Berg's Uncle Eddie
1595-1655
Social Media
Facilitates Communication
 Join HASTAC (it's free) and participate in the Ocelot Scholars group.
 Become a contributor to and comment on other people's postings at the Early American History Blog.
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I will be working on this page until 15 January 2012. Please let me know what else you might want to see on the page. Also, please feel free to comment on aspects of navigation and so forth.
HIST 151
Early American History
Early American history for the 2012 Winter semester was designed in cooperation with students who had enrolled in the course.
Berg's Contribution: Guns, Germs, and Steel
Generally, I select a topic to serve as the way for us to begin the course. While teaching my topic, I focus on research methodology and thinking like an historian. After discussing the course content with students who are enrolled in the class, "my topic" will be Guns, Germs, and Steel. I put "my topic" in quotation marks because, as of a week before classes were to begin, I had neither read the book nor watched the documentary based on the book. I have, however, been in contact with a student who proposed this topic and will work with him to sort out some of the details on how to merge my approach with this topic.
Given other student interest in psychology, I will also introduce the topic of worldviews. Part of our work in the first part of the course will focus on psychological issues.
Student Contribution: "What about Karate?
Unlike most classes, I do not have the intention of selecting the topics we will cover in detail. Instead, I will ask "What interests you?" I will emphasize that the question does not refer to the ancient world; that it is not "What interests you about the early modern world?" Instead, I want to begin with your interests and then help you adopt those interests to a study of early modern world history. For one student who participated in a discussion of the syllabus, the answer was "karate." Therefore, karate will be the example we will use to learn how personal interests can lead to academic research topics.
In addition to working with Guns, Germs, and Steel, teams of students will take responsibility for teaching one of the chapters in the textbook. They will also be responsible for developing individual/team presentations focusing on various aspects of ancient world history that interest them.
Assessment
Given the interactive nature of the course, a significant portion of the grade will be participation. Please note that almost all classroom activities and homework and graded pass/no-credit. Therefore, if you are present and do your work, it is easy to earn 100% for your participation grade.
In a departure from most classes, I am not going to decide how the rest of your work is assessed. Instead, I am going to provide you with the grading rational from the common syllabus designed by the history department before asking you what types of projects you intend to do throughout the semester to meet these requirements.
Students in the class will do equivalent work. But they will not be doing identical work. Grading criteria will be individually negotiated with me. The criteria will be available for anyone in the class to view. However, the grades received based on those criteria will not be made public.
At the end of semester, you will also submit a final course reflection in which you
- evaluate how well you accomplished the assignments you set up for yourself
- describe your contribution to the class
- analyze how successfully you developed in the four core abilities which have been identified as important to the course:
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