HIST-142 First-year seminar: Welcome to Paris!

Faculty:

Horvath-Peterson, Sandra

This seminar course is designed for first-year students with advanced placement in history.

This version of the course (which will meet simultaneously with the upper-level version of the course [HIST 334]) is for freshman who will have a somewhat lesser workload than the upper-classmen. It is a course for both those who have visited the city and for those who have not. It will start with a tour of modern-day Paris, with all of its famous monuments, exuberant life, and charms, and then it will go back in time to get a sense of what Paris looked like in centuries past when it was a sleepy, crowded and smelly old medieval city. All that changed in the nineteenth century when Paris became the city of light, the city of love, the city of music, restaurants, arts, architecture, and so many other things. In this course students will concentrate mainly on Paris in the 19th and 20th centuries, and will learn how to “read” and think about the history of a great city. In the process, they will focus especially on the exciting modern transformations of the Paris which have made it what it is today – one of the most beautiful, enchanting and compelling cities in the world.


General design of the course: This is a three-credit readings and discussion seminar for freshmen that will meet twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. There will be no exams in this course, just short papers and a final research paper. The short papers will be a mix of very short (300 word) response papers (4-6 during the semester) and two three - four page synthetic papers on combinations of course readings. The final research paper will be 10-12 pages long. Readings will include primary and secondary source material, some of them books, others chapters in books or articles in scholarly journals.


Books to be purchased for the course:
Garrioch, David, The Making of Revolutionary Paris*
Zola, Emile, The Belly of Paris
Miller, Michael, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920
Spang, Rebecca L., The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture Pinkney, David, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris*
Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885-World War I
Flanner, Janet, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925 – 39
Jackson, Jeffrey, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris
Mitchell, Alan, Nazi Paris, 1940 -1944


*The asterisks after two of the titles above identify books that can either be purchased or downloaded for free through Lauinger library as E-books.

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: None

Course syllabi
The following syllabi may help you learn more about this course (login required):

Fall '13: Horvath-Peterson, S. (description, file download)

Additional syllabi may be available in prior academic years.

Other academic years
There is information about this course number in other academic years:

• 2010-2011 Fall and Spring
• 2012-2013 Fall and Spring

More information
Look for this course in the schedule of classes.

The academic department web site for this program may provide other details about this course.