What you get from Dr. Carhart’s H-course

History is applied rhetoric. This course offers students tangible exercises for improving their skills of persuasion. The art of persuasion is useful in many life contexts, not only history, not only in school. To persuade someone of the way you see things requires that evidence be selected, weighed, and asserted.

Students are offered five opportunities over the semester to cultivate their written skills of analysis, interpretation, argumentation and persuasion. All writing will be short exercises: only one or two pages in length. Three of these are offered as take-home exercises, two are in-class. All expectations and all available evidence will be laid out well in advance (lectures, assignment sheets, exam review guides); there will be no trick questions, no trivia, no bubbling of multiple-choice items.

In addition to these rhetorical and analytical skills that are directly translatable to all walks of life, we will engage the past experiences of humankind through their very voices (as translated into modern English). We will see how people just like us organized their societies, balanced justice after offences committed, conceived of beauty and the good life, and asserted their freedom against authoritarian overlords.

Tips for success:

• Come to class (all examination material will be conveyed during class)
• Take notes (note-taking is a highly useful life skill, just like persuasion)

If you do these two things, you will find this course pretty easy.