LFU:online

Acquisition of competences and a critical attitude in dealing with historical sources and accounts of modern history as well as the ability to present the attained knowledge in oral and written form

Documents, in which historical actors expressed (or pretended to express) their views and motives for action, provide an illuminating access to the subjective appropriation of structures and processes and to the latters’ social embeddedness. Among other things, this offers the opportunity to examine macro-theses through the experience of contemporaries. In the tutorial we will acquire some theoretical and methodical basics of research on ego-documents and apply them to sources from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

Reading, analysis and discussion of sources and secondary literature; group work; short presentations by students

Regular and active participation; short presentation or essay; small written exam at the end of term

Winfried Schulze (ed.), Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte, Berlin 1996; Kaspar von Greyerz / Hans Medick / Patrice Veit (eds.), Von der dargestellten Person zum erinnerten Ich. Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500-1850), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2001; Eckart Henning, Selbstzeugnisse. Quellenwert und Quellenkritik, Berlin 2012

Willingness to read English texts is expected.