Course Design and Objectives

This course has a substantive digital component: that is, you don’t have to just sit and absorb my lectures, but you will be participating in the building of “deep maps” on the course website, putting the empire together as the mosaic that it was. What is a deep map? I quote archeologist Michael Shanks: “Reflecting eighteenth-century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place.” (Theatre/Archaeology [Routledge 2001], 65.)

Facts are easy to find, and events to chronicle. Making sense of them is less straightforward. We know that historians disagree; that’s called “historiography.” But what of those who participated in or witnessed cataclysmic events? And how were they recorded when they happened, and later represented to form cornerstones of cultural memory? By assembling resources, including primary documents and visuals, we are going to craft our own historical narratives and develop our digital skills in the process.