Highly recommended.
Professor Langdon is extremely passionate for his topic and concerned about his students. A historian like him knows so much and he could keep talking for 75 minutes without any pauses. He even provided chocolates during exams.

The course covers material from pre-history to AD 843, and focuses on western civilization. It is divided into 4 parts: Ancient Near East(Iraq and Egypt), Greece, Rome, and Early Migrations Period(split of the Roman Empire to three daughter cultures). The Greek and Roman parts are easy because most people are familiar with these topics and they are in the chronological order. However the other two parts are more complicated. For the Ancient Near East part, he taught through two time lines as Iraq and Egypt usually interacted with each other in the history. For the Migration period part, professor Langdon was in a rush to finish and there were many unfamiliar Arabic names.

Course reader is essential for study even though there are many handwritten notes and information scattered through all pages. Learn how to read and use the course reader!!! It really helps. Two other textbooks I would recommend you to read are The Western Experience (usually referred as Chambers), and Classics of Western Thoughts. The first one provides basic ideas about what is going on and is pretty easy to understand. The second one contains a lot of material for discussion sections. If you don’t read anything, you are probably going to be an idiot and falling asleep because you don’t know any names.

Midterm and final are fair with curves. The midterm contains one long essay and two paragraphs accompanied by identifications. All his essay and paragraphs have “themes” which he reiterates and emphasizes multiple times in the class. Capture these main ideas and you will do fine. IDs, as people said before, are just terminology of people, ideas, and events. For instance he will put “Sparta, Athens, and the Cycle of Constitutions” as one ID for your choice. Final only has 4 essays. Two long and two short. He basically gives us the main topics in the review sessions.

He also assigns one essay which is about 15% of the total grade. Pretty easy if you go to discussions and learn about those historians.

A great class overall. Though Langdon goes “crazy” sometimes and you don’t know what he is talking about, he still presents useful materials for students who love history.

Selling the Course Reader for History 1A for $30. If you take it with Langdon, it's absolutely essential. Contact me at ********** if interested :)

Is this an easy GE class? Probably not. Is it that hard to get an A? No. I went to almost every class, studied my ass off for the midterm (A-), then ended up barely having time to study for the final and came out with an A in the class. Just pay attention to the main ideas and follow his test directions and you'll be fine - he knows so much and likes to talk about it that the main ideas can get caught up in the details sometimes.

I personally enjoyed Landon's lectures. He knows so much that he never had to pause during his lectures, he essentially speaks through the whole entire class. With that said, I really wish he has powerpoint slides instead of a course reader. The course reader was really riculous. It was all over the place and consisted of hand drawn maps and hand written notes. Ended up not using it a lot because it was so hard to understand and follow. Midterm and final were fairly easy and also graded pretty fairly (midterm had a HUGE curve). Discussions helped a lot with all the primary source readings that we had to describe pretty explicitly especially for the final.

Professor Langdon is very passionate about the subject. I thought I heard somewhere this was his first time teaching History 1A, and he did a pretty decent job at it. He definitely knows his stuff. I took it for a GE class, but if you're a history major, I think you'll like him. There might seem like a lot of notes and yes, it does seem like he talks alot, not giving you time to take the notes, but the thing is, his Course Reader is basically the class in a book. It's completely packed with information, and most of the time I didn't even bother taking notes as most of the information he presented in class was in the Course Reader. The breakdown of the class was 20% participation in class discussion, 35% midterm and 45% final. He originally also assigned a paper, but he dropped it for some reason. The midterm was fairly easy, it was composed of 18 "identifications", which were mostly important people or buildings you learned about, which you were expected to write 2-4 sentences about. There was also two sets of 1 essay question and 1 prose question. The prose question was supposed to be written about in 12 complex sentences, and the essay was...well, an essay. However, he basically gives you what the questions will be, and as long as you paid attention in class, they should be fairly easy to answer. The final was the same format.

Overall, a decent professor, you don't really have to do the readings from the textbook, at least for this class, as he goes over it in lecture anyways.