Course Description
HIS2050 is the course where a history student stops reading about history and starts doing it. The Statewide Course Numbering System titles it The Historian's Craft and describes it in one sentence with no wasted words: "In this course, students will learn how to conduct primary source historical research, and turn their research findings into a high-quality paper based on professional history standards." There is no statewide prerequisite.
Three Florida public universities carry it, all at 3 credits: Florida State under the statewide title, Florida Atlantic as Writing History, and the University of West Florida as Explore History. All three are recognisably the same course — a methods and research-writing course at the 2000 level.
⚠⚠⚠ But one thing about this course differs between institutions in a way that costs students a term, and it is invisible from the title, the description and the credit value: whether the course satisfies Florida's GORDON RULE writing requirement. The statewide records show that Florida Atlantic and Florida State both carry the Gordon Rule writing designation on this number and the University of West Florida does not — UWF instead designates it as a social science general-education course. Read the *Special Information* section below before you use this course to fill a requirement.
⚠ What the course actually asks of you is unlike the survey courses that precede it. A survey course asks you to learn what happened. This one asks you to find out — to work with documents nobody has interpreted for you, decide what they can and cannot support, and write a claim you can defend. The characteristic shock is discovering that primary sources do not answer the question you brought to them, and that the historian's real work is reformulating the question to fit the evidence that survives.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Distinguish primary from secondary sources, and explain why the same document can be either depending on the question asked.
- Formulate a researchable historical question — narrow enough to answer from available evidence, large enough to matter.
- Conduct a literature review and situate a question within existing scholarship; explain what historiography is and why it is not a summary of facts.
- ⚠ Locate primary sources — archives, digital collections, newspapers, government records, manuscripts, oral histories — and assess what has and has not survived.
- Apply source criticism: authorship, audience, purpose, provenance, internal consistency, and corroboration.
- ⚠⚠ Identify bias, silence and absence in the record, and reason about whose voices the surviving documents do not contain.
- Construct a historical argument from evidence, with a thesis that could in principle be wrong.
- Use evidence honestly — representative quotation, no cherry-picking, and explicit acknowledgement of counter-evidence.
- ⚠ Apply Chicago-style footnote citation correctly, including primary sources, archival collections and digital objects.
- Distinguish and avoid presentism, teleology, anachronism and the post hoc fallacy in historical reasoning.
- Write, revise and complete a substantial research paper to a professional standard.
- ⚠ Give and take peer critique, and revise substantively rather than cosmetically.
- Apply research ethics — attribution, plagiarism, the treatment of sensitive material, and the ethics of writing about the dead and their descendants.
Optional Outcomes
- Work in a physical archive with finding aids, request procedures and handling rules.
- Conduct an oral history interview, with consent, release and transcription.
- Use digital history methods — text mining, mapping, databases, digital exhibits.
- Read palaeography or handwritten manuscript material.
- Present research orally or at an undergraduate research conference.
- Address public history — museums, preservation, memory and commemoration.
- Address quantitative or material-culture evidence.
- Prepare a prospectus for a later capstone or thesis.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- What history is as a discipline — and how it differs from the past itself, from memory, and from heritage.
- Sources — primary and secondary, the categories of primary evidence, and ⚠ the fact that the distinction depends on the question, not on the document's age.
- Finding sources — catalogues, finding aids, databases, digitised collections, interlibrary loan.
- Evaluating sources — external and internal criticism, provenance, corroboration, forgery.
- ⚠ The archive itself as a historical artefact — what was collected, by whom, and what that shapes.
- Historiography — schools and turns (political, social, cultural, transnational), and how interpretations of the same events change.
- Asking a question — scope, feasibility, significance, and narrowing without trivialising.
- Argument and evidence — thesis construction, evidence selection, counter-argument, and the limits of what the sources support.
- Historical fallacies — presentism, teleology, anachronism, the single-cause explanation.
- Writing — structure, narrative and analysis, handling quotation, prose clarity.
- Citation — Chicago footnotes and bibliography; ⚠ how to cite an archival box, a folder, a newspaper, a database record and a digital image.
- Revision and peer review — drafting as a process rather than an event.
- Ethics and integrity — plagiarism, fabrication, and responsibility toward subjects.
Optional Topics
- Archive visit and hands-on manuscript work.
- Oral history method and ethics.
- Digital history — mapping, text analysis, exhibit building.
- Quantitative and material evidence.
- Public history, memory and commemoration.
- Graduate school and the profession.
- Conference presentation and publication.
Resources & Tools
- A Short Guide to Writing about History by Richard Marius and Melvin Page — the most widely assigned, and genuinely short.
- From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods by Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier — the stronger methods treatment, good on source criticism.
- Going to the Sources by Anthony Brundage, and The Craft of Research (Booth, Colomb and Williams) — the latter is not a history book and is the best single book on asking a researchable question.
- Telling the Truth About History (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob) or E. H. Carr's What Is History? where the course takes a historiographical turn.
- ⚠ The Chicago Manual of Style is the discipline's citation standard, and the free Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide from the University of Chicago Press covers almost everything an undergraduate needs. Learn footnotes; history does not use parenthetical citation.
- ⚠⚠ Free primary-source collections, and there are more than a student can use:
- Library of Congress digital collections and Chronicling America (digitised newspapers, searchable, free).
- National Archives catalog, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, Digital Public Library of America.
- ⚠⚠ Florida-specific and excellent: the Florida Memory project from the State Library and Archives of Florida — photographs, documents, maps, audio, all free and citable. The Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Publication of Archival Library and Museum Materials (PALMM) collections from the state universities. The State Archives in Tallahassee holds territorial, Civil War, Reconstruction, Seminole, railroad, land-boom and civil-rights-era records.
- ⚠ Your own institution's special collections — every Florida public university has them, and an undergraduate can use them. Ask a special-collections librarian: it is their job and they are almost always glad to be asked.
- Zotero — free reference manager with good Chicago support. ⚠ Start using it in this course, not in your final year; retro-fitting a bibliography is a waste of a weekend.
- ⚠ Florida is an unusually good place to do original undergraduate research: Spanish colonial records, territorial and statehood documents, Civil War and Reconstruction material, the Seminole Wars, railroad and land-boom papers, the citrus and cattle economies, Cuban and Caribbean migration, civil-rights-era records, and the space programme. Much of it is digitised, and a good deal of it is under-studied.
Career Pathways
- ⚠ Be clear-eyed about this one: the skills transfer far more widely than the subject. What this course builds — finding evidence, judging its reliability, constructing a defensible argument, and writing it clearly — is the core of a large number of jobs, few of which have "historian" in the title.
- Secondary Social Studies Teacher (SOC 25-2031) — ⚠ the largest single destination for Florida history graduates, with a teaching qualification and the FTCE.
- Archivist (SOC 25-4011), Curator (SOC 25-4012), Museum Technician (SOC 25-4013) — generally requiring a master's; ⚠ this course is the first real taste of the work.
- Librarian (SOC 25-4022) via an MLIS, and historic preservation roles.
- Lawyer (SOC 23-1011) — ⚠⚠ history is one of the strongest pre-law majors, and this course is why: reading documents closely, arguing from evidence, and writing to persuade is legal work in miniature.
- Writer, Editor, Technical Writer (SOC 27-3043, 27-3041, 27-3042), Journalist (SOC 27-3023).
- Intelligence, policy and government analysis (SOC 19-3094 political scientists, 13-1111 management analysts) — source evaluation is the shared skill.
- Historian (SOC 19-3093) — a genuinely small category, mostly requiring a PhD; ⚠ say this plainly rather than implying otherwise.
- Florida employers and institutions: the Division of Historical Resources and State Archives (Tallahassee), the Florida Historical Society, the county historical societies and museums, St. Augustine's heritage organisations, the National Park Service sites (Castillo de San Marcos, Fort Matanzas, De Soto, Dry Tortugas), Mission San Luis, the Ringling and Vizcaya, the university special collections, and the 67 school districts.
Special Information
⚠⚠⚠ The Gordon Rule designation is NOT the same at all three institutions, and this is the thing to check first
Florida's Gordon Rule (State Board of Education Rule 6A-10.030) requires designated writing-intensive coursework and designated mathematics coursework for an associate or baccalaureate degree. ⚠⚠ A grade of C or higher is required for a Gordon Rule course to count — a C-minus does not satisfy it at most institutions, which is stricter than the ordinary passing standard and is a common and expensive trap.
⚠⚠⚠ The designation is made by the institution, not by the course number — and `HIS2050` is the cleanest demonstration of that in this catalog. The statewide records carry the designation flags per institution, and for this number they differ:
| Institution | Its title | Gordon Rule? | General-education designation |
|---|
| Florida Atlantic University | Writing History | ✅ yes — writing | communication |
| Florida State University | The Historian's Craft | ✅ yes — writing | — |
| University of West Florida | Explore History | ❌ no | social science |
⚠⚠ So the same number, at the same level, with the same credits, teaching the same research-writing course, satisfies the writing requirement at two of these institutions and a social-science requirement at the third. The consequences are concrete and run both ways:
- ⚠ A UWF student who takes this course expecting to clear a Gordon Rule writing requirement has not cleared it, and will need another designated course.
- ⚠ An FAU or FSU student who takes it expecting a social-science general-education credit may not get that either.
- ⚠⚠ Transferring in is the worst case. Designation normally travels within the Florida public system, but a course that was not designated at the sending institution has nothing to carry, and a course that was designated may be evaluated against the receiving institution's own list. Ask the receiving registrar in writing, before you register.
The practical rule: never choose a course to satisfy a Gordon Rule or general-education requirement on the strength of its number. Check your own institution's designated list for the term you are enrolling in. ⚠ It is a two-minute check that has cost students an extra course more often than almost anything else in this catalog.
Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|
| Florida Atlantic University | Writing History | 3 | not published |
| University of West Florida | Explore History | 3 | not published |
| Florida State University | The Historian's Craft | 3 | not published |
All three are State University System institutions at 3 credits — ✅ no credit divergence, and the statewide transferability note is "guaranteed transfer to institution offering same course."
The titles differ but do not signal a different subject, which is worth saying since so many numbers in this catalog do:
- FSU "The Historian's Craft" matches the statewide title exactly.
- FAU "Writing History" names the deliverable — ⚠ and it is the title most honest about where the effort goes, which is consistent with its Gordon Rule writing designation.
- UWF "Explore History" is the broadest of the three. ⚠ Combined with its social-science rather than writing designation, it is the one where a student should confirm that a substantial research paper is actually the central assessment — that is what the statewide definition describes, and it is the whole value of the course.
⚠ The 45 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived — the Florida convention for a 3-credit lecture course. No institution publishes an hour figure. ⚠ The real time commitment is dominated by research and drafting done outside class, and in a course built around one substantial paper the scheduled hours describe the commitment poorly.
⚠ A 2000-level methods course is an unusual and good idea — take it early
⚠⚠ Most history programmes place their methods course at the 3000 or 4000 level, and several Florida institutions number this material as an upper-division course. Putting it at the 2000 level is a deliberate choice, and it is the better one: a student who learns to find, judge and cite primary sources in the second year writes better papers in every subsequent course.
⚠ The practical advice follows directly: take it as early as your programme allows, not as late. Students who leave methods until the year they write a capstone learn the technique and apply it once. Taken early, it improves four semesters of work.
⚠ Note also that it is offered for dual enrolment under the statewide record, so a high-school student may meet it — which makes the Gordon Rule point above matter even earlier.
Position, workload, and the failure mode
No statewide prerequisite. Institutions generally expect one or two survey courses first — a student needs some historical content to have a question about. ⚠ It is usually required for the history major and frequently restricted to majors and minors; check before planning a term around it.
Budget eight to ten hours a week, and ⚠ expect it to be badly distributed. The reading load is moderate; the paper is not. Source availability is the schedule risk nobody plans for — an archival request, an interlibrary loan or a digitisation request takes weeks, and a question that depends on an unavailable source has to be changed.
⚠⚠ The characteristic failure is not bad writing. It is choosing a question too large for the evidence and the term. "The causes of the Civil War" is a career; "how a single Florida county newspaper reported secession in 1860–61" is a paper, and a better one. Narrow ruthlessly and early, and choose a question whose sources you have already held in your hands or opened on a screen.
⚠ The second failure is treating footnotes as decoration. In history the citation is part of the argument — it is how a reader checks you. A paper whose footnotes cannot be followed back to the evidence has not made a historical argument, however well it reads.
AI Integration
⚠⚠ History is the discipline where these tools fail most characteristically, and the failure has a name the course will teach you: FABRICATION. That coincidence makes this a better teaching example than a generic integrity warning.
Genuinely useful: explaining an unfamiliar historical context or a historiographical school; suggesting search terms and archives to try; summarising a long secondary work to decide whether to read it; explaining Chicago citation form for an awkward source type; transcribing or cleaning up your own notes; generating counter-arguments to test a thesis; and tightening prose in revision.
⚠⚠ Where it fails, and the first two are disqualifying for this course's central task:
- ⚠⚠⚠ It invents sources, and it invents them beautifully. Plausible authors, plausible titles, plausible journals, plausible page numbers, plausible archival box and folder numbers. This is the single most documented failure mode of these tools and history is where it does the most damage, because a fabricated citation in a research paper is indistinguishable from academic fraud in its effect. ⚠ Every citation must be one you personally opened. Not "verified as probably real" — opened.
- ⚠⚠⚠ It cannot read the archive, and the archive is the assignment. The statewide definition of this course is primary source research. A model has not opened the folder; it has read text about the period. An account of a document assembled from secondary discussion of that document is precisely not primary-source research, and an instructor who has read the collection will know.
- ⚠⚠ It is presentist by construction. Trained overwhelmingly on recent text, it explains the past in current categories and current moral vocabulary — which is the named fallacy this course exists to correct. The generated answer is a fluent specimen of the error on the syllabus.
- ⚠ It reproduces the historiography of the corpus, not the current field. Interpretations that scholarship has revised or abandoned are abundant in older text, so they are abundant in the output. Ask it what historians now think and you get what historians used to think.
- ⚠ It smooths over silence. Asked about groups the record barely documents, it produces confident narrative where the honest answer is that the sources are thin, partial, or written by someone else entirely. Reasoning about absence is one of this course's hardest and most important skills, and the tool does the opposite.
- Dates, names and quotations drift — subtly, and in the details a historian is graded on.
⚠ The framing worth carrying out of the course: a historian's authority rests entirely on the traceability of their evidence. That is what footnotes are for. Anything you cannot trace, you cannot claim — and that single rule disposes of the whole fabrication problem, which is why the discipline's oldest convention turns out to be its best defence against its newest hazard.
Academic integrity: read your syllabus, and expect history faculty to be among the most explicit and least flexible on this, for the reasons above. ⚠ Where the assessment is a primary-source research paper, the research is the graded work, and a bibliography that cannot be walked back to real documents fails on the discipline's own terms before any policy is consulted.