Courses

Past & Present


Survey Courses

I usually offer World History I every year or two; although I occasionally teach World History II, that course is not curently part of my regular rotation. Dr. Theron Corse and Dr. Andrew Patrick also teach World History I and II. TSU students can count on having at least three sections of World History to choose from each semester (at least one of each half of the course).

Because of increased advisement duties, I no longer offer American History. In the past I have offered both American History II and American History I. The Department of History, Geography, and Political Science at T.S.U. usually offers a dozen or more sections of each course as a lecture course (at both campuses) during the school year as well as offering at least one section of each during the summer.  Students may also sign up for either course through the Board of Regents On-Line Degree program or as a Saturday video course at TSU.

Upper-level Courses

I try to offer these upper-level courses once every two years.

 

Courses Under Development

Slavery and Freedom in the West before 1500.  I would like to offer this course as a prelude to T.S.U.'s extensive course offerings on the Transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the United States.  Clearly the race-based slavery of the period after 1500 was very different from earlier types of servitude.  On the other hand, ideas about slavery and freedom just as clearly went into developing this later form of slavery.  I taught a pilot of this course as a special topics course in Spring 2013.  The special topics course covered slavery in the ancient world (including the code of Hammurabi and the controversy over the Egyptian labor force, as well as slavery in Classical Greece and Rome) and in medieval Europe.  Brief comparative units on slavery in the Islamic world and slavery in west Africa complement the main focus on western European conceptions of slavery.  I still plan to develop this course as a regular offering but with a more limitd scope (probably just looking at Greece and Rome) to allow more attention to theoretical issues and a more detailed consideration of speciifc sources and cultural features. 

Family and Household in Pre-Industrial Europe
This course would replace HIST 375 "Women and Children in the Middle Ages."  The current title for this course is belittling and also neglects the important role that men played in pre-modern households.  This would be a course that more accurately reflected my teaching interests than HIST 432 "Women's History" which implies a more modern emphasis than I chose to give it when it was last taught.  On the other hand, this title implies a wider time span than "medieval" so would allow consideration of households in late Antiquity and changes in households and kinship groups caused by the Reformation and other early modern phenomena.  It would also move away from gender as the main historical variable under consideration, towards families and households.  Although gender is an important historical variable, it cuts across so many aspects of pre-modern society that I do not feel that it works well as the main organizing principle in a history curriculum that does not put much emphasis on pre-modern societies.

World History I and II (on-line)
Because the Board of Regents have allocated all 1xxx and 2xxx courses to community colleges for on-line development, I cannot develop these through the TBR program.  I have now begun a web-enhanced version of World History I.  Eventually, I expect to apply to create a hybrid course (part web-based with some classroom contact as well). 

English History and Literature
I have been working with Dr. Wendy Hennequin in English to develop a cross-listed course in English History and Literature.  We collaborated on a syllabus and assignments with associated grading rubrics in the summer of 2013, and hope to have the course up and running by teh 2014-15 academic year.