Researching and Narrating Community History

Catalog description

How and why does a community record, preserve, research, and narrate its own history and study its own history? In this advanced research seminar, we will address those questions by exploring and telling the history of our own community: the Gallatin School, which celebrates its 55th anniversary in 2027. To that end, this class is primarily a workshop in historical research and writing. Working in the new Gallatin Archives, other special collections, and by collecting oral histories, students will place Gallatin's history in the overlapping contexts of the history of NYU, New York City, and American higher education. This research will serve as a prompt for critical thinking about the university (both this one, and the institution in general) and our place within it. Over the course of the semester, students will research and write their own historical scholarship on our community, which we will publish as a history of the School.