I was going to reply to this thread, but realized I would be hijacking someone
It seems to me that if you are ‘plugging in” history you are already assuming history is secondary. In general, I’d say historical methods are much more about the questions we ask https://twitter.com/aaronrhanlon/status/1341394450229194754

And the sources we use than how we read. One of the most important things I’ve learned from my lit friends is about care in reading and being aware of it. In a “multidisciplinary knowledge network” it’s important to think about what each discipline offers.

I suspect that those of us who became social and political historians did so because we were less philosophically oriented. Sure, there are times here where we delight in “you’re wrong”, because we do think facts matter. But that’s not what we mostly say to each other.

I mean, everyone enjoys @KevinMKruse taking down Dinesh, but I am pretty sure Kevin doesn’t talk that way when he’s talking about his research. We are adding, challenging, etc, but it’s all about figuring out how to understand the past.

When I teach historical methods, I teach students about asking questions, getting curious. And I teach them about paying attention to the genre of sources - purpose, audience, etc. But also about how you put them together.

I think I’ve had this conversation before, but we read differently. Even when I read a literary text as a source, I use it differently than my lit colleagues, and you can always tell I’m a historian. But when lit scholars using “historical” sources they read as lit scholars

In general, the object of study is different: I’ll teach CHaste Maid in CHeapside in my Early Modern England course, but it won’t be the same as if I were teaching an early modern drama course.

So I’m not sure historians will ever have the same discussions of method that lit scholars are having. Our debates about method are different but often about how we read silence in the archives, and how we find new archives.

Also, within history there is not one method. You need certain tools if you’re doing spatial analysis and GIS, others if like @monicaMedHist you’re working with paleogenetics.

I suspect that the methods of intellectual historians are more closely connected to lit scholarship than those of social and political historians. But there’s a reason folks are historians and not philosophers.

One sign that we don’t do the “you’re wrong” bit much is that the historiography we teach our grad students goes back. We still use works from 50 years ago, though we are critical of them. They are still useful. People did detailed work, and we can learn from them.

TL:DR, I don’t think we should expect all disciplines to have the same debates about method because we have different central questions and therefore think about method differently.