Lady Geek-Nerd5 days ago (edited)
As a history major myself, currently selecting my last two history courses, I completely agree with everything I heard in this speech. I'd like to share some of my personal observations of a smaller school's history programs. As with the major ivy league schools listed on this presentation, quite a few of the topics he listed as essential are grouped together and rushed through. In a few cases, higher-level courses covered individual parts of these listed points, and those were probably my favorites. Now the schools I have looked at in the past for higher-level and general history courses to take very rarely have anything horribly appealing or not skewed by a modern social-causes lens. In other words, it's been difficult to find a location that offers a course that I can be passionate about for my upper-level history requirements. Trying to find a title and description not clearly meant to fill a core diversity requirement is difficult. I know that if I were to write a list of courses and descriptions to fill electives beyond this essential 20, they'd look very different and focus a lot more on the historical aspect and context than many courses that try to make a moment in history about a specific group than that moment as a whole. Of course I want to know how a group was part of an event, but I want to know about ALL parts of an event, not just how the women or a specific racial group factored in. So many courses just narrow the scope of a period in history too much. If you're going to do a class, you don't need a full semester or quarter to look at how one side of a historical period operated. Looking at ideologies is a different matter, as in the examples on the third Reich and Nazi Germany, but when you cover something like the 1970s or a specific decade, unless you are covering an ideology or specific movement in that period, you don't need to box yourself in to something like "knowing everything about a diner culture" in a specific year in a specific type of location, as was used as an example in the video. I got into history for many reasons. Learning the history and culture of other countries was one of them--blame Indiana Jones. As a student, it's really disappointing when I can't find courses specifically focused on something historical--like the Viking era of Scandinavia or pre-Columbian America--without it having to carry over into the realm of today's political agenda--or at all in the case of the Scandinavia example. Guess that's where the book store comes in. I feel like I've found far more interesting and important historical information and writing there than I would in half the courses I've found in different schools' course descriptions. In all honesty, the classes I have had, I selected pretty well and have been able to read around any teacher bias or filter pretty well, so it's not nearly as bad as a course on "emotion in history." What on earth does that even mean? Even the description did nothing to clarify it. Anyway, I just thought that hearing from a history student might add something for someone reading through the comments. Thanks for the video!
