Professor Laqueur uses a custom edition of a Western Civilization textbook by Kishlansky, Geary, and O’Brien for History 5. The custom edition entails slicing only those chapters relevant to the Berkeley course from the complete edition. This saves the students some money, and it gives us a chance to create a custom cover for the book!

For the fall I want a more elaborate cover than the ones that have been used in the past. The publisher’s representatives said that we could submit photos that they would arrange, but I wanted to go all-out. My friend and fellow Apple Campus Rep Jarrett Fein is a really talented graphic designer, and he is also a former history 5 student. I gave Jarrett some general ideas and he came up with what I think is a stunning custom cover for us to use. It features blue and gold Cal colors, with the gold appearing as rays of light (”fiat lux” — which has UC Berkeley and “Renaissance” meaning), and a variety of really neat images. There is an image of a 17th century European map of the world faded in the background, on the front cover there are images of Renaissance architecture in Venice, and on the back cover there are images of campus buildings in the neo-classical architectural style that are modelled after those in Venice.

The cover is wonderful because it visually depicts one of the points that Professor Laqueur includes in his lectures on the Renaissance, that the legacy of European culture is evident in many ways on the UC Berkeley campus. The architecture of many buildings as well as some of the university’s principles reflect the admiration that the founders of the school had for Venice and European classical ideals.