Welcome to HST 498, Fall 2010

This is the official blog for History 498, Fall 2010. I plan to use it for two purposes. First as a place to put forward topics for discussion among students. One drawback to online, asynchronous education is that off-the-cuff instructor/student verbal interaction, something taken for granted in face to face courses, is missing. One advantage to blogs, however, is that they can become the venue for a higher form of such banter. In terms of its ability to spark intellectual effort, writing usually trumps talking. Putting words on a page (or a screen) prompts people to think in ways that oral conversation does not. So one of the ways I want to use this blog is to prompt students to think about the topics considered in the class, from the perspective of contemporary events. But I also want this blog to serve as a forum where students articulate what they are and are not learning in the course. I say this not with out of any desire to stimulate student critique (though I am not adverse to that). I say it hoping to get a better handle on what students would like to know in addition to the things I have identified to talk about. My desire is that student discussion help me identify other attributes of the general phenomena the course considers (i.e. race relations in the European past) upon which I should spend time in future versions of the course. In sum, I want this blog to serve as a place where students and I can talk. More formally than if we were seated all together in a room. But also more intelligently than if we were simply trying to keep each other entertained until course work commenced. So please take this occasion to introduce yourself and to briefly outline what you think you would like to know about interactions of Africans and Europeans in past eras.