Class started with my professor asking if any of us watched the debate between Harris and Trump, or at least saw parts of it. He made fun of the whole “immigrants are eating your pets” thing Trump did and then talked about Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala, which led into Elon Musk’s tweet about giving her a child. Then the lecture actually began.

We talked more about what history does: it is supposed to denaturalize the present—things don’t have to be a certain way. History is supposed to provide a collective identity to people and provide a moral check with regard to leaders. As in force leaders to think about posterity. History teaches manny skills such as critical thinking, research, writing, and communication. It can also train empathy and the want to document everything. We looked back at our previous lecture going over the species of history and he wanted to bring up the differences between National and International History as stories that inform collective identity: “are we Canadians or members of the same species?”

Next was just an overview as to what Historiography is, which I guess I will repeat here for the sake of filling this post out a bit more: it is a critical assessment as to how historians try to construct the past; it deals with the methods historians use to gather, analyze, and communicate the data; and it is the history of history, the methods used by past historians and how that has evolved over time.

Then we talked about events in history (old and recent) with differing perspectives between historians, many examples were given but I will list the relevant ones:

The Cold War — Americans/the West have a very different view to it compared to the Soviets.

The Space Race — which is related to the Cold War but more about who won.

Soviet Gulags — my professor gave this one and talked about how American historians compared the gulags to Auschwitz’s while Soviets claimed the gulags were non-brutal rehabilitation centres for people who lost their way. After the archives were open to westerners it was revealed that the Soviets “romanticized” the gulags but they were also not nearly as bad as westerners claimed. I honestly don’t really trust his perspective on the gulags, because even though he seems to be focused on imperialism and incarceration (not normal prisons, but concentration camps) heed doesn’t know any Easter European language to read the archives, I feel like he gets most of his information from English speaking historians. I also don’t know a Eastern European language (although its on my list to learn) but I do try to get my information from people who actually lived in the USSR or know the language/culture. Whatever.

The controversy over North Korean athletes — the difference between people claiming that athletes are killed in the DPRK while dissidents claim they are well regarded back home. My professor chimed in that he would like to learn more about that and while it wouldn’t change his mind on the DPRK being a totalitarian dictatorship, it’s probably not killing off its athletes.

Two readings were assigned for this class, one was by Kim Wagner about the Indian Uprising of 1857, and the other was by Kühne (forgot the first name) about Colonialism and the Holocaust. The Wagner paper talked about various perspectives over the events of 1857 and the disparity between them, was it a mutiny or a war of independence. Wagner even promotes his own book in the paper which is weird but kind of hilarious. The Kühne paper talked about the various arguments lining European colonialism to the Holocaust, I don’t really remember what he said but I got the vibe that he didn’t approve of the idea of colonialism being a major drive for the actions during the Holocaust. I don’t know if Kühne has a chip on his shoulder but I would have to read it again to come to a proper conclusion. Or at least I’ll ask my professor about it.

Why did we read those articles? So we become more familiar with the study of Historiography and how it’s done.

That was school, and I got a hair cut too, so thats cool. When I got home I was hoping to do some textbook reading (my Early Europe class assigns so many pages…) but my back was hurting so bad (I had to stand the whole bus ride home with a heavy backpack) and there was so much mail for me to go through. One of the letters was actually from my school and it was interesting, I might post about it once I figure out more details.