Fall 2026 Courses

Second Half: 22 Oct to Finals Week

First Half: Archive

Grading Breakdown – All Courses

This site will publish the schedules, course materials, rules, and some of the assigned reading my three courses at CCNY in the Fall 2026 semester. Updates will be announced by e-mail. For a start, students usually want to know about course grading. It is the same for all three courses.

Attendance & Classroom Presence, 40%

  • Always bring your course notebook and a working pen or pencil.
  • Arrive prepared and on-time.
  • Be attentive and participate.
  • Phones must be hidden from view and turned off during class time. If you must use it, please take your phone outside, into the hall.
  • Sorry, no eating or sleeping in class. (Sorry to have to say it.)
  • Please read the COURSE RULES in full.
  • CCNY COLLEGE RULES:
    – Four unexcused absences = course fail.
    – Final exam is required

Quizzes and Short Homework, 25%

  • There will be a number of unannounced quizzes on the reading due for that day, always given at the start of class.
  • There will be a number of short homework assignments based on class notes or readings, and due at the following class.

Midterm, 7%

Final Exam, 13%

  • College requirement: “It is mandatory that your class has an in-class final exam and that it be given during finals week. Students are required to take the final and may not make travel plans during finals week.”

Group assignment or individual paper, 15%

  • Students will either write an individual short research paper (5-7 pages) or engage in a group assignment together with colleagues, possibly to be presented in class. In either case, this will involve multiple stages of work and it will be required that subjects and methods are discussed and agreed upon in advance with the instructor during office hours.

Public History Assignment, 5%

  • A fun extra-credit assignment that will be announced after the Midterm.

Fastest way to fail the course

  • Plagiarism, including and especially presenting anything produced by an LLM (“AI”) as your own work.

* * * * *

While we update, here are two photographs taken at an international exhibition in Moscow, July 1959. Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (center, light suit), is debating the subject of consumerism with Richard Nixon, vice-president of the United States (dark suit). They are examining an American exhibit featuring a “model American kitchen.”

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This has been called the “Kitchen Debate.” Nixon is asserting the superiority of the American freedom and the American way of life. Khrushchev is promising that the Soviet model will eventually prove its superiority by exceeding the standards of American consumerism. The man behind Nixon is Leonid Brezhnev, who will replace Khruschev as the leader of the Soviet Union in 1964.

Image credit: Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images