Overall hes a good professor but his lectures are impossible to understand. I found myself sitting in class completely lost,pretty much every week. He assigns great readings tho and as long as you do them you will do fine. The midterm/final study guide are so helpful. So many professors refuse to give a study guide. He gives you a list of what can be covered, and what he expects as far as IDs and essay portion. He assigns an essay and he explains exactly what he is looking for. If you need help go to office hours. Overall lectures are kind of hard to get through and its a lot of info to retain but he's a decent grader not that hard to get an A

LOVE him. course was fantastic and very thought-provoking. no midterms/finals, just 2 papers. he is incredibly knowledgable and articulate. he made things that normally would have bored me seem fascinating. one of the best classes i've had over all 4 years at ucla.

I liked this class. It's not easy, by any means, but Boustan is definitely right up there with the best professors in the department in terms of conveying historical concepts—you'll learn a lot of material about the political structures of the later Roman Empire, early Christianity, and so on. Boustan also provides a lot of primary sources and source analysis. There's a couple of textbooks, but you don't really need them until the final paper.

The grading structure included two midterms (week 4 and week 9) and one 8-10 page final paper. There is no in-class final exam. The midterms had three sections, the first being a timeline where you match years to events, the second being identification, and the third being primary source analysis. Boustan deploys no gimmicks; you get the complete timeline at the beginning of the course, and you also get a study guide before each midterm that lists possible IDs and possible primary sources that can appear on the exams. There is a lot of material you have to learn for each midterm, but the material is entirely predictable and there's no excuse for doing poorly. Just be sure to give yourself more time to study for the second midterm, since it basically covers twice as much material as the first one.

The final paper had four possible prompts, each of which were open-ended, so you could devote your entire paper to one aspect of a prompt if you wanted to. The paper is not difficult at all as long as the majority of your analysis focuses on primary sources.

I got an A+. You probably won't, but take this class anyway.

The class description on the registrars office described it as
"From the death of Constantine to the rise of Charlamange" but in reality was it really from "The rise of Augustine of Hippo and Christianity to Muhammad." This class did not focus on the significant growth of the empire and what caused the split. As far as i learned the barbarians just came in and took over the west with no discussion over how the west's boarders were crumbling, the rise of the barbarians in the first place, and the failing infrastructure but we went into none of this. And speaking of discussion that is something that this class lacked. It was always just him tirelessly lecturing because the class was not involved as a result of his unengaging teaching style.
Im not complaining about the amount of work as much the way he taught the information and decided what information was more useful to study than the others.
The class had two midterms. one week four and one week nine. then a 8-10 page paper for a final. Midterms are fairly straight forward if you do the readings and properly use the study guide. 5 dates from a timeline of events, out of 10 people you write about 7 of them, and out of 3 quotes you analyze only 1 in depth.

If you want to do well in this class you're going to have to write the essays with his opinion in mind. I had to rewrite mine because I disagreed with his opinion on Jews being monotheistic in ancient times. He limits the resources we can use to prove that very important point. While the essay question allowed room for opinion, we were all surprised when he wanted the essay to go in his direction. I've never had another professor that did this. I found myself rewriting an essay persuasively that goes against all of my beliefs, and if you read that essay you will actually believe that Jews believed in many gods in ancient times and were in fact one in the same as the Canaanite people, which is completely unknown. They could have been influenced by the Canaanites and other religions and cultures surrounding them. While we were allowed to use 3 sources, those 3 sources were very short and the psalm to prove monotheism was written by a prophet much later than the time period he was focusing on. So it isn't accurate.
I was left with a weird feeling after this class and if you take the material literally and believe everything that you learn in this class as a religious Jew, this could have a negative effect on your belief system.
Aside from that, midterm was easy and didn't have anything to do with opinion, just facts. Know the date for each term on the midterm and as always there's an essay in the end. Final was a take home essay- 10 pages. Easy A. Many people in the class missed a lot of lectures. It's no big deal. Just write that first essay with his opinion in mind and you'll get an easy A.
Good luck!

Class is like this:
1 midterm (35%)
1 midterm paper (25%)
1 final paper(40%)
1 mandatory office hour visit

Midterm was very easy, but the papers were hard.

Ra'Anan , may be a good scholar (may be not) but definitely is not a good professor.
He chose sources for us to use to write the papers about. We were not allowed to study from any other sources outside of the ones he assigned us. That's not the bad part though.

For the midterm paper, I was busting an all-nighter and I wasn't paying attention to what I was writing. I accidentally fabricated a source that helped his opinion. He approved of it. He gave me a C for my paper because he misread one of my points to be contrary to his opinion (I don't agree with his scholastic stance but for the paper, I wrote it to be parallel to his stance). I asked for a grade appeal, because I knew he read it wrong. Then, after seeing that he misread my point, he fixed my grade.

I was extremely unenthusiastic about my final paper so I did the best I can to fill up the word count (e.g instead of "Gene, a man" I wrote "A man by the name of Gene"). It was the worst paper I ever wrote in my life. I got an A on the paper, so I'm assuming he barely even read my paper.

In short, he is a boring lecturer, and a bad teacher who values spotlighting his scholastic opinion more than accurately teaching students. I would not recommend him