Travel Classes

EMU History faculty regularly offer classes that incorporate off-campus travel.

Over winter break, Ron Delph tours Italy with the students enrolled in HIST 329: Power, Place and Image in Florence and Rome and HIST 516: Medieval and Renaissance Florence & Rome. Students travel to Italy over winter break, where they stay in the beautiful cities of Florence and Rome while studying the society and culture of Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Course work investigates the dynamics of social and political power, and the relationships between men and women, both inside and outside families. The class spends time studying tangible manifestations of power as expressed in monuments, palaces, city walls and churches. They also use the art of Medieval and Renaissance Florence and Rome to gain an understanding of the mentality and values of the period, and to explore the religious beliefs and practices of the time. In Rome students stay in a small hotel, while in Florence accommodations are in a family-run pensione. A complete trip itinerary and information on the cost and academic requirements are available on this website.

Over a week during spring semester, Steven Ramold travels to the southern United States with members of the class HIST 360/479/592: Civil War: Combat, Culture, and Place. Leaving the classroom behind, the Civil War Tour takes students to important Civil War sites, and allows students to understand the events of the war by walking the ground upon which the events occurred. Besides several battlefields, the Tour also visits Arlington Cemetery, Ford's Theater, and several Civil War related museums. The Tour also visits the Library of Congress, where students have the chance to view original letters and diaries written by Civil War participants. For more information, email Dr. Ramold or see this website.

Professor John McCurdy's HIST 479/592: Pilgrims and Patriots: A Colonial and Revolutionary America Travel Course is an intensive one-week exploration of United States history from approximately 1600 to 1800. Offered to both undergraduate and graduate students, the course, the class travels to New York and Massachusetts to visit some of the most important sites in early American history. Beginning at Ganondagan, a Seneca town near Victor, New York, the course explores contact between Native Americans and European colonists. At Plymouth, Massachusetts, the students study early colonization when they visit reconstructions of the Mayflower and Plimouth Plantation. In Danvers and Salem, Massachusetts, the class listens for the lost voices of the 1692 witch craze; before moving on to Boston to trace the steps of Patriots who protested taxation without representation and tossed tea into the harbor. The course visits the battlefields at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, where the Revolutionary War began, and concludes at Saratoga National Park, where the war swung decisively in favor of a new, independent United States. For more information, please email Professor John McCurdy or see this website.

Visit France on the weeklong travel course HIST 379/592: Operation Overlord: D-Day and Beyond with Professor Steven Ramold exploring the planning, execution and consequence of Operation Overlord, the famed D-Day landing of June 6, 1944. You’ll explore sites in Paris relating to D-Day including the Liberation Museum and the Army Museum. While in Paris, see the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Tuileries Garden, then travel to the coast of France for a tour of the actual landing beaches in Normandy. This course offers you the opportunity to walk the ground of one of history’s most momentous events, sites often depicted in television and film, to see how this tide-turning experience unfolded. For more information, email Dr. Ramold or see this website.