This course offers a methodologically pluralist introduction to historical analysis and methods in the social sciences. Social scientists working in different disciplines and different research programs have varying, sometimes competing, assumptions about what it means to be “historical.” Rather than take sides, the course surveys and compares varied self-avowedly historical contemporary research programs: new institutional economic history, comparative historical analysis, historical institutionalism, and historical sociology. As we move across these research programs, we follow cross-disciplinary contrasts and connections to see how history has been analyzed by an array of economists, political scientists, and sociologists.

In our readings we engage reflective and prescriptive pronouncements about the substantive and methodological orientation of research programs alongside concrete examples of historical work. The aim is to examine and evaluate both the framing and actual research practices of each program. Our workshop sessions will be run as seminars in which I provide an organizational outline and introductory remarks, but the bulk of class time is devoted to active discussion of the readings. Participants who are themselves planning or undertaking historical research are welcome and indeed encouraged to connect issues in the readings to choices and challenges they face in their own research. The goal of the sessions is to help workshop participants to identify, understand, and assess the varied assumptions, pronouncements, and practices of diverse contemporary research programs in historical social science, and to spur those undertaking historical research to articulate the particular modes of historical analysis and methods that best fit their own intellectual interests, aims, and intended audience.