Your Instructor
John Monroe
Ross 641
jmonroe@iastate.edu
Student campus hours: MW 1:00-3:30 or by appointment
Welcome to History 202! My name’s John Monroe, and my Ph.D. is in European history, with a focus on France. I've been teaching at Iowa State since 2002 and have published two books on French history: one on religion in the period from 1850 to 1925, and the other on the impact of colonialism in France and in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1880 to 1940. The second, which came out in 2019, received several prizes, including recognition as one of the top three books on French history published between 2019 and 2021. My work as a scholar has taken me to archives and libraries across France; it's also given me the chance to spend several months looking at historical documents in Dakar, Senegal.
As you’ll see in the introductory video and course-level learning objectives, this is a survey of European history from the Protestant Reformation to the present. It’s also an introduction to the discipline of history in general: the distinctive set of critical thinking skills that historians use to make sense of the past. That may sound highly specialized, but in fact it’s not. Historical thinking turns out to be a very handy tool for anyone interested in analyzing connections between events and constructing persuasive arguments using documentary evidence – whether that involves analyzing a business case as a consultant, constructing a marketing plan, or writing a legal brief.
Useful as those critical-thinking skills are, I’ll admit that what I love best about history are the stories. The disciplined way of thinking about the past that history teaches us is why studying it useful; the fascinating people, places and events it includes are why it's fun. My goal, then, is to make those crucial analytical skills easy and enjoyable to learn by doing what I can to bring the past to life.