Winter Course Catalog
101-8-20 Reinventing Paris, 1600-Present
Before the foundations for the Eiffel Tower were laid, or the City of Lights strung with a single streetlamp, Paris was a rough and tumble maze of crooked medieval streets, overflowing cemeteries, and dismal sanitation. Tracing Paris’s transformation into the first modern metropolis in the West – one with broad boulevards, street lighting, public squares, a police force, and even public restroom facilities – this class will ask students to analyze and write about the city as an historical artefact. Using memoirs, songs, images, and films, we will examine how “ordinary” Parisians experienced the changing city, dwelling at length on the experiences of women and colonial citizens. We will examine how the creation of public spaces and amenities fostered novel urban experiences, but also reinforced racial and gendered inequalities among the city’s residents. And, finally, we will reflect on how and why Paris came to hold such power over twentieth-century American writers and artists, using films and magazine articles as jumping-off points for our own written reflections.
101-8-22 Ukraine: Why Should We Care?
Using the current Russia-Ukraine war as a springboard, this course provides a historical and cultural backdrop of the conflict outlining Ukraine as a colonial addendum of Poland, Russian Empire, and the USSR. Students will focus on thirty-year long history of Ukraine after the 1991 collapse of the USSR against a broad historical, political, socio-economic, and cultural perspective. Students will discuss the formation of a modern post-colonial nation bringing together insights into art history, comparative literature, nationalities and imperial studies, social and political history, and genocide studies. We will use op-eds by the famous world poli sci pundits, journalism blogs of Ukrainians who write during air raids, video clips and movies filmed over last thirty years in the independent Ukraine, poems and novels reflecting the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Based on high level of interaction, this course will explain why Ukraine suddenly moved from a peripheral position in the new and minds of European scholars into the central place of the world politics.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent coined the term genocide to describe the mass killings of Jews and other “undesirables” in axis-occupied Europe during the Second World War. Lemkin thought that this type of mass violence required a name to distinguish it from others and lobbied hard for the development of the Genocide Convention, which was approved by the United Nations in 1948. Lemkin’s principal motive was to establish an international legal framework to punish those responsible for this crime so that it wouldn’t be repeated. Despite its noble aims the Genocide Convention’s narrowly legal definition of the term and its identification with the Holocaust remain as important shortcomings which make the study and analysis of mass violence, historical or current, difficult. This course will introduce historical examples and theoretical underpinnings of the concept and encourage students to think critically about the terms and narratives we use to describe and analyze mass murders of civilians in different contexts. Please note that the subject matter requires the use of course materials that include graphic descriptions of violence.
102-8-20 Race and The American Presidency
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.
102-8-22 Sex, Pregnancy, Law, and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America
Sometime during the fall of 1857, a young single woman from rural Vermont discovered she was pregnant. There seemed no possibility she could marry the man involved. What happened next involved multiple family members, train travel, and a legal and medical controversy that tore apart a community. This class will use a “microhistory” approach to explore how nineteenth-century Americans understood sex, pregnancy, contraception, and abortion, and how these issues reverberated in the arenas of law and medicine. Students will gain significant experience analyzing primary sources and piecing together historical narratives. As this is a First-Year Writing Seminar, the class will also discuss practices of writing in college, and students will have ample opportunities to write and revise.
200-0-20 Women's Sports: A Global History
From the multiracial maidens who ran eight-mile races across eighteenth-century London to Brazil’s outlawed futboleras, female athletes across time and space have confronted, challenged, and transformed ideas about gender, race, class, and sexuality. Criticized (by women and men) for grunts that were too gross, shorts that were too short, and leotards that were too long, female athletes have been politicized for centuries. Would sports destroy girls’ uteruses, condemn them to “bicycle face,” perhaps even render them lesbians? Would female athletes blur gender lines, emasculating men while empowering ugly, ambitious “man-girls” with overwrought biceps? What if Black women beat white women? What if women beat men? And if women’s sports were separate from men’s, would they ever be equal?
200-0-26 Drugs and Alcohol in Africa
This is the story of the everyday lives in Africa over the past 5000 years told through drugs and alcoholic beverages—beer, palm wine, tobacco, coffee, kolanut, marijuana, aguardiente, ògógóró, heroin, nyaope, etc. Drugs and alcohol have been central to defining sociality, rituality and sacredness, personhood, community, pleasure, and leisure, as well as pain, power, domination, resistance, bondage, and freedom at different times and places. As substances of taste, addiction, and sociality, they are also implicated in the process of negotiating, contesting, enacting, and debating identities, belonging, gender, class, and ideas about wellness and illness. What can the production, circulation, and consumption of alcohol and other psychoactive substances tell us about Africa’s past, present, and future? All the topics in this course are designed to answer this question, especially with reference to how the use of drugs and alcohol intersects with everyday lives. For example, the contestation and control over who has the right or privilege to consume which drug or alcohol are tied to the issue of power, identity, and anxieties about social order. Moving between the ordinary and special, playfulness and seriousness, pop culture and policy, the instructors will collaborate with students on how to use the study of drugs and alcohol to learn and think deeply about African history and how the African present came into existence.
200-0-28 Civil Rights, Black Power
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.
200-0-30 The 1990s: Berlin Wall to 9/11
This lecture course explores the history of a pivotal decade from the end of the Cold War to the beginning of the War on Terror. Focusing on society, culture, and politics, we will explore the rise of new media (cable news, tabloids, and the Internet); the era of globalization and neoliberal ideology; the implementation of mandatory minimum sentencing and the age of mass incarceration; and the transformation of American childhood. Major touchstones will include the O.J. Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, Y2K, and the Columbine High School shooting.
200-0-32 Europe's Islamic Empire
Even though it emerged in Palestine, Christianity’s core geography is Europe. Islam, on the other hand, is associated with a region invented around the turn of the twentieth century called the “Middle East.” However, the western and eastern extremes of Europe were ruled by Islamic Empires at different times in history: different dynasties that ruled in Iberia from the 8th until the last decade of the 15th century, and the Ottoman dynasty that ruled in Southeastern and Eastern Europe from the 14th until the first decade of the 20th century. This introductory survey course is about the latter. It is structured chronologically and thematically to give you a bird’s eye view of the politics, religions, and peoples of the Ottoman Empire from its beginnings to the Early Modern Period. Your first lesson will be the story of how the indigenous bird and centerpiece of Thanksgiving tables of America and Americans (and Canadians) got to be called after a far, faraway country.
200-0 – The Holocaust and Its Memory in Israel
This course examines the origins, development, course, and consequences of the most comprehensive genocide in history and, the ways it is remembered by Israeli society. The first part of the course will focus on the persecution of Jews during the first half of the 20th century culminating in their genocide between 1939-1945. We will discuss Nazi ideology; the complex interface between the Nazi regime's espousal of racism and the motivation of perpetrators on the ground; the interface between politics and law; the victims' reactions to persecution; conditions of life in the ghettos and camps; the response of the international community; the complex question of the role of 'collaborators,' 'bystanders,' 'beneficiaries'; and the aftermath of the war. In the second part of the course, we will examine the contradicting attitudes of Israeli society towards the Holocaust. We will probe how the establishment of the State of Israel, the 1950's mass immigration, and the evolving Arab-Israeli conflict shaped Israeli's understanding and memory of the Holocaust. Throughout the course, we will analyze various primary documents: manifests, protocols, speeches, letters, and memoirs of men and women, as well as films and documentaries.
200-0 – The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
It could well be argued that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as much about history as about land. Just as possession of the Land of Israel/Palestine is contested between Israelis and Palestinians, so the right to that land is contested between the two peoples, and for both sides, it is history that establishes that right, as if conferring a title deed to the country they both claim as their own. Israeli and Palestinian views of history, however, are so different as to be irreconcilable. This course explores this discrepancy, looking at the two peoples' narratives both on their own terms and in relation to one another. How is it, we will ask and answer throughout the course, that the central events in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are recounted and remembered so differently by the two sides? We will then look at the ways in which Israelis and Palestinians have enlisted history in the service of their cause to vindicate their own right to the land while impeaching that of the other claimant. Accordingly, we will consider the polemical and apologetic dimensions of the two narratives, as we analyze each narrative's omissions, emphases, distortions, trivializations, exaggerations, and appeals to pathos. It will be seen, from our inquiry in this course, that history itself is another battleground in the century-plus-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
201-2-20 Europe in the Modern World
Europe has held many different identities over the modern era: center of capital and welfare, home of imperialists and communists, instigator of devasting world wars and advocate for peaceful international relations. This course contextualize these shifting currents through a survey of major historical developments from the Age of Revolutions in the 1700s through economic integration in the 2000s. We’ll explore how some of these seemingly contradictory aspects of European politics and society emerged from big historical transformations, including revolutions, industrialization, imperialism, nationalism, war, and mass politics. We’ll also consider how people living across Europe may have experienced these transformations differently based on their gender, class, race, nationality, and faith.
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.
214-2-20 Intro to Asian American History
Introduction to the history of Asians in the United States, with a focus on their impact on American society as well as their experiences within the U.S.
How does our understanding of global history change when we foreground law and empire? To what extent have international legal regimes arisen out of imperial dynamics? Why were slavery and settler colonialism so important to so many constitutional histories? This course takes up these and other questions in order to make sense of the interplay between laws, empires, and corporate entities around the world over the last four centuries (circa 1600 to 2000). We will examine: 1) the origins and effects of mixed jurisdictions (or legal pluralism) in different regions; 2) the ways empires have shaped key concepts of sovereignty and citizenship; 3) the role of transnational corporations in bolstering imperial rule; 4) the roots of empire in the history of human rights and international law; 5) scientific versus legal definitions of racial identities and indigeneity; and 6) entanglements between cultural and intellectual property.
250-2-20 Global History: The Modern World
This course examines the rise of global structural interconnection during the modern era, 1750-present. Topics will include the Industrial Revolution; capitalist globalization and its critics; the rise of colonial imperialism and anticolonial independence movements; the socioeconomic roots of climate change; and human responses to rapid, destabilizing structural transformations.
253-0-20 Global History of Prisons and Camps
This course examines two institutions - the prison and the detention camp - that traditionally have been studied separately. At the course's foundation lies a hypothesis: the practice of imprisoning masses of people for extended periods of time is both a product of the modern state and a constituent element of the modern era. Every modern state has its own prison system to remove those it deems criminal from society. Over the past two centuries numerous regimes have resorted to detention camps in one form or another: to confine allegedly rebellious peoples, feared minorities, enemy soldiers, or stateless refugees. With varying degrees of brutality and murderous intent - a critical consideration the course will always keep in mind - those in power have used prisons and camps to suppress racial, religious, political, and other identified groups, and to exploit their labor for public and private use. Authorities have mandated that the condemned toil in confinement to pay a debt to society and for their own rehabilitation. Regardless of the great variety of pretexts under which regimes have imprisoned citizens and subjects, both modern structures of incarceration and the experience of the incarcerated bear a great number of similarities that this course will explore and discuss. The course begins with a consideration of alternate forms of punishment common to the premodern era and then follows the development and spread of the modern prison and the proliferation of mass detention camps across the globe over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will seek to understand the prisoner experience (to the extent possible) and discuss the place of bounded sites of detention in governance, justice, repression, societal relations, and, ultimately, tourism.
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.
263-0-20 Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World
The great witch trials of the early modern era peaked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, leading to the public executions of an estimated 40,000 individuals throughout Europe and North America. This course seeks to contextualize the witch trials within religious, cultural, social, and economic perspective, offering a multifaceted account of why Europeans turned on their neighbors - a large majority of them women - and accused them of fraternizing with the devil, poisoning livestock, brewing love potions, and consorting with grotesque familiars. Towards the end of the course, we will discuss how modern ideologies of witchcraft - in fairy tales, films, and politics - continue to draw upon these earlier European cultural and intellectual legacies. At a moment when the specter of the "witch hunt" has re-entered American political discourse and when women's bodies have become the subject of national debate, the era of the witch burnings offers unsettling parallels to our own society.
292-0-20 Deaths and Afterlives of Lumumba
201 days after taking office, Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the newly-independent Republic of the Congo, was assassinated with the support of mining interests and the US government. Lumumba quickly became a martyr and hero for many working for the liberation and advancement of African peoples. The course takes Lumumba as a window into the last 100 years of African history, including colonialism, decolonization, the Cold War, neocolonialism, civil and regional wars, the extraction of precious minerals, and the repatriation of art and artifacts. Students explore sources together and collaborate on research, producing one short piece of individual research.
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.
300-0-22: Indigenous Peoples and US Law
This course highlights the intricate relationship between Native nations and the U.S. legal system, with an emphasis on their status as sovereign nations, rather than simply racial or ethnic minorities. We will examine the historical development of tribal governments, U.S. laws and policies governing Indigenous affairs, Indigenous legal traditions, the European doctrine of discovery, diplomatic relations, treaty-making, and the constitutional foundations of federal Indian law. In addition, we will analyze key U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the growth of federal bureaucracy in Indian Country, the expansion of tribal authority in the 20th century, and municipal interactions with Native nations. The course will address contemporary relationships between Indigenous nations, federal and state governments, and the role of federal Indian law as both a colonial tool and a mechanism for Indigenous communities to protect their interests. Throughout the course, we will explore the legal and political challenges facing American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Indigenous peoples in U.S. Territories.
The Cold War spurred a decades-long rivalry between the US and the USSR to control the narrative of "great power" competition. Officials on each side promoted a vision of the other as the greatest threat to freedom and progress around the world, while casting their own side as the vanguard of prosperity and peace. Propaganda, espionage, "yellow" journalism, school curricula, and even hockey and ballet were enlisted in these efforts. In "Cold War Mirrors," we explore the story of the Cold War through these epoch-defining efforts to sway hearts and minds. From bluster, paranoia, kitsch, and sensationalism to more sophisticated critiques and theories, we will investigate how each side saw the other--and how each used the other as a mirror for reflection or distortion.
309-0-20 American Environmental History
This course will survey American history from the Colonial Era to the present with two premises in mind: that the natural world is not simply a passive background to human history but rather an active participant in historical change, and that human attitudes toward nature are both shaped by and in turn shape social, political, and economic behavior. The course will cover formal schools of thought about the natural world—from Transcendentalism to the conservation and environmental movements—but also discuss the many informal intersections of human activity and natural systems, from European colonialism to property regimes, migration and transportation, industry, consumer practices, war, technological innovation, political ideology, and food production.
337-0-22 History of Modern Europe
This course is concerned with the history of Europe between 1890 and c. 1990. Its emphasis will be on material and political developments, not cultural-intellectual ones. It assumes some prior knowledge of Europe, including its geography, ethnography, and a good prior knowledge and understanding of the political and social background of twentieth century in Europe.
The course will be based on two books, to be read in parallel: John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe, Fourth Edition (earlier editions are not acceptable) and Robert Paxton and Julie Hessler, Europe in the Twentieth Century (fifth ed.), denoted by P&H below. The course will cover the material in both books and class discussions will be based on them. Part of the assignment of this course is to come prepared to each class. The final exam will cover the entire reading as outlined below. In addition, there will be a 10-15 page paper due the first day of reading week in spring (see attached instructions sheets). Grades will be based on class participation, the paper, and the final exam.
341-0-20 Paris as World City: Capitalism and Desire
“By transforming love into romance, capitalist society allows us to continue desiring.” By structuring satisfaction as ever incomplete, capitalism propels us to seek “the new, the better, and the more,” writes film scholar Todd McGowan. Testing this contention on the “psychic costs of free markets,” this class will take students to mid-nineteenth century Paris, when the modern iconic city of romance, with its elegant bridges, wide boulevards, endless fashion displays, and vibrant café life, was created in the capitalist transformation of its physical space and social relationships. Based on readings from feminist and queer theory, urban geography, sociology, art history, literature, and social history, we will use these various perspectives to study our main laboratory: the massive urban renewal projects under Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire of Napoleon III that demolished the twisted winding streets of old Paris to build a modern capital city of commerce and leisure. Using three of Emile Zola’s novels on the “Haussmannization” of Paris, we will examine how changes in the physical structure altered the old connections between illicit sexualities and nonconforming gender practices. We will investigate how the new department stores, apartment buildings, the café-concerts, open-air promenades, and parks promoted bourgeois gender norms and sexual identities. In turn, we will ask how, with its new opportunities and deep losses, the moral economy of capitalism (its logic of production, profit taking, and social transactions) encouraged new subjectivities that ultimately reshaped both public and intimate spaces, as well as notions of pleasure and criminality. Most importantly, we will ask: what happened to love? The class combines lectures, in-class discussions, with short weekly assignments. With the guidance of the instructor, students will design and write a research paper (7 to 10 pages) reflecting on these topics.
345-3-20 Russia in the Age of Putin
This class explores the history of modern Russia from the end of the Soviet period through the “Age of Putin.” Special topics will include the decline and fall of the Soviet Union; the rise and rule of Putin; the emergence of Russia’s “oligarch” class; the wars in Ukraine, Chechnya, and the Caucasus; and Russia’s relations with the United States, the European Union, China, and Central Asia.
351-0-20 Europe in the Age of Total War 1789-1945
The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 created modern politics and thereby brought forth a new form of war: a total social mobilization on a previously unimaginable scale fought by mass armies of ordinary citizens in the name of the nation, its glory, and its survival. We will trace the social, political, and ethical implications of total war through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II, comparing these to the colonial wars of imperial conquest pursued by European states in the same period as extensions of the political claims of the nation on a global scale – wars whose practices in turn changed and intensified the conduct, scale, and human consequences of war in Europe itself.
374-0-20 The Arabian Peninsula Since The 18th Century
This course aims at introducing students to major themes in the modern history, politics and societies of the Arabian Peninsula—a land mass that comprises the seven states: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen. Although this subsection of the Middle East has long been neglected in academia, it is now an increasingly pivotal region. The first half of the course will concentrate on state formation and the political, economic, and ideological forces that shaped the Arabian Peninsula until the British withdrawal. The second half of the course will be more thematic and will address some of the most important challenges that the region has faced since the 1970s. Because of its undeniable geographic stature and economic influence, Saudi Arabia will receive particular attention throughout the quarter, though lectures and readings will cover other emirates of the Gulf as well as Yemen.
This class explores modern Chinese history from the Revolution of 1911 to the era of post-Mao reform (circa 2000). It is the story of China's turbulent effort to transform an empire into a modern nation-state that would allow China to accumulate "wealth and power" and "stand up." The course stresses both the Nationalist and Communist eras and will consider the disintegration of the Chinese polity into warlordism, Nationalist efforts to reestablish a viable state authority, the disastrous eight-year long War of Resistance against Japan, cooperation, conflict, and eventual civil war between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party, and the triumphs and tribulations of communist rule. We will explore such topics as the growth of modern urban mass culture, the development of new forms of artistic expression, attempts to ameliorate the status of Chinese women, revolutionary charisma and the effects of political campaigns, the economic and social effects of the Four Modernizations, and the place of the Patriotic Democratic Movement of 1989 in China's long tradition of intellectual and labor protest.
When people think of early modern India it it usually the fabled courts of the Mughal Empire, or monuments such as the Taj Mahal, or perhaps romantic portrayals of adventure and derring-do under the British Raj that capture their imagination. But beyond all the glitz and romance, the period from about 1500-1800 was also one of significant transformations in the social, cultural, and political life of the Indian subcontinent. This course will survey some of these developments, beginning with the integration of India’s multiple religious, literary, and visual cultures under the Mughal Empire’s ideology of “universal civility” (sulh-i kull). This policy included the welcoming of European merchants and missionaries who began arriving in the Indian subcontinent during the 16th century; but as Mughal power waned in the 18th century, it faced challenges not only from former client states and regional kingdoms that sought to fill its shoes, but also from the encounter with Europe, particularly the growing military and economic might of the British. And as the British role in India transitioned from one of mere traders to that of empire-builders with a so-called “civilizing mission,” they too would transform the culture and society of India in ways that continue to resonate in South Asian history and cultural memory today.
From the Regulators to Rambo, the vigilante has played a leading role in the history and culture of the United States. This seminar traces a long history of the American vigilante as a character, as well as episodes of vigilante violence from early America to the present. We will focus on the questions central to this history: What is the relationship between the vigilante and the state? Where can we draw distinctions between vigilantism, terrorism, and rebellion? How has the vigilante contributed to nation-building? We will also explore the predominance of the vigilante in popular culture, focusing on figures such as Jesse James, Dirty Harry, Machete, the Punisher, Superheroes, the movies of John Wayne, and the lyrics of Toby Keith. Students will write substantial final papers based on primary sources that explore one element of this discussion.
393-0-22 Voices of the Enslaved
The “slave narrative” usually brings to mind the published works of antebellum fugitive slaves like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and more recently Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave. But enslaved and formerly enslaved people created testimonials to their experiences in a variety of ways, and not only for publication. This course will explore the range of ways enslaved and formerly enslaved people provided or enabled written accounts of their lives in the 19th and 20th centuries—letters, interviews, published accounts, etc. We will also examine how the mainstream historical profession viewed those accounts, moving from skepticism in the early twentieth century, to cautious acceptance today. Are slave testimonials any more difficult to work with than other historical sources? What have literary scholars taught historians about using slave testimony?
393-0-24 Empires, Borderlands, and Nationalisms
What does ‘nationalism’ or ‘national belonging’ look like at the frontiers of a sovereign state instead of its political center? How have expressions of political authority and national belonging changed with global shifts from sovereign imperial polities to sovereign nation-states carved out of former empires? And how do shifts in state authority shape notions of belonging among imperial subjects and national citizens inhabiting frontier territories? This seminar is an opportunity to reflect on these complex and topical questions. We will adopt a historical and comparative approach to analyze frontier regions spread across South and Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and North America. In doing so, we will take border regions and peoples seriously, instead of dismissing them as ‘peripheries’ of imperial and national states. We will learn the stories of communities that inhabit such regions as they moved from imperial subjecthood to national citizenship—a process that happened more than once for some of them. Putting these stories in conversation with inherited cultural and scholarly knowledge about nationalism, we will discover what makes a region a borderland, and the extent to which frontiers are central to the formation and perpetuation of sovereign states.
393-0-26 Pirates and Prostitutes
The period from ca. 1750 to 1950 marked a time of turbulent change in Southeast Asia. European empires rose and fell; colonialism gave rise to nationalism; markets expanded and contracted; and social hierarchies crystallized and dissolved. While some actors aggregated economic and political power during this period others were marginalized or dispossessed. This seminar investigates the making of marginal peoples in Southeast Asia and gives particular attention to the role played by pirates and prostitutes in the history of the region. It also examines the ways in which such individuals influenced broader processes of change in the region, such as patterns of trade, state-making, and the rise of new political ideologies. This course is an upper-division seminar. Each week we will read works of scholarship that focus on the history of pirates or prostitutes in some part of Southeast Asia. While we will give attention to these works’ substantive claims, our main concern will be with the theories and methodologies that inform them. We will critically examine the theories of social structure and social change that explicitly or implicitly frame these works; the earlier works of scholarship that they engage with; the kinds of sources they draw upon; and the ways in which they analyze and use these sources to support an argument. Students will learn how to critically assess historical scholarship; survey the historical literature on a particular topic; prepare an annotated bibliography; and develop a sophisticated historiographical assessment of the scholarship on a particular marginal group in modern Southeast Asian history.
395-0-20 The Establishment and its Critics
395-0-24 The Historian's Craft 2
This is the second half of a two-quarter, application-only seminar that introduces students to the scholarly practices of the discipline of history. Students will pursue a self-directed research agenda in close consultation with their fellow Sanders Scholars. The seminar will scaffold the task of creating a research essay, incorporating abundant peer feedback and guidance. The goal is to create a powerful statement of one's powers as an independent analyst who can successfully design and complete an entirely new primary-source historical investigation and place it within meaningful historiographical context.
This is a full-year course for students writing a senior honors thesis in history. In the fall quarter, the class will meet as a seminar to discuss issues relating to the writing of history, how to organize a thesis, how to evaluate evidence, and the use of primary and secondary sources. In the winter quarter, students will finish researching their thesis and write a first draft. Then in the spring quarter, students will complete their thesis. Throughout the year, students will meet with their thesis advisers and the 398 seminar leader to work on proposals, outlines, and drafts, and to discuss their progress toward completion of their thesis. In order to graduate with honors in history, students must successfully complete their thesis and have it approved. However, it is possible for students to complete the three quarters of this course with respectable grades but not be awarded honors.
In this class, we will read first books by historians who have started tenure- track jobs at North American institutions over the past two decades, focusing on academic monographs published by university presses. We will analyze the structure of the books and the research underpinning them. We will ask what it is possible to accomplish in a first monograph, what distinguishes the genre from other types of history books, what the current expectations are for a first monograph in our discipline, and whether these expectations are reasonable or in need of revision.
Empires have been transformative forces in world history, setting historical processes in motion on a grand scale. Establishing and maintaining empires presented significant challenges, as these durable polities needed to exert authority over diverse populations and across vast distances, often competing for resources with other powers. This course delves into the intricate nature of sovereignty by examining the creation, dominance, persistence, and eventual decline of empires. Using a comparative approach, we will analyze the structures and trajectories of various empires, focusing on the adaptive strategies sovereigns and their administrations employed to secure and sustain control over resources and govern heterogeneous populations over extended periods. Unlike self-proclaimed homogeneous nation-states, empires maintained distinctions and hierarchies even as they incorporated new populations, whether by force or through other means. This course will scrutinize the central aspects of empires through recent scholarship on the Roman, Chinese, Xiongnu, Mongol, Ottoman, Mughal, Habsburg, Russian, and British empires. Additionally, the course aims to underscore the significance of a comparative approach as an essential part of the historian’s toolkit.
410-2-20 United States Field Seminar
This course is the second course in a three-course sequence designed for first-year doctoral students in United States history. Interested doctoral students from other fields/departments are also welcome. The class focuses on the United States in the nineteenth century and is intended to prepare students for later work as teachers and scholars. It is both historical and historiographical. That is, students are introduced to historical events and dynamics from the period, and they also explore changes in scholarly thinking concerning those issues. The course does not aim to "cover" all of nineteenth-century US history. Rather, we will sample a variety of different topics and hope to end the quarter with a better sense of the diversity and possibility of this field and its many subfields.
465-0-20 History Without Documents
What is the nature of non-documentary evidence for studying African and African Diaspora histories? What sources belong to non-documentary evidence? Why are they compelling, and what are the challenges involved in using them? What methodological and conceptual approaches are available for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting these sources and what are the other possibilities? What kinds of history can be and are being written with these sources? What new directions do they open for studying African and African Diaspora histories? How do they challenge, deviate from, and complement some of the conclusions reached by documentary sources? What roles do non-documentary sources play in the politics of historical knowledge and the meaning of the archive? We will answer these questions by reading and critiquing historical texts that derive their evidentiary base from archaeology, linguistics, rituals, landscape, material culture, orality, visual arts, biological sciences, and chemistry. Students will also carry out hands-on projects that curate any of these sources and use them to write historical narratives about African and African Diaspora experiences. Although the readings will focus only on African and African Diaspora case studies, students can write a final paper in their research area outside these two fields. However, they must use mostly non-documentary sources for the paper.
492-0-20 China and Southeast Asia
Why are China and Southeast Asia conventionally understood to exist on separate continents? Geographically, meteorologically, culturally, and economically they have shared common historical experiences. Their interrelations have proven to have been mutually transformative over time. Travelers, scholars, seafarers, nationalists, political organizers, and religious leaders who resided along the shores of Asia’s “Water Frontier” perceived that they lived in an interconnected world that was not bound by national borders. There is a large literature on the “Global South,” but little attention has been paid to the “Asian South” as a category of historical analysis. In this seminar, we will begin to conceptualize the Asian South as a “middle ground” of expanding colonial frontiers (including the Chinese and Japanese frontiers) and emerging nation-states as well as a maritime economy that was integral to the emergence of the modern world. We will mostly focus on the English-language scholarship that has been published in recent years on the Sino-Southeast Asian experience, but students will be afforded the time and opportunity to write a term paper on any subject that advances their personal intellectual agendas.
492-0-22 Pacific World
This seminar is designed to help graduates students prepare themselves for teaching history courses at a college level—not as T.A.s working under the guidance of someone else, but as professors responsible for every aspect of their own undergraduate classes. It will afford students the opportunity to engage with major questions that arise in teaching history, and to develop skills that they can apply later in their graduate careers or on the academic job market. Particular attention will be paid to designing syllabi whose contents serve the intended pedagogical purposes and performing the tasks of lecturing and leading seminars. Compared to other graduate seminars, this course will not be onerous: it meets only every two weeks (except at the beginning of the quarter, when we meet twice in a row on week 2 and week 3), and reading assignments are relatively short. This course is recommended for students to take in their third years.
570-1-20 Research Seminar in History