The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

Abstract

B Bailyn taught Harvard’s introductory graduate research seminar in Early American History for the last time in the fall term of academic year 1992–1993, at the close of which he retired in compliance with Harvard’s thenmandatory policy. The following September he returned to teach an expanded version of the course, reworked as a general introduction to historical methods, under a new rubric. He would offer that seminar every fall term from 1993 through 1999, before he stopped (at age seventy-seven) to concentrate on administering and teaching The International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, the highly successful, influential post-doctoral summer institute that he launched in 1997 and superintended through 2010. Graduate courses in historical method had not customarily been taught at Harvard, where the two research seminars required of all first-year students had been thought a sufficient introduction to professional research and writing. These had varied greatly in approach and content, however, and when the English historian Mark Kishlansky became History’s director of graduate studies, he proposed a common introductory methods seminar as part of a general reform in the curriculum. Such