On June 29, 2023, Professor Anne Foster of Indiana State University posted a query on Twitter: “For all the #twitterstorians , what’s your favorite methodology article? Particularly interested in ones that helped you “get it” in grad school. Looking for inspiration/readings for my “intro to grad study of history” class.”

Having received dozens of helpful suggestions, she compiled them in a bibliography, which she has graciously permitted me to reproduce here:

Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History (originally published 1942).

Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft (originally published 1949).

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021).

Chaudhuri, Nupur, et al., eds. Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (2010).

Corbin, Alain (trans by Arthur Goldhammer). Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France (Columbia, 2001).

Cronin, William. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, 4 (1992) 1347-1376.

Cummings, Bruce, “’Revising Postrevisionism’ or, the Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 17, 4 (1993) 539-560.

Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (originally published 1984).

Dumit, Joseph, “Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time,” Cultural Anthropology 29, 2 (2014).

Farge, Arlette. The Allure of the Archives (Yale University Press, 2013). Originally published in French in 1989.

Ferguson, Thomas, “From Normalcy to the New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization 38, 1 (Winter 1984) 41-94.

Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Fyfe, Paul. “An Archeology of Victorian Newspapers,” Victorian Periodicals Review 49, 4 (2016) 546-577.

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980).

Gleason, Mona, “Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth and Education,” History of Education 45, 4 (2016) 446-459.

Hartman, Saidiya, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe (June 2008) 1-14.

Holt, Thomas C., “Marking: Race, Race-Making and the Writing of History, American Historical Review 100, 1 (February 1995) 1-21.

Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Virginia, 1999).

Kramer, Paul A. “What is your problem?: Dissertations, Bonfires and Wonder-Cabinets,
https://www.paulkrameronline.com/what-is-your-problem-dissertations-bonfires-and-wonder-cabinets/

Laite, Julia. “The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age,” Journal of Social History 53, 4 (2020) 963-989.

Lindemann, Mary, “Slow History,” American Historical Review 126, 1 (March 2021) 1-18.

Miller, Susan A., “Assent as Agency in the Early Years of the Children of the American Revolution,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, 1 (2016) 48-65.

Mullen, Patrick B. “Collaborative Research Reconsidered,” Journal of Folklore Research 37, 2/3 (2000) 207-214.

Nandy, Ashis. “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory 34, 2 (1995) 44-66.

Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews (January 1971).

O’Brien, Patrick Karl, “Intercontinental Trade and the Development of the Third World since the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 8, 1 (1997) 75-133.

Palmer, R.R. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton, 2005).

Panofsky, Erwin. “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) 295-320.

Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, 1 (1969) 3-53.

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge, 1993).

Truillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 2015).

Twinam, Ann. Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (2015).

Vitalis, Robert, “The Past is Another Country,” in Perecman, Ellen and Sara R. Curran, eds. A Handbook for Social Science Field Research (2006) 5-20.

Wimmer, Andrea and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology,” The International Migration Review 37, 3 (2003) 576-610.