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The Use and Abuse of History: A Syllabus
What follows is my syllabus for an undergraduate history majors course on the use and abuse of history. It is an attempt to use primary sources to teach students how to identify secondary misinformation, propaganda, omission, and weaponization of history. INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY MAJOR THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY: MANIPULATING THE PAST TO […]
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What Are the Best Classics Books for Children?
Finishing my third trimester in the midst of a pandemic was not what I had planned for the last months of pregnancy. Since the Ides of March, we have sequestered ourselves in our house in Iowa City and cancelled any and all social gatherings––including the planned baby shower––as has almost everyone else across the globe. […]
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Working Together to Transcribe Ancient Documents During COVID-19
As the pandemic known as COVID-19 grips the globe, thousands of instructors in the United States and elsewhere have been asked to transition their courses online for the remainder of the semester. To some instructors, such as the superb Classics professors at the Open University, distance learning has become a normalized pedagogy. To many others […]
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The Story of the Black King Among The Magi
The Christian liturgical calendar reserves January 6 as Epiphany––the day when the Magi allegedly visited Jesus as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew. I have written before about the origins of frankincense and myrrh, but about a year ago, I began discussing the magus (the Latin plural is magi) named Balthazar with Nyasha Junior. As we […]
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“A Global Antiquity”: The Association of Ancient Historians Meeting 2020
After many months of preparation, we have released the CFP for the AAH 2020 meeting in Iowa City, which will be held from April 23-25, 2020. The theme is “A Global Antiquity” and it is asking ancient historians to think beyond the traditional bounds of Greece and Rome in order to see a more global […]
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In Libris Libertas: Open Access Monographs in Classics, Ancient History, Art History, and Archaeology
It is syllabus time for many once again. If you are like me, you want to save your students from spending too much on textbooks, but still want to have a rich array of current reading for students assigned on your syllabus. A few years ago, I put together a popular list of “Open Access […]
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Consider the Anus Radish: Etymologies, Adultery, and the Defense of the Microhistory
Isidore was a learned scholar and the Bishop of the Spanish city of Seville from 600-636 CE. Thousands of manuscripts containing his Etymologiae (“The Etymologies,” also called the Origines, “The Origins”) survive today; the only work to surpass it in terms of extant manuscript copies in Western Europe is the Bible (Throop 2005: xii). The sheer number of […]
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Through the Eyes of Ruby: Discovering Color and Trade in ‘The World Between Empires’
Last week, Candida Moss and I were lucky enough to catch the tail end of The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East, an exhibition which opened March 18 and closes on June 23, 2019 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The 190 objects within the exhibition acquired from […]
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The Jewish Colosseum: Revising the Memory of Rome’s Flavian Amphitheater
Originally known as the Flavian Amphitheater, the Roman Colosseum is oftentimes directly associated with the death of Christians; however, as Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard point to in The Colosseum, there is no authentic evidence from the first century to support the notion that Christians were ever martyred within it: The fact is that there are no […]
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Pro Publica: A Public Classics Workshop
Pro Publica: A Public Classics Workshop Northwestern University, October 18-19, 2019 How can we better speak and write about the ancient Mediterranean for the general public? How can academics engaged in the study of antiquity underscore the relevance of Classics in the present day? The Society for Classical Studies and the Department of Classics at […]
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History From Below 