Andrew Israel Ross at Air Pollution and Nathanael Robinson at Rhine River are reading and discussing Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot, with an eye to understanding the novelist's effectiveness as a social historian.

ACTA replies to Tim Burke and Burke continues his critique of ACTA's report.

In an exercise that does not hold them up to scorn, though frankly I think some of them are much better than others, Dan Cohen's"Ten Most Popular History Syllabi,"* 10 January 2006, listed these:

#1 – Eric Mayer's U. S. History to 1870 at Victor Valley College;
#2 – Robert Bannister's America in the Progressive Era at Swarthmore College;
#3 – Bruce Dorsey's The American Colonies at Swarthmore College;
#4 – Sheila Culbert's The American Civil War at Dartmouth College;
#5 – Andrew Plaa's Early Modern Europe at Columbia University;
#6 – Robert Griffith's The United States Since 1945 at American University;
#7 – Robert Dykstra's American Political and Social History II at SUNY, Albany;
#8 – Sarah Watts' The World Since 1500 at Wake Forest University;
#9 – Nicholas Pappas' The Military and War in America at Sam Houston State University;
#10 – Jim Jones' World Civilization I at West Chester State University.

More recently, 21 May, Cohen offers the"10 Most Popular Philosophy Syllabi."
*See Cohen's post for explanations of how he derived his findings of relative popularity. For more sophisticated use of his Syllabus Finder, see: Cohen,"By the Book: Assessing the Place of Textbooks in U. S. Survey Courses," Journal of American History, 2005. The title of the article is a little misleading because it also discusses the most commonly used collateral readings.