Provinces–we won’t be reading all of these texts, but it’s a double-credit course where there’s a lot of emphasis on the intensity of work, so I’ve tried to think of an approach that makes this more than just reading a lot. We’ll see if it flies.

RE papers, as a former student who has written about a bajillion papers for you… one of the things that set apart HIST 140 from my other history seminars was the focus on argumentation instead of recitation (be it historiographical or otherwise). We didn’t spend time memorizing Congolese rulers and their reigns, but instead crafted sharp, pointed (and short) arguments about Lumumba. It sounds like that kind of argumentation will still be there, forced, perhaps, by the supplementary texts, but it seems like there is some danger of students returning tepid exercises in the service of piecing together the interconnected web of historians rather than deeply understanding and having something to say about a corner of it. I’ll be interested to hear how the students power through to find the meaty bits!