DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Course Catalog

College Seminar & First-Year Writing Seminar

You will take two different first-year seminars: a College Seminar in the fall and a First-Year Writing Seminar in either the winter or the spring. Both are small, discussion-oriented classes in which you will explore a single topic or theme. The College Seminar, though, will also foreground the differences between high school and college and introduce you to skills such as time management and help-seeking that you need to thrive at Northwestern. College Seminar instructors also serve as their students’ first advisers in the College. The First-Year Writing Seminar builds on that base and pays special attention to the process of writing and revision.

101-7 Gender and Sexuality in Modern England

This course investigates the history of gender and 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. These cultural energies found their way into plays and poems, which reenacted the wider struggles over social norms. Themes covered include love, marriage, and sexual desire, including same-sex desire.

101-7 Ukraine: Why Should We Care?

Using the current Russia-Ukraine war as a springboard, this course provides a historical and cultural backdrop of the conflict outlining Ukraine as a colonial addendum of Poland, Russian Empire, and the USSR. Students will focus on thirty-year long history of Ukraine after the 1991 collapse of the USSR against a broad historical, political, socio-economic, and cultural perspective. Students will discuss the formation of a modern post-colonial nation bringing together insights into art history, comparative literature, nationalities and imperial studies, social and political history, and genocide studies. We will use op-eds by the famous world poli sci pundits, journalism blogs of Ukrainians who write during air raids, video clips and movies filmed over last thirty years in the independent Ukraine, poems and novels reflecting the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Based on high level of interaction, this course will explain why Ukraine suddenly moved from a peripheral position in the new and minds of European scholars into the central place of the world politics.

101-7 Resisting the Nazis

During the Second World War millions of Europeans made the decision to resist domestic terror and foreign occupation. They acted out of a range of motives, personal and collective, and in a myriad of ways, from armed violence to passive noncompliance. Some resisted from the start; others when they were personally threatened; and many only when Nazi defeat became imagineable and then inevitable. Some who once opposed fascism decided to bend to it, while others later joined the resistance, or played a double game from the start. Many, regardless of their choice, paid the ultimate price for it, while others gained from their decisions. From the Nazi seizure of power to postwar efforts to seek justice for crimes against humanity, this course will examine the dilemmas, ethics, and consequences of resistance agains the Nazis and their Axis partners among state officials, soldiers, and civilians. We will read firsthand testimony and secondary scholarship and watch both documentaries and feature films that grapple with the dilemmas of resistance during the Second World War.

101-7 History of Whiteness in the US

This course is a history of the ideas and practices of "whiteness" in the United States from colonial times to the twentieth century. How did the idea of a "white race" come into being and why? More important, how was whiteness systematically privileged in law and policy? In this course, we will look at racial ideology, but also at laws, policies, and practices that have made “white” a privileged social position. We cover the development of New World slavery and race-based labor regimes, laws controlling access to public spaces and good based on race, how state and federal policies controlled the unequal distribution of education, housing, and property, and we also examine how different groups have had access to “whiteness” over time. This course proceeds from the (true!) premise that race is not biological or genetic, but social and cultural. The course argues, that race, moreover, is created not simply by the ideas that people have about one another, but by the structures that systematically produce differential treatment based on skin color and genealogy. Our task is to examine how some of those systems have developed in U.S. history and to trace out how they impact the world we live in today. The course is reading- and writing-intensive. Students should come prepared to engage in careful, meaningful, and sometimes difficult, discussions.

101-7 Genghis Khan: History and Myth

While he is remembered as a world conqueror whose military campaigns left vast destructions across Asia and the Middle East, Chinggis (/Genghis) Khan also established a durable nomad-ruled empire that transformed the two great civilizations that centered in China and the Islamic world. Under Chinggis Khan and his successors, the Mongol Empire became the largest contiguous land empire in world history, stretching from Hungary to Korea, and from Siberia to Burma. Beyond his reputation as a ruthless barbaric disrupter, Chinggis Khan has also been portrayed as an enlightened, tolerant monarch and visionary statesman. The course explores the military and political career, conquests, and imperial legacy of Chinggis Khan and his empire, focusing on the world conqueror’s changing image, from his lifetime through the 21st history. We will analyze the work of medieval authors, and compare their perspectives with later textual and visual portrayals - from Europe to China and Mongolia - where Chinggis Khan’s legacy was suppressed under Soviet influence and later revived as a national hero after the USSR’s collapse in the 1990s. This course is about how the history of Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Empire has been written about and represented. It’s also designed to help you adjust and succeed at Northwestern. Studying history develops one’s thinking and writing skills and perspective – tools essential for charting one’s successful path forward, much as Chinggis Khan did in his time.

101-7 The American Revolution at 250

The American Revolution: a war waged by high-minded gentlemen in wigs. Or was it? This course explores the conflict in all its messy (and surprisingly manure-smeared) reality, particularly its fraught relationship to democracy, settler colonialism, human bondage, and human freedom. Especially because this class convenes on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we will also consider the Revolution as a touchstone in modern-day culture wars, from Supreme Court originalism to the 1619 Project to the Hamilton musical.

101-8 Islam and Gender

‘Islam' is often believed to be a religion which justifies oppression of women and regulation of their public lives in theological terms. In this seminar, we will learn about various intellectual movements that have shaped the interaction of religion and gender in Muslim societies from the nineteenth century to the present. To contextualize our understanding of these intellectual currents, we will focus on South Asia—home to one of the world's largest Muslim populations today—as a site for examining the historical evolution of Islamic perspectives on gender issues. This seminar is an opportunity to reflect on the historical intersections among Islam, modernity, and colonialism, using South Asia as a regional site and gender as an analytical category. The course is divided into two unequal parts. Part One focuses on ideological responses to historical transformations in various parts of the Muslim world. Part Two shifts to South Asia and examines how these ideas of change manifested in this region. Based on texts composed by Muslim women and Muslim male theologians, we will consider the following issues: reformist education, marriage and divorce, gender segregation, property ownership, and Muslim women's political participation. In analyzing these questions, we will elucidate the complexity of Islamic intellectual traditions and emphasize their historical dynamism, especially in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Simultaneously, we will discover the ways in which Muslim women have become agents of their own change while compromising with and negotiating multiple forms of social authority in Muslim societies.

101-8 Wives, Witches, and Wenches

Whether stigmatized as "witches" or heralded as "good wives," women were central to the events of early American history, from first encounters to the U.S. Revolution. Through the lens of women of African, European, and Native descent, this course focuses on their experiences, including well-known women like Tituba and Malintzen as well as lesser-known women like Martha Ballard and Marie Rouensa. What makes women's experience distinct from people of other genders in early America? How did the early American context change women's lives? In the course of reading, discussion, and writing, this course also examines how the category of "woman" was historically constructed, meant something different in different cultures, and what the meeting of these cultures in North America did to challenge and reconstruct that category. This course considers how these women's various circumstances shaped their lives, as well as how these diverse women shaped early America.

101-8 Voices of the Enslaved 

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101-8 Okinawa: Histories, Cultures, Identities

Okinawa is geographically a small place with a large and multi-faceted history. Is it Chinese? Is it Japanese? Is it American? Is it independent? The answer to all these questions is Yes, Sort Of. Each of those answers opens up into a different narrative of Okinawan identity, all of which are passionately held by Okinawans today. All of them are justified primarily through appeals to Okinawan history. How do we make sense of these clashing narratives? What is at stake and why does this matter so much to so many people? This course uses these questions to teach students how specialists and the general public use historical narratives, how to evaluate their accuracy and effectiveness, what makes them powerful, and how to construct high-quality histories themselves.

101-8 Deaths and Afterlives of Lumumba

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101-8 Conquest Cultures

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101-8 Slavery in US History and Culture

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101-8 The Transformation of American Childhood

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101-8 The Wild Child: Are Humans Not Animals?

Through the autumn and winter of 1799 in central France, a naked boy was seen swimming and drinking in streams, climbing trees, digging for roots and bulbs, and running at great speed on all fours. He was captured in January 1800 by local farmers and brought to Paris. This “wild boy” from Aveyron became an overnight sensation, the object of curiosity and endless speculations about the relationship between instinct and intelligence and questions about the differences between humans and animals. A young doctor Jean-Marc- Gaspard Itard, who undertook the task of socializing and educating the wild child, carefully recorded the boy’s progress. Itard’s work ultimately lead to the transformation of the treatment of mental retardation and to a revolution in childhood education that is reflected in every preschool program in our time. This course introduces students to the philosophical and attitudinal changes regarding nature, childhood, and family life that enabled society to view the “wild boy” not as a freak or savage, but as a person inherently capable of civility, sensibility, and intelligence. The story of the “wild boy “teaches why it is important for humans to treat nature with respect and not fear. In order to protect the human rights of the boy, society must extend protection to the non-human beings among us. The course is designed for students interested in intellectual history, environmental history, psychology, and education.

200 Level Courses

200-0 Christianity in Modern History

 This course starts with the voyages of Christopher Columbus, which ushered in the modern age and spread Christianity throughout the world. In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation disseminated new ways of critical thinking that permanently altered modern civilization. Topics include how some people came to be treated as gods, how more and more women were treated as saints and others were persecuted as witches, and how disagreements about religion led to assassinations revolts, and war. The course starts in Europe but extends into the religious history of the globe and argues that religion in all its varieties remains an essential characteristic of modernity.

* HISTORY 200-0 New Introductory Courses in History (1 Unit) Introductory lecture courses on topics not covered in regular offerings. Content varies. May be repeated for credit with different topic

200-0 Hamilton's America

In this course we will explore the life and times of Alexander Hamilton—both the man and the musical. Easily among the most polarizing figures of a famously polarized generation, Hamilton was a Caribbean-born immigrant who became an American revolutionary, a “bastard brat” who became Treasury Secretary, a man who helped to lead thirteen of Britain’s American colonies in a violent independence war only to advocate a financial plan and a foreign policy that presented Britain as a role model. If Hamilton helped to revolutionize his country, meanwhile, Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical has revolutionized the genre of the Broadway musical and become a national sensation. Why has it captured so many people’s imaginations? Where does the show diverge from the history, and what does that say about our memory and use of the past? Taught during the 10th anniversary of the show and the 250th of the Revolution, this course invites us to explore how our national origins resonate in our present.

* HISTORY 200-0 New Introductory Courses in History (1 Unit) Introductory lecture courses on topics not covered in regular offerings. Content varies. May be repeated for credit with different topic

200-0 Civil Rights, Black Power

The course offers a general introduction to the history of African Americans in the United States from the mid-twentieth century through the early twenty-first century. Students will explore the myriad ways in which African Americans challenged various structures of racial inequity and center social movements organized around the principles of civil rights liberalism and Black Power. Special attention in lectures and discussions will be paid to the historical agency of the actors at the center of the course, particularly the relationship between the structural forces that explain racial inequity and the myriad ways in which African Americans made sense of their circumstances that then informed the various politics they adopted.

200-0 Women's Sports: A Global History (265)

From the multiracial maidens who ran eight-mile races across eighteenth-century London to Brazil’s outlawed futboleras, female athletes across time and space have confronted, challenged, and transformed ideas about gender, race, class, and sexuality. Criticized (by women and men) for grunts that were too gross, shorts that were too short, and leotards that were too long, female athletes have been politicized for centuries. Would sports destroy girls’ uteruses, condemn them to “bicycle face,” perhaps even render them lesbians? Would female athletes blur gender lines, emasculating men while empowering ugly, ambitious “man-girls” with overwrought biceps? What if Black women beat white women? What if women beat men? And if women’s sports were separate from men’s, would they ever be equal?

Our Evanston location enables hands-on exploration of these global histories. We’ll meet NU suffragist Frances Willard, who named her bicycle Gladys and urged women worldwide to ride their way to empowerment. We’ll watch Olympic organizers respond in 1924 when NU undergraduate backstroker Sibyl Bauer became the first woman to break a men’s world record. We’ll learn what ensued at NU’s Dyche Stadium in 1932, when sprinters Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes became the first Black women to qualify for the US Olympic track team. We’ll play low-contact basketball, one of the only sports available to midcentury Midwestern girls (though it spread as far as Peronist Argentina, where the YMCA promoted it as a safer, more feminine alternative to soccer). We’ll Jazzercize, exploring why some have characterized this global 1980s fitness craze—invented in Evanston by NU alum Judi Sheppard Missett—as part of a broader cultural backlash against Title IX. We’ll also explore how tampons, sports bras, ponytails, and sex testing have shaped the global history of women’s sports.

200-0 Sex and the Body in Early America

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 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 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 Global Cities

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200-0 Global Tech

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200-0 Thinking Globally: Climate in International Studies

The course introduces students to a new way of seeing and analyzing their world, one which sheds critical light on the global forces that have conditioned their lives and spaces. It opens a path to understanding the world based on the study of peoples, cultures and institutions that together shape our pasts and destinies beyond the limits of nation states. Students are introduced to diverse building blocks of international studies: a field that combines the study of history, human sciences, law, and cultural analysis. They will conduct guided applied research projects on a a global issue, problem, or conflict, employing the key concepts of scale and scope.
This year, the course will focus on ‘climate’ as a critical lens in international studies. Thinking globally about climate will enable students to explore and more deeply understand the intersections of environmental history, policy, justice, and global conflict and cooperation.

201-1 Europe in the Medieval and Early Modern World

The major periods this course considers are the medieval millennium (500-1500 CE) and the Renaissance in order to give a broader view of key historical topics and transitions. While primarily centering European contexts, this class also gestures to Europe’s impactful, interconnected histories with Asia and Africa, connections that were often negotiated across the contested waters of the Mediterranean Sea. This expansive approach to premodernity presents an opportunity to explore a range of human experiences as well as the histories of gender, conquest and settlement, art, frontiers, intellectual exchange, power, and interfaith relations. Students will also constantly question what words like “medieval,” “western,” and “Renaissance” mean, and what role periodization plays in understandings of the past. From Marco Polo to Christine de Pizan, the Crusades to the rise of the Medici family in Florence, the art of illuminated manuscripts and the trade in exotic animals, students will journey into this period through primary sources, and discover that these centuries, far from stagnant, backwards, and insular, were instead filled with innovations, diversity, and vibrancy.

203-1 Jewish History I: 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.

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 African American History 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.

215-0 History of the American Family

Families are not ahistorical categories of population; they have a history that has been crucial to the colonization and development of the United States as a nation and they continue to shape social and political life. This course traces the evolution of family ideals and practices from pre-colonial through modern America, with a particular emphasis on the roles of gender, race, and class in shaping family experiences. Considering both how the state regulated families as well as the many functional families and kinships that existed without state sanction, this course highlights the importance of families in societies and political thought, as well as the lived experience of families in America. As we range over diverse family experiences, we will also follow specific families through time in order to understand how historical changes shaped their family structures. Moving chronologically, the course will touch on topics like gender, economics, political theory, religion, race, and class through the lens of the family.

216-0 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.

221-0 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?

248-0 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 were slavery and settler colonialism so important to so many constitutional histories? This course takes up these and other questions in order to make sense of the interplay between laws, empires, and corporate entities around the world over the last four centuries (circa 1600 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 and citizenship; 3) the role of transnational corporations in bolstering imperial rule; 4) the roots of empire in the history of human rights and international law; 5) scientific versus legal definitions of racial identities and indigeneity; and 6) entanglements between cultural and intellectual property.

250-0 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.

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 examines the rise of global structural interconnection during the modern era, 1750-present. Topics include capitalist globalization and its critics; the rise of colonial imperialism and anticolonial independence movements; the socioeconomic roots of climate change; and human responses to rapid, destabilizing structural transformations.

251-0 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.

253-0 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.

255-1 African Civilizations

The course surveys the history of governance in ancient Africa from the advent of agricultural societies about 8,000 years ago to Africa’s classic age of 400-1400 CE. Students will learn how ancestral Africans organized themselves, conceptualized governance, and negotiated power through knowledge networks, technological innovations, and contestation of gender roles. The class will explore different methods and sources for investigating and writing Africa’s deep-time history of governance, from archaeology, ethnography, and visual arts to literary texts, oral traditions, and material culture. Students will be asked to identify and critique these different methods and sources to develop and improve skills in evidence-based research.

255-3 Modern Africa

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

260-2 History of Modern Latin America

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.

262-0 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.

263-0 Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World

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.

264-0 The Age of Revolutions, 1775-1848

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.

274-0 Indo-Persian Lit as Global Lit: Love, Longing & Dissent

Indo-Persian poetry was present at the very birth of the concept of "world literature": indeed, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (d. 1832) coined the term Weltliteratur in part thanks to his admiration for the Persian poet Hafez Shirazi (d. 1390). Of course today the Persian language — or "Farsi," as it is also known — is most commonly associated with the nation-state of Iran. But the historical association with world literature reveals a forgotten cosmopolitanism. Before the nineteenth century, Persian served for nearly a millennium as the literary and political lingua franca across virtually the entire eastern Islamic world, including vast stretches of South, Central, and West Asia. This course will introduce students to some of the most common genres of Indo-Persian literature, such as the romantic epic (masnavi), the courtly panegyric (qasida), the quatrain (ruba‘i) and especially the lyric (ghazal), as well as to some of the canonical poets of the era and the historical context in which they lived and wrote. Expressions of love, longing, mysticism, and dissent against religious orthodoxy were among the most common themes of this literature, giving rise to its many modern afterlives — for example, in Urdu and Turkish literature, but also in European Romantic poetry, American Transcendentalist philosophy, and the music of Bollywood cinema, to name just a few.

284-1 Ancient and Medieval Japan

This course covers the history of ancient and medieval Japan, from the earliest evidence of civilization on the archipelago through the flourishing culture of the Heian court and the tumultuous age of the samurai. Major themes include the role of religion in government, the relationship between the capital and the countryside, the rise of provincial warriors, and changes in marriage patterns and family life. By reading and analyzing ancient myths, Buddhist sutras, war chronicles, and the diary of a Heian noblewoman, students will gain an understanding of political, social and economic developments in early Japanese history.

292-0 African Histories of Science

TBD

292-0 Witches, Heretics, and Demons

The Inquisition is one of the most infamous and misunderstood institutions in the early modern world. This seminar examines some of the myths and debates surrounding the working of its tribunals and their impact on society, with special emphasis on the practices, experiences, and worldviews of ordinary subjects. How have the records of the Inquisition been used to reconstruct the histories of the Jewish diaspora, African healers, bigamists, homosexuals, and “witches,” among others? Participants will pursue their own answers and construct an alternate archive by which to tell the stories of prosecuted figures. Topics include religious tolerance and intolerance; healing and love magic in the Americas; the policing and politics of gender and sexuality; and the lives of Jewish conversos.

292-0 Thieves and Collectors: Medieval Objects in Modern Hands

TBD

292-0 Early Modern Religious Women

TBD

300 Level Courses

300-0 Life Under Communism

This course takes students you back to the USSR. It explores the history and culture of the first socialist state from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution through the 1991 “velvet” rebellion that resulted in the collapse of communism. This course looks at the communist polity through the perspective of its ordinary people. From kindergarten to their old age, these people on everyday basis encounter the rattling Soviet propaganda, party symbols and Orwellian discourses to which everybody was supposed to kowtow. While the majority was comfortable with such state of things, many discovered racism behind the internationalist slogans, xenophobia behind the mottos of the brotherhood of ethnicities, ultra-conservatism behind the leftist philosophy and chauvinism that replaced the officially acknowledged ethnic equality. What does this mean for our understanding of communism as praxis? Students will study the dichotomy of the official and the non-official that shaped everyday life of a Soviet individual, will ponder the ways the Soviet ordinary people negotiated levels of collaboration with the communist institutions, and will seek to answer major question: How it was possible to remain a person of integrity in the world of the officially imposed cynicism and hypocrisy.

300-0 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 the advance of empires, the fall of the USSR, and the rise of post-Soviet states.

300-0 Capitalism in the Middle East

In Capitalism in the Middle East, we will examine the history of capitalism in the Middle East to gain new perspectives on the region's past and present. We will approach capitalism as a distinct historical form of social, ecological, and economic organization, viewing its development in the Middle East as a historical process characterized by various unevenness. Drawing from investigations in Middle Eastern history, this course ultimately leads to an analysis of capitalism as a global system encompassing multiple historical trajectories rather than a singular narrative. We will engage with theories, approaches, and methodologies in the studies of capitalism, connecting the histories and trajectories of capital(ism) to the everyday lives and labor experiences of diverse economic communities in the Middle East, including traders, bankers, creditors, landowners, industrialists, experts, bureaucrats, peasants, workers, and enslaved individuals. Through close readings of monographs and academic articles, primary sources, excerpts from fictional narratives and autobiographical writings, as well as viewings of films, videos, and documentaries, we will trace the historical arc of capital(ism) across the region. Focusing on case studies from the early Islamic Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Egypt, and the Gulf, we will analyze the fundamental processes and contingencies upon which the development and expansion of capitalism relied on and reproduced—but not limited to—debt and indebtedness, colonial hierarchies, imperialist competition, dispossession, ecological extraction, and gendered social reproduction in the Middle East. We will explore themes such as the relationship between Islam and capitalism, the role of commodities and credit in connecting the Middle East to the wider world, and the development of commercial, extractive, racial, colonial, industrial, and neoliberal capitalisms throughout history. Throughout the course, students will gain an understanding of the field of a new history of capitalism, develop expertise in the history of capitalism in the Middle East, and hone their skills in producing critical academic knowledge.

300-0 Histories of the Trans Present

TBD

300-0 Kelptocracy in Eurasia

TBD

300-0 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 Jewish Environmental History

TBD

303-1 American Women's History through 1856

This course is a survey of U.S. women’s history from colonial settlement through 1865. It focuses not only women’s experiences and activities in the past but also on how constructions of gender have been critical to a variety of other histories from slavery and racial formation to American political and economic development. There are different ways of doing women’s history and this course includes examples of many of them. In some versions of women’s history, we simply add women to the events of the past – asking, for example: how did women contribute to the American Revolution? In other versions, we show how adding women to history changes fundamentally our understanding of the past. Still more radical, we consider not women’s roles and activities in the past, but instead howgender as an ideology has structured our thought and been used to organize the way we distribute power, money, work, responsibility. Concretely, we begin our study with the arrival of Europeans in the “new world” and we end with the Civil War. As we march through time we will survey not only different ways of thinking about women and gender in the past, but we will also pay attention to how the category of “woman” has been fractured by the differences in status and experience that result from divisions of class, race, region, religion, and ethnicity.

304-0 The Vietnam Wars

TBD

305-0 American Immigration

This course introduces students to the social, political, legal, and cultural history of immigration in the United States. In addition to exploring the history of southern and eastern European immigrants, it uses a comparative framework to integrate Latin American and Asian migrants into our understanding of immigration since the late nineteenth century. The course is an exploration of major themes in immigration history rather than a comprehensive examination. Issues students will consider include immigration law, acculturation, community, racial formation, victimization vs. agency, religion, politics, gender, the transnational and international context of immigration, and competing notions of citizenship/nationality, among others.

309-0 American Environmental History

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.

319-0 US 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.

324-0 US 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.  

325-0 History of American Technology

We are currently living through a technological revolution that is radically transforming every aspect of our social, economic, and personal lives. But maybe this is nothing new. From the telegraph to social media, from the bicycle to electric vehicles, from typewriters to AI, Americans have long identified technological change as central to their personal and national destiny. This class deploys historical methods to answer core questions about the past, present, and future of technology. Do artifacts have politics? Is time accelerating? What counts as technological progress—and is it different this time around? To answer these questions, this course operates on a flipped-classroom model. In lectures, students learn how an entire social world can be illuminated by the study of an individual artifact. And in weekly workshop-sections, students are guided as they write an original research paper on the social history of an artifact of their choice. (Note, enrolled students get credit for a history distro/FD, Advanced Expression, and U.S. Perspectives).

340-0 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?

342-2 History of Modern France: Cinema and Society

France from the late nineteenth-century to the present. The politics and culture of fin-de-siècle France including the Dreyfus Affair and empire. The French experience in World War I, the defeat of 1940, the German occupation, France's role in the Holocaust. Decolonization and the Algerian War. Postwar political, social and cultural developments leading to current problems around immigration, race, and gender.

343-0 Modern Italy

Italy from the Enlightenment to the present, concentrating on the movement for unification, the world wars, Mussolini and fascism, the postwar economic miracle, and terrorism.

344-2 German History: Germany Since 1945

Survey of German political, economic, social, intellectual, and diplomatic history covering Germany beginning in 1945 to reunification at the end of the Cold War.

345-1 History of Russia: 800-1917

This course explores the history of Russia from its origins in Kievan Rus to the dawn of the Soviet period. Major themes include the rise and expansion of the Russian Imperial state; serfdom and emancipation; religious and ethnic diversity; and major developments in the arts and sciences. Course readings include memoirs, poetry, and hagiography as well as recent historical scholarship.

349-0 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.

352-0 A 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 History of Capitalism, 1500-1850

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.

360-0 Tudor and Stuart Britain

Formation of the British state during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with emphasis on changing patterns of religious belief and the ascendancy of parliament. Topics covered include warfare, popular politics, court culture, confessional conflict and martyrdom. Sources include writings by Queen Elizabeth, King James I and William Shakespeare.

366-0 Latin America in the Independence Era

TBD

370-0 Music and Nation in Latin America

This course takes a sonorous trip through Latin America and the Caribbean to explore music’s centrality to the formation of nations and states. We address national genres (Brazilian samba, Argentine tango, Cuban son, Mexican corrido) as well as transnational ones (salsa, cumbia, reggaeton), drawing from history, anthropology, journalism, and ethnomusicology. We also analyze lyrics, music videos, and films.

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. 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.

381-2 Modern China: The Twentieth Century

TBD

388-0 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.

393-0 The Historian's Craft 1

This is the first installment of a two-quarter seminar in which we'll engage with the problems that historians face today and their debates about how to solve them. 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 who will be invited to campus specifically to talk with you about their work, your research, and the study of history. In the second installment of the seminar during Winter Quarter, you will 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 Race and the Middle Ages

This discussion-based seminar will explore how a constellation of physical, cultural, and religious characteristics became encoded with racializing meanings before the 17th c. In the diverse Mediterranean, people justified violence, privilege, exclusion, and belonging by constructing notions of sameness and difference. Medieval race-thinking appears in Christian and Islamic literature, religious texts on curses, descriptions of climate and the body, blood purity statutes, human diversity in art, laws about women’s chastity, and geographies of so-called ‘monstrous races.’ This is a frontier field in medieval studies, and students will have the opportunity to engage with cutting-edge scholarship and debates across the semester to think about how historical methodologies can reconstruct past social, cultural, and political dynamics. The primary sources this class covers encompass Chistian and Muslim authors from Basra in the Near East to Seville in Iberia, as well as many texts, such as Marco Polo’s travel writings, crusade romances, and enslavement contracts, that bring in contexts from even further afield. Some classes will also be dedicated to analyzing visual sources, such as medieval maps, statues of saints and knights, and manuscript art to complement historical inquiry. While delving into these visual and textual sources translated from Arabic, Latin, Spanish, and more, students will pursue research that investigates how the history of race and race-craft is deeply related to medieval definitions of power, morality, community, and identity.

393-0 Shanghai:Modernity and Modernism

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 Byzantium: The Greek Empire of Rome

It is well known that Ancient Rome fell in the 5 th century, but few people are aware that the eastern half of the Empire survived for another thousand years. It was inhabited by Greek-speaking people who are these days referred to as “Byzantines” - yet they never called themselves this way and identified themselves as Romans. This empire had its capital in Constantinople, today’s Istanbul in Turkey. It was the longest-living civilization in the whole history of Western Eurasia. Its religion shaped the spiritual life of Eastern Europe, its culture preserved the ancient Greek literature for us, its art forestalled the 20th century Avant-guard, while its main cathedral of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia was for 900 years a building with the tallest inner space on Earth. And yet, Byzantium remains understudied and all but unknown to the general public. This course will introduce students to this mysterious civilization.

393-0 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?

393-0 Queer and Trans Histories of the Holocaust

TBD

393-0 People Lost to History

In recent years historians have developed a new technique called microhistory for capturing the lives of the people who have been lost to history—peasants, religious heretics, poor women, gays, ethnic minorities, and non-conformists of all sorts. These were the people who because of their low social status, rural origins, illiteracy, or unpopular beliefs were ignored, despised, or persecuted by the dominant society. Microhistory is a method of investigation that usually relies on the evidence from judicial trials of otherwise obscure people who found themselves in trouble with the authorities. The method gives a voice to those who otherwise left no written record of their lives. The result of the studies has been a remarkable re-evaluation of the experiences and beliefs of the common people of the past.

393-0 What is Antisemitism?

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 African History through Literature and Film

TBD

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.

395-0 The Historian's Craft 2

TBD

395-0 An American Horror

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 Nature and Empire

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 History of Vegetarianism

TBD

395-0 Commodities and Culture in Atlantic Africa

TBD

395-0 Asian American Midwest: Race, Place, Memory

TBD

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 The Modern American Presidency

TBD

395-0 Xi's 'New Era': China Today

TBD

398-1 Senior 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. 

398-2 Senior Thesis Seminar

TBD

398-3 Senior Thesis Seminar

TBD

400 Level Courses

405-0 Mapping the Discipline

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 Agency

This seminar is about the concept of “agency” in historical writing. What does “agency” actually mean – is the capacity for resistance, the freedom to make choices, or just the ability to affect historical events? Most of us think we have agency, but do we really? Can historians “give people back their agency”? And who can we think of as having agency – do objects have agency? Do animals? What about very small children? Our readings will explore these questions from many angles. We will consider what “agency” means within specific fields of scholarship, concentrating on enslaved people, colonized people, peasants, and premodern women. Then we will consider how historians in other fields, particularly environmental history and the history of material culture, have repurposed and expanded the concept. Meanwhile, we will all exercise our own agency (if we decide we have it) in our analysis and discussion of this scholarship.

405-0 Microhistory

In recent years historians have developed a new technique called microhistory for capturing the lives of the people who have been lost to history—peasants, heretics, poor women, gays, and con-conformists of all sorts. These were the people who because of their low social status, rural origins, illiteracy, or unpopular beliefs were ignored, despised, or persecuted by the dominant society. Microhistory is a method of investigation that usually relies on the evidence from judicial trials of otherwise obscure people who found themselves in trouble with the authorities. The method gives a voice to those who otherwise left no written record of their lives. The result of the studies has been a remarkable re-evaluation of the experiences and beliefs of the common people of Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

405-0 Digital History

TBD

405-0 Global Histories of Science

TBD

405-0 History of Disability

TBD

405-0 Pacific Worlds: Theory and Interpretation

TBD

405-0 Revolution

TBD

410-1 US Field Seminar

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 US Field Seminar

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 US Field Seminar

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.

430-3 Modern European History Seminar

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 African Field Seminar

This course introduces students to the debates and ideas about political culture and modalities of governance in early African history. We will read literature that examines how gender, technology, knowledge systems, environment, belonging, migration, subsistence, and trade are implicated in the modalities of governance. These readings will draw from the eclectic disciplines, methods, and sources that have defined the field of early African history, including archaeology, language and historical linguistics, oral textualities, art history, materiality, and written documents.

481-0 Western Literature of Chinese History

This seminar examines classic and new scholarship on the political, social, cultural, and economic history of the Republic of China, 1912-1949. We will pay particular attention to the flurry of new work that reconsiders the cultural and social transformations of the 1920s and 30s as it relates to the distillation and development of distinctly republican, modern, and Chinese notions of identify and politics. Major themes will include the possibility and structure of the “public sphere” and the history of the public, conceptions of urban vs. rural modernity and modernization, and the transformation of ideas about the Chinese nation in the face of Japanese imperialism.

492-0 Cold War Through Documents

This graduate-level seminar explores the Cold War through a wide array of primary documents. Through sources ranging from declassified CIA reports to memoirs, the class offers an immersion into major twentieth-century conflicts through the eyes of their participants. The class’ geographical range spans the globe, and includes case studies from across Eurasia, the Americas, Africa, and beyond. Special attention will be given to documents that came to light since 1991, revealing how historical narratives and debates change shape (or fail to change shape!) in light of groundbreaking evidence.

492-0 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?

492-0 Laughter as a Historical Category

TBD

492-0 African American History to 1865

TBD

492-0 Cultures of War

TBD

500 Level Courses

560-0 Teaching History

Introduction to the main issues that students will confront as history teachers. Engagement with the most profound and interesting questions that arise in teaching history.

570-1 Research Seminar in History

First half of the second-year directed research course. Students work with their advisers to produce a paper which may be research-based or historiography-based, depending on individual needs.

570-2 Research Seminar in History

First half of the second-year directed research course. Students work with their advisers to produce a paper which may be research-based or historiography-based, depending on individual needs.