DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Description: In 1893, Thomas Edison unveiled the kinetoscope and allowed audience members to glimpse the Hopi Snake Dance by peeking into the device\'s viewing window. Since the birth of the motion picture, films portraying Native Americans (often with non-Native actors in redface) have drawn upon earlier frontier mythology, art, literature, and Wild West performances. These depictions in film have embedded romanticized and stereotyped ideas about Native Americans in the imaginations of audiences throughout the United States and around the world. In this course, we will critically examine representations of Native Americans in film and TV, ranging from the origins of the motion picture industry to the works of contemporary Indigenous filmmakers who challenge earlier paradigms. We will reflect upon revisionist narratives, Indigenous aesthetics and storytelling techniques, reflexivity, and parody. Throughout the quarter, we will view and discuss ethnographic, documentary, and narrative media.

Description: 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.

Description: The second Trump administration has leveraged federal government agencies in novel ways to police immigrant communities in the United States. But policing immigrants has been fundamental to U.S. history since the nineteenth century, even before there was such a thing as federal immigration policy. By “policing,” I mean restrictive immigration policies, immigration enforcement by immigration agents including the Border Patrol, the detention of immigrants by state or federal police, vigilante actions against immigrants, and other forms of surveillance and punishment. The broader conversation we’ll have—an important one in this year marking the 250th anniversary of our country—is how the policing of immigration is a critical part of how we decide who gets to be, and who does not get to be, an American.

Description: Tibet is an ethnic autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. This status recognizes the distinctive cultural and political heritage of Tibet but nonetheless affirms Tibet as an integral part of China. Tibet was "Peacefully Liberated" by the People's Liberation Army in 1950-1951. Previously, the Republican and Qing imperial states variously claimed sovereignty or suzerainty over Tibet. Many Tibetans, whether living in Tibet or abroad, contest the historical and moral legitimacy of this rule, or question the particular arrangements that govern the place of Tibet, Tibetan people, and Tibetan language and culture as part of China's mosaic of fifty-six ethnic groups. The Dalai Lama (a Buddhist spiritual leader), and foreign supporters as diverse as Bjork and Paris Hilton, have made "Free Tibet" a familiar slogan and social cause. Within China such sentiments are commonly viewed as a serious attack on national integrity. This course examines competing claims regarding the national status of Tibet in light of the historically complex cultural and political relationships between Tibet and China. We will focus on the specifics of 20th c. Chinese and Tibetan nationalisms and probe the nature of nations and nationalism generally. As a famous essay we will study asks, "What is a nation?" We will also consider the relevance of history-based nationalist arguments concerning religious freedom, cultural autonomy, modern progress, and the nature of complex, multi-cultural nations, such as China (or, for that matter, the USA).

Description: What happens when we include animals in the way we tell history? How can history help us understand the way we relate to animals today? Together we will learn and discuss the variety of ways that humans have conceptualized their relationships with non-human animals in different cultures and different moments in time: as pets, workers, property, food, commodities, test subjects, memes, pests, zoo animals, conservation targets, and companions of all stripes. This course is also a workshop where you will acquire the basic research methods of history and ethnography. Students will conduct field research on campus and in Chicago as well as historical research in local archives in order to discover and interrogate human-animal relationships past and present. The course culminates in a research project on animals in Northwestern’s history using the visual and documentary records held in Northwestern University Archives.

Description: Who counts as a man or a woman—and who decides? Trans history reveals that the boundaries between man and woman, male and female, masculine and feminine are porous and unstable, and that they shift across time and place. This seminar examines “boundary figures” (trans people, cross-dressers, intersex people) to illuminate the borders of gender and sex, while also exploring the many ways of being in the world that those borders fail to capture. Rather than treating these figures as anomalies, trans history emphasizes their significance: the margins, it turns out, tell us everything about the center. We will read primary sources, diaries, and short stories, engage with cutting-edge scholarship, watch documentaries, and build the analytical tools historians use to read the past on its own terms.

Description: 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.

Description: This course introduces students to the recent history and culture of the United States using the interdisciplinary methodology of American Studies. We will engage present-day and recent cultural production (books, art, movies, graphic novels, photographs, memes, and more) as well as recent history (focused on the application of historical thinking to ongoing social problems such as war, racism, border policy, pollution, religion, politics, and media). The focus of this course will vary depending upon the instructor’s field of study, and may delve more deeply into History, English, or affiliated disciplines. But all versions of the class will explore the evolution of American Studies through the combination of major humanistic and social science fields, and its reshaping by Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Latina and Latino Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Journalism, Sociology, Legal Studies, and Environmental Studies. Students from these majors will find relevant content and approaches in this course.

Description: The course offers a general introduction to the history of Black Americans in the United States within the broad framework of “Jim Crow,” from 1896 to 1954. Students will explore the myriad ways Black Americans organized social movements and challenged structures of racial inequity that were endemic to this period, including legalized segregation, voter suppression, violence and terror, and racial norms that demanded Black subservience. Special attention, in both lectures and discussions, will be paid to the historical agency of the actors at the center of the course and the myriad ways in which Blacks made sense of their circumstances that then informed the various politics they adopted.

Description: Were medieval Jews mobile? Did they travel for business and leisure? Did they relocate for professional opportunities or flee religious persecution? How did they document their journey, and how did they experience encountering Jewish communities living under different political and religious circumstances? Could medieval marriages survive the strain of long-distance relations or an abusive mother-in-law? How was Jewish law shaped by realities of migration mobility? How did Jews navigate the legal systems of the dominant societies - Muslim or Christian? Finally, what are the modern stakes of these medieval "global" Jewish histories? To answer these and other questions, this lecture course will follow the life trajectories and travels of Jewish merchants, pilgrims, rabbis, intellectuals, converts, wives, and husbands across the interconnected medieval world - from the bustling trade hub of Cairo to the shores of Yemen and India, and the ‘Abbasid capital of Baghdad, the Silk Roads and medieval Afghanistan, the booming urban centers of Song China, and finally the flourishing Jewish communities of Cordoba and Toledo before and after the Jewish expulsion from al-Andalus. Drawing on one of the most remarkable archival discoveries— the Cairo Geniza, a cache of letters, contracts, court records, and intimate personal documents that survived for centuries in an Egyptian synagogue — alongside travel accounts, legal responsa, philosophical texts, and material culture, the course explores daily life and food, gender relations and family intricacies, Jewish relations with Muslims and Christians, conversion and apostasy, long-distance trade, intellectual and religious exchange, and legal traditions. Throughout, we will interrogate myths of a "Golden Age" of Jewish-Muslim relations alongside the intricate realities of coexistence, conflict, and the enduring legacies of both. By the end of the course, students will have encountered Jews not at the margins of the medieval world but as mobile and adaptable agents at its very center.

Description: This course brings a global lens to the study of Black history. It aims to explore the various worlds and historical contexts that have shaped Black life, and it examines Black world-making over time and space. The course begins on the African continent in the period that would set the stage for the forced migrations of Africans to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas and moves into an exploration of how enslaved and unfree African labor became fundamental to the project of building European empires in the modern period with a focus on Britain and France. It will look comparatively at enslaving societies and processes of emancipation in the Caribbean and Latin America and devote significant attention to the historical legacies of slavery and colonialism in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The final weeks of the course will give students an opportunity to think about how Black populations outside of the U.S. have engaged in struggles for racial justice, citizenship and forms of Black liberation throughout the twentieth century and into the present.

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

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: 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 the whole planet. That broad scope will allow us to study large-scale phenomena such as empire, industrial technology, communism, the two world wars, pandemics, and globalization. We’ll particularly look at humanity’s adoption of fossil fuels, and the prosperity, inequality, and environmental changes that resulted.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: This course examines the social, cultural, and everyday interactions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine/the Land of Israel from the late nineteenth century until 1948. The course adopts a relational history approach to recover a more nuanced understanding of this highly contested period. Focusing on encounters, interactions, and forms of cooperation and frictions, students explore shared experiences, intersecting identities, cultural exchanges and competitions that shaped Arab-Jewish reciprocal relations in daily life. Course topics include life in mixed cities; education systems; business collaborations; tourism; labor unions and political organizations; leisure spaces; and other sites of intercommunal contact. Drawing on a wide range of primary historical sources, students critically analyze how Arabs and Jews navigated diverse public and social spaces, illuminating often-overlooked dimensions of their intertwined histories.

Description: This course brings face to face two leading forces of the Byzantine culture: the Emperor and the Saint. The Emperor is the most visible figure of the Byzantine history. We know a lot of personal details about each of the thirty seven individuals who sat on the throne during one thousand years. Their appearance is also familiar to us, thanks to the Byzantine coins. The Emperor was the only person entitled to wear red boots. In his presence, his subjects and foreign ambassadors alike had to prostrate themselves on the ground. It was forbidden to touch the august flesh. The Emperor was the “animate law”, he was an embodiment of absolute power, unconstrained by anything. And yet, the secular authorities in Byzantium always felt themselves a bit “illegitimate”: for many сenturies there was no rule of succession, and each emperor was a usurper. Consequently, even the rituals of power emphasized the perishability of any earthly might. Also, there existed a counterbalance to the Emperor’s omnipotence, and, in contrast to the West, it was not the Church, but the Saint. Also in contrast to the medieval West, in Byzantium, a holy “person” became a saint not thanks to his virtues -- but despite his transgressions. The more blatantly did he violate common norms, the stronger was his sacred power. The saint dared to contradict Emperors, to reprove or even condemn them. We can say that Byzantium was an autocratic regime limited by saintly authority of the hooligans.

Description: This course will examine how African Americans understood and experienced gender identity, intimacy and sexuality in the nineteenth century, even as their lives were deeply affected by slavery and racism. Topics: meanings and expressions of manhood and womanhood, including trans identities; gender, sexuality and intimacy in slavery and freedom; same-sex relationships; political activism related to gender and sexuality; and the sources we can use to recover these histories.

Description: 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.

Description: Through classic French films, this class seeks to understand the major events and social developments of twentieth century France such as the First World War, Nazi occupation and French collaboration, the post-1945 recovery period known as “les trentes glorieuses,” the war of Algerian independence, the rise of modern socialism, and the contemporary immigration crisis. Ever since the Lumière brothers held the first public screening of moving pictures in 1895, France has enjoined a vibrant and diverse film industry renowned for its artistry, innovation, and nuanced, often trenchant, critiques of society and politics. Cinema, however, does not only reflect society. Film makers also constructed their own specific visions. Through lectures and in-class discussions, students will learn about the key conflicts of the century as debated in iconic films. Each week, students will screen at least one film (in French with English subtitles). Class readings include chapters from Transnational France: The Modern History of a Universal Nation, articles, and book chapters. Short response papers due for each film and a final seven-page research paper. No knowledge of French is required.

Description: This course explores the history of the Soviet Union from its beginnings after 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 dawn of the post-Soviet era.

Description: 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.

Description: Is sex binary? Does “biology” mean destiny? Can sex change? What, precisely, is sex? These questions shape contemporary political debates, from reproductive rights to trans politics, but they also have deep historical roots. This course examines how “sex” has been defined, debated, regulated, and lived across different times and places. Rather than treating sex as a fixed biological fact, we will approach it as a historical category whose meanings have shifted alongside transformations in science, law, empire, medicine, media, and governance.Drawing on case studies from the Enlightenment to the present, this course traces how anxieties about sex and gender have structured ideas of human difference and shaped understandings of the relationship between body, self, and society. We will examine how concepts of sex have organized bodies, identities, classifications, and institutions, shaping social life from the intimate to the geopolitical. By historicizing a concept often treated as timeless, the course shows that sex changes not only at the level of individual bodies and identities, but across history itself.

Description: 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.

Description: To march, sit-in, litigate, vote, take up arms in self-defense, or take to the streets. Who should lead—a charismatic leader or ordinary citizens? Integrate or separate? Should men lead, and what was the proper role of women? These are among the great questions that Black citizens debated as they mobilized to challenge various systems of racial inequity. Through the exploration of select case studies of Black protest, this course asks students to take deep dives into various protest traditions.

Description: 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: the Bolshevik avant-garde weirdness of the 1920s; the historical epics of the 30s; the awkward Stalinist cinema of the 40s; the Thaw-era character studies 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. The films themselves, meanwhile, shown chronologically, offer a “history” of the Soviet Union from within.

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Description: 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).

Description: * By application only.

Description: On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. The election of the first African American to the American Presidency marked an unprecedented moment in U.S. History. Obama’s presidency also signaled a new saliency about race in American political culture and spurred fantasies about a “post-racial” America. How did this come to be? Against the backdrop of Obama’s rise to national prominence, this course explores the seeming paradox.

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Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: Technology is everywhere in the news nowadays. Some describe the changes it will bring with fear, some others with enthusiasm, but rarely with a cool head. Fears about AI destroying humanity or hopes for its future are just two faces of the same problem: we fear or we love technology, but do we understand it? Technology is often presented as a quick fix to solving complex human problems without the need to radically alter our behaviour or economy. Some say that climate change can be addressed with geoengineering or Direct Carbon Capture. And just this year, AirPods began to offer to translate foreign languages in real time, possibly eliminating the nuisance of having to learn other languages. But is technology a neutral tool to be used as we please? Confusion arises from the way we understand technology, as we tend to focus only on high-tech, large-scale systems, ignoring the less visible but more impactful technologies. But are the same technologies significant to different people around the world? What are the social, economic, and political limits of technological solutions? In this course, we will explore the global history of technology in at least four ways: First, we will study the historical changes in the Western conception of technology in comparison with notions of technology and the material beyond Europe and North America. Second, we will explore how people in the past have also attached meanings, hopes and fears to technology, showing that our ambiguous relationship to technology is not as new or definitive as we might think. Third, we will consider the ways that seemingly “ordinary” technologies have shaped the lives of people in different periods and geographies. And fourth, we will trace the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies, alongside notions of obsolescence, technical change and the repurposing of existing technology. Our goal will be to understand the global process by which societies in different places have adopted technologies and understood their social role.

Description: What can porcelain, board games, speeches, poetry, and rock anthems tell us about European history, and the history of Europe in the world? In this course, we explore modern European history from roughly the mid-eighteenth century to the present with a variety of materials while following three general themes of emphasis: modern economic growth and global business networks, the changing role and nature of the state, and the rise of the nation (with its associated ideas of who belongs and who does not). This course reveals how European history did not happen in an isolated bubble from the rest of the world—instead, European development was contingent on trade, conquest, exchange, colonialism, and collaboration with Asia, North America, Australasia, South America, and Africa. We start with the Industrial Revolution, and then follow the other key themes of modern European history, such as political revolution and representational government, empire, the growth of the middle class, the rise of the centralized state, the formation of the nation, internationalism, welfarism, and neoliberalism.

Description: In 1492, the Spanish Catholic Kings issued a decree banishing the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula allowing converts to stay. Three hundred years later, the French Revolutionary Parliament accepted Jews as legal citizens ushering in the era of Jewish emancipation. This course explores three centuries of radical changes that triggered the rise of new political and religious treatment of and attitude toward Jews. Students will focus on the early modern era of mercantilism that reshaped the Jewish community economically and culturally; on the legalization of the process of readmission of Jews to urban centers from which they were expelled in medieval times; on the spread of Jewish mysticism and the rise of Jewish religious revivalist movements; on the impact of French Enlightenment on the rise of modern Jewish thought; the formation of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish identity; and on the revolutionary upheavals in Netherlands, Britain, and France that triggered the process of emancipation that bolstered Jewish integration into the fabric of European society. Students will look at the early modern European history through the eyes of the previously alienated minority, the attitude to which started to change.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: ‘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 intellectual movements that have shaped the interaction of religion and gender in Muslim societies from the nineteenth century to the present, shaping how Islam and Muslim women are perceived to this day. Our goal is to historicize these common perceptions, rather than accept them as commonsensical. This entails reflection on historical intersections among Islam, modernity, and colonialism, using gender as an analytical category. 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. The course is divided into two parts. Part One focuses on ideological responses to historical transformations, most notably the onset of imperialism, 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 socio-religious authority and political power in Muslim societies.

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Description: The ways people in various parts of Africa drew on and contributed to the range of ideas, practices, and skills associated with Christianity and Islam. The changing ways and meanings of being Muslim and Christian. The place of religion in the broader social, intellectual, and cultural forces of the last 2000 years of African history. Focus on daily life, philosophy, politics, art, including museum visit.

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Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: The French Revolution of 1789 created a new form of warfare: a total mobilization of ordinary citizens into mass armies fighting in the name of national glory and survival. We will trace total war from 1789 to World War II, making comparisons to the colonial wars that Europeans simultaneously pursued as global extensions of the political claims of the nation.

Description: 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.

Description: This course aims at introducing students to the history of modern states in the Arabian Peninsula, which is an often neglected but increasingly pivotal region of the Middle East. Although Saudi Arabia will receive particular attention, the course will also cover the smaller emirates of the Persian Gulf (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman) as well as Yemen.

Description: This is a survey of modern Chinese history from the Revolution of 1911 to the era of post-Mao reform. The course will pay equal attention to the Republican (ROC) and communist (PRC) periods and will consider the disintegration of the Chinese polity into warlordism, the legacy of imperialism, the efforts of the Nationalists to reestablish viable state authority under the Republic of China, the disastrous eight years of war with Japan (“World War II”), the Civil War, and the triumphs and tribulations of communist rule. Within this chronological framework, the course will explore such topics as nationalism, the changing status of Chinese women, the power of revolutionary charisma, and the place of the Patriotic Democratic Movement of 1989 in China’s long tradition of scholarly and labor protest. Throughout the course, we will explore the tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism in its political, social, and intellectual dimensions.

Description: 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.

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Description: 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.

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Description: What can porcelain, board games, speeches, poetry, and rock anthems tell us about European history, and the history of Europe in the world? In this course, we explore modern European history from roughly the mid-eighteenth century to the present with a variety of materials while following three general themes of emphasis: modern economic growth and global business networks, the changing role and nature of the state, and the rise of the nation (with its associated ideas of who belongs and who does not). This course reveals how European history did not happen in an isolated bubble from the rest of the world—instead, European development was contingent on trade, conquest, exchange, colonialism, and collaboration with Asia, North America, Australasia, South America, and Africa. We start with the Industrial Revolution, and then follow the other key themes of modern European history, such as political revolution and representational government, empire, the growth of the middle class, the rise of the centralized state, the formation of the nation, internationalism, welfarism, and neoliberalism.

Description: 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.

Description: 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.

Description: African history from the mid-1800s to 2000. African responses to European conquest and colonial rule; impact of colonial rule on African societies, economies, and intellectual life. Nationalism, decolonization, and neo-colonialism. Emergence of new forms of cultural, religious, and social life during the 20th century. An active learning approach focusing on techniques for interpreting historical evidence including texts, music, film, painting and sculpture, and literature.

Description: 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.

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Description: The history of East-Central Europe from the World War II to the collapse of Soviet rule and beyond.

Description: The purpose of the course is to stimulate a better understanding of the Holocaust in all its ramifications. In pursuing this goal, the course will examine the history of Jewish life and Jewish experience in Europe and Germany. This course also will examine the specific circumstances and historical events that led to the rise of Nazism in the interwar period (1919-1938) as well as the National Socialist seizure of power and the gradual intensification of antisemitic policy. The course stresses the relationship of Nazi policies and actions regarding Jews to their broader aims of domination, conquest, and subjugation of the whole of Europe. It traces the changes in policy throughout the period from 1933 to 1945 and focuses on the ultimate inauguration of the practice of total annihilation after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The course provides insights into how and why these changes occurred when they did, and why those who were victimized by the unfolding disaster were caught unaware. In dealing with the wartime period, the behavior of three key groups is examined: the perpetrators, the victims, and witnesses. An attempt is made to analyze the action or inaction of all three of these groups in the light of the knowledge available to them at the time, rather than to pass judgment with the benefit of post-Holocaust hindsight. Special attention is given to the types and varieties of resistance manifested by the victims in the face of increasing persecution as well as the issues and problems associated with rescuing the European Jews. At the conclusion of the course, you will have an understanding of the social, cultural, political, economic, and military developments that led to and shaped the events of the destruction of the European Jews and other racial and political target groups. The quality and depth of intellectual rigor that you bring into the classroom each day will determine the value that you receive from the course and the benefits that accrue to you today and in the future. I look forward to our journey together.

Description: Introduction to the history of medicine in the Americas from precontact to the present, with special focus on Latin America and the Caribbean in imperial, transnational, and global frameworks.

Description: 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, when Mexico faces a War on Drugs like no other.

Description: 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.

Description: The region we call South Asia is home to roughly one-fourth of the world’s population today. It is also a part of the world which has witnessed some of the most far-reaching—not to mention violent—socio-economic, religious, and political transformations since the eighteenth century. Recognizing South Asia as a valuable site for the study of global changes, this survey course will introduce students to over two hundred years of the region’s history. From the mid-eighteenth century to the present, the region witnessed multiple sorts of political formations—Mughal imperial sovereignty and its successor states, British colonialism, post-colonial nationalism. Dilemmas rooted in histories of imperialism haunt South Asian nation-states and South Asian communities living across the world. Why did the British establish and consolidate political control in this region? How did British Indians confront the ideological challenges presented by imperialism and wrest political independence in 1947? Digging beneath dominant discourses of imperialism, anti-colonialism, and post-colonial nationalisms, we will investigate how caste, class, gender, and religion fueled alternate political movements and aspirations in South Asia. Key themes will include: ideologies and practices of imperialism and anti-colonial nationalism; caste, class, gender, and religion as challenges for both empire and nationalism; socio-religious movements wrestling with ‘Western’ modernity and imperial power; post-colonial nation-making and its continued challenges. This historical overview of South Asia since the eighteenth century will enable us to reflect on the enduring power of imperialism and its continued relevance to global geo-politics and discourses of social justice today.

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Description: 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?

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Description: Once negligible in size and power, the American presidency has grown to employ four million people worldwide and come to possess the ability to intervene in anything anywhere at any time while countervailing forces like Congress, the fifty states, and foreign governments have declined in independence. Paradoxically, as the American presidency grew, historians lost interest in it. Presidents and the presidency once loomed large in historical research and writing. But with the rise of social history, then cultural history, then the turn toward global history, presidents and the presidency fell out of fashion among professional historians, even as it remained ubiquitous in our lives. Fortunately, political history has recently reemerged in ways that invite new attention to the presidency and suggest new approaches to its study. This seminar will introduce students to classic and more recent scholarship on the history of the presidency. And it provides students the opportunity to write an original research paper on a question of their choice related to it. Students will define, research, and author a written work of 15-20 pages along with a short oral presentation of their findings. Course parameters are broadly defined to allow history majors to fulfill their research seminar requirement as they choose so long as they investigate something having to do with this sprawling and powerful institution and its complex history.

Description: * By application only.