The readings that I came up with are fairly different than what I had chosen the first time I contemplated teaching this course (although I had planned to teach this several years ago, the course wasn't held). This time I looked at readings that intersect, overlap, or can be read for several weeks. The visual materials included film, postcards, and still photography. This variety helped to give some sense of what cities are all about, not only in the past but moving towards the present. The class also did far more student presentation than I have done in previous graduate seminars. I set aside at least three weeks for student presentations.
The weekly topics focused on the comparative model, a model that is not used much in history and again is more common for sociology. Instead of looking deeply at one case study to learn something, we looked at two or more. We also needed a specific methodology. This means that I had more planning work for the assignments than may be the case in the standard seminar model. An example of how people employ the comparative method is that I had students look at US and non-US contemporary cities and one problem that they share. Some cities included in the class were Berlin, Las Vegas, Paris, and Buenos Aires. We began the semester with a discussion about what the term “global city” means. I took a devil's advocate position that Las Vegas is a global city, a position that sparked a lively debate. This made the course appear more cross-disciplinary as the students used both historical and sociological methods to examine ideas.
