DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Course Catalog

HISTORY 101-7 College Seminar - European History 

200 – New Introductory Courses in History 

Introductory lecture courses on topics not covered in regular offerings. Content varies. May be repeated for credit with different topic. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. Topic Varies by instructor. See Caesar for specific course descriptions. 

200-0– Sickness and Health in Latin America and the Caribbean 

In 1492 the New World became a crucible for the exchange of diseases, drugs, and therapies between people of American, European, and African origin. The region has been central in the circulation of medical knowledge and materials ever since. This course traces upheavals in the history of medicine, from contact to the present. A key angle of inquiry will be to consider how global frameworks help make sense of local practice, and how local knowledge informed transnational, hemispheric, and Atlantic developments in public health and medicine. We will also ask what medical practitioners today stand to learn from a chronologically deep, culturally informed understanding of healing and illness. Topics include pre-Columbian medicine and conceptions of the human body; the “Columbian Exchange” of pathogens, animals, and people; the global commodification of American plants and botanical knowledge; Catholic, shamanic, and lay healing frameworks; disease eradication campaigns, including the discovery of the yellow fever vector; and experiments with socialized medicine.

200-0-20 Jerusalem: History, Memory, Fantasy

This course appeals to students interested in broadening their vision of Jerusalem, the city deemed holy by the three Abrahamic religions. They will deepen their knowledge of the contested narratives of Jews, Christians, and Muslims centered in Jerusalem and the "land called holy" and contextualize the role of Jerusalem in shaping broad political, religious, and cultural myths. Using the methodological principle of "history and memory," this course will explore the foundational texts that have shaped and continue to shape conflicting narratives of Jerusalem. Students will embark on a journey from the archaeological digs in the 10th-7th centuries BCE through the destruction of the first Solomon Temple and Jerusalem, through the Hasmonaean rebellion in 164 BCE, and Jerusalem's acquiring of a primordial place in classical Judaic and early Christian tradition in the 1st century CE. We will explore the city's transformation as the center of the Temple-based cult into the key holy locus in Jewish and Christian memory. We will focus on the earliest attempts of rising Islam to establish itself in the Judeo-Christian environment of the holy city of Jerusalem and explore the Muslim nomenclature for Jerusalem, Muslim construction on the Temple Mount, and the Arab reaction to the crusades and crusaders. We will focus on the expansion of Jerusalem in the pre-independence era and the rise of the military conflict of Jordan versus the State of Israel around the post-colonial city following the termination of the British mandate, the ramifications of Six Day War for the area, the rise of the PLO, and the emergence of Jerusalem as the national capital in the second half of the 20th century. We will discuss how Jews, Christians, and Muslims negotiate sacred spaces in real life and in political charters, how and why Jerusalem became divided and what the plans of various parties are regarding the future status of Jerusalem.

200-0-22 History of College Sports

This course will explore the history of intercollegiate athletics at Northwestern and beyond, from the 19^th century to the present. For years, various stakeholders across campus have debated the role and impact of athletics at Northwestern. We’ve celebrated the academic and athletic accomplishments of student athletes, and cheered on our Wildcats as a demonstration of school spirit and fandom. But we’ve also asked critical questions about athletics and sexual harassment, hazing, and the allocation of resources to athletics compared with other corners of campus. Versions of what’s happened here are happening at schools across the United States. We will explore these issues and others by grounding them in history. Some of the topics we will cover include the value of athletic competition to student (and human) development, the relationship between athletics and academics, the formation and expansion of sports conferences, physical and mental health, racial and gender equity, the business of college sports, and the vexing question of whether student athletes are more like students or employees of the university. We will read primary sources including the legislation governing college sports, and secondary sources about college sports and their national historical context broadly. Lectures will be supplemented with in-class interviews with one or more guest/s at a time—faculty members, university administrators, student athletes, coaches, athletics department representatives—so they can engage one another in conversation. Ultimately, students will learn to think critically about an issue of great importance to our community and the past and present of the United States in general

200-0 – The Jews of Southeastern Europe 

Starting in the 19th century, in the Western European colonial and postcolonial imagination, Southeastern Europe (known as the Balkans) became the typical locus of Orientalism at the fringe of Europe, depicted as a place of socio-economic backwardness, bloodthirsty tribalism, and ingrained inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatred and violence targeting especially the minorities, such as the Jews. Such myths worsened during the twentieth century when Southeastern Europe - encompassing the modern states of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia and its successor states - was seen as a source of instability, war, and political chaos and fragmentation. One of the most important minorities of Southeastern Europe during the modern era, the local Jews contributed decisively to the region's economic and socio-cultural modernization, while enduring discrimination, marginalization, long-lasting struggles with integration, and eventually mass destruction and mass emigration. At the same time, during the Ottoman and the Habsburg Empires and the successor nation-states, the region harbored significant traditions of multiculturality, multi-confessionalism, and peaceful coexistence, and some of the local Jews achieved economic prosperity and social and cultural prominence. In spite of the relatively small size of their communities, the local Jews triggered a lot of interest in the Great powers' and local states' political-diplomatic circles who debated their status (often conceptualized as the "Jewish Question") at the major peace conferences marking the end of various conflicts such as the 1877-1878 Russian-Ottoman War, World War I, and World War II. 
During the 19th and 20th centuries, the Jews of the region have witnessed a series of transitions that shaped their lives in a major way - from empires to nation states and emancipation, from war and civil war to peace, from fascism to communism and from the latter to liberal democracy. This course will examine the political, economic, and socio-cultural history of the Jews in Southeastern Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries from the disintegration of local empires and the emergence of modern nation-states to the recent democratization and the enlargement of the European Union. 

200-0 – American Religious History from 1865 to the Great Depression 

This course examines major developments, movements, controversies, and figures in American religious history from the end of the Civil War, as the nation struggled to make sense of the carnage of war and to apportion responsibility, to the 1930s, when economic crisis strained social bonds and intimate relations and challenged Americans to rethink the nature of public responsibility. Topics include urban religion; religion and changing technologies; African American religion; religion and politics; and the religious practices of immigrants and migrants. 

200-0 Age of Revolutions

Why do revolutions start? What factors make them succeed or fail? How have people sought to unleash and seize control of massive historical change - or, less grandly, simply tried to survive it? We will consider these questions as we examine the era of modern revolutions, beginning with the outbreak of the interlinked French, Haitian, and American Revolutions of the late 1700s, then following their decades-long aftershocks as a wave of revolutions sweeps the globe from Europe to Latin America to the Middle East. This cascade of dramatic struggles between democracy and aristocracy, freedom and slavery, independence and colonialism, created a new world order as well as key components of our ongoing social reality: socialism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, terrorism, and perhaps most importantly revolution itself, an eruption of sudden and epochal social transformation which has electrified some but terrified others ever since.

200-0– History of the Future 

Our world is awash in predictions: climate models and pandemic models, political polls and betting pools, economic forecasts and scenarios for war, plus the ever-approaching AI utopia and/or hellscape. This is hardly new. For millennia, people have been debating what the future holds. They haven’t always been right, of course, but even their mistakes tell us a great deal about the times when they were made. Ironically, studying the future is an excellent way to study the past (and reconsider the present). In this course we will learn about 5,000 years of prognosticators, from Mesopotamian astrologers to today’s climate scientists. Along the way we will read sci-fi authors and religious millenarians, socialists and Afro-futurists, eugenicists and risk managers. This course will teach you to better assess predictions of things to come. Come explore the alternative worlds of futures past.

200-0 Global History of Slavery 

Slavery has been around for millennia but it has meant very different things in different societies. We will look at different examples in different times and places, such as slavery systems in Greece, Rome, Northeastern Africa and West African kingdoms, to ask: What is slavery, and how did very different societies create the status of the enslaved? And how did enslaved men and women experience, and sometimes resist, their condition? From discussions over the legal status of “slave” to the social condition of the enslaved, we will debate the making of a key category of human experience.

200-0 – The Holocaust and Its Memory in Israel 

This course examines the origins, development, course, and consequences of the most comprehensive genocide in history and, the ways it is remembered by Israeli society. The first part of the course will focus on the persecution of Jews during the first half of the 20th century culminating in their genocide between 1939-1945. We will discuss Nazi ideology; the complex interface between the Nazi regime's espousal of racism and the motivation of perpetrators on the ground; the interface between politics and law; the victims' reactions to persecution; conditions of life in the ghettos and camps; the response of the international community; the complex question of the role of 'collaborators,' 'bystanders,' 'beneficiaries'; and the aftermath of the war. In the second part of the course, we will examine the contradicting attitudes of Israeli society towards the Holocaust. We will probe how the establishment of the State of Israel, the 1950's mass immigration, and the evolving Arab-Israeli conflict shaped Israeli's understanding and memory of the Holocaust. Throughout the course, we will analyze various primary documents: manifests, protocols, speeches, letters, and memoirs of men and women, as well as films and documentaries. 

200-0  American Religious History from WWII to the Present 

This course examines major developments, movements, controversies and figures in American religious history from the 1920s, the era of excess and disillusionment, to the 1980s, which saw the revival of conservative Christianity in a nation becoming increasingly religiously diverse. Topics include the liberalism/fundamentalism controversy of the 1920s; the rise of Christian realism in the wake of the carnage of World War I; the making of the "tri-faith nation" (Protestant/Catholic/Jew); the supernatural Cold War; the Civil Rights Movement; the revolution in American Catholicism following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the rise of Catholic political radicalism in the 1960s; religion and the post-1965 immigration act; the religious politics of abortion; and the realignment of American religion and politics in the 1970s and 1980s.

200-0- Christianity in the Global South 

A thematic survey of Christian communities, thought, practice, and culture from the earliest times to the present, with a focus on regions outside of Europe and North America. Special attention will be paid to the great variety of institutional forms and experiences through time, the ways individual Christians made meaning out of their religion, the initiatives of women, workers, peasants, and enslaved and indigenous peoples, and the enduring impact of non-Western Christians on the West.

200-0 – The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 

It could well be argued that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as much about history as about land. Just as possession of the Land of Israel/Palestine is contested between Israelis and Palestinians, so the right to that land is contested between the two peoples, and for both sides, it is history that establishes that right, as if conferring a title deed to the country they both claim as their own. Israeli and Palestinian views of history, however, are so different as to be irreconcilable. This course explores this discrepancy, looking at the two peoples' narratives both on their own terms and in relation to one another. How is it, we will ask and answer throughout the course, that the central events in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are recounted and remembered so differently by the two sides? We will then look at the ways in which Israelis and Palestinians have enlisted history in the service of their cause to vindicate their own right to the land while impeaching that of the other claimant. Accordingly, we will consider the polemical and apologetic dimensions of the two narratives, as we analyze each narrative's omissions, emphases, distortions, trivializations, exaggerations, and appeals to pathos. It will be seen, from our inquiry in this course, that history itself is another battleground in the century-plus-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. 

200-0 - Race and Racism  

Racial discrimination, segregation, and disenfranchisement are pervasive features of American history. This course thus explores various configurations of institutionalized inequity and violence in the realms of, among other things, politics, education, employment, housing, and criminal justice.

200-0 – Making the Modern Middle East: Culture, Politics, History 

This team taught course offers an interdisciplinary approach to major issues in the study of histories, cultures, and societies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as an introduction to MENA as a field of study. We seek to understand how "MENA" was made as well as how the imaginary of MENA coalesced into a geopolitical entity and conceptual category. Among the topics explored are the history of the idea of MENA and the multiple meanings of "modernity" in that context; the complex relations between MENA and the West, the historical formation of Middle East nation states, polities, ideologies, identities, and economies; the War on Terror and its impact on the region, and the dynamic struggles unfolding in the region since the 2011 Arab uprisings including mass migration. The course will consider the making of these structures, events, and relationships from a range of perspectives, focusing on historical and cultural production. Primary and secondary course materials will include historical, social science, performance, cinematic, literary, and digital texts. Short description: This team taught course offers an interdisciplinary approach to major issues in the study of histories, cultures, and societies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as well as an introduction to MENA as a field of study. We seek to understand how "MENA" was made as well as how the imaginary of MENA coalesced into a geopolitical entity and conceptual category. 

200-0-20 Sex and the Body in Early Americas

This course examines the history of sex and the body in early America, a particularly fruitful time and place for this study, as multiple different groups including Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans came together with different ideas and practices. These groups used the evidence of the body and embodied experience to articulate notions of sameness and difference at various moments, leading to new ideas about key concepts like race, gender, and sexuality. Topics include disability, disease and medicine, reproduction, sexuality, and sexual violence.

200-0-24 History of the Black World

200-0-26 Drugs and Alcohol in Africa

The course engages students about the fascinating stories of drugs and alcoholic beverages in African history over the past 5000 years. Students will be guided on how to develop a deep understanding of gender, class, and religious identities, rituals, state formation and power, protest and revolution, sociality and pleasure, taste and addiction, and ideas about illness and wellness in Africa through the study of alcohol and drug substances—palm wine, beer, tobacco, coffee, aguardiente, kolanut, ògógóró, narcotics, etc. Case studies will cut across different periods and places, including Ancient Egypt, Classic Yoruba Civilization, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana. Students will learn to analyze secondary and primary texts, performative genres, visual arts, and archaeological artifacts associated with Africa's "drugoholic" history.

200-0-30 Global Queer Activism

Queens. Inverts. Sapphists. Hijra. Uranians. Abatoni. Friends of Dorothy. Many of the terms used to describe gender and sexual minorities in the past and around the world might be unrecognizable to us today – but they have all shaped current understandings of sex, gender and identity. In this course students will explore queer histories in a global context to understand the people and experiences behind the categories. Instead of a chronological approach, or looking at countries in isolation, the class will focus on the most hotly-debated topics in gender history and queer history: how have identity categories developed over time and in different contexts? How have gender and sexual minorities fought for liberation, and how have these efforts informed movements around the world today?

200-0-32 Christianity in Modern History

A history of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century and their legacies in the modern age. Topics include theological controversies, religious radicalism, the role of women in religious reform movements, the great witch craze, religious violence, religion and ritual, and the origins of religious toleration. The course starts in Europe but extends into the religious history of the Americas, especially the US.

200-0-34 History of Witchcraft

The great witch trials of the early modern era peaked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, leading to the public executions of an estimated 40,000 individuals throughout Europe and North America. This course seeks to contextualize the witch trials within religious, cultural, social, and economic perspective, offering a multifaceted account of why Europeans turned on their neighbors – a large majority of them women – and accused them of fraternizing with the devil, poisoning livestock, brewing love potions, and consorting with grotesque familiars. Towards the end of the course, we will discuss how modern ideologies of witchcraft – in fairy tales, films, and politics – continue to draw upon these earlier European cultural and intellectual legacies. At a moment when the specter of the “witch hunt” has re-entered American political discourse and when women’s bodies have become the subject of national debate, the era of the witch burnings offers unsettling parallels to our own society.

200-0-36 A Global History of Prisons and Camps

This course examines two institutions – the prison and the detention camp – that traditionally have been studied separately. At the course’s foundation lies a hypothesis: the practice of imprisoning masses of people for extended periods of time is both a product of the modern state and a constituent element of the modern era. Every modern state has its own prison system to remove those it deems criminal from society. Over the past two centuries numerous regimes have resorted to detention camps in one form or another: to confine allegedly rebellious peoples, feared minorities, enemy soldiers, or stateless refugees. With varying degrees of brutality and murderous intent – a critical consideration the course will always keep in mind – those in power have used prisons and camps to suppress racial, religious, political, and other identified groups, and to exploit their labor for public and private use. Authorities have mandated that the condemned toil in confinement to pay a debt to society and for their own rehabilitation. Regardless of the great variety of pretexts under which regimes have imprisoned citizens and subjects, both modern structures of incarceration and the experience of the incarcerated bear a great number of similarities that this course will explore and discuss. The course begins with a consideration of alternate forms of punishment common to the premodern era and then follows the development and spread of the modern prison and the proliferation of mass detention camps across the globe over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will seek to understand the prisoner experience (to the extent possible) and discuss the place of bounded sites of detention in governance, justice, repression, societal relations, and, ultimately, tourism.

201 – European Civilization: High Medieval Through Mid-18th C 

Culture and structure of preindustrial society, high medieval through mid-18th century. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

201-1 Europe in the Medieval and Early Modern World 

This course surveys the history of Europe from the High Middle Ages through the early modern period to the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. These centuries changed the course of European and world history. The Renaissance, the Reformations, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment unfolded at the same time as European empires spread first into the Mediterranean and then across the Atlantic, spurring the growth of global capitalism and the transatlantic slave trade. Political and religious freedoms emerged alongside new forms of persecution, control, and oppression. A divided Europe grew increasingly connected to the rest of the world as commercial goods, people, ideas, and diseases traveled across land and sea. Among the major themes we'll explore are a) how individuals who lived through these tumultuous centuries experienced their changing world and b) how changes in health, disease, and environment - including the Black Death, the Columbian Exchange, and the climactic cooling period known as the Little Ice Age - drove the religious, political, social, and economic upheavals of the late medieval and early modern periods.

201-2 Europe in the Medieval and Early Modern World 

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 created modern politics and, in so doing, brought forth a new form of war – a total social mobilization on a previously unimaginable scale fought by mass armies of ordinary citizens in the name of the nation, its glory, and its survival. This course will trace the social, political, and cultural implications of total war through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II, comparing these to the colonial wars of imperial conquest pursued by European states in the same period as extensions of the political claims of the nation on a global scale – wars whose practices in turn changed and intensified the conduct, scale, and human consequences of war in Europe itself.

201-2 – Europe in the Modern World 

This is a course about the two centuries after 1750 when events in Europe determined the course of world history. We will ask why Europe came to dominate the world in the nineteenth century, considering especially industrialization, revolution and imperial expansion. We will investigate, too, how these apparent triumphs paved the way for the catastrophes of Europe’s 20th century – the world wars, the Holocaust, decolonization and the Cold War – and explain the relatively peaceful decades that followed World War II and the monumental experiment in European integration. Our central theme will be the transformation of social relations: how societies of subjects and serfs became societies of citizens and comrades; how intimate relations within families changed; how masters and workers came to think about their interests and what they had to do to defend them.

203-1 – Jewish History 1: 750-1492 

Political, economic, cultural, and intellectual life of Jewish communities under medieval Islam and Christianity. Judeo-Arabic culture and its critics; Jewish-Christian relations; the place of violence; rise and influence of Jewish law and mysticism. 

203-2 – Jewish History II: Early Modern, 1492 - 1789 

1492-1789: Jewish community's economic and cultural reshaping; legalized readmission of Jews to European cities and integration into European society. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

203-3 – Jewish History III: 1789-1948 

1789-1948: Plurality of models of integration, acculturation, and assimilation; multiple identities; split of traditional community; sociocultural behavior; political movements. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

210-1 – History of the United States, Precolonial to the Civil War 

Everyone, it seems, from politicians to television shows, references early American history--as an ideal or as a disappointment, as a model or as a cautionary tale. Part of the disagreement stems from the vague term "early American history," which has been understood and mobilized in a variety of different ways. One of our tasks in this course will be to explore what, exactly, "early American history" means. Does it refer to the British colonies that became the United States of America, and the westward advance of an English-speaking population? All of the territory that would eventually become the U.S.? The entirety of North America? When does "early" begin? When is it no longer "early," and is it ever on time or late? Whose history qualifies as American, and what makes it so? Even historians can offer no answers to these questions, only further complications, and they continue to debate these very questions among themselves. While it is unlikely that we will be able to offer the world a definitive definition of "early American history" by the end of this course, we will nonetheless dip our toes into over four centuries of events performed by people who might be called "Americans," in a manner that may seem "American," in a space with disputable borders called "America," and attempt to arrive at some understanding of this thing called early American history. 

210-2 – History of the United States, Reconstruction to the Present 

History 210-2 surveys the course of American history from the end of Reconstruction to the present. That is to say, it explores the forces, events, ideas, and individuals who have shaped the way we live. 
The course will center on the tension between the nation's foundational promise of equality and the profound inequalities that have run through the American experience since the Civil War. It will pay particular attention to racial and class dynamics as they operated within the American economic system and to the United States' relationship to other nations, from the imperialist drives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the intensified globalization of recent decades. 

211-0- American Wars 

The history of the United States is a history of war. Yet like most things so ubiquitous, war has often gone unnoticed. Once up close and visceral, American wars have grown distant and ill-defined over time. This was especially true on college campuses like ours, which have not sent large numbers of students, faculty, or alumni to war in many generations. As military veterans passed from the scene, military history disappeared from college curriculums, leaving students with little real awareness of this defining feature of the American past and present. This new lecture course aims to change that. Combining chronological coverage with topical concerns about race, gender, citizenship, and politics, it views the United States, its peoples, and its place in the world through the prism of war. As it goes it educates students in college-level historical reading, thinking, writing, and verbal expression. Assessment is based on class participation, weekly quizzes, two in-class exams, and regular analytic writing. No prerequisites or prior knowledge are required, all students are welcome.

212-1 – Introduction to African-American History: Key concepts from 1700-1861 

This course covers the origins and experiences of the group of people known as African Americans or Blacks in the United States Their development is rooted in the cultures of Africa, Europe and the Americas; the African slave trade from the African continent to the Americas; and the founding of the United States as a nation distinct from the rest of the Americas. Beginning with Africa and the African Diaspora from the 1400s to the late-eighteenth century, the course than focuses on African descendants in the United States from the late-eighteenth century to the eve of the U.S. Civil War in 1861.

212-2 – Introduction to African American History: Emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement 

This course offers a general introduction to the history of African Americans in the United States from emancipation through the Reconstruction Era, Age of Jim Crow, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, and Long Civil Rights Movement and Black Power. With an acute eye toward human agency, students will explore the myriad ways in which African Americans mobilized their collective resources to demand the recognition of their rights as citizens, women and men, and, more broadly, human beings. This course, thus, explores the myriad ways in which historical actors at the center of dramas challenged racial segregation, exclusion, and discrimination—structural features endemic to U.S. society. In the process, students will engage a problem central to United States history: How do we figure African Americans relationship to the ideologies and institutions at the center of American political development from marginal and subordinate positions? And in what ways do the histories of African Americans demand a rethinking of those ideals embedded in the nation's highest documents? 

214-0 – Introduction to Asian American History 

This class introduces students to a broad survey of migratory and displacement patterns of those living in Asia as agitated by militarism, capitalism, imperialism, war, racism, sexism, classism, and nationalism stemming from within the region and abroad. What are the multiple and competing narratives of how these histories and experiences are produced? Once in the United States, how did similar—although not identical—processes of racialization, economic and labor exploitation, legislative and political exclusion, social and cultural othering, and strategies for survival and resistance work together to transform these heterogeneous populations into "Asian Americans"? 

215 History of the American Family

216 – Global Asians 

Survey of Asian diasporas in the United States and elsewhere in the 19th and 20th centuries, emphasizing causes of migration, process of settlement, relations with other ethnic groups, and construction of diasporic identities. ASIAN_AM 216-0 and HISTORY 216-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

218 – Latina and Latino History 

History of Latina/os in the United States and in the context of US- Latin American relations from the 18th century to the present. HISTORY 218-0 and LATINO 218-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses. 

218-0 Latina and Latino History 

The growth of the Latino population has transformed the United States and has led to heightened debates about their political power, cultural influence, citizenship, civil rights, and ethnic and racial categorization. Yet as the 2020 election demonstrated, many Americans still don’t really understand who Latinos are—or who Latinos have been, and will become. While the increased attention to Latinos may feel “new,” Latino communities have played a pivotal role in U.S. history for centuries. In this course, we will explore the 500-year history of Latinos in the United States—and, indeed, across the Americas—from the 16th century through the early 21st century. In its broadest sense, Latino History offers a reinterpretation of United States history that focuses on race, migration, labor, and empire. It is also the history of a community—or several communities, including Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Central Americans, and Cuban Americans, and others—that represents a growing percentage of the U.S. population as a whole, and one that will increasingly influence the politics, social life, culture, and economy of the United States. Although we will focus on the United States, we also will examine the movement of Latino peoples within and between the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. We will use a variety of media, including literature, film, and music, as well as more traditional historical interpretations. Ultimately, you will gain a deeper understanding of the issues and histories that bring Latinos together, those that continue to divide them, their multiple and shifting racial classification, and the long struggles for equality and belonging that have animated their histories.

219 History of the Present

220 History of the Future

Our world is awash in predictions: climate models and pandemic models, political polls and betting pools, economic forecasts and military scenarios, plus the ever-approaching AI utopia and/or hellscape. This is hardly new. For millennia, people have been debating what the future holds. They haven't always been right, of course, but even their mistakes tell us a great deal about the times they were made. Ironically, studying the future is an excellent way to study the past—and reconsider our present. In this course we will study 5,000 years of prognosticators, from Mesopotamian astrologers to today's climate scientists. Along the way we will read sci-fi authors and religious millenarians, socialists and Afro-futurists, eugenicists and high-tech visionaries. We will also play in-class scenario games and read Covid predictions to get a feel for how the future unfolds in lived time. This course may not teach you to predict the future more accurately, but it will help you to better understand visions of things to come. Come explore the alternative worlds of futures past.

221-0-20 Famous American Trials

The American courtroom has provided a venue through which Americans have grappled with moral panics, political tensions, celebrity scandal, and mass violence. The high-profile prosecutions of people ranging from Lizzie Borden to OJ Simpson had a powerful hold on American culture at the time. And although these trials rarely had a significant effect on the law, they remain potent cultural touchstones, their stories told and retold through movies, television shows, podcasts, songs, and souvenirs. This course examines several famous American trials—famous both in their time and today—to understand and examine key themes in American political, legal, social, economic, and cultural history. We will focus largely on the twentieth century—a period of multiple "Trials of the Century" —to see how each trial crystallized broader political and social tensions over ethnicity, gender, race, religion, politics, sexuality, and social status. Each trial combined elements of both formal law and public theater; through these trials, we'll examine the relationship between legal reasoning and storytelling. We will also examine how and why we return to such stories; how do they endure in historical memory, and what tensions do they help us think about today?

249-0 The End of Citizenship 

This course explores the historically shifting characteristics of what makes people think, feel and act like citizens across the world and in spaces stretching from polling booths to bowling leagues. Students will look at texts of global history as disparate as Aristotle's Politics, the poetry of Claudia Rankine, and dystopian analyses of digital surveillance from Ecuador to South Africa. By placing these in historical context the course centres on the ends of citizenship, understood in two ways: ends as in the goals of people who are or would be citizens, and ends as in the processes through which those peoples' citizenship can be terminated.

250-1 – Global History: Early Modern to Modern Transition 

The early-modern to modern transition. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

250-1 – Global History: Early Modern to Modern Transition 

This course provides an introductory survey to prominent themes in early modern global history from roughly 1450-1800. Topics covered will include: the rise of early colonial empires; global trade and material culture; religious missions; technologies of navigation; early ideologies of race and gender; and currents of intellectual exchange.

250-2 – Global History: The Modern World 

This course introduces the main episodes and themes of modern history. Unlike other history classes, however, its focus isn't on a particular region or country, but on the whole planet. That broad scope will allow us to better understand large-scale phenomena such as empire, industrial technology, communism, the two world wars, HIV/AIDS, and globalization. We'll particularly look at humanity's adoption of fossil fuels, and the prosperity, inequality, and environmental changes that resulted. No prerequisites, and it's fine to take this course before taking 250-1. 

254- Entrepreneurship: A Global History 

This course sets out to answer two big questions: What can history tell us about the making of successful entrepreneurs? How has entrepreneurship shaped the modern world? We will consider how the quest for new products and new markets helped to transform societies, economies, and environments from the 1780s through the 1950s. We will ask why and how entrepreneurs as various as Josiah Wedgwood, Madame C.J. Walker, Jamsetji Tata, and Aristotle Onassis exploited opportunities that other people either failed to see or failed to act on. Among the subjects we’ll discuss are the strengths and weaknesses of family firms, the search for capital, resource extraction and depletion, and the dynamics of globalization and deglobalization.

251 – The Politics of Disaster: A Global Environmental History 

A global survey of key natural disasters from the eighteenth century to the present. Focus on the political and human-made dimensions of these supposedly "natural" events. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

255-1 – African Civilizations 

This course surveys some of the major cultural innovations and historical processes in ancient Africa, from the advent of agricultural societies to their descendant civilizations, peoples, and societies in the Nile Valley, Western Sudan, and Central Sahara, the Rainforest of West Africa, and the East African Coast. The topics include major cultural innovations and historical milestones in ancient African history and their relevance to the contemporary world. The course mostly covers the period before 1500. Among the topics awaiting our inquiry are the impacts of climate change on agricultural innovations at the onset of the Holocene period; the philosophical, religious, social, political, and economic foundations of ancient African civilizations; and the changes and continuity in Africa's cultural history. Throughout, the instructor will emphasize the impacts of geography, environment, and global interactions on the unfolding of African history. The class will also use the concept of "intercommunication zone" to explore the different regional and subcontinental networks in African history.

255-2 – Africa in the Age of Early Modern Empires 

 Historical approach to society, economy, polity, and culture in Africa. 16th through 19th centuries. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

255-3 – Modern Africa

Historical approach to society, economy, polity, and culture in Africa. 1875 to 1994. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

260-2 – History of Latin America in the Modern Period 

Aspects of the development of Latin America's socioeconomic, political, cultural, and religious institutions and practices. After independence and through the modern period, c. 1821 to the present. 

261-0-1 – Sex After Shakespeare 

This course investigates the history of sexuality in early modern England by examining the social norms that shaped behavior. Notions of what was normative and what was aberrant were constantly being tested. Public scandals served as moments of stress, revealing the cultural faultlines in the changing world of early modern England. Behavior that was considered appropriate in one venue spilled out into other venues where it was considered unseemly. These cultural energies found their way into plays and poems, which reenacted the wider struggles over social norms. 

262 – Pirates, Guns, and Empires 

This class investigates the history of piracy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. We will focus on piracy in the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the China Seas. The history of piracy encompasses many different genres of history: maritime and imperial history, gender history, the history of race, labor history, and history from below. Although much of pirate history is about conflict, it is also about consensus and the rules that came to prevail on the high seas, both among pirate crews and in the relations between pirates and their antagonists. No previous background in History is required for this class; first-year students are welcome. Sources will include writings by Nanpo Bunshi, Alexander Exquemelin, and Elizabeth Marsh.

270 – Middle Eastern/Islamic Civilization 

Influence of Islam on the components of Middle Eastern societies (nomads, agrarian and urban populations) from the inception of the faith (7th century BCE) to the modern period. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

271-3 – History of the Islamic Middle East: 1789 - Present 

The course surveys the factors that shaped the political, economic, and social features of the modern Middle East from 1789 to the present. The course begins with a study of traditional (mainly Ottoman) institutions; it then traces the forces which weakened those institutions and examines the efforts of Middle Eastern leaders to resist or encourage change. The second half of the course focuses on the period since World War I. It examines the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the significance of secular ideologies such as Arab nationalism and socialism, the successes and failure of the Nasser regime in Egypt, the rise of Islamism, the Iranian revolution, and the Middle East since the end of the Cold War.

272 – History of Ancient Egypt, 3100 - circa 1000 B.C.E. 

The Old Kingdom: centralized government, divine kingship. The Middle Kingdom: new monarchic principles in the aftermath of social disorder. The New Kingdom: imperialism in response to foreign aggression; religious revolution of Akhenaton. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

275-1 – History of Western Science and Medicine: Origins in Early Modern Europe 

Origins of science and medicine in early modern Europe: science, religion, and cosmology; anatomy and sexual difference; the Enlightenment and social science. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

275-1 – History of Early Modern Science and Medicine 

This course explores the social spaces of science and medicine in early modern Europe during the so-called 'Scientific Revolution.' We will survey the varied and surprising spaces in which scientific and medical knowledge was produced, from princely courts and grand cathedrals to humble artisanal workshops and Europe's overseas colonies. In so doing, we will see how science and medicine intersected with religion, politics, race, gender, and emerging market economies during the first age of European imperialism and globalization. 

275-2 – History of Western Science and Medicine: In Modern Europe and America 

Science and scientific medicine have profoundly reshaped our world over the past 200 years, transforming our knowledge of nature and the human body, as well as the conditions under which billions of people live. But change has worked in the opposite direction as well: social, economic, and political priorities have also driven scientific innovation and medical practice. This class invites students in the sciences and the humanities to explore the dynamic relationship between science, medicine, and our broader society. One theme is the relationship between the natural sciences and our material world. How has scientific knowledge led to radical new technologies like global telecommunications and the atom bomb, and how has technological change shaped theories of the natural world, from thermodynamics to climate change? Another is the relationship between the bio-medical sciences and social values. From Darwin to genomics, biological knowledge has developed in conjunction with public mores, altering our approach to health, our understanding of race and sexual difference, and our hopes for the human species. The guiding premise of this course is that science is an intrinsically human activity, so that knowing its history is integral to understanding how the modern world came to be the way it is--and where we are headed.

281 – Chinese Civilization 

How did China become "Chinese?" This course seeks to answer that question. It is an introduction to traditional Chinese history from the Neolithic to the late imperial period (ca. 1700) and explores the emergence and ever-evolving nature of a land and culture that came to be called "Chinese." It will address important topics in recorded history: the Neolithic and Bronze Age foundations of Chinese civilization; the politically legitimating tendencies of classical Chinese philosophy; the splendor and social tensions of the commercialized urban centers; the challenges of, what was then, a culturally alien religion called Buddhism; the increasing constriction of women's lives; Pax Mongolica (the Mongol "Peace"); the shift in Eurasian trade from caravan to maritime communication; the traditional Chinese world order; and some of the continuities and transformations that mark the early modern world. "The past is not dead," William Faulkner once observed, "it is not even past." We will try to understand how China's traditional history lives on in China's present. This is an introductory course and no previous knowledge of Chinese history will be expected. 

282 – Sino-American Relations in the Modern World 

 This course considers the bilateral Sino-American relationship in its larger global context and in connection to the issues of war, diplomacy, race, gender, religion, and material and popular culture. Focuses on the ways domestic politics shape international relations. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

 284-2-20 Early Modern Japan

This course covers social, political, and cultural developments during the Tokugawa period, from 1600-1868. During over two hundred fifty years of peace, samurai became administrators (while writing incessantly about death and honor), merchants created a culture of conspicuous consumption, wealthy peasants took advantage of an expanding market economy, and people from all status groups found common ground in their enjoyment of art, literature, and drama. By analyzing readings that include the rantings of an unemployed (and slightly unhinged) samurai and a series of "archival" documents, students will gain an understanding of this pivotal era in Japanese history.

286 – World War II in Asia 

The Second World War reshaped Asia: Japan, attempting to consolidate the region under its own power, forced the transformation of China, leading to Communist revolution there. Japan then suffered a massive defeat, forcing further transformation of its own society in planned and unanticipated directions, as well as of Korea and Taiwan. The war also destroyed the British, Dutch, and Japanese empires and vastly strengthened colonial resistance to other imperial powers, transforming South and Southeast Asia, and allowing the United States to play a larger role in Asian affairs, leading to U.S. military involvement in Korea and Vietnam. The conflict wrought unprecedented destruction: entire cities were leveled, whole populations decimated. Civilians were often victims, but also participated in other ways. They experienced a "total war" for which governments mobilized societies to a degree never before seen. This course will concentrate on the dilemmas that faced the war leaders and ordinary individuals, occupiers and the occupied alike. 

292 – Introduction to Topics in History 

Introductory seminar for non-majors and majors interested in a variety of topics related to a historical event, period, or broader historical problem. 

292-0 Watching Narcos 

Crimes, deeds, and spoils of drug traffickers have saturated pop culture for the last decades becoming valuable raw materials for the entertainment industry. This course is designed for students to identify, trace, and analyze audiovisual productions on the so-called narcos in the Americas in order to understand: (a) the plot devices and aesthetic mechanisms with which cultural producers have commodified history as entertainment; and (b) the effects of these types of narratives and imageries in the creation of historical understandings regarding one of the most challenging problems of our times. We accomplish these objectives by watching films, telenovelas and TV shows; reading selected works of history, sociology, anthropology, and journalism (film criticism in particular); and using the tools and technologies of digital humanities in a series of individual and collaborative projects. The ultimate goal is to produce together an open-access digital repository on drug history as entertainment in the Americas.

292-0 – Transgender History 

The terms "trans" and "transgender" have only been in widespread use since the 1990s, transsexual, transvestite, cross-dressing, and other non-normative genders have a much longer history. This course takes a trans approach to reading gender in the past, with a focus on North America and Europe. 
 
How did people in the past understand genders beyond the binary? How did the modern movement for trans rights develop? Can history serve as a resource in fighting anti-trans backlash today? As we seek to answer these questions, we will read academic as well as at medical and sexological texts, political manifestoes, newsletters, memoirs, and zines. 
 
Students will finish the class by curating their own virtual exhibition of trans history. 

292-0 – The Black Atlantic: Slavery and Diaspora in the Modern World 

The Black Atlantic is both a space of physical movement—i.e., coerced and voluntary migrations—and of cultural exchange, shaped by social inequalities and racial discourses. We will look at the historical experiences of this diaspora's populations and debate how these experiences created an important body of reflections, and critiques, on the idea of "modernity." From theoretical discussions over the concept of "Black Atlantic" to the development of racial thinking during the period, and from conversations about the forms of enslavement in Africa to the making of slave systems in the Americas, we will explore why this history has left an enduring shadow in the political and cultural struggles of the contemporary world. 

292-0 Traveling in the Early Islamic World 

For many people, the premodern Islamic world is a fabled Arabian Nights-type place, with princesses, domes, genies, and adventure. Popular depictions such as Aladdin (1992) emphasize perfumed women in harems, bearded sultans in turbans, deserts and palaces, sword and horse. But what was it really like? Using primary sources and scholarly literature, this course analyzes medieval Islamic history from the advent of Islam in the seventh century up to the aftermath of the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century to understand the political, cultural, and socio-religious contours of the medieval Islamic world. Through the eyes of scholars, travelers, writers, and merchants, we will explore pluralism, mobility, and cosmopolitanism within the Dar al Islam, which stretched from the Atlantic to the South China Sea. We will study the foundations of Islamic belief and praxis, their transformations during the medieval period, and the theological debates that shaped them. In conjunction with political history, we will consider cultural, social, and literary history to illuminate an innovative, rich, and vibrant civilization. And we will interrogate historical narratives about this past and why, now more than ever, the medieval Islamic world needs to be revisited.

292-0 – Islamism: Conceptualizations, Variations, Interpretations 

This seminar provides an accessible yet in-depth look at the brand of Islamic theorization and activism best known in English as Islamism. We are going to examine the historical origins of that movement (which are not as clear-cut as one might assume), how it changed over time (and why), and how the different ways in which analysts conceive of Islamism inform the value judgements they make about it. Our main geographical focus will be the Middle East, with an emphasis on Egypt, and course materials will include a combination of scholarly works on Islamism and primary sources in translation. The seminar proposes that Islamism represents not the politicization of Islam, as is often claimed, but rather the ideologization of Islam. What that means, and why this is an eminently modern phenomenon, are issues that students will be asked to read, think and write about. 

292-0 Settler Colonialism on Campus 

This seminar explores histories of the “campus” as a central geography of US settler colonialism. We will study the historical construction and histories of anticolonial movements on many forms of the campus – educational institutions (PWIs, HBCUs, Tribal colleges, boarding schools), military bases, religious institutes, museums, and corporate landholdings. By engaging with Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Asian American Studies, and Queer theoretical scholarship, we will study how structures of power and possibility are embedded in the landscape. Students will be encouraged to create a research project based on a campus of their choice, producing either a traditional paper, a digital project, a performance, or a public event. Class meetings will center on discussions of texts, films, and other documentary material but will also include trips to sites around Evanston and Chicago, collaborative research sessions, and project workshops.

292-0 – Conspiracy Theories: A Global History 

Conspiracy narratives have become one of the postwar period's most durable genres, as the popularity of recent no-vax, no 5G no-Covid campaigns attest, not to mention the resurgence of anti-Semitism through the theories of the New World Order controlled by George Soros. They have also become an important expression of social anxieties and desires, and an important way to understand the relationship between the individual and the modern state. In this course, we will approach conspiracy narratives and the theories they embody both as symptoms and as modes of knowledge. This module will provide students with the necessary historical and psychological knowledge to understand why these theories formed throughout history and how they have become widespread. The main purpose of this module is to allow students to engage with the society they live as informed and critical thinker individuals. Students will be required to work in small groups and produce a believable conspiracy theory which has to be based on psychological and historical research. 

292-0-20 Comparative Fascism

Ever since the emergence of fascism in the early 1920s, historians, political theorists and ordinary citizens have debated what its true nature is—a debate currently experiencing a revival as populist, xenophobic and far-right parties make electoral gains across the globe. Focusing primarily on the fascist regimes that arose in Italy and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, but also fascist movements that subsequently arose elsewhere, we will investigate questions such as: Is fascism a single, coherent ideology? Is is a form of populism? What is its relationship to imperialism? How did fascists want to reconstruct national, sexual, and racial identities? Who joined fascist movements and why--and, just as importantly, who fought fascism and how? Are "fascism" and "anti-fascism" still useful concepts for helping us to understand developments today, or is it a purely historical phenomenon from the previous century?

292-0-22 Tricksters and Charlatans 

Tricksters, outlaws, imposters, shams, and mischief makers populate our historical records, literary classics, folktales, movies, politics, and imagination. These enigmatic figures can be terrifying, criminal, and vicious but also charming, heroic, imaginative, and inspirational. This course invites you to explore the phenomenon of the trickster and the charlatan within the realms of literature, history, and the archive. Our focus will be the historian’s perspective, and the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. We will pay particular attention to figures who defy conventions and transgress geographical, religious (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim), social, and cultural boundaries. From the shadows of the criminal underworld of medieval Cairo and the Jewish mystic circles of seventeenth-century Istanbul and the renowned folk hero Nasreddin Hodja, we will examine the accounts of intermediaries, mischievous heroes, and messianic claimants. Together we will investigate the attraction that such characters hold for us, seeking to unravel the secrets behind their enduring allure.

292-0-28 History of Western Marriage

Have you ever wondered why need a license to get married? Or a lawyer for a divorce? How did the state get so involved in our personal relationships? This course explores the history of marriage in the western world from the French Revolution through the legalization of same-sex marriage in the 2000s. We'll learn how marriage became defined and regulated by modern states, how those definitions changed over time, and how marriage has been an important tool for both granting and denying benefits such as citizenship, property ownership, and legal rights.

292-0-28 Great Trials in History

One of the distinguishing characteristics of western civilization has been its persistent concern to adjudicate disputes and to judge alleged wrong-doers through the process of a trial. The forms of trials and standards of evidence have changed a great deal since ancient times when Socrates was condemned to death, and yet the trial still remains the principal means through which society makes its most important judgments. Trials are also exceptionally revealing of the basic values in society. What distinguishes the great trials has been how they uncover conflicts about those values, how they preserve for prosperity a sensitivity for justice and injustice, how they symbolize conflicting values, and how often they have stimulated great works of philosophy and literature. In this course we shall analyze a few of the most famous trials from the ancient world to the twentieth-first century and ask such questions as what is justice and injustice, what is the role of persuasive rhetoric in trials, how have trials constructed evidence for and against defendants, and most importantly how have the trials of certain individuals stimulated a debate about the fundamental values of society?

292-0-30 Jewish Refugees in the 20th Century

While migration has been a key feature in the life of Jewish communities throughout the last millennia, the last century – defined by some public intellectuals as “the century of the refugee” (Rabbi Hugo Gryn) – witnessed the displacement of an ever-larger number of Jews as the result of antisemitic persecutions, wars, geocidal policies, or desire to find a national homeland. Despite the relatively small size of their communities on a global scale, the Jews made one of the largest community of refugees in 20th century Europe. This course will examine the history of the European Jews who became refugees throughout the 20th century, focusing on key moments that represented the peaks of the afflux of refugees, triggered by the rise of modern states and their security and nationalizing policies (borders, citizenship, and demographic engineering), the spread of radical ideologies, the emergence of the Zionist national project, political persecutions, World War I and the collapse of European empires, the antisemitic and genocidal policies of Nazi Germany and its collaborators before and during World War II, and the persecution and violence that took place in communist dictatorships, such as USSR and in its successor states.

300 – New Lectures in History 

Lecture courses on special topics not covered in regular offerings. Content varies. May be repeated for credit with different topic. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. Topic Varies by instructor. See Caesar for current course description. 

 300-0-20 Artificial Intelligence: A History

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is not new. Long before the term was coined in 1956, engineers and inventors sought to mechanize human thought and behavior. This course will address and contextualize the chronological arc of AI, from eighteenth-century automatons to today's large language models. Together, we will investigate how changing conceptions of human intelligence and creativity influenced the development and implementation of what we now call AI. In so doing, we will familiarize ourselves with changing strategies for creating "intelligent" machines and engage in lively debates over the problems and possibilities of machine sentience. Will this course secure you a six-figure salary working for OpenAI? Sadly, no. It will, however, enrich your knowledge of the historical trajectory and critical concepts of AI.

 300-0-22 Cannabis: Global History

This course examines the history of cannabis in a global perspective to understand how and why a plant that has been crucial to most civilizations for millennium became one of the most consumed intoxicants in human history, and one of the most demonized, criminalized, controversial and profitable commodities of the modern world. We consider archeological evidence to explore the earliest uses and meanings of the plant in antiquity and how it spread from Central Asia to the rest of the planet. We also examine various types of historical works to comprehend what roles cannabis played in the rise of maritime empires and the formation of a global capitalist world. Then, we revisit some of the urban and rural cultures in various parts of the world that modernized the plant's uses and meanings in the 20th century; and study scientific, legal, and pop-culture materials to elucidate what was at stake in the most heated controversies and campaigns against and in favor of the plant at the time. We conclude analyzing the most recent debates and policies on decriminalization and legalization in North and South America in a comparative perspective and their socio-economic, political, and environmental implications. We address these topics reading history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and journalism; and watching and analyzing critically songs, advertisement, literature, feature films, and documentary movies.

300-0-26 Nomads in World History

In contrast to prevailing stereotypes of nomads as improvised, marginal wanderers or their romanticized depiction as exemplifying a simpler way of life, pastoral nomadic societies had a decisive role in shaping global history. From the late second millennium BCE to the eighteenth century CE, pastoral nomads emerged, often from the fringes of Eurasian civilizations, and wielding substantial military force influenced sedentary states, empires, and societies, from China to the Middle East and Europe. Beyond their military prowess, however, they also functioned as cultural agents. Sedentary people - Chinese, European, Muslim or others - portrayed them as violent intruders negatively impacting their cultures; yet nomads also facilitated and directed the exchange of goods, people, animals, religions, ideas, and technologies across civilizational boundaries, and maintained a relationship of interdependence with their settled neighbors. This course offers a comparative perspective on the role nomadic societies had in world history, spanning the early nomadic empire of the Xiongnu in nowadays Mongolia, Chinggis Khan's universal empire, the Berber Arabs of North Africa, and the Turkish armies in Asia Minor. We will explore how modern historians navigate the paucity of sources about nomads and the polities they established, and untangle narratives predominantly crafted by members of the sedentary societies.

300-0 – Music and Nation in Latin America 

This course takes students along a sonorous trip through Latin America and the Caribbean. We will travel some of the region's largest countries studying particular cases in order to comprehend why popular music has been crucial in the formation of these nations and their states. 
The history of son in Cuba, samba in Brazil, tango in Argentina, corrido in Mexico, merengue in Dominican Republic, among others, will help students to understand how certain sounds became sonorous emblems of modern nations. These particular histories will allow students to examine how popular music has mediated the tensions that resulted from processes of development and urbanization. They also illustrate how racial, gender, and class hierarchies have been represented in musical styles, shaping the contours of national identities and cultures. 

300-0 – Arabian Peninsula 

This course aims at introducing students to major themes in the modern history, politics and societies of the Arabian Peninsula, which is an often neglected but increasingly pivotal region of the Middle East. The first half of the course will concentrate on state formation and the political, economic and ideological forces that shaped the Peninsula until the final British withdrawal (1960s-70s). The second half of the course will be more thematic and will address some of the most important challenges that the region has faced since the 1970s. Because of its undeniable regional importance and influence, Saudi Arabia will receive particular attention throughout the quarter, though lectures and readings will cover other emirates of the Gulf as well as Yemen. 

300-0 Europe in the Age of Total War, 1789-1945 

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 created modern politics and, in so doing, brought forth a new form of war – a total social mobilization on a previously unimaginable scale fought by mass armies of ordinary citizens in the name of the nation, its glory, and its survival. This course will trace the social, political, and cultural implications of total war through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II, comparing these to the colonial wars of imperial conquest pursued by European states in the same period as extensions of the political claims of the nation on a global scale – wars whose practices in turn changed and intensified the conduct, scale, and human consequences of war in Europe itself.

300-0 – History of Socialism 

In this course, we will investigate socialism from its origins during the Age of Revolutions in Europe to follow its development globally down to the present day. We will consider the interrelated aspects of socialism as an oppositional movement against the capitalist world economy, as a critical analysis of capitalist society, and as an attempt to establish a new kind of human community on the basis of that critique. Topics will include the dynamics of revolutionary social change; the building of international working-class and national liberation movements; socialism as an economic system; and socialist approaches to gender, race, and identity. 

300-0 – Mexico: Five Centuries 

It was 1534, or maybe 1535, when the Spaniards found him among the dead, far to the south in Honduras. He was dark-skinned, pierced and tattooed, and he had led the Maya people of Chetumal to war for two decades. But he was also in his own way white, a fellow Spaniard called Gonzalo Guerrero, and his three children, born of marriage with a Maya woman, might be seen as the first Mexicans. The history of Mexico, understood as the country and people that grew from those first contacts, began with that Spaniard in 1511 when his caravel foundered on Scorpion Reef over sixty miles north of the Yucatán peninsula. This course traces that history from the beginning until the present. 

300-0 – Silk Road Empires 

The Crossroads of the World. The Pivot of History. The Graveyard of Empires. For all its grand nicknames, Central Eurasia remains a region little studied in the West. This course endeavors to separate fact from fantasy while introducing the social, cultural, and political history of Central Eurasia from medieval times to the modern age. Special topics include the rise and rule of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane; nomadic society in the steppe; cultural encounters and diverse religious traditions; and the rise of the Russian Empire. 

300-0 – Global History of Refugees 

The twentieth century was often called "the century of the refugee," but with over 84 million people displaced from their homes in 2022, the 21st century is well on its way to claiming this dubious distinction. In light of the continued prevalence of mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, and statelessness throughout the world, we need to move past experiencing each new episode as a sudden, singular and unprecedented "crisis" in order to understand the enduring patterns that continue to produce refugees every single day. 
 
In this course, students will learn about the kinds of events that have produced mass displacement since the late nineteenth century and the way that "the refugee" has consequently been defined in international law, humanitarian action, and public imaginaries. While states have often defined refugees as "problems" in need of a "solution," we will also examine how refugee individuals and communities have generated their own politics to challenge their categorization and marginalization. 

300-0 Colonialism and Genocide: 20th Century Europe in Africa 

Genocide, considered by some scholars “the crime of crimes”, has received increased attention from diplomats, academics, and the general public since the end of World War II. It has been a major topic in international law, scholarly studies, and debates. However, the connection between colonialism, its legacies, and genocide has been rather neglected. Only during the last several decades scholars have started to scrutinize many cases of genocide from the perspective of colonialism and postcolonialism studies. The goal of this course is to give students the opportunity to gain wider theoretical and empirical knowledge about several genocides that took place in different parts of Africa during the 20th century as a result of the European colonial rule and of its legacy during the postcolonial era focusing mostly on the twentieth century cases of the Herero and Nama Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Genocide in Darfur. In order to provide in-depth explanations and increase knowledge about the character of colonial and postcolonial genocides, one therefore needs to place specific events in their proper historical, cultural, social, political, ideological and other contexts. After completing the course students will acquire solid knowledge about several cases of genocide, with a particular focus on the colonization processes and postcolonial struggles in Africa during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the contemporary debates on colonial genocides, prosecution, denial, and prevention.

300-0 – Comparative Genocides 

Genocide, considered by some scholars "the crime of crimes", has received increased attention from diplomats, academics, and the general public since the end of World War II. It has been a major topic in international law, scholarly studies, and debates. The goal of this course is to give students the opportunity to gain wider theoretical and empirical knowledge about several genocides that took place in different parts of the world (North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia), focusing mostly on the twentieth century cases of the Herero Genocide, the Holocaust, and Cambodia. The course will also examine the precursors of twentieth century genocides, by briefly focusing on the destruction of Native Americans during the centuries of European colonization and the persecution of African Americans during the Jim Craw era, which remains some under-researched and much debated topics, with major implications for today's American society. For decades, the Holocaust and the terror of the Khmer Rouge regime (Cambodia) have represented examples of mass atrocity that affected millions of innocent civilians, with the aim of eliminating groups of people in whole or in part. The first genocide of the twentieth century, the destruction of the Herrero and Nama (in present-day Namibia) by the German Imperial Army is a lesser known case of genocide - it was almost forgotten until the boom in mass violence research in the 1990s - and yet crucially important to understand the ways in which the colonial driven destruction of indigenous people continued into the twentieth century and how it influenced the emergence of the Holocaust. 

In order to provide in-depth explanations and increase knowledge about the character of genocide, one therefore needs to place specific events in their proper historical, cultural, social, political, ideological and other contexts. After completing the course students will acquire solid knowledge about several cases of genocide, with a particular focus on the colonization processes, the growth of nationalist, racist, fascist and communist ideologies during the twentieth century, and the contemporary debates on comparing genocides, prosecution, denial, and prevention. 

300-0-30 Red Power: Indigenous Resistance in the US and Canada 

In 2016, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and their non-Native allies camped at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in an effort to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. That movement is part of a long history of Native activism. In this course, we will examine the individual and collective ways in which Indigenous people have resisted colonial domination in the U.S. and Canada since 1887. In addition to focusing on North America, we will also turn our attention to Hawai‘i. This course will emphasize environmental justice, and highlights religious movements, inter-tribal organizations, key intellectual figures, student movements, armed standoffs, non-violent protest, and a variety of visions for Indigenous community self-determination.

300-0-32 History of Medicine in Asia

300-0 – Europe Since 1945 

How did Europe re-define itself after the devastation of the Second World War? Could this warring continent achieve peace? This class explores the history of "Europe" understood broadly—from Franco's Spain to the Soviet Union, from French Mayotte to Greenland. How has the idea of "Europe" inspired both admiration and revulsion? 
 
The course offers students both an overview of postwar European history and helps them analyze current events through their roots in European history. To this end class will explore topics such as the impact of decolonization in the Dutch, French, Portuguese, and British empires, the East/West divide in the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ascent of neoliberalism in Europe, the Yugoslav Wars and Bosnian genocide, European unification and secession, and the current rise of the far right in Europe. 

300-0-22 Histories of Violence

How does violence change life stories and national narratives? How can a nation remember and retell obscured histories of violence, reconcile past violence, and resist future violence? What does it mean that lynching emerged as a category in the same historical moment as the Bill of Rights, and that certain kinds of violence have been central to American identity? The story of the United States is built on the inclusion or omission of violence: from the genocide of Native Americans to slavery to imperial conquest, from “private” pain of women to the nationalized pain of soldiers. This lecture course brings violence to the center of U.S. history. Moving from Early America to the present, we will discuss these overlapping stories in terms of their visibility and invisibility, addressing questions of representation and the haunting function of traumatic experience. Following an emerging subfield of scholarship in Histories of Violence, this course examines narrative, archival, and political issues around studying, teaching, and writing such stories.

300-0-32: History and Theory of Information

We live in an information age, with computers of unprecedented power in our pockets. This course seeks to understand how information shapes our lives today, and how it has in the past. It does so via an interdisciplinary inquiry into four technological infrastructures of information and communication—print, wires, airwaves, and bits.

300-0-34 Gender and Sexuality in African American Women's History: The Nineteenth Century
This course will examine the lives of African American women between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Topics to be addressed include labor; family and community relationships; sexuality and intimacy; political activism: free black women in the anti-slavery movement and enslaved women's resistance to enslavement.

300-0-38 South Asians in the World

Why did South Asians migrate and settle outside South Asia? What are the historical origins of South Asian diasporic communities in Africa, South-east Asia, Europe, and North America? How did South Asia's encounter with colonialism affect the migration of South Asians elsewhere? In this thematic survey, we will learn about the history of South Asians' migration from the nineteenth century to the present, with special emphasis on the historical inter-relatedness of migration, colonialism, and decolonization. Our cast of characters will range from soldiers and exiles to laborers and merchants. We will traverse a diverse array of geographies, ranging from Singapore and Fiji to Uganda and Britain. We will discover how South Asian communities in various parts of the world were made and unmade by colonial economic imperatives, often exploitative trans-oceanic labor networks, and colonial categories of social identification. Instead of being erased by mid-twentieth century decolonization, South Asians' migration was reshaped by national imperatives of the ‘home' country on the one hand, and the new political and economic order of the post-World War II world on the other. The course is divided into two parts. In Part I, we walk through the history of South Asian migration, paying attention to the changing historical contexts and causes of this phenomenon. In Part II, we dive deeper into socio-religious characteristics of South Asian migrants, such as caste hierarchies and gender relations, and examine why these features have persisted, and been reinvented in some instances, despite centuries of habitation outside South Asia.

300-0-40 Khans, Communists, and Oligarchs

The Graveyard of Empires. The Crossroads of the World. The Pivot of History. For all its grand nicknames, Central Asia remains a region little-studied in the West. This course endeavors to separate fact from fantasy while providing an introduction to the history of Central Asia from the eighteenth century to the present day. Spanning the region from Afghanistan to southern Siberia and from western China to the Caspian Sea, the class explores how this diverse region was impacted by cross-cultural contacts, the advance of empires, and the fall of the USSR.

300-0-42 The Mongol Empire

The Mongol Empire In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Chinggis (or Genghis) Khan and his successors conquered and ruled the largest land empire in world history. At its height, their empire extended from Hungary to Korea, and from Siberia to Burma. This course introduces students to the empire’s history - from the Mongols’ harsh living conditions as nomads in the Mongolian Steppe to Chinggis Khan’s rise to power and extraordinary military success, which facilitated the Mongol Empire’s near universal expansion. We will explore how the Mongols ruled over diverse geographical regions and populations, and the impact their expansion had on the territories they ruled and further beyond. We will read sources in translation and discuss how European, Chinese, Arabic and Persian authors viewed the Mongols, but also what we can learn from the Secret History of the Mongols, the Mongols’ account of the establishment of their empire. In the past few decades, the image of the Mongols in modern scholarship has changed: no longer only brutal yet highly effective nomadic conquerors, they are recognized also as cultural agents responsible for fostering cross-cultural encounters and facilitating inter-Eurasian exchanges of knowledge and expertise, from warfare to astronomy and medicine. We will explore the results of the transmission and mobility of people, objects, technologies, and ideas between China, the Middle East, and Europe during this era.

303-1 – American Women's History to 1865 

Women and gender in American life, with attention to differences among women based on class, race, and ethnicity. To 1865. 

303-2 – American Women's History Since 1865 

This course explores the history of women in the United States from 1865 to the present. Adopting an intersectional approach, we will examine women's changing roles as wage earners, mothers, and activists. We will also investigate how prevailing ideas about race, gender, work, and the family have shaped women's lives. 

305 – American Immigration 

Themes in history of immigration, especially from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Law, racial formation, acculturation, transnational and international contexts, competing notions of citizenship. HISTORY 305-0 and LEGAL_ST 305-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses. 

309 – American Environmental History 

American history from precontact to the present, focusing on the role of the natural world in human history and the role of human thought and action in natural history. ENVR_POL 309-0 and HISTORY 309-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

309-0 – American Environmental History 

[Combined w/ ENVR_POL 309-0-1] 

This course will survey American history from the Colonial Era to the present with two premises in mind: that the natural world is not simply a passive background to human history but rather an active participant in historical change, and that human attitudes toward nature are both shaped by and in turn shape social, political, and economic behavior. The course will cover formal schools of thought about the natural world—from Transcendentalism to the conservation and environmental movements—but also discuss the many informal intersections of human activity and natural systems, from European colonialism to property regimes, migration and transportation, industry, consumer practices, war, technological innovation, political ideology, and food production. 

310-1 – Early American History: Conquest and Colonization to 1688 

Conquest and colonization. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

311 – New Nation: The United States, 1787-1848 

The early years of the new republic from the Constitution to the war with Mexico. Political theory, slavery, social reform, religious revivalism, westward expansion, political parties, the growth of capitalism. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

314 – The Civil War and Reconstruction 

"Middle period" of American history, emphasizing origins of the Civil War, its revolutionary nature, and its immediate and long-term consequences for the South and the nation. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

315-2 – The United States Since 1900: Mid-20th Century 

America's domestic history and role in world affairs since 1900. Mid-20th century. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

315-3– The United States Since 1968 

This course examines the recent past that most US history courses never get around to discussing. The course surveys the rise and fall of market values--often called neoliberalism--in the United States (and around the world) over the past half-century to explain such pressing problems as rising inequality, mass incarceration, mass immigration, party polarization, political extremism, and social isolation. It focuses on politics and policy but also attends to society and culture. Along the way it considers the specific risks and rewards of studying the recent past, asking what sources we can rely on, where is the line and what is the relationship between history and the present, and how can history help us to understand and respond to present day problems? The course begins with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and ends with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, arguing that each of these moments marked the end of one social and political order and the rise of another. No prior collegiate coursework in US history is required.

316 – The Sixties 

Examination of one of the most tumultuous eras in US history, its roots in the reshaping of American society after World War II, and its legacies for the present. Emphasis on social movements of the period, particularly the civil rights movement, and political and cultural change. 

317-1 – American Cultural History: 19th C. 

This course examines major themes and shifts in American culture over the period 1820-1890. The course will consider: popular theatre, including blackface minstrelsy; urban entertainments and cultural authority; backwoods brawling; sentimental fiction and antebellum women's culture; the emergence of cultural categories for "high" and "low" art; and the emergence of mass culture in the industrial age. Students will be introduced not only to "more" history, but also to different methods of "doing" history.

318-1 – Legal and Constitutional History of the United States: Colonial Period to 1850 

Colonial period-1850. Development of legal institutions, constitutionalism, law and social change, law and economic development. Taught with LEGAL_ST 318-1; may not receive credit for both courses. 

318-1 – Legal and Constitutional History of the U.S: Colonial Period to 1850 

[combined w/ LEGAL_ST 318-1-20] 

This course explores some of the major questions and problems of American legal history from the colonial era to 1850. First, we will examine how and why the colonies developed their laws and legal institutions, and what assumptions about justice and equality lawmakers relied on in doing so. Next, we will explore the legal, political, and social forces that led to the American Revolution and the framing and ratification of the United States Constitution, where Americans drew on their legal experiences and called for freedom in powerful but partial ways. We will then examine how judicial and legislative action guided and enabled explosive economic growth in the nineteenth century. Not everyone was able to participate in the new economy, however; we will also explore how law created separate categories for white women, American Indians, and African Americans that limited their participation in law, politics, and society. 

319 – History of U.S. Foreign Relations 

Survey of US relations with the rest of the world from the 18th century to the present, with particular attention to the 20th century. 

320 – The Fourteenth Amendment 

he Fourteenth Amendment's role in defining and protecting citizenship, privileges and immunities, due process, and equal protection from its nineteenth-century origins to the present. HISTORY 320-0 and LEGAL_ST 320-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

321-0 Vietnam Wars 

Analysis of Vietnam's wars for national independence, with emphasis on US involvement. Topics include international context, political rationales, military engagements, popular attitudes, cultural exchange, and lasting legacies. 

 Historical Studies Distro Area 

322-1 – Development of the Modern American City to 1880 

City characteristics of urban society in America from the period of settlement to the present. To 1880. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

322-2 – Development of the Modern American City: 1880-Present 

 City characteristics of urban society in America from the period of settlement to the present. 1880-present. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

324-0 – U.S. Gay and Lesbian History 

This course explores the history of homosexuality as a legible social and cultural category; of lgbtq individuals and communities as self-aware social and political actors; and of lgbtq/anti-lgbtq politics as arenas in which modern Americans have debated fundamental questions about human rights, personal autonomy, and citizenship. We will map the frameworks within which individuals have sought out, enjoyed, and understood sexual activity with others of the same sex; trace the growth of gay and lesbian communities over the course of the twentieth century; and survey the dramatic shifts and turns from the emergence of an organized gay and lesbian political movement to the traumas of the AIDS epidemic and the increasingly bitter fights over lgbtq citizenship and personhood of the last few decades.  

Gender, sexuality, and the rise of modern lesbian and gay identities. Lecture and discussion. HISTORY 324-0 and GNDR_ST 324-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses. 

325 – History of American Technology 

American history through its material culture; industrialization and its discontents; consumer culture and household technology; mass communication and democracy; technological utopia and the computer revolution. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

326 – U.S. Intellectual History 

Central questions in America's intellectual past from the colonial era forward; specific dates vary by instructor. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

330 – Medieval Sexuality 

Christian theorists were convinced that human sexuality underwent an irreversible debasement as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve. Their negative assessment has remained with us until the present day. This course will grapple with the both the origins of this negative bequest as well as some of the anomalies of the medieval tradition. For example, despite the insistence that heterosexuality was ordained by God, the disparagement of physicality and women led to the institutionalization of clerical celibacy in the West. This, in turn, fostered a gay subculture. Likewise, despite the theoretical insistence on a separation between the sexes that was even present in the afterlife, these same theorists not only praised "virile women," but occasionally celebrated cross-dressing in female saints! This course will examine the institutions and ideas that dominated the construction of gender in the Middle Ages. It will also lend insight into not one, but many "sexualities."

332-1 Medieval Europe 1: Early Middle Ages, 300-1000

332-2-20 – Medieval Europe II: High % Late Middle Ages 1000-1450 

Perhaps the phrase "the Middle Ages" calls to mind a period where society was in thrall to a repressive, superstitious church and violence ran rampant: a dark age, indeed. But it might also call to mind Gothic architecture like the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, full of light and exquisite stained glass. Spanning the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, the High and Late Middle Ages are a study in contradiction. It is a period of both vibrant life and innovative change as well as violence and disillusionment. Cities grew, universities flourished, and new forms of spiritual life helped people engage directly with Christianity. At the same time, the Crusading movement fostered violence against Muslims, Jews, and people who were perceived as heretics. Famine in the early fourteenth century followed by the Black Death dealt suffering across the continent. Misogyny and other forms of discrimination increased as the medieval millennium drew to a close. How did medieval Europeans respond to these tensions and societal changes? We will examine a variety of ways to answer this question by focusing on the cultural history of the period. The course will be divided into thematic units rather than taking a straight chronological approach. Class time will blend lectures and discussion activities designed to allow you to engage with primary sources and "do history." Assignments will be written opportunities to deepen your thinking on course themes and sources; there will be no in-class exams. This class will help you think about how narratives about the past are arguments, as well as how the kinds of sources we use as historians shape the kinds of narratives we can tell. 

333 – The Age of the Renaissance 

Decline and revival of European civilization, 1350-1530. Cultural, political, economic, and social developments. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

333-0 – The Age of the Renaissance 

In 1348 perhaps a third to one half of all Europeans died from a mysterious illness called the Black Death, which was only one of a number of calamities that disrupted normal life. In the wake of these disasters, thinkers, artists, and a surprising number of common people began to search for explanations for what had gone wrong by asking questions about their own personal identities, about the obligations of a moral life, about the virtues of civic service, and about the their personal relationship with God. This course explores that search, which is what we now call the Renaissance. It began among the independent city-states of Italy, particularly Florence and Venice, and spread from them to the rest of Europe. 
The course will compare developments in Italy with those in northern Europe, especially on the political and family structures of the city-states, the culture of the princely courts, the ambitions of the Roman popes, the social and intellectual basis for artistic creativity, the origins of modern political thought and the scientific method, and the constraints and opportunities available to women. 

337-0 – History of Modern Europe   

This course is concerned with the history of Europe between 1890 and c. 1990. Its emphasis will be on material and political developments, not cultural-intellectual ones. It assumes considerable prior knowledge of Europe, including its geography, ethnography, and a good prior knowledge and understanding of the historical background. 

340 – Gender, War, and Revolution in the 20th Century 

Catastrophic events in the twentieth century (two world wars, the Russian Revolution, world economic depression, the Nazi counter-revolution and Holocaust, and threat of nuclear war) set into clear relief key terms we hear bantered in the news today. What does fascism mean? What is socialism? Is capitalism inherently democratic? Through the lens of gender and sexuality studies, these regimes take on an extraordinary clarity, differentiating along distinct family and gender ideals, sexual freedom, reproductive rights, and personal expressions. Most importantly, these rival regimes developed dynamically in relation to each other and as responses to the crisis of total war. During World War One, military strategy and technology blurred the boundaries between war zones and home fronts. Not only did civilian populations become military targets, but the strains of war also exposed them to food shortages, fuel rationing, forced evacuations, and violent death. At the same time, disillusioned soldiers and veterans saw their war experiences through the threat of gender inversions. During the war, women had been mobilized to do men=s work. In the 1920s and >30s, the "new woman" of the century B building on the beginnings of legal equality and the vote B enjoyed greater economic, political, intellectual, and sexual freedoms than their nineteenth century grandmothers and great-grandmothers. If conventional warfare was defined by (and reinforced) traditional notions of heterosexuality, did the disruption of those norms mean emancipation for women? Did wars invite utopian hopes for alternate gender and sexual alignments and identities? Through novels, memoirs, primary documents, films, and propaganda art, we study the individual and collective biographies of people who struggled and thrived through these changes. Despite the much-touted return to happy domesticity after the half century of total war and revolutions, could the genie of sexual malcontent be ever fully re-contained?

342-1 – History of Modern France: Ancien Régime and the French Revolution 

 The course covers the social, political, and cultural history of France in the era of the French Revolution broadly defined, from the reign of Louis XIV (d. 1715) through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. The central question of the course is that posed nearly two centuries ago by Alexis de Tocqueville: why did the French get rid of their king and end up with an emperor? What profound changes did the French Revolution bring about and what remained the same? In search of the answer to these questions we will explore the political, social, and cultural history of this period including living conditions for the poor and the rich, the meaning and impact of the French Enlightenment, the personalities and shortcomings of rulers like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Napoleon, the relationship between the French and Haitian Revolutions, as well as the politics and culture of the Revolution itself. The history of this period is rich in historical drama, which will be covered in the lectures, but because it inspired thinkers like Marx, Tocqueville and others it also serves as a way of learning about theories of history: why do revolutions break out, why and how do they end?

342-2 – History of Modern France: 19th Century to present 

19th century to the present. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

343 – Modern Italy 

An examination of the history of Italy from the Unification to the present. Principal topics will include the movement for national unification, the tenacious economic backwardness of the South, the history of the Sicilian Mafia and similar criminal organizations in Naples and Calabria, the dictatorship of Mussolini and Fascism, Italian participation in World War II and the Allied invasion of the peninsula, the role of the Roman Catholic Church in society, the economic miracles of the 1960s and 1980s, the Red Brigades and terrorism, the struggle for women's rights, and the "bloodless" political revolution of 1992-93. The course concentrates on political and social history but includes several novels in the readings.

344-2 – Germany Since 1945 

In 1945, Germany was in ruins. The defeat of the Nazis had physically destroyed Germany's infrastructure, morally delegitimized its institutions, and divided its diminished territory into a capitalist West and a socialist East. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) represented two experiments of how to create the "ideal society" against a vacuum of traditional authority. The German-German border, vividly symbolized by the Berlin Wall, quickly became a central site of the Cold War. This course examines those two states and the solutions they developed to common challenges. Those ranged from turning Nazis into "good citizens" and economic reconstruction to confronting terrorism and environmental degradation. On the way, we'll examine the central question: how did these societies "re-civilize" in the wake of global war and genocide? How is it that this ruined land of 1945 could become the most powerful country in Europe eighty years later?

345-1  History of Russia 800-1917: From Kievan Rus to the Bolshevik Revolution 

This course explores Russia from its prehistory in Kievan Rus to the dawn of the Soviet period. Major topics will include the Mongol conquests; the rise of Muscovy; the expansion of the Russian Imperial state; its religious and ethnic diversity; serfdom and emancipation; and major developments in the arts and sciences. In class readings, special emphasis will be given to texts produced by authors from the region, and our course materials will include memoirs, poetry, hagiography and art as well as recent historical scholarship.

345-2 – History of Russia, 1917-1991: The Soviet Union 

This course explores the history of the Soviet Union from its beginnings in the revolutions of 1917 to its collapse in 1991. Special topics will include Lenin and the Bolsheviks; the rise and rule of Stalin; the Great Terror; the Second World War; the "Thaw"; the Cold War; and the fall of the Soviet state. In our weekly readings, special emphasis will be given to texts produced by Soviet authors, as we will consider the Soviet experience not only from the vantage point of foreign observers, but also from within. While the lectures offer a chronological history of the Soviet Union, our readings offer an in-depth exploration of the most ambitious social experiment in human history: the creation of the "New Soviet Person." 

345-3 – History of Russia, 1991 - Present: After Communism

This class explores the history of modern Russia from the end of the Soviet period through the Putin era. Special topics will include the decline and fall of the Soviet Union; the chaotic Yeltsin years; the rise and rule of Putin; the emergence of Russia’s “oligarch” class; the wars in Ukraine, Chechnya, and the Caucasus; and Russia’s relations with the United States, the European Union, China, and Central Asia.

347 – Christians and Jews 

Varieties of historical encounters between Jews and Christians. Origins of the "Jesus movement"; rabbinic attitudes toward Christianity; medieval polemic and engagement; the modern "Judeo-Christian tradition"; Christian Zionism and postwar ecumenicism. 

348-1 – Jews in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, 1250-1917 

Who are the European Jews, how and when did they arrive to East Europe, and why did they seek to move to the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century? Why do Americans consider them too traditional and conservative while Russians and Poles view them as too leftist and liberal? Using contextualization and unique primary sources, this course explores how East European Jews managed to build a robust civilization that lasted over a millennium, how they perceived historical upheavals such as wars, revolutions and pogroms, how they interacted with Christians and Muslims, and how the imperial politics in Russia, Poland, and Austria shaped Jewish identities that continue to frame Jewish mentality. This course traces the itinerary of East European Jews from the times of the medieval Kievan Rus to the early twentieth-century revolutionary upheavals taking a close look at Jews in Poland and the Russian Empire, which also include Lithuania and Ukraine. It challenges cultural myths, provides substantial European context and integrates Jewish history within a framework of a broader imperial and national histories. 

348-2 – Jews in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, 1917-1991 

Jewish encounter with Marxism and communism; social, political, cultural, and artistic aspects of Jewish life; Soviet Jews and the Russian empire: patterns of survival, accommodation, and interaction, 1917-91. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

349 – History of the Holocaust 

This course examines the Holocaust of European Jews from its origins through its aftermath in the context of Nazi Germany’s murderous campaigns against other groups of victims, including disabled persons, sexual minorities, Roma, and Slavs. We will read first-hand accounts and analyze primary documents written by victims and perpetrators as we seek to understand the causes, course, and consequences of the genocidal policies of Germany and its Axis allies. From Vichy France in the West to the occupied Soviet territories in the East, the persecution, expropriation, and murder of millions necessitated the participation of countless civilians and state officials. With a special focus on Eastern Europe, where the greatest number of Jews lived and nearly all of the murdered died, we will explore questions of local complicity, the motives of perpetrators and of those who sought to impede them, and the responses of the continent’s Jews and other victims to the onslaught. The course will conclude with postwar efforts to punish the Holocaust’s perpetrators, to commemorate its victims, and to deny that genocide was even committed.

Historical Studies Distro Area. 

352 – Global History of Death and Dying 

How death shapes the modern world via slave trades, imperial conquests, pandemics, wars, medicine, and genocide. Transformations in rituals; personal and social meanings of death; ways and patterns of dying. 

353-0-20 History of Capitalism

In 1500, Europe was a relatively unimportant backwater, overshadowed by richer, more populous and scientifically advanced societies in China, South Asia, and the Middle East. Yet, by 1800 - the blink of an eye, historically speaking - Europe had become the most economically dynamic region of the world, as the emergent social relations of capitalism reordered its states and connected them to different regions of the globe in surprising new ways. How and why did this happen? What were the consequences for everyone else? As we consider and evaluate competing answers to these questions, we will investigate ongoing debates on issues including: the ultimate source of wealth; the cultural, political and personal consequences of marketization, commodification and consumerism; the formation and stratification of social classes; and the forces that drive economic globalization.

354-0-20 History of Socialism

In this course, we will investigate socialism from its origins during the Age of Revolutions in Europe to follow its development globally down to the present day. We will consider the interrelated aspects of socialism as 1. an oppositional movement against the capitalist world economy, 2. as a critical analysis of capitalist society, and 3. as an attempt to establish a new kind of human community on the basis of that critique. Topics to be studied include the dynamics of revolutionary social change; the building of international working-class and national liberation movements; socialism as an economic system; and socialist approaches to gender, race, and identity.

356-1 – History of South Africa, 1879-on

From the African iron age to the establishment of the multinational gold mining industry, emphasizing the rise of African states and the contest for land with white settlers. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

356-2 – History of South Africa, 20th Century 

Emphasis on the 20th century, the rise of African nationalism, and the clash with the apartheid state. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

357 – East Africa 

Selected topics in East African history. 

360 – Tudor and Stuart Britain 

Formation of the British state during the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, 1485- 1714, with emphasis on changing patterns of religious belief and the transformation of the monarchy. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

362-1 – Modern British History, 1688 - 1815 

Social, political, and institutional history, 1688-1815. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

362-2 – Modern British History, 1780-1900 

The Victorians: liberalism, empire, and morality, 1780-1900. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

362-3 – Modern British History, 1900-Present 

Empire to Cool Britannia, 1900-present. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

366 – Race and Nation in the Independence Era 

The process of Latin American independence, from the colonial background to 19th century insurgency wars, economic development, and nation formation, with emphasis on race and "the Indian question" in liberal thought. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

367-0-20 Mexico

It was 1534, or maybe 1535, when the Spaniards found him among the dead, far to the south in Honduras. He was dark-skinned, pierced and tattooed, and he had led the Maya people of Chetumal to war for two decades. But he was also in his own way white, a fellow Spaniard called Gonzalo Guerrero, and his three children, born of marriage with a Maya woman, might be seen as the first Mexicans. The history of Mexico, understood as the country and people that grew from those first contacts, began with that Spaniard in 1511 when his caravel foundered on Scorpion Reef over sixty miles north of the Yucatán peninsula. This course traces that history from the beginning until the present.

373-1 – The Ottomans: Last Empire of Islam, 1300-1622 

The Last Empire of Islam, 1300-1622. Emergence and rise to power; relations with other European and Asian powers; principal institutions; governmental and societal frameworks. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

373-2 – The Ottomans: From "Second Empire" to the Age of Nationalism, 1622-1918 

From the Second Ottoman Empire to the Age of Nationalism, 1622-1918. Political and societal changes that shaped the modern Middle East and southeast Europe. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

376 – Global Environments and World History 

Environmental problems are today part and parcel of popular consciousness: resources are being depleted at a record pace, human population levels have crossed the seven billion threshold, extreme poverty defines the majority of people's daily lives, toxic contaminants affect all ecosystems, increasing numbers of species face extinction, consumerism and the commodification of nature show no signs of abating, and weapons and energy systems continue to proliferate that risk the planet's viability. This introductory lecture course is designed to help students understand the relatively recent origins of many of these problems, focusing especially on the last one hundred and fifty years. Students will have an opportunity to learn about the environmental effects of urbanization, industrialization, population growth, market economies, empire-building, intercontinental warfare, energy extraction, and new technologies. They will also explore different environmental philosophies and analytic frameworks that help us make sense of historical change, including political ecology, environmental history, science studies, and global history. Finally, the course will examine a range of transnational organizations, social movements, and state policies that have attempted to address and resolve environmental problems. 

ENVR_POL 340-0 and HISTORY 376-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses. 

378 – Law and Science: A History 

The changing relations between justice and science-including the forensic sciences of identification and intellectual property-in the United States and Europe over the past 300 years. 

Historical Studies Distro Area 

379 – Biomedicine and World History 

This lecture course uses the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine. We will break the quarter into four segments during which we will consider: 1) the "unification of the globe" by infectious diseases; 2) the role of empires, industries, war, and revolutions in spreading biomedical cultures around the world; 3) the functions played by transnational and global health institutions in different continents; and 4) the growth of the pharmaceutical industry and the narcotics trade. Students will have a chance to apply insights from the readings - about histories of racial segregation, reproductive politics, militarization, and police powers - to the more recent past. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

379-0 – Biomedicine and World History 

This lecture course uses the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine in comparative terms. We will break up the quarter into four segments during which we will consider: 1) how and why infectious diseases "unified" the globe and with what effects; 2) the role of empires, industries, war, and revolutions in spreading biomedical ideas, experts, and tools around the world; 3) the functions played by transnational and global health institutions in setting medical priorities and sustaining health norms across continents; and 4) the growth of clinical trials, the pharmaceutical industry, and narcotics trade. Because the world around us has been radically altered by SARS-coV-2, you will have an opportunity to place in historical context this pandemic's roots and its ongoing cycles. You will also be given a chance to apply insights from the readings - about histories of racial segregation, reproductive politics, militarization, and police powers - to this pandemic. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. 

381-1 – Qing China

 This is the first quarter of a two-quarter sequence on late imperial and modern China. (The second quarter covers twentieth-century China. Each course stands on its own; you will not be required to take both.) The themes linking both quarters are tensions regarding ethnic and national identity, shifts in gender ideals and family structure, and the effects of imperialist depredation. Modern China was forged by the Qing (1644-1911), the last imperial dynasty. Its achievements and travails continue to inform our present moment. Whether its massive territory, multi-ethnic society, complex economic and political relations with the "West" and the rest of Asia—and much more—key facets of contemporary China are rooted in the Qing. Formidable in warfare, the Qing created a multi-ethnic empire bound by Confucian culture, surging domestic and international commerce, and a potent imperial political structure and ideology. At the same time, millenarian and ethnic yearnings, foreign imperialism, and intellectual and political ferment threatened throughout the course of the dynasty to tear the empire apart. Topics to be explored include the Manchu conquest, the imperial state and its problematic relationship with the gentry elite, shifts in gender ideals and family structure, millenarian movements, commercial and industrial growth, intra-Asian connections, the lives of common people, foreign imperialism, US-China relations, early Chinese nationalism and feminism, human and state rights, and revolutionary radicalism. Both classes explore the definition and development of modernity in China. As part of this process, we will question the applicability of the term "modern" to Chinese history and consider how the Chinese experience with imperialism has fundamentally shaped their contemporary understanding of their own history.

381-1 – Modern China: The Transition to Modern Times, 1600-1912 

This is the first quarter of a two-quarter sequence on late imperial and modern China. (The second quarter covers twentieth-century China. Each course stands on its own; you will not be required to take both.) The themes linking both quarters are tensions regarding ethnic and national identity, shifts in gender ideals and family structure, and the effects of imperialist depredation. 
 
Modern China was forged by the Qing (1644-1911), the last imperial dynasty. Its achievements and travails continue to inform our present moment. Whether its massive territory, multi-ethnic society, complex economic and political relations with the "West" and the rest of Asia—and much more—key facets of contemporary China are rooted in the Qing. Formidable in warfare, the Qing created a multi-ethnic empire bound by Confucian culture, surging domestic and international commerce, and a potent imperial political structure and ideology. At the same time, millenarian and ethnic yearnings, foreign imperialism, and intellectual and political ferment threatened throughout the course of the dynasty to tear the empire apart. Topics to be explored include the Manchu conquest, the imperial state and its problematic relationship with the gentry elite, shifts in gender ideals and family structure, millenarian movements, commercial and industrial growth, intra-Asian connections, the lives of common people, foreign imperialism, US-China relations, early Chinese nationalism and feminism, human and state rights, and revolutionary radicalism. 
 
Both classes explore the definition and development of modernity in China. As part of this process, we will question the applicability of the term "modern" to Chinese history and consider how the Chinese experience with imperialism has fundamentally shaped their contemporary understanding of their own history. 

381-2 – History of Modern China: 1911-Present 

This class explores modern Chinese history from the Revolution of 1911 to the era of post-Mao reform (circa 2000). It is the story of China's turbulent effort to transform an empire into a modern nation-state that would allow China to accumulate "wealth and power" and "stand up." The course stresses both the Nationalist and Communist eras and will consider the disintegration of the Chinese polity into warlordism, Nationalist efforts to reestablish a viable state authority, the disastrous eight-year long War of Resistance against Japan, cooperation, conflict, and eventual civil war between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party, and the triumphs and tribulations of communist rule. We will explore such topics as the growth of modern urban mass culture, the development of new forms of artistic expression, attempts to ameliorate the status of Chinese women, revolutionary charisma and the effects of political campaigns, the economic and social effects of the Four Modernizations, and the place of the Patriotic Democratic Movement of 1989 in China's long tradition of intellectual and labor protest. 

381-3 Modern China: Post-Mao Reforms, 1978-2016

Since the advent of the Four Modernizations under the aegis of Deng Xiaoping in late 1978, Chinese society, culture, economy—indeed, almost every aspect of life—have been transformed. At the same time, however, the country's Maoist and more distant Republican and Imperial pasts have continued to inform and shape reform. This course examines the complexities of China's reformist period from the late 1970s until ca. 2014. We will highlight key currents, such as the transformation of rural-urban relations, domestic arguments about the unevenness and morality of socio-economic change, the 1989 Spring Democracy Movement, China's "Peaceful Rise," and its growing participation in global affairs, with an eye to understanding new social formations and highlighting the resonance of the past. Topics include The Four Modernizations; the transformation of rural-urban relations and domestic arguments about the unevenness and morality of socio-economic change; "Floating" and otherwise living in the city; SARS, AIDS, and the politics of public health; the Sichuan earthquake and civil society; China in the World; the rise of the popular environmental movement; unemployment and the growth of the new welfare state; and the 2014 Umbrella Movement. At the 19th Congress of the Communist Party in 2017, Xi Jinping, declared that the current "New Era" had dawned. The Reform Era is thus truly the history of present

382 – The Modern Japanese City 

Social and cultural history of urban Japan. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. See Caesar for current course description. 

385-1 Early Modern India 

 When people think of early modern India it it usually the fabled courts of the Mughal Empire, or monuments such as the Taj Mahal, or perhaps romantic portrayals of adventure and derring-do under the British Raj that capture their imagination. But beyond all the glitz and romance, the period from about 1500-1800 was also one of significant transformations in the social, cultural, and political life of the Indian subcontinent. This course will survey some of these developments, begininning with the integration of India's multiple religious, literary, and visual cultures under the Mughal Empire's ideology of "universal civility" (sulh-i kull). This policy included the welcoming of European merchants and missionaries who began arriving in the Indian subcontinent during the 16th century; but as Mughal power waned in the 18th century, it faced challenges not only from former client states and regional kingdoms that sought to fill its shoes, but also from the encounter with Europe, particularly the growing military and economic might of the British. And as the British role in India transitioned from one of mere traders to that of empire-builders with a so-called "civilizing mission," they too would transform the culture and society of India in ways that continue to resonate in South Asian history and cultural memory today.

385-1 – History of Modern South Asia, 1500-1800 

When people think of early modern India it it usually the fabled courts of the Mughal Empire, or monuments such as the Taj Mahal, or perhaps romantic portrayals of adventure and derring-do under the British Raj that capture their imagination. But beyond all the glitz and romance, the period from about 1500-1800 was also one of significant transformations in the social, cultural, and political life of the Indian subcontinent. This course will survey some of these developments, begininning with the integration of India's multiple religious, literary, and visual cultures under the Mughal Empire's ideology of "universal civility" (sulh-i kull). This policy included the welcoming of European merchants and missionaries who began arriving in the Indian subcontinent during the 16th century; but as Mughal power waned in the 18th century, it faced challenges not only from former client states and regional kingdoms that sought to fill its shoes, but also from the encounter with Europe, particularly the growing military and economic might of the British. And as the British role in India transitioned from one of mere traders to that of empire-builders with a so-called "civilizing mission," they too would transform the culture and society of India in ways that continue to resonate in South Asian history and cultural memory today. 

385-2 – History of Modern South Asia, Circa 1750 - Present 

This survey course will introduce students to over two hundred years of the history of South Asia - home to nearly one-fourth of the world's population today - and South Asian communities. From the mid-eighteenth century to the present, South Asia has witnessed multiple political transitions - from Mughal sovereignty to British colonial rule, from British authority to post-colonial nation-building, and the creation of new territorial nation-states. Dilemmas rooted in histories of imperialism haunt South Asian nation-states and South Asian communities living elsewhere in the world today. In this course, we will examine a range of themes related to this diverse region and its colonial and post-colonial history. How and why did the British state consolidate political control and transform itself in this region? How did British Indians challenge the many edifices of imperialism and wrest political independence in 1947? What sort of anti-colonialism emerged in colonial India? What is the place of imperialism in the creation and evolution of diasporic South Asian communities? In addition, we will reflect on socio-political movements that sought to redress gender and caste inequality and investigate their fraught relationship with the colonial state, anti-colonial nationalism, and the ongoing project of post-colonial nation-making. Key themes include: ideologies and practices of imperialism; anti-colonial nationalisms; social movements focused on caste, class, and gender inequalities; post-colonial nation-making and its continued challenges. In looking at these issues from the regional perspective of South Asia, we will also have occasion to reflect on the colonial roots of many contemporary global debates about diversity, inclusion, and social justice.

386-2 – History of Modern Southeast Asia Until 1945 

This course is an introduction to the history of modern Southeast Asia, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of World War II. The region comprises eleven modern nation-states: Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines, and East Timor. Its history can seem like a bewildering parade of princes, plenipotentiaries, presidents, and prime ministers: Diponegoro, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, Thibaw, Chulalongkorn, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, Johannes Van Den Bosch, Sir Hugh Clifford, and Paul Doumer, among many others. This course focuses, therefore, on the economic and social changes that have spanned the region and give its disparate parts historical unity. It begins by charting the contours of Southeast Asian social structures on the eve of European colonial rule; it then examines Southeast Asians' responses to the challenges and opportunities of their region's integration with new markets during the era of European high imperialism; and it details the social transformations that followed from depression and war, in the mid-twentieth century, including violent peasant rebellions and the birth of communism. 

386-3 – History of Contemporary Southeast Asia Since 1945 

This course addresses the history of Southeast Asia from the end of World War II to the Present, a period of rapid and sometimes bewildering change in the region. The course will explore such themes as decolonization; the establishment of authoritarian states; the participation of the region in the Global Cold War; the effects of Import Substitution Industrialization and Export Oriented Industrialization on domestic populations; the management of ethnic and religious diversity; growing social stratification; and the rise of popular democratic movements, among others. We will seek to understand commonalities of experience across Southeast Asia that might warrant it being called a ‘region.' 

393 – Approaches to History 

 Introductory seminar for history majors and others interested in understanding how history is thought about and written. Intensive exploration of a significant historical event, period, or topic. 

Historical Studies Distro Area. Topic Varies by instructor. See Caesar for current course description. 

393-0 Gender, Race, and the Holocaust 

The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to the history and historiography of race and gender during the Holocaust. As in many historical contexts, race and gender interacted dynamically and created the particular context of Nazi-occupied Europe, which was a place where Jewish men and women suffered in particular ways, German men and women participated in particular ways, and other racial groups - men and women alike - were targeted, collaborated, resisted and rescued. We will read a variety of texts that explore the influences that shaped the behavior and response of an array of people during the Holocaust. Racism sat directly in the center of the Nazi world view. Once the Nazis got into power, they sought to translate ideology into policy. Still, their racial policies evolved over time, spurred by opportunism, innovation, and war. And too, Jewish men and women responded in ways similar and divergent to the Nazi onslaught. Sexism was also seemingly an important aspect of the Nazi perspective. While they indeed embraced an anti-feminist stance, the Nazis nevertheless sought to incorporate "German" women into the national community and women participated actively in the implementation of Nazi racism.

393-0-22 The Natural Supernatural in S.E. Asia 

This course examines the ways in which different Southeast Asian peoples have conceived of what we might think of as the natural world - the environment; and the supernatural world - various religious traditions and cosmologies; and the continuous interplay between the two. Together we will explore the Kahiringan tradition of the Ngaju Dayak people from Central Kalimantan in Indonesia; representations of nature in the textual traditions and temple paintings of the Vessantera jataka in Myanmar and Thailand; swiddening and headhunting in the Philippines; and the hydraulic landscape of Bali's water temples. Our goal will be to understand the kinds of conceptual and practical resources Southeast  Asians have brought
to understanding and controlling the world in which they have lived.

393-0– The World of Japan's Empire 

Japan was the only non-western country to build a modern empire in the 20th century--a project that turned out to be a disaster, with huge implications for Asia to this day. This is also the history of China, Taiwan, Mongolia, the Koreas, Southeast Asia, Sakhalin, and several of the Pacific Island nations. What was distinctive about this non-Western empire? What was not? What are the key legacies? How should we think about the real-world impact of empires in general? 

393-0 1947 Partition of India 

This seminar will focus on the 1947 Partition of British India to understand how this traumatic event has become paradigmatic for colonial India and post-colonial South Asia. The Partition created more than just the two rival nation-states of India and Pakistan from what used to be British India. It also generated a long shadow that continues to define ongoing regional conflicts such as those in Kashmir, continual anxieties about majoritarian and minoritarian identity politics viewed alternately with dread and jubilation in both India and Pakistan, and a persistent desire among South Asian creative artists to make sense of the pain of this violent event. How did the Partition come about? How have scholars, commentators, filmmakers, novelists, creative writers, and those who survived the violence of this event understood and narrativized it? Why does an event that occurred seventy-five years ago loom so large in the collective memory of South Asians today?

393-0 – Xi's "New Era": China Today 

This seminar explores Chinese contemporary history by examining shifting notions of China, its place in the world, its unlimited future, and its prosperous present. Like the celebration of the "China Dream" and the injunction to tell the "China Story," these ideals both reflect and result from significant shifts in Chinese politics and society, which are subject to influence by a rejuvenated Chinese Communist Party and "Xi Jinping Thought with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era." We will begin by considering China's place in the world by discussing the 2017 box office hit "Wolf Warrior 2" (China's "Rambo: First Blood II") and end by considering popular Chinese science fiction. In between we will consider notions of gender, socialism, and citizenship, among other topics. Students can petition to take the class as a 395. 

393-0-28 Illness and Disability in History

This course explores the changing meanings of disability and illness in history and around the world. How can we understand a historical figure as "disabled" before the invention of this category? What is the relationship between race, gender, class, illness and disability? By reading the historical writings of physicians, religious scholars, officials, activists, and others, some of whom were sick & disabled, we will investigate the social construction of categories relevant to disability and (chronic) illness in the history of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. This course strives to respect contemporary disability justice principles, and as such, to be accessible to a range of bodyminds. Course materials will center academic and popular writings, podcasts, and memoirs, but will also include some film and visual art. Your final project will be a proposal for an archival and/or oral historical project on the history of illness and disability, which we will work towards throughout the semester. We will not carry out that proposal in this class, but you may in the future.

393-0 – Shanghai: Modernity and Modernism in 20th Century China 

Shanghai: Paris of the East, Paradise of Adventurers, Birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party, City of Migrants, City of Capitalist Decadence and Debauchery, Nightmare City, Refugee City, Island Shanghai, China's Industrial City, Open Port. In the first part of the 20th century, Shanghai was known by many names and attributes, positive and negative. Each highlighted different aspects of Shanghai as a key site for the creation of modernity and modernism in China and greater East Asia. This class will examine various facets of Shanghai's complex bequest as the paradigmatic modern Chinese city due to its place as a colonial port city and center of industry, culture, and politics. This course will use fiction, historical studies, and films to explore the city and its place in modern nationalism, industrial capitalism and finance, feminism and gender/sexual politics, intellectual movements, and modern urban lifeways. [Students may take the class as a 395; they will be able to draw on a vast store of English-, Chinese-, Japanese-, and French-language newspapers, archival documents, films, and more (via NU Library databases) to write a research paper.] 

393-0 – Beyond Pocahontas: Finding Native Voices in Early America 

Touching on topics including environmental change, gender and sexuality, Native power, slavery, and memory, this course will examine the various ways that scholars have written histories of Native Americans in early America, when most of the sources were produced by colonizers. Famous figures like Pocahontas are well known and well documented, but how can historians tell the story of everyone else? And what is their responsibility to modern Native nations? 

393-0 Drag Queens in Modern History 

In 2023, the art of drag has reached a fateful juncture. While drag now enjoys unprecedented levels of mainstream, commercial success, it once again stands at the heart of polarizing political discourses. With five US states introducing bills to regulate and ban drag, and a growing pattern of armed protests against drag events, one might ask: why do cross-dressing acts elicit such extreme responses, and how did we get here? In this course, we will dive into the tumultuous history of drag as an object of heated public debate in the modern era. We will evaluate the different ways in which states, communities, and people responded to drag in different temporal and national contexts, with a focus on Europe and North America. What do these debates teach us about how norms of citizenship, morality, gender, and sexuality were negotiated on and off the stage? What distinguishes drag as an art form, and when and how did it truly begin? Is drag inherently liberatory, radical, and progressive, or actually conformist, oppressive, and misogynist? What is the relationship between drag and social movements? How did the World Wars transform and revolutionize drag? And what do queens and kings have to do with any of this? Using primary and secondary sources, including memoirs, documentaries, and memorabilia, we will explore the significance of drag as an art form and a political subculture.

393-0 – Mass Violence 

In spite of the moral condemnation by numerous religious, political and intellectual leaders and the massive (national and international) efforts aiming to prevent it, mass violence - in its extreme forms, such as mass murder and genocide affecting groups of people - was and still is a widespread phenomenon in human societies. Recently, numerous scholars have argued that, since the advent of modernity, mass violence has become more murderous, especially during the last century. Its persistence and intensification has triggered a lot of scholarly debates about its origins and nature, particularly how it functions and why so many people got implicated in the violence. This course aims to examine various theories and case studies of extreme mass violence, focusing on the dynamics of group behavior and social, political, economic, gender, and psychological factors that shaped cases of collective violence especially during the twentieth century. The main goal is to discuss various cases of extreme mass violence that targeted entire communities based on their group identity, focusing on the perpetrators and on the various explanations of their murderous behavior and the mechanism of mass violence. 

393-0 Holocaust Memories

The most well-known and best documented case of genocide of the 20th century, the Holocaust, attracted the attention of both the general public and academics, who were especially interested in understanding what happened during WWII and the reasons for human participation in such a horrendous event. Holocaust survivors and their families and communities and the broader postwar societies engaged in various forms of private and public commemoration and remembrance after the defeat of the Axis by 1945. Scholars seemed to have been less interested in Holocaust memory during the first postwar decades. The increased presence of the survivors' voices through various forms of public testimony, from the publication of ego-documents to their participation in education and commemoration activities and Holocaust representation in mass-media, including film and graphic novels, contributed to the growing interest in Holocaust memory in academic and the broader society. As the result, the last four decades had witnessed a boom in the research on Holocaust memory and commemorative practices. Our examination of Holocaust memory will be based primarily on historical texts of Holocaust scholars as well as on postwar autobiographical accounts of survivors and on their participation in commemorative practices.

393-0 The Quest for Arab Independence after WWI 

This seminar introduces students to major themes in the history of Syria and other Arab-majority areas during and after WWI (1916-1920)—arguably one of the most pivotal periods in modern Middle Eastern history. Ultimately, the course is about the ways in which different historians have understood and interpreted the events that unfolded during this time period. Imagine that you and your classmates are a group of conscientious lawyers examining a case ahead of a trial. In this hypothetical scenario, one party has put forward a case based on a certain narrative of events. Out of concern for its accuracy and plausibility, your task is to determine if, or to what extent, it holds water. The case in question has been put forward by historian Elizabeth Thompson in a recent book dealing with Syria and the Arabs' quest for independence following WWI. We are going to familiarize ourselves with the facts of the case and the case itself. Then we are going to scrutinize the argument, weigh the evidence, consider alternatives, and assess the extent to which the case withstands scrutiny.

393-0 – Abortion in the United States 

This seminar offers an intensive exploration of the history of abortion in the United States. Using primary and secondary sources, the class will look at how women in the past terminated pregnancies, the drive to restrict or outlaw abortion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the relationship between abortion regulation and other questions of constitutional "privacy," the reproductive rights and reproductive justice movements that emerged in the twentieth century, Roe v. Wade and other major Supreme Court decisions, the legalization of abortion and its consequences, and the anti-abortion movement of the 1970s and later. 
 
To obtain permission, write Professor Kate Masur (kmasur@northwestern.edu). 

 393-0 The Historian's Craft 1

Sanders Seminar: The Historian's Craft This is the first installment of a special two-quarter seminar in students engage with the problems that historians are facing and their debates on how to solve them. The course is open only to candidates who have successfully applied to the Department of History for admission. This seminar offers opportunities far beyond what a standard class can provide. Not only will you read classic works and cutting-edge scholarship, but you'll also meet major figures in the field, including authors on the syllabus, invited to campus specifically to talk with you about their work, your research, and the study of history. Then you will be able to follow your interests to address selected debates and themes that have spoken to you as you devise an original research project in close consultation with your fellow Sanders Scholars.

393-0 Monsters and Marvels in Early Modern Europe

Max Weber described the early modern period (16th-18th centuries) as an era of "disenchantment," in which Europeans threw off the mantle of religious superstition and embraced secularism and "rational" scientific understanding. In this course we will interrogate and challenge Weber's thesis, exploring the ways in which the monstrous and the marvelous permeated the early modern imagination. Early modern Europeans collected and catalogued mythical beasts and natural wonders from around the globe in private collections, speculated on the divine significance of comets and earthquakes, and testified to the existence of ghosts and witches in judicial trials. Mystical visions and wondrous miracles saturated popular religious culture, gaining strength and urgency from the confessional divisions of the Reformation. Throughout this course we will be guided by a series of case studies drawn from the vast catalogue of European marvels (a woman who gave birth to a litter of rabbits in eighteenth-century London; a compendium of hybrid beasts compiled by Ambroise Paré; a mass possession among religious pilgrims in Paris; and many others). We will explore how the marvelous and the monstrous were continually reinvented to reflect broader cultural forces and political anxieties, from the rise of colonial European empires to the ascendancy of scientific attitudes among intellectual elites. In early modern Europe, wonders signaled the limits of human knowledge, blurred the boundaries between the natural and the divine, and testified to the continuing presence of the supernatural in an increasingly secularized world.

393-0 Revolutionizing Gender and Sex

This course explores the cultural, social, and political significance of systems of gender in 20th and 21st century China. Themes include the roles of women and men in Confucian hierarchies, modern concepts of biology and health, reform of the family and marriage, desire, and deviance. In addition to analyzing how the “revolution of the heart” and other heteronormative, family-focused ideals have transformed, we will discuss shifting attitudes towards male and female same-sex relations and the debate regarding current #MeToo feminist concerns.

393-0 What is Anti-Semitism?

In modern political discourse, "anti-Semitism" is frequently invoked and infrequently defined. The imprecision with which the term is deployed leads to broad disagreements about the nature and scope of the phenomenon: Is it anti-Semitic to call a Jewish person a pig? To advocate for boycotts against the State of Israel? To work to criminalize infant circumcision, or kosher slaughter? To accuse George Soros of bankrolling BLM protests, or of conspiring to "steal" the presidential election? What kinds of critiques of Jews or of Judaism are fair game, and which cross the line into hate speech, or foment violence? More broadly, is anti-Semitism a form of racism? Of xenophobia? Of anti-religious animus, akin to Islamophobia? Is it a conspiracy theory? Does anti-Semitism assume that Jews constitute a religion? A nationality? An ethnicity? A "race"? One reason these questions are so hotly contested is because they are usually discussed ahistorically, in isolation from the extensive academic scholarship on the origins and development of anti-Semitism—both the actual phenomenon and the descriptive term itself. This course traces the historical trajectory of anti-Jewish rhetoric, violence, and discrimination from antiquity through the present. We will pay particular attention to the analytical concepts that historians have developed and deployed—including, but not limited to anti-Semitism, antisemitism, anti-Judaism, and Judeophobia. Rather than seeking to isolate an overarching definition of what is and is not anti-Semitic, we will explore the specific contexts in which anti-Jewish animus and violence developed, and the constantly evolving role "Jews" (as individuals and as a category) have played at key historical junctures.

393-0 Soviet History Through Film

The story of Soviet cinema is one of the most remarkable artistic "underdog" tales of modern times: in a country where freedom of expression was severely curtailed, Soviet filmmakers found ways to craft some of the greatest films ever made. This class takes students on a cinematic journey across the full spectrum of classic Soviet genres, including the Bolshevik avant-garde weirdness of the 1920s, the Stalinist kitsch of the 40s, the brooding realism of the 60s, the charming rom-coms of the 70s, and the subversive coming-of-age hipster classics of the USSR's final years. This class does not presume any background in Soviet history, and it offers a concise historical overview as an accompaniment to the wonderful movies on display.

393-0-24 Black Atlantic Cultures

Black Atlantic Culture is a seminar on approaches to studying and writing the history of Black cultural formation in the Atlantic world. Black Atlantic refers to the African and Africa-descended people and their cultural geographies in Africa, Europe, and the Americas since the fifteenth century. It is a world made possible by the Atlantic slave trade, racial capitalism, drug/alcohol addiction, racism, early modern empires, and colonization. In this seminar, we will study the processes of dispossession, disruption, and displacement that created the Black Atlantic world and how Africans—enslaved, free, and displaced—used their creativity to fashion new cultures, new intellectual traditions, and new philosophies. The class emphasizes that Black Atlantic cultural formations cannot be studied separately from the political economy and intellectual project of racism and modernity. Likewise, several aspects of Black culture-making were tied to the project of resistance, liberation, and restoration of black humanity. Hence, the class will read some of the literature that unites political economy and intellectual history with liberation movement and cultural history. The readings will be illustrated with archaeological artifacts, visual arts, and documentaries. At the end of the course, students are expected to develop a sound understanding of the major historiographic debates that have shaped the study of Black Atlantic Culture and where to look for primary sources for studying the long-term Black experience in the Atlantic world.

393-0-24 Computing: A Global History

How did computers become globally ubiquitous? Should we thank—or perhaps blame—isolated geniuses who toiled away in Silicon Valley? Or were our digital devices forged through geopolitics, international organizations, and world wars? This course will seek to answer these questions by analyzing the global development of modern computing from the nineteenth century to the present. In addition to looking at the technological and cultural contributions of the United States, we will spotlight the interconnected global nature of computing's history. By illuminating connections others have missed, we will see that the internet didn't connect the globe; rather, an interconnected world formed modern computing. To this end, participants will investigate how the Information Age was shaped through state planning in the Global South, Cold War competition, Japan's postwar growth, and the worldwide extraction of silica sand and quartz. Students will emerge from the seminar with both an appreciation of computing's historical highlights and an analytical framework for understanding how digital developments transcended borders and reconfigured the global community.

393-0-26 Science and Decolonization

Do the modern sciences have colonial tendencies? If so, what would it mean to decolonize them? This historiography seminar approaches these questions through historical case studies that explore how postcolonial states and professionals attempted to rid scientific practice of the vestiges of colonialism. There are scientists in nearly every country on earth, and scientific institutions in many of those countries date to the colonial era. Historians are increasingly interested in finding out what happened to colonial science after independence, and we will read exciting new scholarship that approaches this issue from the Americas, Africa, and East and South Asia, on topics ranging from medicine to botany to nuclear physics. We will use these case studies, along with short theoretical essays, to better understand contemporary proposals to decolonize science. As a historiography seminar, the course will also introduce students to the craft of history, exploring what it means to be an academic historian today.

393-0-28 Sex and Gender in Revolution

This course explores the cultural, social, and political significance of systems of gender in 20th and 21st century China. Themes include the roles of women and men in Confucian hierarchies, modern concepts of biology and health, reform of the family and marriage, desire, and deviance. In addition to analyzing how the "revolution of the heart" and other heteronormative, family-focused ideals have transformed, we will discuss shifting attitudes towards male and female same-sex relations and the debate regarding current #MeToo feminist concerns.

395 – Research Seminar 

Students research and complete a term paper on a topic of choice. Required of majors. 

Topic Varies by instructor. See Caesar for current course description. 

 395-0-20 A Woman's Work is Never Done: Gender and Labor in U.S. History

This is an historical research seminar in which students will complete a 25-30 page research paper using primary (historical) and secondary sources. The course will begin with common readings about women and labor in US history, and then students will identify, research, and write about topics of their own choosing. In our readings, we will focus on issues of race, class, and sexuality in the history of women's labor, considering not only conventional paid work but also reproductive labor and unpaid housework.

395-0-20 An American Horror

History 395 explores the nature of historical research. In this class we won't simply be reading other scholars' work, though. We'll be doing the work of history, digging deeply into one profoundly disturbing event in the American past and interpreting it as best we can. Please note that this class centers on a horrific act of racial violence. Students who want to know more about its content before enrolling are encouraged to contact the instructor.

395-0 Imperialism in Asia 

The history of “imperialism in Asia” is a global history. It involved virtually all of the European colonial powers: Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany and, of course, Great Britain. The United States joined the club in the nineteenth century and, unlike the rest of the colonized world, a non-Western nation, Japan, participated in this tradition of territorial conquest and cultural hegemony. Paradoxically, the Japanese simultaneously intensified the colonial experience and, by starting the war in the Pacific, inaugurated the process that led to decolonization and the emergence of independent nation states. This seminar will explore this history in its multifaceted dimensions, and students interested in Asian, European, American, and Global history are all welcome. The initial two-thirds of the seminar will be devoted to reading primary and secondary sources relating to colonialism and imperialism in East, Southeast, and South Asia. Naturally we will not be able to explore the topic in all its dimensions in just a few weeks, but we will learn from each other. The latter third of the course will be devoted to the research and writing of a term paper on any topic of your choice relating to the history of imperialism in these regions, whether from the historical perspective of the perpetrators or the victims. The purpose of this exercise is to enable students to write the sort of polished term paper that is not usually possible within the hectic confines of the quarter system. You will be afforded the time and personal attention necessary to write a good paper.

395-0  Podcasting the History of Science 

This course will provide students with the opportunity to create a podcast on the history of science together. Taking a global approach to the history of science, each student will conduct original research on an object, text, or other source relevant to the theme of the podcast. Students will learn how to record, edit, and produce sound, while we ask: What counts as signal, and what counts as noise? We will take that question to the archive and the editing studio.

395-0 – Oral History & the Archives of Terror - Research Seminar 

This course helps students understand oral history as a political battlefield. We studied how various historical actors used different forms of oral expression to engage in processes of formation of political consciousness, collective identities, social movements, and states in Latin America during the Cold War. 
The course is divided into three sections. In the first part, we will unpack the concepts and practices of oral history by discussing the theoretical and methodological challenges that professional historians and social scientists confront when doing oral history in the region and beyond. In the second and third parts, we will study the "archives of terror" of the Latin American Cold War, and how various forms of orality (i.e. testimonio, life histories, journalistic interviews, and truth commission reports) helped victims of violence to put an end to dictatorships and civil wars, intervene in the peace processes and democratic transitions that followed, and fight for justice, reparation, truth, and reconciliation. 

395-0 Gender and Sexual Minorities in History 

Queens. Fairies. Inverts. Sapphists. Hijra. Uranians. Abatoni. Friends of Dorothy. The terms used to describe gender and sexual minorities in the past and around the world might be unrecognizable to us today – but they have all shaped our current identities. In this course we will be exploring queer histories in a global context to understand the people and experiences behind the categories. Rather than taking a chronological approach, or looking at countries in isolation, we will be focusing on some of the most hotly-debated topics in gender history, LGBT history and queer history: how have the identity categories we understand today developed over time and in different contexts? How have gender and sexual minorities sought to liberate themselves and others, and how have these efforts informed movements around the world today?

395-0 – Nature and Empire - Research Seminar 

The arrival of European colonizing powers in the Americas in the wake of Columbus's voyages marked a new and often disastrous chapter in global environmental history. American nations and environments shaped the course of European colonial settlement at the same time as colonial expansion profoundly changed the flora, fauna, disease ecology, and patterns of labor and land use prevailing across the Americas. This seminar explores the entangled histories of imperial and environmental history in the colonial Atlantic world. Topics will include the so-called Columbian Exchange and the dispossession of indigenous lands; the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of the plantation system; the intersections of African, European, and Indigenous American agricultural practices; European theories of race and climate; colonial bioprospecting; and the role of disease in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. We will also consider the imperial origins of modern conservationism and of key environmental concepts such as ‘wilderness' and 'native' and 'invasive' species. 

395-0 – Russian Revolutions 

From the Pugachev Uprising to the Bolshevik Revolution, this class surveys revolutionary ventures in Russian history-- those that succeeded, those that failed, and those that were simply bizarre. Students will read, present, and discuss a range of texts that includes eyewitness reports, diaries, manifestos, poems, and the latest debates among historians. Meanwhile, independent research throughout the quarter (in consultation with the professor) will culminate in a 15pp-20pp final paper on the history of pre-Soviet or Soviet Russia, Central Asia, and/or the Caucasus. 

395-0 – History with Things 

This seminar guides students as they research and write the social history of an artifact of their choice. How do our histories read if we organize them around changes in the material world? Do artifacts have politics, and if so, of what sort? In this course, students learn multiple approaches to the study of material culture. We will read exemplary accounts of objects which people have designed, made, sold, bought, gifted, and/or trashed. We will study how these objects came to mediate differences among people, like gender, race, age, nation, and of course, rich and poor. The course offers a well-tested template for conducting, organizing, and writing up your own research on a topic that interests you. Try out an idea for a senior thesis. Research an artifact you love or hate, or feel ambivalent about. Develop a case history of innovation (or obsolescence). The last time the course was offered, students wrote papers on such topics as: the wiretapping of ‘70s radicals, the late nineteenth-century obsession with photographing the dead, how knitting patterns went online, the rise of the labradoodle, the gender dynamics of ‘20s fashion, how changes in intellectual property transformed ‘90s biotech, and why Admiral Grace Hopper programmed COBOL the way she did…. The goal is to illuminate our changing world by telling the history of a material being. 

395-0 – Refugees/Migration/ Exile: Digital Storytelling 

In this course, students will research a case study from among the many refugee and migration crises that have dominated the news cycle in recent years. The final project is a short video about your case study. 
 
To develop your research projects, the class foregrounds different methodological approaches: 1) To move beyond journalism, we will conduct primary and secondary historical research to understand the complex historical roots of each case study. 2) We will analyze and practice forms of ethnographic writing to better situate and describe the lived experiences of migration and exile, both past and present. 3) We will pay attention to various forms of media, whether print culture, sound, or visual media, to interrogate but also experiment with contemporary modes of narrating and conveying human experience in the digital age. Our work in class will be collaborative, thus a key prerequisite is that you are mature and self-motivated. You do not need to have prior research experience, but you need to demonstrate a desire to dig into your topic and hone your ability to write deeply informed, rigorous, and nuanced arguments and to think about creative ways to bring rigorous historical and ethnographic detail to visual story-telling. You will be graded on written reading responses, in-class participation, and the final product (a short video, less than five minutes). 
 
Students are required to petition for permission to enroll in the class (see instructions in the "Registration Requirements" section). 

395-0-26 Queer Oral Histories

"Oral histories are particularly vital to gay history, since written records of our past rarely exist or have been destroyed", wrote the San Francisco Gay History Project in 1979. The belief that oral history interviews are the primary way to overcome archival erasure has shaped feminist, radical and LGBT history projects. However, the advent of queer theory has called some of these assumptions into question. How far does oral history privilege the voices of those who are "out", visible and confident? How is the relationship between interviewer and interviewee altered when both parties are LGBTQ (or assumed to be)? Finally, how can historians build a complex picture of the past when we are reliant on those who are willing to speak? This class provides a unique opportunity to unpack queer theory through the practical methodologies of conducting and analyzing your own interview projects. We will work on this step by step throughout the term, with consistent feedback and support to enable you to become an independent researcher.

395-0  The Black Death

The fourteenth-century Black Death (or bubonic plague) has long been the benchmark against which all other disasters have been measured. Although there were devastating instances of plague in Roman times, and even isolated outbreaks in our own time, the medieval plague was a true pandemic that raged throughout the world. This courses focuses on the bubonic plague in Western Europe. After examining the first visitation of the plague in the Byzantine era (6c), we will then focus on the period between 1346 and 1348, when the Black Death wiped out somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the population, and the aftermath. At a time when principles of contagion were hazy and medical treatment primitive, the panic-stricken society alternated between regarding the plague as evidence of God’s wrath for humanity’s sins and desperately seeking scapegoats to blame. This course will approach the plague from multiple perspectives through the lens of primary and secondary sources. Among the topics addressed will be: the immediate causes of the plague; medieval and modern theories of the disease; the plague’s impact on both religious personnel and the secular work force; its impact on culture; the relation between plague and persecution, and violence; and the impact of the plague outside of Europe and beyond the Middle Ages.

395-0– Participatory Research in Queer Studies 

IParticipatory research methods have been key to queer studies since its inception. The use of methodologies like oral history, ethnography and participant observation reflects the lack of written sources on the queer past, but also the political objectives of many researchers - to empower their participants, challenge normativity, and often pursue social change. In this class, we will examine some of the approaches to participatory research, and explore how participatory research might be different in the specific context of queer studies. How is the relationship between researcher and participant altered when both are LGBTQ+ (or assumed to be)? How might queer theory pose a challenge to the activist objectives of participatory research, and vice versa? 
 
The central focus of your writing requirements will be your own research paper, on a topic of your choice, putting the participatory research methods we have learned about into practice. We will work on this step by step throughout the quarter, with consistent feedback and support to enable you to become independent researchers. The ability to conduct independent research is an extremely valuable skill, enabling you to develop as scholars and engage directly with the topics and questions we will be covering. 

395-0 The World That Fossil Fuels Made

This course will examine energy use in American history, ranging from the use of wood and water in colonial times, to animal-derived oils and fossil fuels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to nuclear in the late-twentieth century, and finally to the search for alternative sources in recent decades. We will consider not only how human use of various forms of energy has affected the non-human environment but also what particular energy regimes have meant for the social, political, and material lives of Americans at different points in history.

 395-0 Indiana Jones in Historical Context

This course will examine the Indiana Jones films from the perspective of three key historical frames of reference. First, there is the context of European colonial expansion in Asia and Africa during the 19th and early 20th centuries — a formative stage for the emergence of a modern scholarly idiom about places like Egypt, India, and "The Orient" generally, much of which would have been inherited by an archaeologist (even a fictional one) like Jones. Secondly the 1930s, the timeframe of the films themselves, when British and French colonial power was on the wane, Nazi Germany was on the rise, and America was on the cusp of its own emergence as a global "superpower" in the wake of World War II. In this latter contest for global supremacy, too, the nexus between geopolitical power and scholarly knowledge loomed large, both in real life and in the Jones films. And yet one also has to remember that the films' idealization of Jones and the 1930s actually emerges from a nostalgic, late Cold War vantage point. Thus our third historical frame of reference — basically, from the 1980s to the present — will force us to examine the earlier legacies of Western power and knowledge from our own perspective, as they are refracted in the films, and as they have been re-imagined and redeployed in the present-day American political and cultural imagination.

395-0 The Historian's Craft 2

This is the second half of a two-quarter, application-only seminar that introduces students to the scholarly practices of the discipline of history. This quarter, students will pursue a self-directed research agenda in close consultation with their fellow Sanders Scholars. The seminar will scaffold the task of creating an original product of one's research interests, incorporating feedback and guidance from peers along the way. The goal is to develop one's abilities as an independent analyst who can successfully design and complete an entirely new primary-source historical investigation and place it within meaningful historiographical context.

395-0 The 1930's and Now

Are we living again through the 1930s? The invasion of a sovereign nation, the rise of populist movements around the world, the retreat from international institutions, the ascent of authoritarianism, financial crisis, attack on minority populations: If you're curious about the comparisons often made these days between the 1930s and now, this research seminar will offer a structured opportunity to delve into a tumultuous period through focused study of a topic of your own devising.

395-0-22 Holocaust Trials

After the Second World War the victorious Allied powers and the liberated peoples of Europe engaged in an unprecedented attempt to bring Nazi war criminals and domestic collaborators to justice. Courts throughout the continent tried and punished hundreds of thousands for having worked with and for Germany and the Axis powers. By and large, however, those trials concentrated on crimes of political collaboration and paid little attention to what is now accepted as the Nazis' greatest crime: the genocide of European Jewry. Although courts did punish some architects of the so-called Final Solution, thousands of Europeans who had organized, perpetrated or otherwise contributed to the Holocaust escaped with minimal penalties or no punishment at all. Over the subsequent decades individuals, organizations, and states have sought to redress the failure to seek out and punish those perpetrators at war's end. Lawyers have prosecuted and defended accused war criminals before courts. Historians have documented the development and execution of genocide, while others have sought to deny the very murders themselves. Through the examination of a series of trials, the first half of the course will discuss both the struggle to bring perpetrators to justice and the efforts to obscure the crimes that had been committed. We will consider the prosecution of war crimes and genocide in the context of the development of international law and historical knowledge over the decades from the Second World War to the present day. For the second half of the course students will concentrate on individual research papers based on primary sources (for example, the records of the Nuremberg Tribunal or Eichman Trial).

395-0-24 Jewish Autobiographies

Autobiography in general and Jewish autobiography in particular presents an unparalleled opportunity to look at history, historical realities, and historical memories (or fantasies!) through the lens of a private individual. Yet the purpose of the autobiography is to tell a story, not history. The autobiography is a quintessential narrative that combines history and memory, authentic details and borrowed narratives, documentary precision and artistic ambition. Autobiography is a historical narrative bordering on the literary. If so, is it possible to use autobiography in historical research? This course opens up a variety of ways to identify and neutralize the literary layer in autobiography to make it a usable historical source. This course takes the participants through five hundred years of Jewish ego-narratives including the autobiographies of rabbis and mystics, schismatics and philosophers, merchants and writers, dissidents and historians, nationalist politicians, cultural assimilationists, and even converts.

395-0-24 Jews and Muslims: Intertwined Worlds

For centuries, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) witnessed a rich tapestry of Jewish-Muslim cultural interactions, religious exchanges, and shared social realities, beginning with the spread of Islam in the seventh century. This course will explore the vibrant lives and everyday experiences of Jewish communities in the region, spanning from the 11th to the 20th centuries. Drawing on specific case studies and recent research, the course will offer a nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics that shaped the relationships of Jews to their predominantly Muslim environment in premodern MENA. Instead of a simplistic narrative of either harmonious coexistence or constant conflict and discrimination, we will explore the intricate layers of the history of Jews in the Islamic world to reveal their intertwined world. The course does not aim to provide a comprehensive historical overview but rather seeks to illuminate critical aspects of Jewish cultural and social embeddedness in MENA through recent scholarship on key themes. These include competing and overlapping legal systems, commercial life and material culture, gender, religious polemics and intellectual exchanges, shared devotional spaces and practices, and more. The students in the course will concentrate on individual research papers based on secondary scholarship but also translated primary sources.

398-1 – Thesis Seminar 

 Advanced work through supervised reading, research, and discussion. Admission by written application, to be reviewed by department. Grade of K given in 398-1 and 398-2. 

398-1 – Thesis Seminar 

This seminar is a three-quarter sequence in which senior thesis students prepare a thesis and meet regularly as colleagues to discuss problems of common interest under the guidance of a faculty member. It meets weekly in the fall quarter but less often in winter and spring. Subjects for discussion include historiography, the use of primary sources, framing and structuring historical arguments, and the art of writing. Practical matters like funding sources and library resources are also discussed. 

398-2 – Thesis Seminar 

This is a full-year course for students writing a senior honors thesis in history. In the fall quarter, the class will meet as a seminar to discuss issues relating to the writing of history, how to organize a thesis, how to evaluate evidence, and the use of primary and secondary sources. In the winter quarter, students will finish researching their thesis and write a first draft. Then in the spring quarter, students will complete their thesis. Throughout the year, students will meet with their thesis advisers and the 398 seminar leader to work on proposals, outlines, and drafts, and to discuss their progress toward completion of their thesis. In order to graduate with honors in history, students must successfully complete their thesis and have it approved. However, it is possible for students to complete the three quarters of this course with respectable grades but not be awarded honors. 

398-3 – Senior Thesis 

 This is a full-year course for students writing a senior honors thesis in history. In the fall quarter, the class will meet as a seminar to discuss issues relating to the writing of history, how to organize a thesis, how to evaluate evidence, and the use of primary and secondary sources. In the winter quarter, students will finish researching their thesis and write a first draft. Then in the spring quarter, students will complete their thesis. Throughout the year, students will meet with their thesis advisers and the 398 seminar leader to work on proposals, outlines, and drafts, and to discuss their progress toward completion of their thesis. In order to graduate with honors in history, students must successfully complete their thesis and have it approved. However, it is possible for students to complete the three quarters of this course with respectable grades but not be

405-0– Revolution 

This course introduces major debates in the comparative history of revolution. The global analysis starts in France; proceeds with the spread of revolutionary ideologies in the Americas; returns to Europe for 1848 and 1917; tacks back to the Americas for peasant revolutions in Mexico and Cuba; and then migrates to China before ending in a consideration of the revolutions that never happened. En route we will explore the intellectual history of revolution in the works of Tocqueville, Marx, Lenin, James, Guevara and Scott, juxtaposing these texts with more recent scholarship to shed light on their multiple qualities: primary sources, political prescriptions and analytical frameworks. 

405-0-20 Global Legal History

How does our understanding of global history change when we foreground law and empire? To what extent have international legal regimes arisen out of imperial dynamics? Why have slavery and settler colonialism been so important to so many constitutional and state histories? This course takes up these and other questions in order to make sense of the interplay between laws and empires around the world over the last five centuries (circa 1500 to 2000). We will examine: 1) the origins and effects of mixed jurisdictions (or legal pluralism) in different regions; 2) the ways empires have shaped key concepts of sovereignty, personhood, and citizenship; 3) the role of transnational corporations in bolstering imperial rule; 4) the roots of empire in the history of human rights and global governance; 5) tensions between scientific and legal definitions of race and ancestry; 6) histories of Islamic law; 7) entanglements between cultural and intellectual property; and 8) shifting legal definitions of indigeneity.

405-0 – Sexual Knowledge: Science, Archives, Traces 

Sexuality studies has flourished in recent decades amidst the multiplicities of desires, identities, and bodies. As loci of meaning-making, hierarchical differentiation, and political struggles, as well as the space of transgressive imagination and alternative subjectivities, sexuality studies has never been neutral. This course focuses on the scholarly debates over the practices and politics of sexual knowledges across historical moments, locations, and projects. We will analyze how this knowledge was (and is) produced, what counts as knowledge, who gets recognized as an Expert (and why), and who collects and curates. Our work will especially highlight the dynamic relations between story-telling, assembling, documentation, and interpretation. In doing so, we critically examine the multiple meanings of archives, their origins, and uses. Equally, we problematize the silences and so-called ephemera. Readings will include works on sexuality and bio-politics, classic works in sexology, and ethnographies. The course will also consider film and other media as well as digital archives. Finally, I hope to arrange Zoom conversations with archivists, collections curators and investigators on how they navigate collections as well as how they have assembled their research. 

405-0 – Comparative Racial Thought 

405-0 History of the Modern Global City

This class engages the "spatial turn" in the humanities and social sciences by examining influential arguments about cities as fundamental to the modernist progress or retrogression of society in the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. According to many influential social science and literary manifestoes, urban development provides the quintessence of national and greater civilizational progress - or regress. We will start by considering how the theoretical literature on "urban space" can complement and transform "urban history" and examine paradigmatic Euro-American conceptions of "the modern city." We will then explore how notions of modern urbanism have had a very different effect and reception in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We will gain a nuanced appreciation for key theoretical approaches of "spatial-turn"-inflected scholarship on modern urbanism. We will also critically evaluate the varying ways that "urban modernity" has been appropriated and transformed in cities around the world during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

405-0 – Gender History as Global History 

In the past few decades, scholars in the field of global history have challenged others to move beyond the framework of the region or the nation-state. But as many have argued recently, scholars invested in "thinking big" about history sometimes have difficulty addressing people who did not move across political boundaries, and they have typically neglected small, ordinary stories and domestic spaces. Since these have been the traditional interests of women's historians, the fields of global and women's history often seem irreconcilable, especially in the era before the twentieth century. One possible solution to this impasse is to deploy the analytical category of gender, which should be able to speak to both fields and across long spans of time. How have historians done this? What does gender history look like on a global scale? In this seminar, we will consider these questions, reading recent work that combines global and gender history in the early modern and modern eras. 

405-0-22 Material Culture 

This course explores diverse approaches to writing history under the rubric of "the material turn." How are our interpretations of the past be transformed by placing material objects at the center of our accounts? Do artifacts have politics? To answer these questions, we will juxtapose several theories of material culture with historical case studies. Our examples will be world-wide, ranging from the Trobriand Islands and early modern Europe to modern America, Asia, and Africa, right up to present-day debates over AI. We will consider the many people involved in the design, production, and use of objects: artisans, engineers, capitalists, laborers, enslaved peoples, children, Luddites, Futurists, and consumers of all stripes, as well as coders, hackers and hobbyists. We will consider the life cycle of banal objects, as well as liminal objects which mediate diverse realms of experience. These perspectives will be examined in light of contending theories of material change: commodity fetishism, the social construction of technology, the anthropology of the gift, gender analysis, evolutionary theory, systems theory, infrastructure studies, and performance studies. The goal of the course is to show how accounts organized around inanimate artifacts can illuminate human histories. A unique feature of this course is that its assignments are themselves "object lessons," in which students practice various short-form academic genres: a peer review, a book blurb, a speaker introduction, a lay-press book review, an undergraduate lecture outline, a one-book one-TGS proposal, etc. For their final assignment, students write a short review essay organized around a material artifact of their choice.

405-0 Understanding Marx 

This course is an introduction to the biography and major works of Karl Marx. The seminar will also make forays into the development of Marxist thought by Gyorgy Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, and Antonio Gramsci.

405-0 Oral History 

History depends heavily on textual evidence. Oral history offers not only a different form of historical evidence but an opportunity to explore the characteristics of historical evidence. This course will begin with a brief discussion of historical evidence, orality, and textuality. We will then explore oral history methods, discuss issues of veracity, interpretation, and memory, and consider the works of several major oral historians. The oral history scholarship considered in this course includes both U.S. and European histories, and may include Latin American and Asian histories as well

405-0 – Mapping the Discipline 

A Graduate-Level Introduction to the Field of History The purpose of this course is to offer history students a guide to "professional literacy" by introducing them to some of the main approaches and themes of the academic study of history. Historians have a broad variety of strategies of investigation, interpretation, and explanation to choose from. Understanding those strategies requires articulating methods and theoretical perspectives and recognizing the implications when others do so. The course will orient students in some of the big debates in humanities and social-science scholarship—and their implications--with a specific focus on the contributions that historians are best equipped to make. This will involve learning to read for deep comprehension and paying attention to the methodologies employed in the surveyed works. Topics to be considered in the course include: defining fields of history; such as spatiality, empire, and borderlands, the use of certain analytical categories such as social class, race, gender, and other forms of identity, and the implications and impact of organizing principles such as agency and networks. And, I should also say that, because we only have ten weeks, the course in no way claims to cover all major approaches to History.

405-0 Global Migration

 Migration is a central theme of global history and a crucial driver of processes of globalization. Societies have developed a wide range of labels to categorize people on the move: the "undocumented migrant," the "guest worker," the "refugee," the "migrant woman," the "people smuggler," the "expatriate." All these categories are consequential, and all of them have a history. This course investigates those histories across the 19th and 20th centuries, reading classic and new works in global migration studies. We will read selected works to consider the methodologies that historians have used to study the movement of people in the modern world, as well as the political, cultural, and economic implications of those movements. As we discover how states have repeatedly used migration as a resource and constructed it as a threat, we will also pay careful attention to how historians have tried to use their knowledge in contemporary political debates, reading public history projects and editorials alongside academic articles and monographs. We will consider questions such as: • What are the historical processes that explain migration patterns? Are migration and migration restriction intrinsically linked to one another? • How are scholars globalizing what began as a Eurocentric field, and specifically an Atlantic-centric field? What are productive conversations that can be had between scholars who work on migration in different parts of the world? • What productive conversations can be had about migration across disciplines? What related social sciences have historians drawn from, and how has historical work on migration contributed to theorization in other social science fields?

405-0-20 Public History

This course explores the many ways that museums, monuments, and historic sites present opportunities for the public to engage with the past. Readings address history's relationship to memory, as well as case studies that examine closely the politics of public history, especially the ways that museums, monuments, and memorials often become proxies for political debates.

405-0-22 Body in Time

The body has been the focus of scholarly interest for the several decades in practically all fields and periods. It has been examined from multiple perspectives: as a sexualized transmitter of original sin; as ultimate guarantor of survival in the afterlife; as alternately intrinsic to and separate from gender roles; as sexually indeterminate; as an object of dissection; as entity to be manipulated by eugenics; as spectacle; as conveyor of psychological trauma; and many more. Scholars have also become increasingly aware of the more abstract uses of the body, such imagistic uses for uniting society into a corporate whole. This course considers these perceptions through the prism of history and fluctuating theoretical perspectives.

405-0- Orientalism and its Discontents

Edward Said's "Orientalism" (1978) has been one of the most influential -- and controversial -- works of scholarship of the last half century. As a pioneering work of postcolonial theory, it has reshaped entire disciplines, from history and area studies to comparative literature, anthropology, and even the study of English literature(s). But Said has also had his critics, some very astute and others not so much. In this course, we will begin by closely reading Said's own works to try to understand them in all their nuance and complexity, and then examine some of the arguments of his critics of various disciplinary backgrounds.

410-1 – General Field Seminar in American History: Colonial through Early Republic

This course is designed to introduce the major historical and historiographical issues that have dominated the field of early American history. Focusing on the period up to the Early Republic, we will explore conflicting interpretations of significant historical questions, as well as changing views on the nature of historical knowledge and the purpose of history.

410-2 – General Field Seminar in American History:The Nineteenth Century

This course is the second element in the three-quarter sequence designed for first-year doctoral students in United States history. Interested doctoral students from other fields/departments are also welcome. The class focuses on the United States in the nineteenth century and is intended to prepare students for later work as teachers and scholars. It is both historical and historiographical. That is, students are introduced to issues in the period and explore changes in scholarly thinking concerning those issues. The course does not aim to "cover" all of nineteenth-century US history. Rather, we will sample a variety of different topics and hope to end the quarter with a better sense of the diversity and possibility of this field and its many subfields. 

410-3 Field Seminar in American History: 1900-on 

Combining classics and the best new work in the field, this seminar explores the evolution of historical scholarship on The United States Since 1900, samples its variety, and seeks to identify future research trajectories. Along the way, it teaches graduate students to read quickly but carefully, to identify and evaluate arguments, to recognize and appreciate methodological and interpretive differences, and to locate their own preferences and place in the field. In sum, the course provides the foundation for future research, success on field exams, and a professional career.

420-1 – Field Seminar in Latin American History: Early Modern/Colonial 

More information can be found on Caesar. 

420-2- Field Seminar in Latin American History: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 

Modern Latin America Field Seminar introduces graduate students to some of the principal topics, debates, and literatures about the region’s history since independence to the neoliberal turn. It covers the most important economic, political, social, and cultural questions. It also analyzes the methodological strategies used by historians while writing about different countries. The course does not pretend to be inclusive of all historical approaches. Rather, it aims to introduce students to some of the most relevant historiographical discussions and invite them to go beyond narrow North American points of view about the neighbors to the South. The course helps students in training to become instructors to examine how Latin Americans view themselves and understand the region’s histories under different lenses.

430-2 Field Seminar in Early Modern European History 

This seminar is designed to acquaint graduate students with classic and emerging scholarship in Early Modern European history between roughly 1400 and 1800. The course is part of the essential preparation for a graduate field examination in European history but also welcomes the perspectives of students from other fields, programs, and departments. Major topics will include Europe's ties to the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, locality and community, colonialism, the Renaissance, the Reformations, environmental transformations, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, slavery, and the origins of the Atlantic revolutions and Industrial Revolution.

450-2 Field Seminar in African History 

This course introduces you to a field of knowledge called African history by juxtaposing early and recent periods, old and new books, African authors and not. Whatever your specialized interests, you should be familiar with shifting debates over the key questions occupying “specialists” in that vast field and its equally vast past. Such questions include biography, gender, political cultures of centralization and heterarchy, urbanization, belonging, technology, slavery, long-distance and trade diasporas, religion, intellectual history, labor, colonialisms, and so forth. If you develop a reading fluency in all methodological approaches used to explore some of those questions you can engage more history, African or otherwise. Methods include archaeology, language and historical linguistics, oral textualities, art history, photography, materiality, and entanglements with other-than-human beings. Each method often involves the analysis and interpretation of written documents. You should develop the habit of considering the interplay of politics and ideologies with academic African history.

465-0-20 History Without Documents: Africa and the Americas

What counts as evidence in the history of Africa and Its Diasporas? Why has the answer to that question changed over time? In what ways have those changes altered the scope of the questions their historians ask? In what new—or not so new—ways might scholars push past these answers? This course introduces you to the history and politics of constituting archives for writing histories of Africa with Its Diasporas. We will engage the constitution of archives through pairing a monograph rooted in Africa with one rooted in a connected Diaspora.

481-0- 20th Centruy China Field Seminar 

This field seminar examines classic and new scholarship on the growth of the CCP and the history of the PRC, from its founding to recent times. We will pay particular attention to the flurry of new work that reconsiders the 1950s and Cultural Revolution, as well as emerging scholarship on the post-Mao reform era, which has now irrevocably passed into "history." Major themes will include modulations in the conception and structure of the Chinese state and its relationship with society, the transformation of the gender system, the growth of scientism in state and society, and China's shifting role in world affairs.

483-0-20 Literature of Japanese History

This graduate readings course aligns and coordinates individualized reading lists for each student on modern Japanese history. Students read the equivalent of one book each week and wrote short papers summarizing and analyzing their reading, which are distributed in advance. In class we discuss each of the books and, increasingly as the quarter progressed, the relationship of each new book to previous work. This course should prepare students for major/minor field exams and year-long research papers.

492-0 – Latinx Historiography 

Contact the department for further information. 

492-0-Atlantic Histories

This topics seminar is for graduate students with research interests in the Atlantic world, roughly spanning the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. A proliferation of edited volumes, journal issues, dissertations, and historical monographs on connections and continuities in the early modern Atlantic has aimed to reorient the field away from its conventional northern Atlantic focus and demonstrate African, Amerindian, and Iberian influences. What is the current state of the field, an inherently comparative, transnational, transcultural, and oceanic approach to the past? In what ways is the scholarship most persuasive? What insights and analytical frameworks can scholars of Latin America, Africa, Europe, or the United States glean from this recent turn in Atlantic history? Seminar participants will read examples of this scholarship, with an eye toward prevailing trends, methodologies, and topics, as well as ongoing debates about chronology, scope, and concepts—e.g., region, empire, nation, subject, citizen, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, commodity, ecosystem, sovereignty, and revolution.

492-0 Eighteenth-Century Britain 

This seminar covers British and Irish history in the long eighteenth century, from 1688 to 1815, with an emphasis on politics, state formation, and empire.

492-0- African American History since 1865 

African American History is currently centered in several conversations about its production and meaning. This course returns to the work of academic historians who have and continue to transform what we know about the history of African Americans and the United States. Open to historians and non-historians, this course reviews works that use historical methods to uncover US histories of people of African descent as they confronted various structures of racial inequity after emancipation. In this graduate research seminar, students will examine many of the most salient historical questions and scholarly interventions that have shaped the field of modern African American history in recent years. Course content will focus on—among other subjects— historical agency, community formation, citizenship and nationhood, war, protest and resistance, gender and sexuality, and policy and political mobilization. 

492-0 – The British Empire 

This is a graduate course that explores why the British acquired an empire and what use they saw in it.  It is also a course about why the British empire fell apart.  Our chronological emphasis is two periods – 1760-1850 and 1920-1960 – with relatively little either on the Victorian high noon of imperial rule (a subject well covered in courses on South Asia, the Middle East, and the African continent) or on how the empire affected Britain itself (a domestic debate that we deal with in the Modern Britain course).  It is intended as an introduction to a vast and complex literature, and because of the welter of different systems of rule (both realized and attempted), our focus is contrasts and comparisons. 

492-0 Global Histories of Science, Medicine, and Technology

This seminar examines the historical geography of science, technology, and medicine, focusing especially on cross-cultural entanglements over the last five hundred years. While economic historians have been animated by questions of a "great divergence" between Asian and European economies in this period, historians of science have circled around questions of a great divide between Western and non-Western knowledge systems since the so-called "scientific revolution." The readings will include 8 or 9 monographs and about a dozen articles covering the major world regions: Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. We will historicize a number of relationships, including scientific disciplines and dominant ideas about reality, technologies and industrial economies, pandemics and public health, warfare and digital worlds, geology and geopolitics, racial and indigenous identities, and energy regimes and ecology. Assignments are designed to help students expand their expertise in their chosen time periods and regions.

492-0 The State in U.S. History 

 This graduate seminar will ask how scholars have defined and studied “the state” in the United States and discuss exemplary historical scholarship in the field.

492-0-30 Indigenous AntiColonialism in "America" 

This graduate seminar offers a critical exploration of Indigenous anti-colonial resistance movements across North America, spanning from the 17th century to present day. Moving beyond conventional US-centric narratives, this course pushes the boundaries of the term "America" to incorporate territories such as Hawaii and other Pacific regions, challenging the settler colonial notion of American territoriality. Throughout the course, we will critically interrogate Eurocentric constructs of "America" and the implications these have on erasing and marginalizing Indigenous histories and perspectives. Key themes encompassed in the seminar include the historical and contemporary impacts of European colonization on Indigenous communities, the myriad strategies of Indigenous resistance ranging from political activism and armed struggle to cultural revitalization, and the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race within these resistance movements. Beyond the politics of resistance, students will also gain insights into Indigenous epistemologies, worldviews, and the co-constitution of colonial and Indigenous identities. This course welcomes graduate students from all disciplines.

492-0-w – U.S. and the World 

This graduate seminar explores the relationship of the United States to its larger global context since its founding. This includes not just diplomacy but also culture, economics, ideas, empire, and war. Admission will go to history graduate students first, but those outside the department will be heartily welcomed if there is room. 

492-0-20 Water Histories

What can historians (and other humanists) do with water? This course surveys the rich and varied literature on water history, a growing subfield that spans all time periods and all corners of the globe. A focus on water opens up critical new perspectives on knowledge, power, energy, technology, mobility, and borders, to name a few. How do rivers, oceans, lakes, and wetlands create and divide communities, fostering sovereignty, dispossession, travel, or migration? How do the use and abuse of water resources correlate to struggles over land use, to concepts of scarcity and abundance, to the sacrality and desecration of landscapes? What can water history teach us about climate change and environmental justice in the 21st century? To answer these and other questions, we will read and discuss key works in water history from Latin America, Europe, Africa, North America, Asia, and Pacifica. Readings may include: Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast (2019); Lucas Bessire, Running Out (2021); David Aiona Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It (2016); Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom (2018); Keith Dawson, Undercurrents of Power (2018); Sugata Ray, Water Histories of South Asia (2020); Vera Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land (2014); Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering (2009); Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State (2016); Philipp Lehmann, Desert Edens (2022); Richard White, The Organic Machine (1995). This course is open to graduate students in all fields of History and from all disciplipinary backgrounds, including the natural and social sciences, who have an interest in water and the

492-0-22 The Caribbean in World History

For generations of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural critics, the Caribbean has been a heated topic of debate and research—not to mention a source of inspiration and inquiry for fiction writers, essayists, poets, filmmakers, and artists. The depth and intricacy of Caribbean history, and its centrality to world history is one of the reasons for this fascination. Slavery and emancipation; colonialism and imperialism; republicanism and revolution; nationalism and decolonization, are some of the historical categories of analysis that from a Greater Caribbean perspective complicate easy periodizations, clear-cut imperial boundaries, and ready-made gender and racial constructs. This course introduces graduate students to this historical/historiographical complexity, and the generations of scholars who have contributed to Caribbean studies with a profusion of theoretical and interpretative lenses. We will start with the cornerstone of the scholarship: What is the Caribbean? Then, we will consider specific topics, and the variety of approaches in their study in order to examine multiple frames and bridge the different linguistic, and imperial areas.

492-0-20 US Women's and Gender History

This is a graduate readings course in U.S. Women's and Gender History. We will survey a range of classic and contemporary scholarship to understand the major questions and problems in the study of women and gender, asking how women's history changes conventional narratives and how women's historians have developed intersectional analyses. Students can expect to help lead class discussion, write short papers or book reviews, and complete a final historiography paper.

492-0 – American Labor and Working Class History 

More information can be found on Caesar. 

492-0 – China and Southeast Asia 

More information can be found on Caesar. 

570-2 Research Seminar in History 

Second half of the first-year research seminar.

585-0 – U.S. Dissertators' Workshop 

This is a workshop for dissertators working on U.S. projects. 

585-0 – European Dissertators' Workshop 

This is a workshop for dissertators working on European projects. 

COURSES PRIMARILY FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS 

405 – Seminar in Historical Analysis 

A varying menu of courses in methodology and/or theory. At least two seminars are offered every year. 

Topic Varies by instructor. See Caesar for current course description. 

410-1, 2, 3 – Field Seminar in American History 

Field seminars designed to familiarize students in each division of the graduate curriculum with pivotal issues, interpretations, controversies, research techniques, and works in the field. 

420-1,2 – Field Seminar in Latin American History 

Graduate student field seminar in Latin American history. 

430-1, 2, 3 – Field Seminar in European History 

Field seminars designed to familiarize students in each division of the graduate curriculum with pivotal issues, interpretations, controversies, research techniques, and works in the field. 

443-2 – Literature of Early Modern English History 

The British Empire from its origins to 1800, including trade, exploration, ideology, and governance. 

450 – Field Seminar in African History 

Field seminars designed to familiarize students in each division of the graduate curriculum with pivotal issues, interpretations, controversies, research techniques, and works in the field. 

465 – Sources in African History 

Explores the kinds of meanings that historians can recover from non-written sources and the ways in which recent scholarship has grappled with these sources. See Caesar for current course description. 

481 – Western Literature of Chinese History 

See Caesar for current course description. 

483 – Literature of Japanese History 

See Caesar for current course description. 

484 – Literature of the History of Science 

A graduate field seminar covering scholarly approaches to the history of science, technology, and medicine. 

492 – Topics in History 

Topic Varies by instructor. See Caesar for current course description. 

560 – Teaching History (Pedagogy) 

This course is an introduction to the main issues that students will confront as history teachers. Students will engage with the most profound and interesting questions that arise in teaching history, develop insight into effective and equitable pedagogical strategies, and build confidence in their teaching abilities. 

570-1, 2, 3 – Research Seminar in History 

First-year research seminar. Students work jointly with the 570 instructor and their adviser to produce a polished research paper based on primary sources. 

585 – Dissertation Workshop