Your department stands out for making this a required course. I wish others would do the same. Most students of, say, macro, tend not to appreciate where the data come from. I'm sure, you'll impress on them this one thing: We know about economic growth, among other things, mainly because a generation of economists and economic historians collected the data. They did so the old fashioned way: by rolling up there sleeves and spending uncountable hours in the historical archives. They then spent years debating/questioning it. It didn't come easy. That first 'download' took years.
A theme whose converge I wonder about is the movement of resources from open access to restricted access/private property: the enclosure movement, change from individual tillage to long row tillage in Medieval England, atmospheric. CO2 levels
"And the idea is not to teach controversies, but rather to teach how a historical orientation can make your analysis much more far-reaching and substantively correct and important than simply grabbing a data set and looking for a way to do an internally valid estimate of some single causal link or other."
Double that font size and bold it! I wish I was in this course. Many subscribers of Grasping probably wish it too.
That's an excellent reading list for the mentioned goals. Any reason for leaving out monetary history? Perhaps it will be covered in another, probably macro, course. There's a time constraint, too, for you and the students. Do fewer things, but thoroughly. Looks very good!
Your department stands out for making this a required course. I wish others would do the same. Most students of, say, macro, tend not to appreciate where the data come from. I'm sure, you'll impress on them this one thing: We know about economic growth, among other things, mainly because a generation of economists and economic historians collected the data. They did so the old fashioned way: by rolling up there sleeves and spending uncountable hours in the historical archives. They then spent years debating/questioning it. It didn't come easy. That first 'download' took years.
A theme whose converge I wonder about is the movement of resources from open access to restricted access/private property: the enclosure movement, change from individual tillage to long row tillage in Medieval England, atmospheric. CO2 levels
"And the idea is not to teach controversies, but rather to teach how a historical orientation can make your analysis much more far-reaching and substantively correct and important than simply grabbing a data set and looking for a way to do an internally valid estimate of some single causal link or other."
Double that font size and bold it! I wish I was in this course. Many subscribers of Grasping probably wish it too.
That's an excellent reading list for the mentioned goals. Any reason for leaving out monetary history? Perhaps it will be covered in another, probably macro, course. There's a time constraint, too, for you and the students. Do fewer things, but thoroughly. Looks very good!