Spring Course Catalog
101-8-20 First-Year Writing Seminar: 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.
101-8-22 First-Year Writing Seminar: Holocaust Testimonies
The Nazis veiled the Holocaust in a fog of secrecy and deception in their efforts to disguise their crimes and erase the voices of their victims. In response, Holocaust victims, both at the time and since, have struggled to tell their stories to the outside world. Paradoxically, the iconic genocide of the modern age that silenced millions of the murdered, and destroyed all trace of many of them, has also bequeathed to posterity the largest number of first-person testimonies about any single historical event. In this course we will examine a range of firsthand accounts of the Holocaust from the period itself and the subsequent decades. We will read selections from diaries, letters, memoirs, graphic novels, and courtroom testimony. We will discuss accounts left behind by victims, perpetrators, and so-called bystanders. Finally, we will work with the USC Shoah Visual Archive, the largest single collection of video interviews of genocide victims in existence. Throughout the course we will explore why the authors of these statements chose to testify and what we can (and cannot) learn from their testimony.
103-8-20 First-Year Writing Seminar: A Beginner's Guide to Forgery
Societies forge the objects they value most. Despite this, scholarship on forgery tends to be a footnote to the histories of art and archaeology. This seminar puts forgery at the centre of history as a window onto the cultures, political economy and geography of knowledge of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will use a broad range of primary sources, including court records, forgers’ diaries, intelligence files, novels and expert reports, to explore the historical detective stories of frauds such as the evolutionary “missing link” of Piltdown Man, the tomb of the last Aztec emperor, the Hitler diaries and the masterly pre-Hispanic epic of the Codex Cardona. These detailed case studies of archaeological, artistic and paleontological fraud are juxtaposed with social histories to investigate why people go to immense trouble to make fakes; why other people buy them; and what their efforts tell us about societies ranging from late Imperial China to post-revolutionary Mexico.
102-8-22 First-Year Writing Seminar: Islam and Gender in the Modern World
‘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.
200-0-20 Business Disasters in Modern History
This class explores the history of the Western market economy through instances of its failure—times when businesses, markets, or financial structures collapsed from the 1600s to the present. We will explore the context and cause of crises such as Dutch Tulipomania in the 1630s, the Australian gold rush in the 1850s, and the global Great Depression of the 1930s. In addition, we will explore how contemporaries understood these crises as symptomatic of the social failings of their time. We will compare both the nature of the failures and the social responses to the failure over time, and develop critical contrasts as well as comparisons to crises in our contemporary moment. Themes we will explore throughout the course include the relationship between morality/religion and the economy, the role of the state as regulator, imperialism and distance, and the role of emotions in the market economy.
200-0-22 Jews and Arabs in Palestine/The Land of Israel, 1880-1948
This course explores the complex social and cultural dynamics between ordinary Jews and Arabs in Palestine/LI from the late 19th century to 1948. Moving beyond the conventional narrative of rivalry, violence, and conflict, we adopt a Relational History approach to uncover a richer and more nuanced understanding of this contested period. Focusing on interactions that extended beyond conflict and violence, we will examine shared identities, joint experiences, and daily encounters that shaped relations between Arabs and Jews. Topics include mixed cities, the education system, business collaborations, tourism, labor unions, political organizations, leisure venues, and more. We will also delve into communal, personal, and, at times, even romantic relationships that developed amidst the growing national struggle. Using primary historical sources, this course invites students to critically analyze how Jews and Arabs navigated their everyday lives in diverse public spheres, shedding light on an often-overlooked dimension of their interconnected history.
200-0-24 Making the Modern Middle East
This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to major issues in the history of the Middle East and North Africa since the nineteenth century, and also an introduction to Middle East studies as a field of study. That is, we will seek to understand how the modern Middle East was “made,” as well as how something called “the Middle East” emerged as a geopolitical entity and a conceptual category. Among the topics explored are the history of the idea of the “Middle East” and the multiple meanings of “modernity” in that context; the complex relations between the Middle East and the West; the historical formation of Middle East nation-states, polities, ideologies, identities, and economies; and the dynamic struggles unfolding in the region since the 2011 Arab uprisings. The course will consider the making of these structures, events, and relationships from a range of perspectives, including imaginative ones. Course material will encompass literary, cinematic, historical, and social science materials, as well as both primary documents and secondary scholarly sources.
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.
212-1-20 Introduction to African-American History: Key concepts from 1700-1861
This course covers the origins and experiences of the group of people known as African Americans or Blacks in the United States Their development is rooted in the cultures of Africa, Europe and the Americas; the African slave trade from the African continent to the Americas; and the founding of the United States as a nation distinct from the rest of the Americas. Beginning with Africa and the African Diaspora from the 1400s to the late-eighteenth century, the course than focuses on African descendants in the United States from the late-eighteenth century to the eve of the U.S. Civil War in 1861.
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.
218-0-20 The History of Latinas and Latinos in the United States
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.
262-0-20 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.
274-0-20 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.
282-0-20 Sino-American Relations in the Modern World
There are few international relationships more important—and less understood—than the one forged between the United States and China over the course of two centuries. This course will explore the historical evolution of Sino-American interactions from the rise of the American opium trade off the China coast in the nineteenth century to the fraught relations of the two allies during both World Wars, and from the Cold War-era of rivalry and rapprochement to the present-day tensions in the South China Sea region. We will consider the bilateral Sino-American relationship in its larger global context and in connection to the issues of war, diplomacy, commerce, race, gender, religion, and material and popular culture. Special consideration will be given to the Southeast Asia region, where so many of the problems confronting China and the US have unfolded. We also will consider the ways in which the international arena became integral to the domestic politics of both countries.
292-0-20 Flying Nuns and Mighty Warriors: Early Modern Religious Women
The Spanish nun Saint Teresa of Avila was in her thirties when she began to levitate during her ecstatic trances. “She dearly wished not to be considered a saint,” a fellow nun recalled after her death, “so she constantly begged me and her other daughters to pull down hard on her vestments whenever we saw her rising into the air.” The attempted concealment was futile, however; Saint Teresa’s extraordinary spiritual gifts - and otherworldly humility - gained her instant fame and established a model for religious women that lasted throughout the rest of the early modern era.
At a time in which women’s social roles were severely circumscribed, religious women and female religious communities flourished across Europe. Early modern women levitated, bilocated [appeared in two places at once], experienced visions, battled with the devil, wrote autobiographies, and pioneered religious missions around the world. Working within traditions and cultures that subordinated them to men, some religious women carved out relatively independent lives devoted to charity, teaching, and prayer (occasionally gaining fame, fortune, and notoriety along the way). This course will explore the lives and experiences of women of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faith within both Europe and European colonies in the Americas and Asia. Together we will engage with the cultural, theological, liturgical, social, and political factors which shaped women’s spirituality from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.
300-0-20 Thinking Machines: The History and Ethics of Artifical Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is not new. Long before the term was coined in 1955, engineers and inventors sought to mechanize human thought and behavior. This course will address and contextualize the chronological arc of AI, from eighteenth-century automatons to today’s large language models. Together, we will investigate how changing conceptions of human intelligence and creativity influenced the development and implementation of what we now call AI. In so doing, we will familiarize ourselves with changing strategies for creating “intelligent” machines and engage in lively debates over the problems and possibilities of machine sentience. Will this course secure you a six-figure salary working for OpenAI? Sadly, no. It will, however, enrich your knowledge of the historical trajectory, evolving ethics, and critical concepts of AI.
300-0-22 Cannabis: Global History
This course examines the history of cannabis in a global perspective to understand how and why a plant that has been crucial to most civilizations for thousands of years became one of the most consumed intoxicants in human history, and one of the most demonized, criminalized, controversial and profitable commodities of the modern world. We consider archeological evidence to explore the earliest uses and meanings of the plant in antiquity and how it spread from Central Asia to the rest of the planet. We also examine various types of historical works to comprehend what roles cannabis played in the rise of maritime empires and the formation of a global capitalist world. Then, we revisit some of the urban and rural cultures in various parts of the world that modernized the plant’s uses and meanings in the 20th century. We also study scientific, legal, and pop-culture materials to elucidate what was at stake in the most heated controversies and campaigns against and in favor of the plant. We conclude analyzing the most recent debates and policies on decriminalization and
legalization in North and South America in a comparative perspective, and their socio-economic, political, and environmental implications. We address these topics reading history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and journalism; and watching and analyzing critically songs, advertisement, literature, feature films, and documentary movies.
300-0-24 Black Women's History: Slavery and Freedom in the 19th Century
This course will examine the lives of African American women between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Topics to be addressed include labor; family and community relationships; sexuality and intimacy; and political activism: free black women in the anti-slavery movement and enslaved women's resistance to enslavement. By the end of the course, students will have learned about the life experiences of women of African descent in the nineteenth-century U.S.; and will have gained an understanding of how historians write history using primary and secondary sources.
300-0-26 Nomads in World History
In contrast to prevailing stereotypes of nomads as improvised, marginal wanderers or their romanticized depiction as exemplifying a simpler way of life, pastoral nomadic societies had a decisive role in shaping global history. From the late second millennium BCE to the eighteenth century CE, pastoral nomads emerged, often from the fringes of Eurasian civilizations, and wielding substantial military force influenced sedentary states, empires, and societies, from China to the Middle East and Europe. Beyond their military prowess, however, they also functioned as cultural agents. Sedentary people - Chinese, European, Muslim or others - portrayed them as violent intruders negatively impacting their cultures; yet nomads also facilitated and directed the exchange of goods, people, animals, religions, ideas, and technologies across civilizational boundaries, and maintained a relationship of interdependence with their settled neighbors. This course offers a comparative perspective on the role nomadic societies had in world history, spanning the early nomadic empire of the Xiongnu in nowadays Mongolia, Chinggis Khan's universal empire, the Berber Arabs of North Africa, and the Turkish armies in Asia Minor. We will explore how modern historians navigate the paucity of sources about nomads and the polities they established, and untangle narratives predominantly crafted by members of the sedentary societies.
300-0-28 Histories of Medicine Across Asia
How have people understood the body across Asia? This course explores different conceptions of the body, illness, and therapeutics across several medical traditions in Asia, from the ancient and medieval periods up to the present day. We will study primary sources like medical diagrams, the biographies of physicians, and case notes about patients to understand the roles of medical practitioners in a range of contexts. We will explore traditions like Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Galenic medicine, and Tibetan medicine. These traditions were always dynamic, but they also changed dramatically in the modern period, as biomedicine became one of the many medical traditions of Asia.
320-0-20 The Fourteenth Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, promised equal protection and due process for all, and it declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens of the United States. The amendment’s consequences for American federalism were vast. But the change was even greater than that, for Americans began to understand rights differently. Much of today’s rights-based culture—including ideas about the right to marry, the right to privacy, and the right to be free of discrimination—is founded in the Fourteenth Amendment and its legal and cultural legacies.
324-0-20 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.
Gender, sexuality, and the rise of modern lesbian and gay identities. Lecture and discussion. HISTORY 324-0 and GNDR_ST 324-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses.
327-0-20 Histories of Violence in the United States
How does violence change life stories and national narratives? How can a nation remember and retell obscured histories of violence, reconcile past violence, and resist future violence? What does it mean that lynching emerged as a category in the same historical moment as the Bill of Rights, and that certain kinds of violence have been central to American identity? The story of the United States is built on the inclusion or omission of violence: from the genocide of Native Americans to slavery to imperial conquest, from “private” pain of women to the nationalized pain of soldiers. This lecture course brings violence to the center of U.S. history. Moving from Early America to the present, we will discuss these overlapping stories in terms of their visibility and invisibility, addressing questions of representation and the haunting function of traumatic experience. Following an emerging subfield of scholarship in Histories of Violence, this course examines narrative, archival, and political issues around studying, teaching, and writing such stories.
333-0-20 The Age of the Renaissance
In 1348 perhaps a third to one half of all Europeans died from a mysterious illness called the Black Death, which was only one of a number of calamities that disrupted normal life. In the wake of these disasters, thinkers, artists, and a surprising number of common people began to search for explanations for what had gone wrong by asking questions about their own personal identities, about the obligations of a moral life, about the virtues of civic service, and about the their personal relationship with God. This course explores that search, which is what we now call the Renaissance. It began among the independent city-states of Italy, particularly Florence and Venice, and spread from them to the rest of Europe.
The course will compare developments in Italy with those in northern Europe, especially on the political and family structures of the city-states, the culture of the princely courts, the ambitions of the Roman popes, the social and intellectual basis for artistic creativity, the origins of modern political thought and the scientific method, and the constraints and opportunities available to women.
Varieties of historical encounters between Jews and Christians. Origins of the "Jesus movement"; rabbinic attitudes toward Christianity; medieval polemic and engagement; the modern "Judeo-Christian tradition"; Christian Zionism and postwar ecumenicism.
349-0-20 The History of the Holocaust
This course examines the Holocaust of European Jews from its origins through its aftermath in the context of Nazi Germany’s murderous campaigns against other groups of victims, including disabled persons, sexual minorities, Roma, and Slavs. We will read first-hand accounts and analyze primary documents written by victims and perpetrators as we seek to understand the causes, course, and consequences of the genocidal policies of Germany and its Axis allies. From Vichy France in the West to the occupied Soviet territories in the East, the persecution, expropriation, and murder of millions necessitated the participation of countless civilians and state officials. With a special focus on Eastern Europe, where the greatest number of Jews lived and nearly all of the murdered died, we will explore questions of local complicity, the motives of perpetrators and of those who sought to impede them, and the responses of the continent’s Jews and other victims to the onslaught. The course will conclude with postwar efforts to punish the Holocaust’s perpetrators, to commemorate its victims, and to deny that genocide was even committed.
352-0-20 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.
362-2-20 The Victorians: liberalism, empire, and morality, 1780-1900
The Victorian Era was one of the most influential periods in not just British history, but the history of the modern world. Between 1780 and 1900, the British Isles transformed from a small island nation of the coast of Europe to the heart of an empire that claim to a quarter of the world’s land and population. This expansion not only changed Britain itself, but spread political structures, Victorian culture, and British settlers around the world. This course explores how and why Britain came to “rule the waves” over the nineteenth century, along with considering what everyday life was like for people both in Britain and in the Empire. It also considers the legacy of the Victorian era in both historical structures and cultural memory.
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.
393-0-20 Gender, Race and the Holocaust
The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to the history and historiography of race and gender during the Holocaust. As in many historical contexts, race and gender interacted dynamically and created the particular context of Nazi-occupied Europe, which was a place where Jewish men and women suffered in particular ways, German men and women participated in particular ways, and other racial groups - men and women alike - were targeted, collaborated, resisted and rescued. We will read a variety of texts that explore the influences that shaped the behavior and response of an array of people during the Holocaust. Racism sat directly in the center of the Nazi world view. Once the Nazis got into power, they sought to translate ideology into policy. Still, their racial policies evolved over time, spurred by opportunism, innovation, and war. And too, Jewish men and women responded in ways similar and divergent to the Nazi onslaught. Sexism was also seemingly an important aspect of the Nazi perspective. While they indeed embraced an anti-feminist stance, the Nazis nevertheless sought to incorporate "German" women into the national community and women participated actively in the implementation of Nazi racism.
393-0-22 Race and the American Midwest
This seminar explores the role of race and Indigeneity in histories of the American Midwest. Despite popular narratives of the Midwest as purely a heartland of white homogeneity and normativity, racialized communities of color have long shaped politics, culture, and society in the region. This course emphasizes the fluid nature of ideas about race, and their interplay with the construction of place in a settler colonial society. The course materials cover a wide range of topics that are crucial for understanding both Midwestern and U.S. history writ large. From the multi-ethnic world of the fur trade, to contemporary housing inequalities, this course highlights the making of a U.S. region, and confronts mythologies of the Midwest in the American imagination.
393-0-24 Pop Music, History, and the Nation
Moving from the birth of recorded music and the music industry in the late 19th century all the way to the present, this class explores how popular music can be used as a source for understanding history. Using Turkey as the class's main case study but also discussing intersections between popular music and nationalism from Mexico and the United States to Greece, Brazil, and beyond, we will also explore issues like globalization, cultural flows, gender, queerness, and social movements related to music. The class will follow the major turning points of Turkey’s history (the westernization movements of the late Ottoman Empire, the establishment of the Turkish Republic, military coups and other crises, social and everyday transformations) through its important musicians, genres, and scenes. While studying specific musical trends (like rock 'n' roll, for example) and their social/historical underpinnings, the class will provide students with broader methodologies and theories for using popular culture and music in the study of history.
Visual culture – art, photographs, cartoons, fashion, films, advertisements, and reels, to name but a few elements – is something often experienced with little thought as to its broader significance. Yet images, icons, and other visual cues profoundly shape cultural meaning and our senses of place and self. In this class we will explore visual culture in the history of the United States, from the early Republic to the present, asking what ideas of “America” are being depicted and how they have changed over time. We will examine topics such as the formation of national identity, the visual language of empire, race and representation, consumerism, and the influence of mass media, while also developing a critical vocabulary with which to discuss these topics. We will situate images and objects both within their own history of making and as products of a broader cultural and social context, using them to track the complex and shifting socio-political landscape of the United States’ history. At the end of the course, students will produce an original research paper which examines an aspect of visual culture in US history, and to that end assignments will be scheduled throughout the quarter to build towards the final project.
395-0-24 Energy and Environments: A Global History
Today's strong focus on decarbonization and renewable energy stems from reflections on how modern society has consumed large amounts of petroleum, resulting in global problems such as climate change. This has many precedents in human history, as, in many instances, people have viewed energy transitions as solutions to the environmental problems they faced. The class will examine the inseparable relationship between energy sources—human labor, biofuel, coal, electricity, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy—and the environmental concerns of the periods when these sources entered and dominated human societies. When a new energy source is introduced to a community, advocates often present it as a solution to existing environmental issues. However, throughout the entire cycle of energy production and consumption, many energy sources negatively impact both the environment and people. When a new energy source enters society, whose environment does it claim to protect? Who is marginalized by energy transitions?
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.
405-0-20 Policing the Color Line: Violence, Race, and Racism
405-0-22 Orientalism and its Discontents
Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) has been one of the most influential -- and controversial -- works of scholarship of the last half century. As a pioneering work of postcolonial theory, it has reshaped entire disciplines, from history and area studies to comparative literature, anthropology, and even the study of English literature(s). But Said has also had his critics, some very astute and others not so much. In this course, we will begin by closely reading Said’s own works to try to understand them in all their nuance and complexity, and then examine some of the arguments of his later critics of various disciplinary backgrounds.
405-0-24 Intellectual and Social Histories of Religion
Intellectual and Social Histories of Religion: Reading seminar. Overview of main approaches to religious history; theory and methods. No specific geographic or temporal focus. Read several articles/book chapters per week, prepare weekly reading responses, a book review, and a final essay (either a "review essay"-type assessment of two recent books or a historiographic essay on a theme).
410-3-20 Field Seminar in American History: 1900-on
Combining classics and the best new work in the field, this seminar explores the evolution of historical scholarship on The United States Since 1900, samples its variety, and seeks to identify future research trajectories. Along the way, it teaches graduate students to read quickly but carefully, to identify and evaluate arguments, to recognize and appreciate methodological and interpretive differences, and to locate their own preferences and place in the field. In sum, the course provides the foundation for future research, success on field exams, and a professional career.
430-2-20 Field Seminar in Early Modern European History
This seminar is designed to acquaint graduate students with the most significant historical works and the important historical issues in Early Modern European History between circa 1400 and 1800. The course is part of the essential preparation for a graduate field examination in European history. Major topics will include the social and intellectual origins of the Italian Renaissance, the development of modern political thought and diplomacy, the urban foundations of the Protestant Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, the scientific revolution, the historical anthropology of peasant societies and the urban poor, ideas of kingship and absolutism, the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the rise of England, and the social history of women and gender.
492-0-20 Early Modern and Modern Japan
This seminar introduces graduate students to major issues in the history of pre-twentieth century Japan, paying particular attention to recent scholarship that crosses the Tokugawa/Meiji divide and focusing on themes such as gender, status, “mapping,” discipline, and information. We will discuss major debates in the field: Where was (and wasn’t) Tokugawa Japan? What did status mean to Tokugawa peasants, merchants, and samurai, and what came to replace status in the Meiji period? Was Tokugawa Japan “early modern,” or was there a major break between the Tokugawa status quo and Meiji modernity? Were the foundations of Meiji economic development laid in the Tokugawa period? Reading knowledge of Japanese is not necessary for this seminar; in fact, students from other fields are encouraged to enroll.
492-0-22 War and Peace in Mexico
492-0-24 Histories of Colombia
Located in the northernmost section of South America, between two geostrategic regions, the Panama Canal and Venezuela’s oil district, Colombia has been a long-standing bridge between the Caribbean, the Andean, the Pacific, and the Amazon basins, and a key ally in the consolidation of a U.S. hegemonic project in the hemisphere. However, as historian David Bushnell stated in his 1993 seminal book, Colombia is one of “the least studied of the major Latin American countries, and probably the least understood” in the US academia. This course puts Colombia back on the map asking instead how its histories illustrate fundamental questions about modernity and democracy in the Americas. We begin by inquiring how different actors imagined a republic after the wars of independence, then move on to examine the irruption of the masses in the public sphere to shed light on the struggles of the popular sectors to craft citizenship vis-à-vis local and national elites. We also study the legacies and consequences of these conflicts in the 20th century, and the various social and political crises as they unfolded until our present times. We conclude exploring the country's recent history: the neoliberal turn, the persistence of violence, everyday practices of resistance and accommodation, and the labors of memory. We do so by putting the historiography in conversation with the interdisciplinary literature and a collection of primary sources.