an icepick through the keyhole

You may wish to try Penzey's Spices to get stuff that you like. Or you could try learning how to cook Southern as you learn how to speak Southern. (Before I moved to Nashville in 1993, I never knew someone could make a fruit-salad dressing from pudding and Tang. Amazingly enough, it tasted great.) Tip for using the oven: Stop using it to store books first.

A proseminar titled Theory and Practice is very amusing if it's all about social theories. Historiography is one of the few jargonish words historians have all to themselves. (Others include agency, cliometrics, presentist, and prosopography [my personal favorite].) I think of it as comprising five different ways of looking at history writing:

• Arguments about a specific time and place. ("Civil war causation" is an example.)
  
• The intellectual history of history writing.
  
• The tropes used in history writing. (Noble's discussion of the "American jeremiad" style in his book Historians against History is the best concrete example I can think of right now.)
  
• The social theories undergirding historians' writings. (That's where you get Marx, Weber, and their ilk.)
  
• Attitudes towards historical epistemology. I can't call it philosophy of history, because historians generally don't do their own philosophizing. Maybe philosophy-of-history posing?
  

The best works of historiography combine two of the above angles. Is it the contemplation of navels? I don't think so, but I haven't come up with a great justification for it apart from the need for professional reflection.