Read Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes, right away. It will crash course you in post-positivism in an afternoon and you can rape her fucking mouth. It's primarily concerned with natural science, but will give you a good coverage of the debate in social sciences as well, particularly sociology.
Also read Ernst Breisach On The Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge.
All you really need to know if she's in History is that, plus maybe:
- Hayden White (which you can get from a Wikipedia summary) so you're aware of the whole narrativity/emplotment thing, and then Ricoeur or Ankersmit as "but emplotment is OK, actually!"
- The basics of modern hermeneutics. You'll run into it throughout Zammito and Breisach, but be able to cite the basics of crisis of historicism, Geisteswissenschaften vs. Naturwissenschaften, nomothetic vs. idiographic, and the basic thrust of modern Western historiography* and you're good.
* Here you go:
>Ranke, "the father of scientific history," is a hermeneutic idealist
>his followers, who establish the modern historical discipline, over-privilege political and diplomatic history, especially individuals, great men, landmark decisions, the State, and the general idea of history as leading to modernity (rational, bureaucratic, liberal etc.)
>Comte and others start to demand scientific study of man
>Germans react badly and entrench themselves in conservatism, fields like historical geography, economic history, sociology start to split off, demanding a less idealist approach (
>in the 20th century, people start to do "social history" with inspiration from sociology and other disciplines, social + economic history, etc.
>slowly you get "history from below" (famous phrase of E.P. Thompson, who is often used as paragon of this development in its simplified cartoon form), still predominantly social/economic (often Marxist)
>next big wave: cultural turn in the 70s, brings in cultural anthropology perspectives, big trendy for a while
>lots of trends like "history of everyday life" start to pop up in the 70s/80s, "history of sex," "history of food" etc.
>feminist history and other self-consciously dissident stuff spawns mostly in the 80s
>linguistic turn brings in trendy poststructuralism, discourse analysis, foucauldian archaeology, etc.
You can now rape your sister.