Teaching Thursday: History 140

We’re already starting to plan the Fall 2025 schedule mostly because we have some new faculty members and we’re trying to be a bit more attentive to what classes we’re offering when. Also, it seems like there is a move at the university to plan further and further out. 

As part of that conversation, I’ve started to consider teaching History 140 next fall, which is effectively a selected topics class but pitched to (first semester) freshmen. While the class will be capped at 25, so too big to be a true seminar, it is as close to a freshman seminar that we can offer right now.

I have three ideas for a 140 class. 

Idea One

As of next year, we’ll have a 200 and 300 level course dedicated to the history of things and material culture. We’re also developing a public history certificate which will have a focus — partly — on material culture. This is a pretty cool thing. We do not, however, have a 100 level course that would give students a sense for what these classes could be.

So my class would be 140: Doing Stuff With Things. We’d talk about objects, architecture, archaeology, and heritage management using campus as a backdrop. I could easily imagine 5, 3-week modules (intro to things, objects, architecture, archaeology, and heritage) with each module having a couple lectures, two work days, and two writing days. I could be a super fun class that introduces the students to a wide range of thinking about material culture from a historical perspective.

Idea Two

For the last 15 years, I’ve thought about an “Introduction to Antiquity” class which would focus on working with students to understand how the ancient (and broadly “pre-modern”) world is different from the 20th or 21st century. The course would also introduce students to the basic narrative of Mediterranean antiquity (i.e. the Greek and Roman world) and give the students a healthy dose of archaeology. Much like the my “Doing Stuff With Things” class, I’d create five modules: introduction to pre-modern society, Greek history and texts, Greek archaeology, Roman history and texts, Roman archaeology. 

This class could be very fun and work like a conduit for students into both Classics and my history classes. 

Idea Three

When my colleague Ty Reese created this class, he imagined it to be a “Historical Detectives” kind of class that focused on a particular historical problem. I think he taught it on pirates and privateers. I’ve been tempted to teach a class on Late Antiquity at some point in my career and wondered whether this would be a good opportunity to teach it.  I could organize the class around either the question of when did antiquity end or, perhaps more basically, what killed antiquity?

The challenge with this class is that these questions — at least to my addled, mid-career mind — seem quite complex. That said, the course would address certain fundamental issues associated with the study of the past: continuity or change, decline and fall, and periodization schemes.