Fall 2024 First-Year Seminar BC1601 section 003

REACTING TO THE PAST

Call Number 00601
Day & Time
Location
TR 11:40am-12:55pm
113 MILSTEIN CEN
Points 3
Grading Mode Pass/Fail
Approvals Required None
Instructor Ellen Morris
Type SEMINAR
Course Description

In these seminars, students play complex historical role-playing games informed by classic texts. After an initial set-up phase, class sessions are run by students. These seminars are speaking- and writing-intensive, as students pursue their assigned roles objectives by convincing classmates of their views. Examples of games played in First-Year Seminar Reacting class include: 1) The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C. explores a pivotal moment following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, when democrats sought to restore democracy while critics, including the supporters of Socrates, proposed alternatives. The key text is Plato's Republic. 2) Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor examines a dispute between Confucian purists and pragmatists within the Hanlin Academy, the highest echelon of the Ming bureaucracy, taking Analects of Confucius as the central text. 3) The Trial of Anne Hutchinson revisits a conflict that pitted Puritan dissenter Anne Hutchinson and her supporters against Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop and the orthodox ministers of New England. Students work with testimony from Hutchinsons trial as well as the Bible and other texts. 4) Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman investigates the struggle between radical labor activists and woman suffragists for the hearts and minds of Bohemians, drawing on foundational works by Marx, Freud, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.

Web Site Vergil
Department First-Year Seminar Program @Barnard
Enrollment 14 students (16 max) as of 9:06AM Saturday, December 14, 2024
Subject First-Year Seminar
Number BC1601
Section 003
Division Barnard College
Open To Barnard College
Note Barnard 1st Year Students Only
Section key 20243FYSB1601X003