HIST 2301

I would not recommend this course. It was co-taught by Professors Vaidhyanathan and Hitchcock who themselves were nice and passionate people. It was framed around their podcast "Democracy in Danger" and several of the classes were actually live tapings of the podcast. That part was very interesting, and it was amazing to see these world class experts talk about their field and answer our questions. However, the lectures in between really let the course down. They covered a variety of topics about the nature and current state of democracy in the U.S. as well as in some other countries around the world. I think that due to the breadth of what they were covering, the material they lectured on was often very basic and uninteresting. If you have no politics background, you may find it more interesting, but the material they covered was often just very basic versions of material covered much more in-depth in my other classes. I often found myself dragging myself to lecture because I just didn't feel like I ever learned anything. The class was formatted around 7 varying assignments. 5 of them were short responses to an article of the week (under 500 words), and they were usually graded easily, though I did get 10% taken off one time for a small critique. There was also a 5 page essay on the podcast ULTRA, which, while the podcast itself was really good, I found it very hard to write 5 pages critiquing it. The final assignment was to write a script and questions for your own mock episode of their podcast. The expectations for this assignment weren't communicated that well, and I didn't find much enjoyment in creating my own script. Overall, the class felt more like a chore with small inconsequential assignments and lectures that didn't teach me that much. I would recommend skipping it.