ABSTRACT
Given the importance of academic training in the methods of modern economic analysis for professional economists, historians of economics have a stake in understanding the development of the curricula and actual course content of economic programs over time and across educational institutions. This chapter is concerned with the practical side of establishing a continuous and broad historical record of what has been taught to whom by whom as well as when and where. Historians of most recent economics and their colleagues going forward in time face information-engineering challenges of learning to harness the power from the enormous current of weblog postings, tweets, working papers, media transcripts, and exploding data bases to study the processes of scientific innovation and diffusion in the economics of this and future ages. In contrast this chapter considers the pre-digital age for which the overwhelming evidence needs first to be culled from papers in folders in archival boxes containing professors’ and students’ course notes, syllabi and course outlines, and examination questions, problem sets, etc. The archival experience of the author has been that course syllabi and exams appear to be the historical artifacts from courses that most often survive to the point of archival storage. An important question is just how well does the limited information in a syllabus and/or exam reflect actual course content compared to, say, a near-stenographic set of student course notes? This is illustrated with a graduate economic theory course taught at MIT by Paul Samuelson in 1943.
