This is a joint course for PhD students, which allows MA students to enroll in as well but they will get substantially less course assignments and subject to much lower academic requirement in terms of volumes of readings and length and depth of their writing and analysis. All PhD students will have to take qualifying exam in the area this course covered in addition to passing this course. In this course, students will learn about the historiography of the traditional and modern West, mainly Western historians’ approaches to and methods in studying the human past, so that they would be equipped with the updated historiography and enabled to find a good topic and appropriate research method for their master and doctoral thesis, while well prepared for the sequent course for advanced writing in the next semester. Another objective of this course is to let students get familiar with the first-class research and the existing literature in the field of modern Chinese history, to see how the approach of a historian could fundamentally affect his/her research and writing.

CILO-1: Familiarize with select works of recent scholarship, and the types of materials and methodologies used in constructing these books and enhance the skills needed by research scholars: critical reading, thinking, and writing. CILO-2: Develop skills, including how to ask questions of, accurately evaluate, and effectively synthesize primary and secondary historical writings. CILO-3: Communicate arguments effectively. CILO-4: Identify the historical and social contexts that created diversity in past and present human cultures.