Syllabus

HIST 202 | Introduction to Western Civilization II

3 credits. Half-Semester, Asynchronous Online.

Instructor: John Monroe

E-mail: jmonroe@iastate.edu

Phone: 4-6642

Office: Ross 641

Office Hours: In person or over Zoom: Mondays 1:00-2:00, or by appointment

Tech Support Email: elotech@iastate.edu  Go to Canvas Help for more information on finding help with Canvas.

 

Learning Objectives

1. Students will gain a basic knowledge of major historical events, cultural developments, and ideas in Europe from the Protestant Reformation to the present.
2. Students will learn how to read texts from the past closely and how to understand them as historical evidence.
3. Students will develop an ability to analyze processes of change over time by recognizing cause-and-effect connections among events.

 

Learning Outcomes

1. An understanding of the difference between primary sources (texts written during the historical period being studied) and secondary sources (textbook and lectures).
2. An ability to analyze primary sources in light of their historical context, as you have understood it from secondary sources.
3. An ability to use the key intellectual and cultural developments of European history since 1500 as relevant background information in other courses and in your future civic, professional, and personal life.
4. An ability to recognize the importance and nature of political, cultural-intellectual, and socioeconomic processes of change.
5. An ability to analyze both past and current events as interconnected products of those simultaneous processes of change.
6. An ability to extrapolate those processes of change into the future, recognizing various potential consequences they might have.
7. Basic familiarity with the ways in which historians use evidence to understand the past.

 

Course Format

Asynchronous online lectures with weekly selected-response assessments.

 

Required Technology

1. A reliable Internet connection.
2. Access to Canvas.
3. The capacity to play either video or sound files.

 

Required Texts

Hunt, Lynn, et al., The Making of the West, Peoples and Cultures, Vol. 2, available as an “Immediate Access” e-text through the course’s Canvas site.

Pdf scans of primary source documents for each week, available under the “Read and Outline” section of each module.

 

Course Materials

Readings

The two texts in this course serve complementary functions.  The Making of the West is an e-textbook written by a group of historians under the direction of the main author, Lynn Hunt.  The purpose of the book is to give you a grounding in the basic facts and themes of European history from 1500 to the present.  Since it is written by scholars drawing on evidence they and others have gathered in their research, it is what historians call a secondary source.  The second, shorter readings are 2-4 page excerpts of various key texts – government documents, political speeches, works of philosophy, letters, newspaper articles, etc. – that were written during the period covered in the relevant chapter.  Historians call materials of this type primary sources. They are what we use as evidence when determining what happened in the past and making arguments about why it happened.  

Lectures

Each module also includes recorded lectures: four in modules 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7; two in modules 3 and 5. These lectures are available in two different forms: as video files that can be viewed on canvas, and as audio files downloadable as mp3s (the audio files just have a break in the middle, but are not divided into two separate files).  You are free to pick whichever format works best for your learning style.  In addition, for each lecture there is a two-page outline in pdf form, available under the "Read" section of the relevant module.  These outlines are meant to serve you as an aid for note-taking and test review. 

The lectures do not always follow the readings exactly.  Instead, they highlight key themes by going into more detail about select events and historical figures, giving you a sense of how the specific facts you’ll be learning fit into large-scale processes of development: political changes, changes in how people think about the world, changes in the economy, changes in social structure, changes in culture.  By doing this, the lectures aim to provide you with a model of how historians think, so you can practice that intellectual approach yourself as you read the primary documents and prepare for the tests.  The lectures can also serve as a guide for reading the textbook, helping you identify the themes and facts that are most important for the class.

 

Assignments and Grading

Grade Distribution

Assessments	Point Value
Weekly Content Quizzes	310
Primary Source Quizzes	280
Cumulative Midterm Quizzes	100
Final Exam	110
Total	800

 

Assignment Descriptions

Weekly Content Quizzes – By midnight on Friday of each week, you will be expected to complete a timed, selected-response quiz on the material covered in that week’s lectures and textbook chapters.  The quiz will involve a mix of conventional multiple-choice, multiple-answer multiple choice, true/false, matching, and ordering questions.  These quizzes will not be cumulative: each quiz will focus entirely on the relevant week’s material.  You are free to use any notes you like when you take these quizzes.  I’d suggest having print-outs of the pdf outlines, ideally supplemented by notes you’ve taken on them while watching/listening to the lectures.  It will also help to make a time-line of the material covered in the week’s lectures, so you can see how things fit together chronologically at a glance. Do note that the quizzes are timed: usually 30 minutes, 25 minutes for the shorter module 3 and 5 quizzes. That means you probably won’t have time to look up the answer to every question “from scratch” as the clock is running.  A more effective strategy would be to prepare a set of notes in advance, read them over carefully, and then start the clock to take the test.

 

Primary Source Quizzes – Each week, there will be one 20-point timed selected-response quiz assigned for each of the assigned primary source documents.  These quizzes will also be due by midnight on Friday of each week.  They are meant to build your skills as a “historical reader” – that is, as somebody who knows how to interpret a text as a product of the time, place, and other circumstances in which it was written (historians call this its “context”). To prepare for these quizzes, you will want to read the relevant document carefully in advance, ideally from a hard-copy printout that you can highlight or underline.  Since the purpose of these reading quizzes is skill-building, I have designed them to give you two attempts.  Whichever of the two scores is higher will be the one that goes toward your grade.  My hope with this is that you’ll learn from the experience of seeing your wrong answers and having the opportunity to correct them.

 

Midterm Quizzes – At two key junctures in the course, week 3 and week 5, there will be timed cumulative midterm quizzes worth 50 points each.  You will have 30 minutes to complete each of these quizzes, and they will also be due by Friday midnight on the week in which they are assigned.  The purpose of these quizzes is to give you a chance to assemble the material covered over the previous weeks into a bigger picture.  Each midterm will only cover what has happened since the previous one, so midterm 1 will cover weeks 1-3, and midterm 2 will cover weeks 4-5.  The questions in these midterms will involve putting events in chronological sequence (ordering), connecting terms with definitions or ideas with names (matching), and assigning concepts, people, or events to proper categories (categorization).  These tests are also open-note, so to prepare for them, I recommend putting together a cumulative timeline of events, which you can consult alongside your printouts of the lecture outlines and any other notes you might have taken.  To help with the “timelining” process, I’ve put together two review sheets, one for the week 3 exam and one for the week 5 exam.  These are available under the “read and outline” headings of their respective weeks. If you can define all the terms on those review sheets and understand how they relate to one another chronologically and in terms of cause-and-effect, you should be in a good position to do well on the midterms!

 

Final Exam – By midnight on Thursday of final exam week, you will be expected to take our final exam, a 110-point test covering the whole span of our course.  It will include a mixture of questions like those in the Content Quizzes and those on the Cumulative Midterms – so there will be some specific multiple-choice material as well as ordering, matching, and categorization.  Once again it will be open-note, so you are free to use whatever materials strike you as potentially most useful.  You will have one hour and thirty minutes to complete the exam.

 

Grading Scale

Letter Grade	Percentage Range	Letter Grade	Percentage Range
A	93-100	A-	90-92
B+	87-89	B	83-86
B-	80-82	C+	77-79
C	74-76	C-	70-73
D+	67-69	D	64-66
D-	60-63	F	59 and below

 

Course Policies

Weekly Due-Dates

I have structured the class with ongoing weekly due-dates in order to make sure everyone goes through the material at a sustainable pace.  My goal is to create the conditions to help you do as well as you possibly can by keeping you from getting overwhelmed.  That said, I understand that life is complicated, and that it could therefore be a burden to have a string of due-dates one after another during the week. Weekly Friday deadlines are my way to strike a compromise here, giving you some flexibility but also keeping things moving along.  Therefore, insofar as you can, I’d suggest not allowing all your tests to pile up on Friday: try taking the Content Quiz first, maybe Wednesday or Thursday; then read through the week’s documents and take the Primary Source Quizzes, maybe Thursday or Friday; then (if assigned that week) take the Midterm Quiz on Friday. 

Late Penalties and Make-Up Options

If you end up missing a deadline for whatever reason, or know there is one coming up you’ll have to miss, contact me as soon as possible to schedule a make-up or give you an extension.  The purpose of the deadlines is to keep you on track, but again I understand that life can get in the way sometimes. 

Cheating and plagiarism

Please review information under Academic Misconduct. 

Student Responsibilities

Students will be expected to keep up with the course calendar, viewing or listening to each week’s lectures, doing each week’s primary source and textbook reading, and taking quizzes before the weekly deadline.  Students will also be expected to prepare for each quiz, using their own notes, the course materials, and the study guides provided on Canvas. 

 

How to Make the Most of This Class

Pace Yourself – This course moves fast.  We will be covering 500 years of history in seven weeks!  If you are going to absorb the material successfully enough to do well on the exams and meet the learning objectives, you need to allow it some time to sink in.  If you pace yourself steadily, rather than attempting to cram everything at the last minute, you’ll find that this class becomes much more rewarding.