Historiography Today through the Lens of Recent Textbooks

If we are going to be able to gain some perspective into what is going on in how the history of historical writing is being taught to undergraduates, we need some sense of what is being included in recent history textbooks. There are a few historiography textbooks that continue to be reprinted and circulate (Breisach, Cheng, Budd, Hoefferle, etc) and are handy to use in the classroom. But there are also historian's craft textbooks (e.g., Cullen, Tosh, Storey, Popkin and so forth) that are constantly updated and often feature a section on historiography. Surveying these textbooks will give insight into how we value and teach the history of historical writing. Given time constraints, it is likely that historiography is crammed into undergraduate methods courses and we set up our courses as if we are creating a greatest hits playlist that gets as quickly as possible to the Berlin, where Ranke reigned, and culminates in present practice. Students wonder why on earth we are taking valuable time in a methods course away from pressing topics, such as how to find sources or conduct a review of scholarly literature for their research papers. Even learning Turabian can strike a student as more useful than figuring out why or what they should learn from the nearly men such as Villani, Schiller, Michelet, or Carlyle who never quite qualified as "real historians". Perhaps our very approach to teaching the history of historical writing can appear antiquarian and reinforces student bewilderment and boredom with the topic. I explore these textbooks to ascertain not so much the content but the reasons provided for why an undergraduate student should study historiography. This will lay the groundwork for my two co-panelists who will present on two innovative approaches to teaching history undergraduate students the history of historical writing.