Travel Classes
EMU History and Religious Studies faculty regularly offer classes that incorporate off-campus travel. We offer several scholarships to support our majors and minors participating in travel study programs.
Please note that travel classes include required meetings and assignments due before and after travel dates.
Travel classes for 2024
HIST 329/HIST 516: Power, Place and Image in Florence & Rome/Medieval and Renaissance Florence & Rome
Once again Professor Delph will lead students over spring 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.
Travel dates are February 23 to March 3, 2024. 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 479B/592: Nazi Germany: History and Memory
This course has two primary goals: to see firsthand the sights associated with many of the key moments in the history of Nazi Germany, and to analyze the different ways that Germans have—or have not—memorialized this past. We will begin in Munich, where the Nazi party was established and which remained central to the Nazis’ understanding of their own history. Berlin may have been the political capital of the Third Reich, but Munich enjoyed special prestige as the “Capital of the Movement” (a term used by Nazis to describe their political party.) Our time in Munich will include a trip to the Dachau concentration camp, the first established by the regime and the one that provided the template for what became a sprawling system of repression and murder. We will then take a day trip to Nuremberg, where some of the structures used by the Nazis in their massive and elaborately choreographed party rallies—immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will—still stand. While in Nuremberg we will also visit the courtroom where senior Nazi leaders were prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity after the war. Finally, we will travel to Berlin, where we will visit the Holocaust memorial; a Nazi slave labor camp; a Soviet military cemetery and memorial; and the Wannsee Haus, where the “Final Solution” was planned in January 1942.
Travel dates are May 20 to May 28, 2024. A complete trip itinerary and information on the cost and academic requirements are available on the APA website.
HIST 479A/592: Encountering American Empire in Puerto Rico
Students will learn the history of Puerto Rico with a particular examination of its role as part of America’s Empire. The class will cover the indigenous peoples to the region, the slave trade and sugar plantations, with a major focus on the island after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Trips to Vieques, a pristine island that was occupied by the U.S. military after World War II walking tours around Old San Juan will focus on American influence in Puerto Rico and the territory’s battle over statehood and representation in the United States. Students will have time to explore old San Juan, kayak in a bioluminescent bay, and snorkel or relax at the beach between day trips.
Travel dates are February 23 to March 2, 2024. Travel dates are May 20 to May 28, 2024. A complete trip itinerary and information on the cost and academic requirements are available on the APA website.
HIST 479A/592: Second World War: Italian Campaign
Students will explore the conduct and consequences of the U.S. military effort in Italy during the Second World War. Although a difficult campaign, the U.S. operation knocked Italy, a German ally, out of the war and diverted German resources away from other important Allied operations in the last two years of the war.
Travel dates are May 5 to May 12, 2024. A complete trip itinerary and information on the cost and academic requirements are available on the APA website.
RLST 179/379: Becoming Jewish in America
Study the contributions Jews have made to American life as you travel to New York, Philadelphia and Washington to examine points of triumph and loss, power and powerlessness, in the American Jewish experience. Since arriving in the United States, Jews have found themselves alternatively persecuted and assimilated. Out of an often-awkward relationship with the majority culture, American Jews have fashioned intellectual and political cultures that you'll have the opportunity to examine during this trip. This program is generously subsidized by a grant from EMU's Center For Jewish Studies.
Travel dates are February 25 to March 1, 2024. A complete trip itinerary and information on the cost and academic requirements are available on the APA website.