HISTORICAL TRIPOS PART II

HISTORICAL ARGUMENT AND PRACTICE: GUIDELINES

This paper aims to provide an opportunity for candidates to reflect on broad issues of historical argument and practice arising out of their work for all three years of the Historical Tripos, but especially Part II. The paper is a means of enabling candidates to raise and discuss fundamental questions which relate their specialist knowledge to more general themes of historical inquiry and explanation. The focus of HAP, as distinct from other Part II papers, is on understanding the conceptual, historiographical and methodological dimensions of historical argument and practice. However, the paper also fundamentally requires candidates to develop their understanding of these conceptual, historiographical and methodological issues in relation to their work for their other Part II papers, for example by critically evaluating the merits of different approaches in relation to the more specific and empirical material that they encounter elsewhere in Tripos. The questions will be designed to encourage broad discussion of issues derived from, and relevant to, papers set in Part II, and will also allow candidates to draw upon their wider reading, done within and outside Parts I and II. The paper will offer a choice of questions, from which candidates will be required to answer one. There will be sixteen classes in the Michaelmas and the Lent Terms. They will be modelled on the History in Question sessions; most classes will be led by a team of two, and will start off with brief presentations by the lecturers, followed by questions and discussion with the students (usually fifteen to thirty minutes for each presentation followed by question time, for a total of ninety minutes. The subjects aim to cover a range of central issues in historiography, sources, methods and concepts. A detailed description of the classes is to be found in the Facultys Programme of General Teaching. The HAP coordinator will give an initial introduction to the nature of HAP and the content of the programme at the beginning of Michaelmas term, and there will be one further class in the Easter Term, also given by the coordinator, which will focus on How to do HAP. The reading list will be prepared from individual lists submitted by the 16 teams, each covering the area of their assigned subject, collated and harmonized by an HAP coordinator. A committee composed of the HAP coordinator (chairing) and other HAP examiners will set the paper, based on questions proposed by the HAP lecturers but extending to include questions submitted by all Part II teachers, in order that the paper should provide a fair reflection of the full range of conceptual, methodological and historiographical questions raised by Part II teaching, and enable each student to relate their specialist knowledge to more general themes of historical enquiry and explanation as the rubric requires. Students should be firmly discouraged from simply repeating the content of the lectures or summarising material and ideas taken from the reading list; their aim should be to think about the issues and problems raised by the HAP lecturers in the context of their own Part II studies. It is recognised that by drawing on their work for Part II papers, including where applicable their dissertation, students may write HAP answers that overlap to some degree with work completed for other papers. This is to be expected, given the nature of HAP, but students should avoid the substantial repetition of material drawn from their dissertation, Special Subject Long Essay or other assessed work. The HAP coordinator for the Academic Year 2009-2010 is Dr Gabriela Ramos.