Proposed Courses at the University of Maryland

In the interests of drumming up support for forthcoming courses, I propose the following.

Hist. 124: Africa through Wikipedia

Students read and critique Wiki pages devoted to some aspect of Africa — from Leo DiCaprio's eternal role in Blood Diamond, to Winnie Mandela's soccer club, to Ogoni oil lease demands in the Niger Delta, to Tanzanian drug transshipment.  Students then recheck Wiki to see if the truth has changed while they were writing their final composite amalgam papers.  The final submission is an e-mailed work in progress for which the entire class collaborates from their mobile devices.  As an electronic text, it is then thrown away or assimilated to another text, and the students collectively receive an A.

Hist. 3981: Transnational constants: Breathing, eating, drinking, walking, washing, unmentionabling

The class looks at wide continuities and contextualizes "change over time" as just one facet among many other more important ones, like getting a good night's rest.  Each professor selects a country or region, and offers a single fact differentiating/assimilating a "constant" (C) into the "Big Story" (BS).  Each student is responsible for a term project locating their own daily habits in a matrix of continuity.  We supply the conclusion of the class in advance, so those without the hours or know-how to follow the class in real time will not suffer.  It is: "People are different, people are the same."  Students receive an A.

Hist. 800: Gender in the History of History

This course pools the talents of the entire staff.  Each professor writes a thirty page summary of their field, drawing out the continuities and ruptures in the way sex-role-performance in society has been dealt with by previous scholars over time, and the way each him or herself is part of that history.  Using only the internet accessed in their free time, students merge the documents into one big document, and then edit them to fashion a master chronology of events (CE) roughly sixty to seventy pages long.  Random words and phrases are then chosen from the document and memorized for the test, which is a practice exam only.  All the students receive an A.