Our primary goal in this course is to come to some conclusions about the current state of the historical profession-about the nature and practice of history in an era often dominated by postmodern cynicism-and to situate the current "crisis" of history in its broader historical context. We will begin our explorations by discussing the beliefs and writings of several nineteenth-century historians (Thomas Babington Macaulay, Karl Marx, and Leopold von Ranke), those titans of the past who believed that historical "truth" existed and could, with skill and practice, be discovered. Next we will explore the rise of the new social history and the new cultural history, beginning in the 1960s, and examine the extent to which the practitioners of these subfields differed in their assumptions and methodological approaches to the past from their nineteenth-century predecessors. Finally, we will consider the work of more recent literary theorists and metahistorians who have refuted historians' claims to be able to capture the "truth" of the past and who have put forward a very different agenda for the practice of history. In general, we will be less concerned with "the past" than with what historians do with "the past." Consequently, we will focus almost wholly on epistemological issues, surveying various issues in the philosophy of history during the last 175 years. Evaluation will be based on a short position paper ( "What is History?"), on-going participation in class discussion, two 10-page interpretive essays, and a take-home final exam. Enrollment limited. Restricted to History majors.