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.