An NYU History Course That Looks to the Future

After the 2016 election, Naftali, a CNN presidential expert, sought to contextualize the presidency. And he saw his colleagues and students looking to do the same. “David [Ludden] and I wanted to introduce students to the ways in which historians use their knowledge of the past to contextualize what we read about this country and the world every day,” he says. “It’s not only about understanding the nature and magnitude of various crises. It’s also about planning pathways beyond them. Accordingly, we need to ask, ‘Can looking at previous eras in world history provide a GPS for unsettling times?’”

So, in January 2017, History in the Headlines was born at the New York City campus. The course features a different specialty lecturer every week, including cross-disciplinary scholars and historians. What’s more, the course has spread across NYU’s global network, since the world’s histories are inextricably linked. And this fall, Professor Martin Klimke will bring the course to NYU Abu Dhabi. There, scheduled speakers include a biologist, a legal expert, and an economist. Each 75-minute class focuses on a current key issue in the context of what’s happened before it. Upcoming lectures include “The Black Lives Matter Movement in Historical Perspective” and “Environmental Challenges in the Middle East.”

The course has now been taught in New York City and at multiple NYU locations abroad, including NYU Prague and NYU Florence. Alice Berlin, a rising junior at Stern, took the course while studying at NYU Prague. At the time, her goal was to develop a more nuanced understanding of Czech history. “Taking this course abroad gave me a whole new perspective on the world. Specifically, I learned how major decisions and world events affect smaller countries that aren’t world players and how decisions across the world resonate,” she explains.

“For example, I learned how Brexit inspired similar movements in Central Europe, including the Czech Republic, leading to a possible ‘Czexit.’ Additionally, in a lecture about misinformation, I learned that the prime minister of the Czech Republic runs a company that owns the country’s two largest news sources. So he can influence what gets published—something we’re starting to see in the United States. Discussing the effects of trends and themes in the course and then seeing them in real time, as we lived in and explored Prague, was amazing.”