Introduction to Peoples’ History of the Roman Empire

HIST 3440 Digital Project

The Public History Project is the central throughline of this course. Instead of writing a traditional research paper that only your instructor will read, as a class you will build a historically grounded interpretation of the Roman world designed for a public audience. Each student or pair will contribute one “page” of a new digital exhibit. Your work will be guided step by step through a series of scaffolded assignments that help you 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 course is to help you recognize those misuses and to understand why careful, ethical public interpretation of the ancient world matters.

Public historians work in museums, archives, libraries, cultural heritage sites, digital platforms, classrooms, and community spaces; they interpret the past for broad audiences, make scholarly debates legible, and help the public understand how history shapes the present. Your project asks you to practice that kind of interpretation yourself. You will choose a theme that interests you, work through the life of a historically plausible individual, and use real evidence—texts, objects, images, spaces, and scholarship—to explore how larger systems like empire, labor, religion, inequality, mobility, and identity shaped lived experience. Along the way, you will confront the limits of the evidence and learn how historians responsibly interpret gaps in the record without inventing facts or flattening complexity. This is especially important for Roman history, where many surviving sources were produced by elite men and often obscure the experiences of women, enslaved people, non-citizens, migrants, and the poor.

Your final contribution to the digital project will take one of three formats:

  • Multi-modal Visual Essay
  • Narrative Essay
  • Interpretive Video Essay

Whatever format you choose, the goal is the same: to present a clear, evidence-based interpretation of Roman history that is accessible to a non-specialist audience while remaining intellectually honest and historically responsible. You are not expected to “dumb things down.” You are expected to translate complexity clearly, explain why interpretations matter, and make your reasoning visible.

This project is also about confidence. Many students come into Roman history assuming they are not “experts enough” to interpret the ancient world. The structure of this assignment is designed to show you that historical understanding is built through questions, evidence, and careful reasoning—not through memorizing facts or already knowing the answers. You will be supported at every stage, and revision is built into the process. If you engage seriously with the milestones, by the end of the semester you will have created a piece of public history that reflects real scholarly thinking and contributes responsibly to how the Roman past is understood today.

Introduction to Digital Scholarship

At University of Idaho Library:

  • CDIL
    • Digital Collections (digitized or born digital library open access collections)
    • CDIL Projects (scholarship projects with collaborators)
    • CollectionBuilder (open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites, developed at CDIL, powers everything!)
    • Iterative development!

Student Digital Scholarship Projects

Data and Spreadsheets

  • Thinking about humanities/history data.
  • How does structured data becomes websites?
  • How does metadata impact discovery, useability, and context?

Example guide-like project:

Resources