After teaching his iconic Black history seminar for seven years, Paideia’s own Dr. Barrington Edwards has begun a new era of classes. This year he’s teaching How the West Ends, a new seminar history class.
The course centers on trying to define the bounds, creation, success, and future demise of the West through historiography: the study of how and why history is written and taught. According to Edwards, “This is not a ‘what happened?’ class; this is a class that breaks down who constructs the narrative, why, how, and who’s included.”
When he was asked to offer a new class in place of his Black History curriculum this school year, Edwards admitted to some reluctance: “If there’s any time Black History needs to be offered, it’s now,” he asserted. “In a political climate where history is already being hardlined from curricula, I felt some resistance to putting Black History on rotation.” But as the department chair, Edwards shared that he wrestled with the question of how to bring a greater variety of courses to students. Eventually, he decided the enhanced enrichment afforded to students by diversifying course material took precedence and began the process of realizing an entirely new curriculum.
“The class itself came about as a eureka moment,” Edwards recalled, “I was inspired by a John Adams quote from 1814: ‘There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.’ The name of the class came first, and the material followed from there.” The name of the course functions as a pun: students examine not only the West’s eventual ruin, but the destination or purpose it serves.
Edwards will continue to alternate his course offerings in coming years, with Black History returning for the 2027-2028 school year. He ended the interview by affirming the experience of creating a new class, a magnum opus of sorts: “Teaching How the West Ends opened up this incredible door for me: this class is forcing me to lean on everything I’ve learned these past few decades to look at one problem: the construction of the West and of democracy…it really plays to my strengths.”
