HIST 410 Seminar: Persecution and Tolerance in the Medieval Mediterranean
This course introduces history majors to the craft of writing history, or explaining and interpreting the past. It has two main components. In the first half of the course, students are introduced to and grapple with the problem of historiographical debate by reading and writing responses to multiple works of scholarship that approach the same historical question from different perspectives and reach different conclusions. This semester, that question is "tolerance and persecution of religious minorities in the medieval Mediterranean." In the second component of the course, students use their experience dissecting a historiographical debate to write an original research paper related to the course's theme. Analyzing historiography and doing original research are the first step toward a successful senior thesis that this course facilitates. The course is open to junior and second-semester sophomore history majors. Other students require departmental approval.