HIS 1113 - Personal Trauma and the Record

Credits: 2
Through reading and analyzing various types of ego documents (testimonies, confessions, memoirs and autobiographies), we will explore what kind of historical sources ego documents are. Employing literary, psychological, linguistic, and historical methods as well as exploring the historical and social historical contexts of the documents, we will assess how reliable the narratives are and specify what sort of connections exist between individual, historical and social historical narratives. Ego documents that have been treated with condescension by scholars are the subjects of heated debates recently, as their reliability and usefulness for historical research are often questioned. As an interdisciplinary course that requires no previous knowledge of the disciplines involved, it also provides a methodological basis for future interdisciplinary research.
This course is offered at the Budapest campus.
McDaniel Plan: January Term