One Event, Four Methods: The Great Depression Read by Each Discipline

The idea

The course's fifteen units each teach a discipline's way of arguing, and the capstone's first [C] applies all four to one event the exam names in three bands, the Great Depression. The historian's method, taught at 0401 and 0402, asks of every source its author, audience, intent and context, and of every claim its cause and its interpretation: unit 02's 0122 and 0123 give the American record, the crash, its spread, and Hoover's response; world history's 0535 gives the Depression as a global event, and the course voices its causes as contested, attributed, no verdict, under convention one. The political scientist's method, taught at 0829 and 0830, separates the empirical from the normative and treats generalizations as probabilistic: the New Deal's measures, sorted at 0126 into relief, recovery and reform, are an empirical record; whether government should have done them is a normative question the discipline names as such and does not settle; and unit 08's 0738 shows the safety net the era left as a policy cycle. The geographer's method, taught at 0903, asks the five kinds of question, where, why there, and what the pattern shows: the Dust Bowl and the migrations it drove are a push-and-pull case of 1012, and the Depression's spread from one economy to others is diffusion, classified at 0914 as relocation or expansion. The economist's method, taught at 1203 and 1210, treats a theory as a tool and separates positive from normative: unit 15's 1410 reads the event as a leftward shift in aggregate demand, 1419 names the recessionary gap and the Keynesian fiscal response, and 1440 gives the neoclassical reply that prices would have adjusted; the course voices both and chooses neither. What the four share is the social-scientific stance the exam assumes: a claim is answerable from evidence, the evidence has a source, the source has an author, and the reader's task is to say what the evidence supports, with the discipline's own tools, and to stop there. What separates them is what each counts as evidence and what question it lets the evidence answer.