Travel Classes
EMU History faculty regularly offer classes that incorporate off-campus travel. We offer several scholarships to support our majors and minors participating in travel study programs.
Travel classes for 2020
HIST 329/HIST 516: Power, Place and Image in Florence & Rome/Medieval and Renaissance Florence & Rome
Once again Professor Delph will lead students over winter break to Florence and Rome, where they will study the history and culture of these two beautiful Italian cities during the later middle ages and Renaissance eras. Students will learn about the political turmoil that engulfed both of these cities, as the popes struggled to gain control over Rome, and an emerging class of wealthy merchants, bankers, and manufacturers worked to gain control of Florence. We’ll examine how people exercised political and social power and the relationships between men and women, both inside and outside of families. We’ll also spend time studying tangible manifestations of power, in the form of architecture and what messages monuments such as palaces, churches, city walls, fountains, city squares, monumental streets and arches were meant to convey. Finally, we’ll use the art of medieval and Renaissance Florence and Rome to gain an understanding of the mentality and values of the period and explore the religious beliefs and practices of the time. Cultural and social values as portrayed in the art of these two cities will also provide us with another means of examining how political and social power was structured and expressed in the everyday lives of the men, women, and children of this period, from the popes and nobles in Rome to the orphans and prostitutes of Florence.
This program runs from runs from Feb. 21—March 1, 2020. Students will enroll in either HIST 329 Power, Place & Image in Florence & Rome, or HIST 516 Medieval and Renaissance Florence and Rome. A complete trip itinerary and information on the cost and academic requirements are available on the APA website. For more information, contact Prof. Delph at [email protected].
HIST 385/592: Civil War and Reconstruction
This offering has been postponed. We will reschedule for summer 2020 or a later semester.
HIST 385/592: Civil War and Reconstruction explores the events that triggered one of the most significant events in American history, the course and outcome of the war itself, and the tumultuous postwar efforts to both bring the country back together while integrating the former slave population as equal citizens. Students will learn the causes of the Civil War and what each side hoped to achieve, understand the strategies of the war and key battles that determined the outcome, and discover how military victory by the Union did not mean an easy postwar Reconstruction would occur. The course will also emphasize the theme of historical memory and how the Civil War still shapes our view of American history, how Americans choose (sometimes falsely) to remember the war, and how commemoration of those who participated in the war remains a controversial issue.
HIST 438/546: Nazi Germany
This class will travel to sites in Germany connected to the history of the Nazi regime. We begin in Munich, birthplace of the Nazi movement, and visits historical sites such as Odeonsplatz, where a young Adolf Hitler celebrated the news of the outbreak of the First World War, and where, several years later, the Nazis would be stopped in their attempt to launch an armed insurrection against the German government; the Bürgerbräukeller, where the Nazis used to hold political rallies; the Dachau concentration camp; and the campus of the Ludwig-Maximiliens University, where the student resisters known as the White Rose distributed the anti-Nazi literature that would eventually cost them their lives. We then proceed to Nuremberg to explore the ruins of the Reich Party Day Stadium, where Leni Riefenstahl filmed her famous propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The class concludes in Berlin, where we visit the Holocaust Memorial as well as the Wannsee House, the place where top Nazi officials planned the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Along the way we will discuss and consider not only the importance of these sites, but also the difficult decisions that must be made about how--and if--to preserve the physical traces of the Nazi past. A complete trip itinerary and information on the cost and academic requirements are available on the APA website.