Same anon asking about becoming a Historian- what kind of courses did you take? What kind of things did you learn? I kinda want to teach history too yet im scared of presenting. Im trying to overcome that fear on my own but are there any parts in courses that help or does one need to go to teaching school?

Hello again!

As an undergraduate, I took a pretty wide range of courses in history: I took a course on the Early Roman Empire, a course on the Late Roman Empire, a course on Greek and Roman political philosophy, a course on the history of capitalism, Eric Foner’s class on the American Left and his class on the Civil War, Simon Schama’s course on narrative history, Kim Phillips-Fein’s course on the history of public policy, a course on the history of capitalism, a course on African-American history from Reconstruction to the present, and a bunch I’m sure I’ve forgotten in the years since.

As a graduate student, there was a core set of courses you have to take: as an Americanist, I took a three course sequence that covered early, middle, and modern American history, but there were also required courses on historical methods and historical theory. As someone who studied public policy history, I took a lot of courses on that. I also took courses to round out my other fields, so I took a bunch of intellectual history courses, a bunch of labor history courses, and some modern European history courses.

In terms of teaching, I think the only way to get over that fear is learning by doing, which you do starting as a teaching assistant, where you don’t have to write up the syllabus or lectures (although you should absolutely pay attention to how the professor set up both and how you would do things similarly or differently), but you do have to walk the students through the readings, do the grading, answer students’ questions, etc. Then a bit later you probably get asked to give a guest lecture or two, which gets you used to the public speaking part of the job, and then you end up teaching a course on your own which is initially a lot of work and scary but eventually you learn how to do it.