HIAF 2001

A super passionate professor. LaFleur is incredibly engaged throughout the class and teaches a deeply intellectual course on African history and Africa's place in the world. The first bit, on ancient history, felt a bit long, but the course was brilliant as it progressed onto the building of Empires, Mansa Musa et al. It is a lot of reading, but I'd highly recommend it. My only tip is to sit towards the front of the class, as, with 60 people, it is quite big to be in a Nau hall room.

I loved this course! Professor La Fleur is obviously very enthusiastic about the course material, and early African history was incredibly interesting to learn about. La Fleur is an engaging lecturer, and this was probably the best course I've taken at UVA so far. There is a good amount of reading for this class, but you can probably get by with skimming some of it/strategically and selectively doing the readings. The bulk of your grade in the class is made up of the exams, which is half an essay you write the week before and half identifications done in class. For the IDs, you do 5 out of 10 options, which is nice. As long as you've shown up to lectures and done most of the readings, you'll do well in this class. There are also weekly responses to the readings. This class is a fair amount of work, but it's not more than any other history class, and it's incredibly interesting, and, in my opinion, well worth the effort.

Professor LaFleur and TA Chloe are genuinely great people. They understand that you have more going on outside of school and the class is very forgiving given that attendance isn't required and he gives options for quiz retakes at the beginning of the semester. The course grade is composed of midterm 1 (20%), midterm 2 (20%), midterm 3 (20%), participation (30%), and quizzes (10%). Half of each midterm grade is an essay and the other half are IDs.
Tbh you can get by skimming the readings for the answers to the weekly assignments and get rest of the information in discussion.
My one bone to pick in this class is that a good chunk of the class is dedicated to checking your bias against Africans and African history. While I think that is important, I do think it does a disservice at times to African history. This may be structured differently than other history courses you've taken since there aren't many documents to go off of in early african history, and historians instead heavily rely on artifacts and science to piece together what happened.
#tCFfall2021