The History department is excited to announce a new introductory History course, History 10: “History of the Present,” starting in the fall of 2024. This course will be team-taught by Jill Lepore, a U.S. historian who teaches American political and legal history, Maya Jasanoff, a historian of the British Empire, and Kirsten Weld, a historian of modern Latin America.
The goal of History 10 is to introduce students to many different ways of approaching the study of the past and asking questions about the relationship between the past and the present. Here’s a brief introduction:
“The past isn’t over; it’s everywhere. And history isn’t something dead—a body of evidence locked in a box. It’s a living thing—an ongoing investigation. This team-taught course will raise your historical consciousness by excavating the origins of key and contested concepts in the world today using a wide range of cases and kinds of evidence. Lectures will be interactive, modeling debate and disagreement. Students will acquire a richer sense of context for present-day issues, and of how to deploy historical thinking in making sense of the past, present, and future. Climate change? It has a history! Artificial intelligence? It was created long ago. Everything’s got a history, and if you want to understand a thing better, it’s always a good idea to figure out where it came from, and how it got to be the way it is. Especially if you’d like to change it.”
Learn more about History 10 here: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/139881
Read coverage in The Crimson here: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/25/intro-history-course-returns/