About the Course
| Course number | HIST 07.38 |
| Distributives | FYS |
| Time | 10 (MWF 10:10-11:15, Th 12:15-13:05) |
| Classroom | Reed Hall 108 |
| Instructor | Yi Lu |
| Office | Carson 205 |
| Office Hour | Monday 14:00-16:00 |
| Phone | 603-646-0156 |
Course Description
We live in an age of fake news, but what is new about it exactly? Making up and manipulating facts have a long and storied past; meanwhile, our notions of truth and evidence do not remain constant, either. Treating words such as “information” as concepts with their own history, this course explores the unstable relationship between truth and politics through the history of modern China. While the country is commonly depicted as a suppressor of dissent at home and spreader of disinformation abroad, our class takes a longer and broader view. Misinformation, after all, is neither new to our age of social media, nor unique to non-democratic regimes.
So why does misinformation exist and persist, how does it spread and divide, and what can we do to combat them? To answer these questions, we will explore techniques for controlling information, including secrecy, censorship, propaganda. We will examine the role of technology – from print to the Internet to AI-powered algorithms – and the social publics they have created. Instead of accepting facts at face value, we will also ask how we know what we know – through surveys, statistics, and knowledge institutions such as archives, libraries, and museums.
Fake contents have real history. To explore their impact, our class is organized around case studies that span over eight hundred years. From Marco Polo’s fabled journey in the 13th century to sorcery scare in Qing China, from the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic to the future of Tiktok, you will meet characters from diverse backgrounds – scholars, statesmen, as well as ordinary Chinese from all walks of life. To understand how they made sense of the world and their place within it, we turn to a variety of primary sources: they include not just written texts of various genres, but also images and movies, physical objects, and digital contents from the periods that we study. These primary sources will be supplemented by readings from historical contexts and from other academic disciplines, including literature, political science, and psychology.
As a first-year seminar, this class will devote considerable attention to developing your reading and writing skills. Through regular response papers, revisions, and presentations, you will practice traditional methods of fact-finding, such as library and archival research, and compare them with new digital tools such as generative AI. You will apply your skills to a variety of writing tasks, from newspaper op-eds to an independent research project on a topic of your choice. By the end of the class, you will not only learn more about China, the history of information, and the study of history; you will also develop your own thinking, research, and writing practices – information literacy that is essential for building an empathetic, informed citizenry in our “post-truth” era.
Learning Objectives
This class contributes to the Writing Program’s learning outcomes for First-Year Seminars. By the end of the course, you will be able to:
- engage in critical discussion about (mis)information, especially in the context of Chinese history
- find, evaluate, and cite a variety of primary and secondary sources
- execute an independent project, from defining problem to conducting research to presenting
- communicate your ideas in a variety of formats and genres – from academic essays to policy briefs – to a wide range of audience