About

The Peoples’ History of the Roman Empire is a student-created public history project exploring Roman history through individual lives, material culture, and cultural reception. It brings together multimodal essays, narrative essays, and video projects presenting evidence-based interpretations of the ancient world for a general audience.

Instead of writing a traditional research paper that only an instructor will read, students in this course work together to build a historically grounded interpretation of the Roman world designed for a public audience. Students select a character profile that provides basic information about age, citizen status, family, occupation, and location in the ancient world. Starting from the profile, students adapt and add to the character’s context following their research to answer historical questions. Through this careful scholarship, they learn how historians ask questions, work with evidence, make careful interpretations, and communicate those interpretations clearly and responsibly.

Public history matters because most people encounter the past outside of classrooms and academic journals–through museums, documentaries, podcasts, websites, social media, and popular culture. Roman history, in particular, is everywhere online, and much of what circulates under the label of “Roman history” is inaccurate, oversimplified, or shaped by modern political agendas. Roman imagery is often used to promote ideas about power, race, gender, masculinity, empire, and decline that are not supported by historical evidence. One of the goals of this project is to help recognize those misuses and to understand why careful, ethical public interpretation of the ancient world matters.