What is History? | Introduction

This fall, I’m launching a new Substack series: Rethinking History. It grows out of one of our most popular CORE courses, What Is History?, which I have the privilege of teaching. Each post will open a window onto the debates we take up in class: what history is, how we argue about it, and why the books we read matter not only to the field but also to me personally. I hope you enjoy.

— Tristan

On the surface, it can seem strange to devote an entire course to a single discipline in a program that celebrates interdisciplinarity. But here’s the truth: you can’t begin to understand what interdisciplinarity is until you first understand what a discipline is. And history is a great place to start, because it forces us to confront questions about evidence, perspective, narrative, silence, power, etc.

At the center of the course are the debates of historiography. Students often struggle with this word but the idea is simple. Historiography is not just the study of history, it is the study of how history is written. Which voices get amplified, which are ignored? How do historians disagree? What counts as evidence? And what happens when new questions (about race, gender, class, sexuality, or empire) reshape the framework of the discipline? Historiography asks us to look at history as an argument, not a fixed truth. And that’s the starting point for all of our discussions.

This course is personal to me. Each book reflects a piece of my own journey: mentors who shaped me, turning points in my education, moments when I grasped what it means to do historical work. Students often ask why I don’t share these stories in class. The reason is simple: I want them to form their own perspectives. This blog, outside the classroom, is the space to tell mine.

We begin with our main textbook: Sarah Maza’s Thinking About History. It’s a guide to the big questions every historian faces: Why does history matter? How do we choose our subjects? What role does theory play? How do we balance narrative with analysis? Maza takes these questions out of the abstract and grounds them in vivid examples, moving from the French Revolution, her own area of expertise, to global histories of slavery, migration, and empire. What makes the book so effective is her style: sharp, witty, and never weighed down by jargon. She shows that history is not a fixed set of answers but an ongoing debate: shaped by evidence, perspective, and imagination. For students just entering the field, it’s a map to participate in that debate.

For me, the book carries a deeper resonance. I was one of Sarah’s students at Northwestern, where she taught a required graduate seminar entitled “Cultural History,” on which this book is based. It was a course that every doctoral student had to take, and for me, it cracked open the discipline in ways I had never imagined. It taught me that being a historian was about learning to ask better questions, to read against the grain (sometimes: to read silences), and to recognize that history is always provisional.

That’s why I chose Thinking About History as our starting point. My hope is that, for students in the MLA program, it sparks the same sense of discovery it once did for me: challenging assumptions, revealing history as a living conversation, and maybe even inspiring a few new historians along the way (I know it did!).

I wrote this blog series over the summer of 2025 as part of my plan to revamp “What is History.” My hope is that you’ll enjoy reading it, and that it gives you a clearer sense not only of what we study in our CORE course, but also why these books and debates matter.