical analysis, the enormous preoccupation
with popular culture, the impact of