Category Archives: hist 102 (Spring 2010)

Extra Credit Opportunity: Business Ethics Panel

Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) is dedicating the week of February 8-12 to business ethics by displaying a variety of information concerning the fundamentals of ethics (including basic meanings or perceptions, specific situations and how ethics relate to society today). On Thursday, February 11th, we will hold a panel discussion in Grubbs Hall Room 109 at 7:00 pm. This event will entail the showing of a short video that outlines a specific situation about a medical insurance dilemma. Each panel member will be allowed a specified amount of time to give their professional opinion about the situation and then discussion will open to the audience.

Two quick reminders on the article review assignment

  1. For the article review, Please don’t send me PDF files with the entire article. I really, really just want the basic bibliographic information: author, title, journal, date, pages. If you want to include a JSTOR link, or something like that, fine, but don’t just send me the article and expect me to go looking for the information I need. That’s not the assignment.
  2. When you’re picking your articles, please try to pick something that deals with the history of the last 500 years. It can go back further than that, of course, but the goal is for you to read something that is related to this course.

Extra Credit Opportunity: Faculty Reading

Poetry, fiction presented at 4th annual Faculty Reading

Poetry and fiction will come together in the 4th annual Faculty Reading at Pittsburg State University. Pittstate creative writing faculty, poet Christopher Anderson and novelist Kathy De Grave, will read at 8:00 Thursday, Feb. 4, in the Governor’s Room at the Overman Student Center.

“This should be an exciting reading. Kathy and Chris are both writers whose characters startle,” said Professor Laura Lee Washburn, director of the creative writing program. “I’ve seen images and ideas in their works that exist nowhere else. One of Chris’s poems mentions the ‘foretaste of damnation,’ and Kathy’s Fire Handed Down certainly grapples with heaven and hell.”

Both Anderson and De Grave teach creative writing and American Literature at PSU.  Anderson’s poetry has appeared most recently in Tar River Poetry.  De Grave is the author of the novel Company Woman and her short stories have been published in such journals as Margin and Potato Eyes and in the anthology Our Working Lives.

The reading is co-sponsored by the Student Fee Council and is free and open to the public. A reception (which means food!) will follow in the Heritage Room.

As usual, a 1-2 page summary-reaction paper will earn you extra credit.

Extra Credit Opportunity: “Terrorism, War, and The Challenge Facing the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Your first extra credit opportunity of the semester is on Tuesday the 26th:

The International Academic Affairs Committee, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of Social Sciences, and the International Studies Program are sponsoring a program entitled: “Terrorism, War, and The Challenge Facing the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” It will be held on Tuesday January 26 in the Crimson and Gold Ballroom. Admission is free, and the program is open to all members of the university community as well as the community at large. People are free to attend whatever session interests them. The featured speakers in the morning are professional historians who work for the Department of the Army. The US military officers on the afternoon panel have extensive experience as advisers in Iraq and Afghanistan. An Afghani officer is also included on the panel.
9:00 Registration
9:45 Welcome—Dr. Lynette Olson, University Provost
10:00 Mr. William Lambert—Military and Political Overview of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater
11:00 Dr. Don Wright—The War in Afghanistan
12:00 Break for Lunch
1:00 Military Officers Panel—MAJ Dave Conner, MAJ Paul Culberson, MAJ Nicholas Dickson, MAJ Nelson David, and LTC Mohammed Omari
2:00 Wrap-Up Panel—All Participants, Dr. John Daley (Chair, Dept. of History) Moderator

You don’t have to attend the whole day: just one panel is enough for extra credit, but if you want to do more (the afternoon sessions look particularly good to me!) you can. The usual requirements of extra credit: attend, and write me a 1-2 page summary and reaction paper.

A quick guide to Dresnerworld

The main page at https://dresnerworld.edublogs.org is structured like a blog, with the most recent postings at the top. I will use it for announcements, handouts, recommendations of interesting things to read and extra credit opportunities. If you use an RSS feed reader, you can follow the blog that way; otherwise, it’s a good idea to check in every few days.

There are also some stable pages which will be useful resources, most of which can be accessed through the tabs in the blog header. The “hist 102 (spring 2010)” tab contains the complete course schedule, including links to assignments, policies, handouts, etc. You can find the syllabus through that page, or through the “syllabi” tab. If there are changes to the schedule or assignments, I will announce them in class, on the blog, and I will change the schedule (but the syllabus will remain unchanged); in the event of a discrepancy between the syllabus and schedule (the result of a schedule change or other unforseen circumstance), the schedule is to be considered the authoritative source.

I recommend that you read the syllabus before class on Friday — I will not be distributing paper copies of the syllabus, or most of the assignments and handouts; if you need a paper copy, you are free to print them out yourself — and I will be happy to answer any questions about it at that point.

I also recommend that you get hold of the textbook as soon as possible. You will be expected to have read the first chapter by next Friday (the 22nd of January).

See you Friday!