Department of History Courses
Course descriptions listed on this page for the Department of History are from the College Catalog. For more information on the courses offered during the fall and spring semesters, please log in to the course schedule through STAR.
100-level introductory surveys and topical courses are suitable for majors and non-majors. Survey courses offer students a broad overview of a continent, region, country, or people over several generations. Through lectures, discussions, reading, and writing, students learn to consider continuity and change over time by assessing and interpreting evidence. Whereas survey courses adopt a panoramic perspective, topical courses — labeled “Historical Themes” and some Montserrat courses — zoom in for a closer view. Instead of a single large textbook, students might read parts of several monographs and sources from the actual time period. Short writing assignments are augmented by considerable oral work, with discussions generally predominating over lectures.
200-level intermediate courses are suitable for majors and in many, but not all cases, non-majors. They place greater emphasis on concepts such as colonialism, nationalism, feminism, and post-modernism, or on the role of ideology, gender, race, ethnicity and class in history. They may also incorporate approaches that are more global, transnational, and comparative. Readings emphasize monographs, journal articles and primary sources. Some lectures, discussions, student-led oral presentations and debates consider questions of historical interpretation, theory and methodology. Writing assignments are fewer in number but of greater length and complexity than those at the introductory level.
300 and 400-level advanced courses are open to third- and fourth-year history majors who have taken HIST 200 The Historian's Craft. Non-majors with appropriate background may also enroll with the permission of the instructor. Admission to all 400-level courses is by permission only. 300-level courses delve deeply into a topic or area of history that students may have encountered previously in an introductory or intermediate course. Enrollment is limited to 16 students, in order to facilitate student engagement with the topic and active participation in class discussions, group research projects, and presentations of their research. Students have more opportunity for independence and initiative in shaping their papers and projects, including both historiographical papers and longer research papers that may employ primary sources. Courses at the 400 level include seminars (limited to 12 students), tutorials, and thesis preparation. Students are expected to produce a substantial paper as a final project and some form of oral presentation of the project at the end of the term. Success in 400-level courses relies on the student’s ability to take initiative in the research process by consulting regularly and meeting with the professor or thesis advisor
HIST 101 — Themes
An introduction to history as a mode of intellectual inquiry, this is an intensive reading, writing, and discussion course. Seeks to develop a critical awareness of history through an in-depth study of selected topics and themes. Emphasis is on student participation and the development of critical thinking. Readings involve some textual analysis and there are frequent short papers. Enrollment preference is given to first-year students. Only one Themes course may be applied toward the minimum of 10 courses needed for the major. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
HIST 111 — The Rise of the Christian West to A.D. 1000
Western history from the later Roman period to the formation of Europe in the 11th century. Covers political, religious, economic, social, artistic and legal developments in the fusion of Roman and Christian civilization, the disintegration of the Western Roman empire in the face of barbarian invasions, relations with the Byzantine Eastern Empire, the impact of Islam, rural and urban life, the Carolingian revival, and the impact of new peoples on the European scene. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 112 — Emerging Europe 1000-1500
The emergence of Europe in the 11th century to the era of the Renaissance. Covers political, religious, economic, social, artistic and legal developments in the formation of European states and territorial monarchy, European frontier expansion, urban growth, the evolution of Romanesque and Gothic styles, and the conflict of church and state. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 113 — Renaissance to Napoleon
Social, cultural, religious, economic, and political developments in Europe from the Renaissance to the fall of Napoleon. Special emphasis on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the evolution of monarchical power, the rise of European overseas empires, slavery, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Fulfills one of pre-modern/pre-industrial requirements for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 114 — Napoleon to the European Union
European history from the end of the French Revolution to the aftermath of the collapse of communism in Europe: industrialization, the rise of liberalism and nationalism, the revolutions of 1848, the creation of national states in Italy and Germany, evolution of a consumer culture, European imperialism in Asia and Africa, art and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, World War I, the rise of Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism, world War II, the history of the cold War, Western European integration, the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the formation and growth of the European Union.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 122 — Food, Power, & Environment
The story of the American food system Is fundamentally an environmental one. Over the past several centuries food production has evolved from a process that was bound by seasonal, regional, and other ecological limitations, to a highly industrialized and astoundingly productive system that defies these earlier limitations. For most Americans, food exists in the abstract. We find it at restaurants and in grocery stores with little sense of how it came from the earth and to our tables. Indeed, we expect to eat whatever we might desire regardless of what time of the year, which is an astoundingly new reality in the grand scope of human history!
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 126 — Colonial Latin America
Provides an introduction to Latin American history from pre-Columbian to the late 18th century, emphasizing native cultures, the conquest of the New World, the creation of colonial societies in the Americas, race, gender and class relations, the functioning of the imperial system, the formation of peasant communities, and the wars of independence. Fulfills one non-Western and one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 127 — Modern Latin America
Surveys the history of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America, focusing on six countries. Topics include the formation of nation-states, the role of the military, the challenges of development and modernization, the Catholic church and liberation theology, social and political movements for reform or revolution, slavery, race relations, the social history of workers and peasants, and inter-American relations. Fulfills one non-Western requirement for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 134 — Spirit Worlds: Early America
Early America was more than a world of Puritan, Quaker, Anglican, and Catholic (etc.) colonists pursuing a divine mandate to convert and prosper, only to explain their failures as the work of heathens. Indigenous cosmologies would certainly clash and intermingle with missionaries and settlers who sought to impose a Christian moral geography on the American landscape. Yet for all communities-colonizers and colonized-religion and spirituality were as messy as they are today. Theirs was a world of visions, wonders, witches, fits, trances, signs, apostates, and apostles. Babies popped up in their cribs and offered sage wisdom! Comets portended all sorts of things. And God(s) did not exactly smile on the rich...or the poor...or the virtuous. Most significantly, religious beliefs and practices played a central role in the creation of gender, racial, and class categories in the modernizing world. They infused these social hierarchies with a sense of timelessness, naturalness, and moral urgency that belied their inherently constructed and power-laden nature. But if those in power-the chosen, as often understood-sought to make these boundaries real in religious spaces and discourses, spirits and their real-life prophets could challenge these boundaries, both legitimizing and creating space for protest and liberation.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Fall
HIST 137 — American Slavery, American Freedom
Examines the intertwined origins and development of American slavery and American freedom, racial ideology and democracy, and the combustible interaction that created the central contradiction of antebellum America: a republican nation professing equality that was also an enormous slave holding society. Also examines the ways in which historians work and make arguments, and students will be asked to critically examine both primary and secondary documents.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 155 — World War II in East Asia
The regional and global wars in the 1930s and 1940s were in many ways crucial in the making of modem East Asia. The history and popular memory of these conflicts have continued to inform national self-understandings in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the relationships between these regions and the rest of the world, including the United States. This course provides a comprehensive examination of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45 and the Asia-Pacific War of 1941-45, focusing not only on political and military history, but also cultural developments and social changes in China, Japan, and the Japanese empire throughout Asia, as well as connections to the United States and the world during the global Second World War. Themes include imperialism and revolution, diplomacy and politics, refugees and environment, resistance and collaboration, labor and economy, race and gender, literature and arts, as well as postwar history and memory.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 196 — African Colonial Lives
This course analyzes the colonial experience of African people in sub-Saharan Africa, from the late 19th century and throughout the twentieth century. European colonialism in Africa transformed customs, traditions, and social organizations, introduced new boundaries between peoples and erased others through the institutionalization of racism and the creation of new ethnicities. The history, theory, and practice of colonialism (and neocolonialism) are presented in this course through historical documents, scholarly writing, literature, and film. The course also explores the long-term economic, psychological, and cultural effects and legacies of colonialism on the colonized.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 197 — Early Africa to 1800
Early African farmers and hunters, men and women, kings and queens, commoners and slaves long stood at the center - not the margins -- of global change. From the rise of agriculture to the culmination of the slave trades, Africans actively borrowed ideas, technologies, and foods, guns, and other goods from Asian and European(strangers). But they profoundly influenced these strangers as well, contributing their innovative ideas,technologies, cultural expressions, and wealth. Through close study of oral traditions, epics, archaeological data,food, autobiography, and film, we will investigate early Africans' global connections. Environment plays an important role in our study; we explore the ways that Africans creatively adapted to, manipulated, and altered the continent's diverse environments, and how choices shaped the kinds of societies in which they lived. By immersing ourselves in Africa's early history, we will also begin to understand and to critique how and why contemporary western media has come to portray Africans as (marginal) to global change. This course begins its study of global connections when the climatic changes that contributed to the rise of agriculture (after 20000 BCE), and it concludes in the late-eighteenth century, following the period of Africa's most intensive exports of slaves.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 198 — Modern Africa Since 1800
A survey of Africa's complex colonial past, examining dominant ideas about colonial Africa and Africans' experiences during colonialism, including important historical debates on Africa's colonial past and the legacy of colonialism; pre-colonial Africa's place in the global world; resistance and response to the imposition and entrenchment of colonialism; and the nature of colonial rule as revealed in economic (under) development, ethnicity and conflict, and the environment.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 200 — The Historian's Craft
An introduction to historical methods and to historiography--that is, how history is written and interpreted, and how the discipline or a topic within it has evolved. Students examine how historians formulate questions or lines of inquiry, how to locate and read primary sources, how to use secondary sources, how to develop research topics that are incisive and focused, and how to organize and present one's research in oral and written form. Required of all history majors. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
HIST 202 — Amer in the Age of Revolutions
The American Revolution and independence in the context of Anglo-American ideas and institutions. Special emphasis: imperial reorganization after the Seven Years' War; colonial resistance and loyalty; revolutionary ideology; social and political consequences of the Revolution; Confederation and Constitution; political parties under Washington, Adams, and Jefferson; and impact of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars on the U.S. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 203 — Slavery, Industry, Empire 1815-60
This course analyzes developments in economy, polity, and society in the United States from 1815 to 1860. In the early republic and antebellum periods, the United States formed part and parcel of the Age of Revolutions across the Atlantic worldthe Haitian Revolution and French Revolution, slave revolts and gradual emancipation in the British Caribbean colonies, and the Revolutions of 1848 throughout continental Europe. We will address crucial junctures and core themes such as the expansion of slavery westward into the Deep South, struggles over the Second Bank of the United States, the removal of Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples across the Mississippi, transport and communication revolutions, industrialization and the advent of wage labor, the U.S.-Mexican War, realignments in party politics, Irish and German immigration, and the coming of the Civil War.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 204 — Civil War and Reconstruction
American life and politics from the Civil War to the end of Reconstruction. Emphasizes Lincoln's leadership and vision, the proximate causes and military progress of the civil War, "Reconstruction" of the former Confederate states, and the evolution of the 14th and 15th Amendments as protectors of civil rights.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 205 — United States in the 20th Century 1
Examines the major political, economic, social and cultural forces that contributed to the modernizing of America. Special emphasis on: industrialization and Empire; the impact of racial, gender, class and ethnic struggles for justice with a democratic republic; "Americanism"; the expanding role of the government in the lives of its citizens; labor and capitalism; popular and consumer culture; war and homefront.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 206 — US in 20C II 1945-Present
Examines the major political, economic, social and cultural forces of the post-WWII era. Special topics include: Reorganizing the post-war world; McCarthyism; consumer and youth culture; the Civil Rights Movement; the New Left and the Vietnam War; the women's movements; Watergate and the resurgent Right; and post-Cold War America.
Prerequisite: Students who have taken HIST 101-Themes "US Social Movements" and "American Social Movements" are unable to enroll in this course. Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 209 — Hamilton's America
From the growth of a globally connected system of trade and the entrenchment of plantation slavery, to the inklings of revolution and the genesis of a wholly new form of government, Alexander Hamiltons America was a contested time and place. It was certainly much messier than John Trumbulls iconic painting that hangs in the Capitol rotunda, The Declaration of Independence, would have us believe. In this class, we will explore songs from the smash hit musical, Hamilton, as a way to help understand the tumultuous emergence of the United States and consider the role of the arts in representing history.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 210 — Early American Lives
This course will explore the history of Early America through biography. We will look at the lives of a range of individuals from Columbus to Betsy Ross, and from Thomas Jefferson to Sacagawea, as we cover themes such as exploration, colonization, Native American responses, the rise of race slavery, the American Revolution, the formation of American democratic thought, and Euro-American expansion. The course will focus on social developments, conflicting political and economic visions, and tensions between ideals and realities. We will begin in the pre-Columbian era and end in the early national period with the expedition of Lewis and Clark into the American West.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Fall
HIST 212 — Hist of Capitalism: US & World
This course will explore the history of capitalism from the Atlantic plantation economy of the early modern period to the global supply chains, distribution networks, and financial circuits of today. With an eye toward the shifting sources of power for groups and individuals in the United States, we will focus on regimes of free and unfree labor; developments in banking, insurance, and finance; shifting legal interpretations of contract and corporation; the concentration of capital and mass production; the rise and fall of organized labor; transformations in modes of consumption and retail; the making and unmaking of the welfare state; and the dynamics of race and space in American capitalism. We will examine the works of major economic thinkers alongside fundamental changes within the local, state, regional, national, and transnational institutions shaping American capitalism.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 223 — Radicalism in America
Americans recognize that we live in a profoundly different nation than that which was created out of the American Revolution. Citizenship, itself, has changed. Civil society has been expanded such that we feel quite confident in our belief that the United States today is a fairer and more just nation in relation to the status of women, African Americans, and working people. We might account for these changes in various ways--the genius of the Founding Fathers, the general prosperity of the nation, even the feeling that "things" just always get better over time. This course is based on the idea that these changes have been the result of human effort, and that the efforts of American radicals have been essential to the rise of the American democracy. It examines the thought and action of radicals of various stripe and means, from Tom Paine to Martin King, from the brutal war on American slavery attempted by Nat Turner and John Brown, to the more genteel fight against patriarchy waged by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and look closely at the various efforts of Wobblies, Syndicalists, and Reds to advance the cause of industrial democracy.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 224 — Catholicism In The United States
A historical examination of the development of the Catholic Church and its people in the U.S. Particular attention devoted to issues of church and society as they have developed since the 19th century.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies, Studies in Religion
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 225 — Th Civil Rights Movement
Provides an in-depth study of the civil rights movement from its origins in Jim Crow America to its stirrings in the 1950s, through to the heights of its successes in the mid-1960s and its dissolution thereafter. Assesses its legacy and consequence in the 1970s and afterward. Special attention is paid to the way in which the movement worked within and challenged consensus notions about progress and "the Negro's place" in America and also to the movement as an ideological problem for Americans and activists like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others. Also examines the ways in which historians work and make arguments, and students are asked to critically examine both primary and secondary documents. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 226 — Irish American Experience
Examines the historical experience of the Irish, one of the largest ethnic groups in America. The Irish in America have left an indelible mark on the nation's economy, politics, and culture, while at the same time they have been shaped by their adoptive country. Among the topics addressed: colonial era immigration, the Famine, changes in ethnic identity, class conflict and the labor movement, the Catholic Church, machine politics and political affiliations, culture and the arts, nationalism and the fight for Irish freedom, upward mobility and the quest for respectability, relations with other ethnic and racial groups.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 229 — The Asian American Experience
This course presents a survey of Asian American history from the mid-19th century to the present, a period marked by multiple waves of immigration, imperialism, world wars, and social revolutions across the pacific. The course aims to place contemporary issues of Asian American identity, cultural belonging, politics, and social justice in historical and transnational perspective. Major themes will include the experience of immigration and the formation of enclaves, the legacy of settler colonialism and imperialism, racism and relations with ethnic groups, labor and social mobility, negotiations over identity and cultural production, the role of Asian Americans in social movements and political activism, as well as the influence of global politics and transpacific networks.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 232 — Medieval Lives
Course explores personal expressions of the intersection of faith and action. These works deal with the most basic questions of morality and ethics, and expand our understanding of the variety of rhetorical methods by which to communicate such issues. The readings include works of writers from many walks of life: saints such as Augustine and Joan; sinners like Abelard and Heloise, a king of Reconquest Spain; and a variety of folk in between: a Frankish noblewoman worried about her son, an Arab gentleman observing the crusaders' conquest of his country, a monk recalling his childhood, a young woman escaping an arranged marriage for a life of contemplation and prayer.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Fall
HIST 236 — Renaissance Europe
Surveys the significant intellectual, cultural, social, and political developments across Europe, beginning with the social and economic structures of family life during the early Italian Renaissance, continuing with the political and artistic expressions of the Italian city-states, and tracing the spread of Renaissance influences to northern Europe through the early 16th century. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Fall
HIST 237 — The Reformation
This course will treat the transformation of Christianity in Europe from c. 1500 to 1650, when unified body of believers loyal to the Roman Church split into several different religious communities. We cover the transformation of Catholic traditions of the medieval period under the influence of print culture and ever-stronger calls for institutional change. We will then tum to Martin Luther's protests against the Church's indulgences that eventually fractured the Holy Roman Empire. Next, we will consider religious violence during the Reformation, and, concomitantly, how such disputes over belief changed views on political authority in Europe. Subsequently, we will take a short tour of Europe, treating the differing Reform contexts in France, England, and the Netherlands, while also discussing the distinctive ways that women shaped this movement. Finally, we will cover the Counter-Reformation, discovering how-through focused reform initiatives- the majority of Europe actually remained Catholic during this period.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 241 — French Rebels & Revolutionaries
From the Revolution of 1789, which gave birth to the nation, to human rights and to citizenship, to the creation of the European Union in the 1990s, France has been at the center of European culture. Paris was rebuilt in the late 19th century as "the capital of Europe," a center of artistic modernism as well as an expanding global empire. During three wars with Germany between 1870 and 1945, the French suffered the devastating effects of total war on their own soil. France played a crucial role in the creation of the European Union but was forced to adapt to becoming a diminishing power in the world since World War II. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 242 — British Soc & Empire 1763-1901
By the end of the Seven Years War (1756-1763), Britain had emerged as a genuine world power, with holdings larger and richer than any other in the Western world. During the next 150 years, Britain would eclipse its European rivals in industry, trade, and sea power. At the height of its power in the late 19th century, Britain controlled one quarter of the world's population and one-fifth of its land surface. This course surveys the history of Britain and its empire from the late 18th century to the turn of the 20th century. This course rethinks certain familiar topics in British history by considering the intersections between home and empire and by highlighting how imperial considerations influenced Britain's social formation. Topics include the slave trade and slavery, rise of capitalism, industrialization and consumer culture, political reform movements (e.g., anti-slavery, Chartism, and Irish Hone Rule), imperialism, religion, and British identity.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 243 — Britain & Empire since 1901
In this course, we will focus our attention on the social, economic, cultural and political transformations within Britain and its empire over the course of the twentieth century. This course recognizes that the experience of empire is not merely about the impact of the British overseas, but rather also about the relationship, often unequal and hierarchical, between Britain and its colonies. This course rethinks certain familiar topics in British history by considering the intersections between home and empire and by highlighting how imperial considerations influenced Britain's social formation. The aim in this course will be to foreground the ways in which imperialism was constitutive of much of the domestic history of Britain from 1901 to 2019, even after Britain lost most of its colonies. During the course we will focus on Britain's declining role as a world and imperial power and interrogate the meaning of Britain's national and imperial identities, particularly in the wake of Brexit referendum and Brexit. A good deal of attention will be devoted to a discussion of the two World Wars with analysis of their economic, social, and ideological repercussions within Britain and its empire.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 244 — Medicine, Health, and Empire
The coronavirus pandemic has brought heightened awareness of the close links between medicine and political and economic interests. As we will discover, such a relationship has a long legacy. From the early days of European colonial expansion, matters of health and sickness were central concerns of agents of empire. As a result, medicine was often mobilized to promote the physical and psychological well-being of Europeans in colonial settings, thereby assisting in the proliferation of European influence and territorial predominance. Medicine was intimately entwined with imperialism.In this course, we will explore the interrelations of medicine and empire across a range of contexts including the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Our investigation will focus on the following overarching themes: 1) doctors as agents of imperial influence and medicine as an instrument of empire, facilitating imperial expansion through the treatment of soldiers, administrators, settlers, and local populations; 2) medicines role in the pathologization of the colonial subject and in the construction of difference between Europeans and the colonized other; 3) the involvement of public health policies in the management, control, and surveillance of colonial subjects; and 4) the ways in which nineteenth and twentieth century medical research was shaped by colonialism and empire. Further, this course will examine the role of imperialism and modern technologies in the spread of sickness and ill health, challenging triumphalist narratives of globalization and modernity. It will also address local or indigenous responses to colonial medical and public health practices. This course focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but will also examine earlier periods and draw parallels to our contemporary moment.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually Fall
HIST 245 — Imperial Russia/East & West
At its height, the empire of tsarist Russia stretched across one-sixth of the globe, running from Germany to the Pacific Ocean and bordering regions as disparate as Sweden, China, and Iran. Ever preoccupied with their country's amorphous position between Europe and Asia, Russians have struggled for centuries to define how their vast homeland should modernize and what models of development it should follow. This course examines debates about Russian identity and the relationship of Imperial Russia to "East" and "West" that raged from the time of Peter the Great in 1682 to the outbreak of World War One in 1914. Important issues over the course of the semester include serfdom and emancipation; terrorism and the ethics of resistance against authoritarian power; conflicts over the relative merits of capitalism, liberalism, and socialism; strategies for managing a multi-ethnic empire; and theories of revolutionary vs. evolutionary change. Readings draw on works of Russian literature as well as a variety of other political and cultural sources.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 247 — Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East
Middle Eastern women and sexual minorities are often imagined in the West as oppressed, voiceless and subdued by religion, traditional patriarchal society and the authoritarian state. This course will challenge these notions, focusing instead on the lived experiences of men and women in the Middle East and North Africa, examining the historical construction of complex and intersecting identities and peoples understanding of gender and sexual difference. Additionally, we will also interrogate what is politically at stake by framing our understanding of the region in gendered terms or by claiming Muslim women are inherently oppressed and therefore need our intervention on their behalf. Among the themes this course explores are the changing Islamic understandings of sexuality and gender roles, the ways in which both colonial modernity and the emerging nation-state profoundly transformed gender relations, as well as new Islamic sensibilities and their implications for the constructions of gender.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Fall
HIST 253 — Soviet Experiment
This course traces the cataclysmic history of the USSR from its unpredictable beginnings amid the chaos of the First World War, to its consolidation as a giant Communist power, to its surprise disintegration in 1991. It explores the project of socialist revolution and the violent efforts of leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin to transform an agrarian Russian Imperial Empire into an industrialized Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, abolish private property, and create an egalitarian, atheist, non-capitalist state. We look at the hopes and fears the Revolution inspired, the mechanisms of power in Soviet dictatorship, the practice of repression, and the struggles of everyday life. We pay particular attention to the Soviet experience of the monumental Second World War against Nazi Germany and to the wars aftermath, including the onset of superpower struggle with the US. Attentive to the politics of memory, we consider how WWII and the Cold War are remembered in Vladimir Putins Russia of today.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 254 — The Soviet Union After Stalin
This course examines the Soviet dictatorship from the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 to the sudden, surprise dissolution of the USSR in 1991. While it delves into some of the "high politics" of the era - a narrative shaped by major figures such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Mikhail Gorbachev - it also explores social and cultural tensions. What led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? What did Soviet citizens think about the world in which they lived and the relationship of their world to that of the West? How did the USSR experience the 1960s? Topics include destalinization, the Space Race, Soviet and U.S. competition in the Third World, resistance movements in Eastern Europe, the roles of science, surveillance, and secrecy in Soviet culture, the rise of the black market, problems of bureaucratic corruption and socialist legality, the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, and the peaceful revolutions of 1989. Above all, this class considers why Soviet leaders failed in various post-1953 attempts to reform their country's political and economic system. What can the fate of the Soviet Union teach us about ideology and dictatorship, and what kind of legacy has the Soviet era has left on Russia today?
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 255 — Eur:Mass Polit/Tot War 1890-1945
From the high point of European global power and cultural influence, Europe moved into an era of world war, popular millenarian ideologies, dictatorships, and unprecedented mass murder. This course examines the origins, evolution, and impact of the modern European ideological dictatorships, from the cultural ferment and socioeconomic change that characterized the pre-1914 "belle époque" through the two world wars. Topics include: modern art; liberalism and its discontents; the origins and nature of World War I; the Russian revolutions; the Versailles peace settlement; the struggling interwar democracies; the economic crises; communism and fascism; the Italian, German, and Soviet dictatorships; the Spanish Civil War; and the origins of World War II.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 256 — Europe & Superpowers:1939-1991
Postwar Europe was shaped in part by four major influences: the clash between Western liberalism and Soviet communism; the withdrawal from overseas empires; the effort to come to terms with the legacy of world war; and the creation of integrative European institutions. Concentrating on Europe, this course examines reciprocal influences between the Europeans and the two peripheral superpowers (USA and USSR) of the Atlantic community. Topics include: World War II, the Holocaust, science and government, the Cold War, the division of Europe, the revival and reinforcement of western European democracy, de-Nazification, Christian democracy, the economic miracle, European integration, the strains of decolonization, the rise of Khrushchev, the Berlin crises, De Gaulle and his vision, protest and social change in the sixties, the Prague Spring, Ostpolitik and détente, the oil shocks, the Cold War refreeze, the Eastern European dissidents, the environmental movement, Gorbachev's reforms, and the collapse of communism. One unit.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 258 — Nature, Culture, and Power in Global History, 1500-1850
From the Scientific Revolution to the origins of industry based on fossil fuel, the early modern period has long been understood as a time of transformation in humans relationship to the natural world. Yet such changes were not limited to Europe alone, but involved every part of the world. This course explores the global history of how people have understood, interacted with, and reshaped nature from the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas around 1500 up to the mid-nineteenth century. Key topics include the role of European colonialism and interactions with indigenous people in the development of science and environmental thought, global systems of categorizing and cataloguing nature, and changing approaches towards natural resources at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually Fall
HIST 260 — Wicked Women and Proud Patriarchs: Gender & Sexuality in Colonial Latin America
Understandings of gender and sexuality shaped social relations and the nature of colonial society in Latin America. In 1521, an Indigenous woman named Malintzin served as an interpreter for Hernán Cortés and helped topple the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. Over the following century, Black and mixed-race women in Guatemala were hauled before the Inquisition to confess to using sexualized magic to ensnare or harm lovers. Enslaved African women in Peru struggled for emancipation, gaining freedom by degrees by navigating legal and extralegal systems. These case studies allow us to analyze what gender, sex, and sexuality meant across time and space in colonial Latin America. This course encompasses Spanish and Portuguese settlements throughout the Americas from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, beginning with the century prior to European conquest efforts and ending with the close of the colonial period. We will examine gender roles among Indigenous communities in the pre-Columbian era, the sexual politics of conquest and colonization, the gendered dimensions of the transatlantic slave trade, and the nuances of daily life in colonial settlements. Over the course of the semester, we will address how gender and sexuality intersect with other markers that shaped peoples lives: race, ethnicity, class, and status as free versus enslaved. Students will engage with a wide variety of sources including Indigenous codices, European conquerors chronicles, Inquisition records, love letters, and slave ship registers. I have invited specialists in the field to join the class via Zoom on select days to discuss their research and its relationship to course themes. Students will grapple with a series of questions: How did people think about gender roles, sex, and social relations? How can we use gender and sexuality as lenses for examining the lives of marginalized historical figures? Which gender and sexual norms are particular to specific places, times, and groups of people? Which ones carry over into the present?
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Fall
HIST 261 — Germany in Age of Nationalism
Late to unify, late to industrialize, and late to acquire democratic institutions, Germany had to cope with all three processes at once, with tragic consequences for human rights and international order. This course analyzes the development of German nation-building from the time of Metternich, through the age of Bismarck and the Kaisers, to the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. We explore the trends and circumstances in German and European history that came together to produce Nazism. But we also explore the presence of diversity, the alternative pathways, and the democratic potential in pre-Nazi German history. Topics include religious tension and prejudice (Catholics, Protestants, and Jews), Prusso-Austrian duality, the German confederation, the revolution of 1848, German national liberalism, Bismarck's unification and its legacy, imperial Germany under the Kaisers, German socialism, World War I, the revolution of 1918, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazis.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 262 — Germany:Dictatorship/Democracy
In Western Germany after World War II, a people that once had followed Hitler now produced perhaps the most stable democracy in Europe. At the same time, eastern Germans lived under a communist dictatorship that lasted more than three times as long as Hitler's. What is the place of the two postwar Germanies in the broader context of German and European history? To what degree were the two German states a product of their shared past, and to what degree were they products of the Cold War? What are the implications for reunified Germany? This course explores these questions by examining the history of democracy, dictatorship, political ideology, and social change in modern Germany. Topics include: Marx as a German; liberalism, socialism, communism, and political Catholicism in pre-Nazi Germany; popular attitudes toward Nazism; the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust; the Allied occupation; de-Nazification, the Cold War, and the partition of Germany; Christian Democracy and Social Democracy; the Adenauer era, the Berlin crises, and the economic miracle; German-German relations and the Ostpolitik of Chancellor Willy Brandt; protest politics, Euromissiles, and the Green movement; the development and collapse of East Germany; and Germany since reunification.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 263 — Work, Culture, and Power in U.S. History
This course examines the history of labor and working people in the United States from the colonial period to the present. It explores the diversity of work and working-class experiences, the history of labor movements, labor conflicts, and the larger processes of social, economic, and political change that have affected work and workers. While work and organized labor receive central attention, the course gives equal consideration to the comparative dimensions of class and cultural identity, race and gender, immigration and ethnicity, family and community. How, for example, do race and gender inequalities shape the labor market, peoples access to particular types of work, how much they get paid, and their experience in both the workplace and the labor movement? In exploring these questions, we will examine theories that try to understand why, how, and to what extent inequalities persist or change over time. We will also work to improve our skills in critical reading and writing. Lectures, readings, videos, and discussion explore the actions, opinions, identities, and experiences of diverse people.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 271 — The Indians' New World: Native American History 1
This course is a survey of Native American history from the pre-Columbian era through the mid-19th century. Many people have much to "unlearn" about Native American history before true learning can take place. What assumptions do many Americans have about Native history? Where to Native Americans appear in our national and local narratives, where are they absent, and why? What was life like in North America 500 years ago? How did Native Americans react and relate to various forms of European settler colonialism? We cannot make broad generalizations about Indian experiences; how do particularities of sex, age, and geographical location demonstrate diverse experiences among Native Americans? These are some of the questions we will consider as we explore themes such as trade, work, war, disease, gender and religion, in early North America. The course begins by looking at theories of origin and life in North America before 1492. It ends with forced "removals" of the mid-19th century.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 272 — Native American History II
A survey of Native American history from the 19th-century Plains Wars to the present. Because of the complexity, diversity, historical depth, and geographic scope of North American Indian societies, this course seeks to provide a general framework, complemented by several case studies, through an approach that is both chronological and thematic. Among the topics addressed are the development and implementation of U.S. federal policies toward Indian peoples; Indian resistance and activism; definitions and practices of sovereignty; and cultural attitudes toward Indians in American society. Considers Native Americans not as victims, but as historical, political, economic, and cultural actors who resourcefully adjusted, resisted, and accommodated to the changing realities of life in North America and continue to do so in the 21st century.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 275 — U.S. Mexican Border
This course examines the history and culture of the region encompassing the modern American southwest and Mexican north from Spanish imperialism to modern immigration debates. Particular attention is paid to the interaction of Native, Latinx, and Anglo American societies in creating unique borderlands society through the present day. This history offers important insight into processes of religious conflict, political revolution, economic dependency and globalization through Latin American and U.S. history.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 276 — Historically Speaking
This course examines the history of several pivotal late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century events through the lens of rhetoric and various modes of public oral communication (such as major speeches, interviews rap, spoken performance, etc.). Case studies include the Modern Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements, the HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 pandemics, and the Wars on Drugs/Crime/Terror and extend over several decades in order to provide students with rich opportunities to examine evolving historical contexts and rhetorical choices. In addition to learning historical content, students will develop their speech-writing and oral presentation and critical oral feedback skills. By semesters end, students will have a greater ability to unpack critically the strategies and meanings of major public speaking moments as well as an increased comfort with how to prepare and present their own ideas in oral form.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 277 — Afro-Latin America
This course examines the African Diaspora in Latin America from the aftermath of slavery to the present. We will study the struggles of Afro-Latin America in establishing citizenship and a dignified existence, emphasizing topics such as: liberation movements; gender and racial politics; art; African religions in the Americas; national policies of whitening; and Afro-centric ideologies of the Caribbean. The course extensively uses music as both art and historical text.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 278 — Raza e Identidad
Este curso examina los orígenes y el desarrollo de las identidades raciales y nacionales en el Caribe, enfocando en el caso de la República Dominicana, pero partiendo desde un marco trasnacional e histórico. Estudiaremos muchos de los fenómenos socio-históricos que han formado el país: el colonialismo español, la revolución haitiana, el imperio azucarero estadounidense, y la Alianza para el Progreso entre otros. También, prestaremos atención a las migraciones entre países caribeños y cómo influencian las identidades raciales y nacionales.
Prerequisite: One 300 level Spanish course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Spring
HIST 279 — America's Colony: Puerto Rico since 1898
This course analyzes the history of Puerto Ricans from the moment their island became a US territory in 1898 to the present. It analyzes the political status of the island and the cultural, economic and social world of Puerto Ricans both in the island and the mainland United States. The course also highlights how Puerto Ricans have shaped and/or undermined US colonialism.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
HIST 280 — Modern India
This course takes us on an intellectual journey through India's past and present. The course begins with important vignettes of Indian society, culture, and politics prior to the arrival of the British. We will examine how and why various facets of Indian society, namely: economic, legal, religious, and gender relations underwent radical transformation during the British rule. In the second segment of the course, we will study the causes and consequences of the Indian struggle for Independence that ended the British rule, but also led to a violent partition of India in 1947. The third segment of the course will look at some key individuals who sought to implement differing visions of India in the post-colonial era. By following the stories of the historical actors, events, and ideas we will seek to understand how colonial legacy, caste and gender relations, political corruption, and religious fundamentalism have shaped the contemporary Indian society.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
HIST 281 — Imperial China
This course presents an overview of Chinese history from the Neolithic period to around 1800. Themes include the emergence of Confucian thought as well as other philosophies and religions; the establishment of bureaucratic empires and evolving state-society relations; war, diplomacy, and trade between various Chinese states and their Inner Asian and East Asian neighbors as well as Western nations; the features of an elaborate literary and artistic tradition; shifts in gender relations; and the internal rebellions and early reform efforts as the last Chinese empire drew to its close.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 282 — Modern China
This course presents a survey of Chinese history from 1800 to the present, a period marked by multiple reforms, rebellions, revolutions, and wars as China transformed from an empire to a modern nation-state in search of a coherent identity and a new global role. Major themes will include shifting state-society relations; cultural and intellectual movements; responses to imperialism and modes of nationalism; war and revolution; industrialization and urbanization; changing gender relations; evolving ethnic tensions; scientific culture and environmental challenges; as well as the legacy of history, reform, and revolution in the contemporary era.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 286 — Modern Japan
This class traverses the stunning transformations of Japanese society between 1850 and the present day. The course begins with the birth of the modern Japanese nation-state amidst internal revolution and international pressure from the great powers of the day. In the years that followed, Japan quickly emerged as the worlds first non-Western society to undergo a modern industrial revolution and as an expansionist empire on the world stage. Japan imposed a massive empire in Asia only to lose it in infamy in the Second World War. In the post-World War II decades, Japan rivaled the US as an economic and technological power, yet still grapples today with the environmental, social, and cultural legacies of its rapid transformations. Through the twists and turns of Japanese history, this course interrogates broad questions about global struggles with empire and colonialism, economic change, and social conflict.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 291 — Making Modrn MidEast 19th Century
The nineteenth century was a time of profound change in the region we today call the Middle East. Over the course of the 1800s, European powers began to encroach on the Ottoman and Qajar empires, exerting informal imperial influence as well as actively seizing and administering Ottoman and Qajar territories. During this period, the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, and a semi-independent Egypt carried out a series of reforms in a bid to push back against European interference in their domestic affairs and ensure their territorial integrity. This course explores the transformations that colonial intrusions and local reforms engendered and their consequences for the peoples of the region in the build up to the First World War. In doing so, it aims to challenge overarching teleological, Orientalist, and historicist perspectives on the region as well as long-standing narratives about Ottoman decline, Oriental despotism, and eternal and inherent sectarianism in the Middle East. The three main themes of this course are imperialism, anti-imperialism, and reform.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually Fall
HIST 292 — Making of the Mod Mid East II
This course examines the cultural and political history of the Middle East (Egypt, the Levant, Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and the Gulf States) from World War II until the recent Arab Uprisings. Through literature and film, the course highlights the major trends and themes in the history of the region including the effects of European imperialism and the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, the birth of the oil economy, the rise of political Islam, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the U.S. led invasions of Iraq, and most recently, the Arab Uprisings and the rise of ISIS.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 293 — Ottoman Empire 1/1300-1600
In the mid-16th century, all of Europe feared the power of the "Grand Turk," whose empire stretched from Baghdad to Budapest and from the Adriatic to the ports of the Red Sea. Its population was made up of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Kurds, Serbs and Bosnians, to name a few. This course surveys the emergence of this demographically diverse and geographically vast Ottoman state from a small frontier principality into a world empire in its social, political and cultural contexts. Fulfills one non-Western requirement and one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 296 — South Africa & Apartheid
South Africa's past is a painful history of deep racial discrimination, racialized violence, and segregation. But it is also a history of human resilience and the struggle for equality. This resilience is exemplified by the participation of women and men from diverse racial and social backgrounds, who struggled to end the racist policies of apartheid in South Africa. A course such as this one therefore draws students to debate some of the most important philosophies of an engaged Jesuit education, including a deep commitment to the well-being of the human community and the pursuit of a more just society. In dealing with the many controversies that mark South African history, students will develop their abilities to think critically and logically via weekly journal responses to course readings.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 297 — History of Disease and Healing
Experiences of disease and healing, as Covid-19 has shown, are inseparable from social, political, economic, and environmental circumstances. Taking a global historical approach, this course examines diverse human diseases (malaria, pellagra, influenza, HIV/AIDS) and one livestock disease (rinderpest) to better understand these circumstances. Two general inquiries will guide our studies: 1) How have varied social groups such as rich and poor and men and women experienced disease and healing across time and space? 2) How have research, policies, and treatments been produced and circulated? We will explore different places and time periods, from malaria in the earliest human communities to rinderpest in 1890s Africa to the global AIDS pandemic. Materials include historical scholarship, medical and scientific reports, literature, and film.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 298 — Asian Revolutions
This course will engage the numerous revolutions that proliferated throughout the 20th century in the region we identify as Asia. Engaging with recent scholarly work that addresses the global nature of revolutions in Asia, it aims to break down and interrogate organizing principles of nation and region. Students will be challenged to situate the lives and careers of Asian revolutionaries into a transnational context in which they were active participants and shapers of revolution, both as practice and concept. Themes include empire, colonialism, revolution, war, and memory.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 299-F03 — Filming Revolution in 20th Century Asia
A vast number of the countries that dot contemporary maps of Asia are the inheritors of the regions twentieth-century revolutions. So, how do these revolutionary states and their peoples remember their revolutions? Interrogating film, we will probe the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual legacies of Asia's revolutions. How are these revolutions remembered? How are they forgotten? What importance do they have to vastly changed societies today? Together, by interrogating films from China, Vietnam, India, and elsewhere, we will ask what revolution means across Asia today.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-F14 — History of Global Slavery
This course introduces students both to historical and ongoing systems of slavery. Topics will include concepts of forced labor in Greece/Rome, medieval European servitude, the early modern slave trades impact upon African and Indigenous American populations, slavery and abolition in the age of Revolutions, mid-19th century slave narratives, Comfort Women during the Second World War, and late-20th/21st century global sex trafficking. Assignments include a series of short essays, a longer essay, and a movie review essay.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-S04 — Indian Nationalism, the British Empire, and Gandhi
Time magazine compared Gandhi to influential twentieth-century figures like FDR and Albert Einstein, calling Gandhi the single most important figure in the crusade for civil rights and individual liberties. How did Gandhi become such a central figure in the global struggle for human dignity? What was persuasive and effective about his method of nonviolence that brought down the British Empire in India? How did his strategies become a grammar of resistance for the various anti-colonial struggles around the world? In this course, we will explore together these questions and seek to understand how Gandhi grappled with local and global structures of imperial power as he sought to build an ethically and morally just society in India. Using a variety of sources (archival, art, film, literature, political speech, journalistic accounts) we will trace the evolution of Gandhis political and spiritual philosophy and their lasting legacies in India and beyond.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-S06 — Sports, Society, and History
Few human activities have produced as much excitement as sports. We play, we coach, we cheer, we officiate, we teach our children to play. These are a few ways that people across the world have participated in sports. Yet we seldom think about the historical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the sports that we love. Students will study sports in the past and present to explore how they shape, and are shaped by race, gender, class, migration, belonging, nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism. Focusing on all genders in sports, this class will include case studies of the Olympics, soccer, basketball, ice hockey, surfing, hurling (national sport of Ireland), and more. Although emphasis will be placed on North America, course materials will also take us to South America, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. Materials will include students first-hand experiences, scholarly writing, literature, music, films, podcasts, sports writing, and a trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 299-S07 — Sinners or Saints?: Women and Gender in the Middle Ages
In this course we are embarking on a study of sex and gender constructs in European societies between 500 and 1500 CE. We will also be stretching back to classical antiquity in order to uncover the origin of Western ideologies about the female, forward to the contemporary world, as we seek to understand how medieval legacies have shaped current concepts about gender roles. Our challenge will be not only to interpret ideologies about premodern women, however. We will also attempt to uncover their daily experiences by reading a multitude of primary sources. These works and genres run the gamut from legal code to love poem and many of them preserve women's own voices. We will also evaluate expert secondary sources that engage creatively with history. During such examination, we will look through many disciplinary lenses: those worn by medical researchers, demographers, and lawyers as well as archaeologists, literary theorists and scholars of religion. The semester will conclude with the completion of individual research projects that address a specific aspect of womens medieval experience, work that takes care to acknowledge that these women lived multifaceted lives that can still impact us today.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 299-S12 — Witchcraft and Persecution in Europe (c. 1300-1700)
This course will explore the history of witchcraft in premodern Europe. We will begin by tracing the specific development of supernatural beliefs in early and high medieval Europe (from c. 500-1200), showing how both black and white magic were part of everyday life for everyone, from peasant to royal. We will then investigate how later medieval society (from 1200-1400) became increasingly invested in paradigms of investigation and persecution, specifically in regard to heretics: religious deviants. We will see that Church and civil authorities first focused on heresy, but then turned to the punishment of maleficia: evil acts of magic perpetrated by reprobate individuals. We will further study the growing belief, (from 1400-1500) that these individualsusually womenwere witches (malificarum) in league with the devil and each other with the aim of destroying Christendom. Building on our study of later medieval trends, the heart of the class will be an examination of the Witch-Panic of the Early Modern period, c. 1500-1650. This was the era of large-scale persecutions and executions that left around 50,000 dead. But where did such a Craze come from? and what impact did Witch-Hunting have on a European society already in flux? This course will attempt to answer those questions not only through readings and lectures, but through your own research projects culminating in a mini conference. We will conclude our study with the decline of witch-belief in the West (from 1650 on) still bearing in mind the persistence of persecution in society today.
GPA units: 1
HIST 305 — America's First Global Age
There is great talk about "globalization" and "global economies" during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, people living in America were touched by global economic processes as early as the time of Columbus. This course explores North America's first global age beginning in the 1400s and extending through the 1860s. It examines this history thematically by focusing on various kinds of trades and industries such as gold, fish, timber, tobacco, silver, sugar, alcohol, fur, coffee, tea, and cotton. In addition to economic processes, the course addresses the social, cultural, and political implications of these global trade connections for Americans of African, European, and Native descent. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or permission of the Instructor. Students who have taken MONT 102G in Fall 2016, or MONT 103G in Spring 2017 are unable to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 310 — Global Modernities: Polities of Difference
Modernity, modern, and modernization are often used interchangeably to refer to distinct concepts in history including a global capitalist system, European imperialism and Eurocentricism, the division of the world population into racial and gender categories, and a hegemonic conceptualization of a linear, progressive time. Modernitys uses and abuses are a highly contested terrain not only among historians today, but among peoples who experienced, resisted, and fractured the forces of modernization. Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to both the events and their theories as the muddle of modernity. This course delves into this muddle by studying moments in history in which Europeans Others fractured modernity in multiple ways: through narratives, representations, images of dislocation and splintering, and individual and collective resistance (i.e., liberation, anticolonial, Marxist, feminist, decolonial movements). Thus, the course privileges Indigenous, African, Asian voices, knowledges, and cosmologies that point to powerful polities of difference.
Prerquisite: Historian's Craft (HIST 200) or permission of instructor
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 314 — Music/Sport/Cultural Encounter
From aristocratic flute recitals to playoff games and rock festivals, human cultural expression takes place in social and political settings. Audiences are an intrinsic part of culture: Jackie Robinson integrated the stands, not just the playing field; some of George Harrison's fans learned Eastern Zen practice; Soviet teenagers sang "Jesus Christ Superstar." Inherently sensual, music and sports lend themselves viscerally to political, racial, ethnic, economic, and gendered contestation. We will explore case studies in this history: Bach, religion, and enlightened despotism; Robert and Clara Schumann's struggles with gendered expectations of artistry and family; ballet, "The Rite of Spring," bourgeois morals, and the modern audience as spectacle; the Olympics as proving grounds for liberal democracy and totalitarianism; Hispanics and racial categorization in North American baseball; the transatlantic musical invasions (rock/jazz in Europe, the Beatles in America); the Cold War as culture war; Korean hip-hop; and gender in rock and sport. As historic sites of participatory spectatorship and cross-cultural encounter, what can music halls and sports arenas teach us?
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 315 — East Asia Displayed: Global Sports and International Exhibitions
From the inception of Worlds Fairs and the modern Olympic Games in the nineteenth century, global sporting competitions and international exhibitions have always been a way of showcasing national progress and strength, as well as material and technological achievements. This course examines both the representation of East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) in these international mega-events in addition to East Asian countries own participation in and hosting of expositions and games, from the London and Paris worlds fairs in the late 1800s to the 2008 Beijing and 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Shanghai World Expo in 2010. It will explore the changing meanings of sports and competition, scientific and technological innovation, artistic and cultural exchange, as well as national and racial identities in the shifting contexts of colonialism, imperialism, war, diplomacy, urbanization, environmental change, and globalization. Students will analyze both textual and visual sources and explore a topic through in-depth individual research.
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Spring
HIST 317 — Pain & Suffering: US History
This is a course in American religious and social thought from the late-18th century to the present. Through reading, discussion, and written assignments, students will explore the development of competing assumptions rooted in various religious, political, and moral traditions about the meaning of suffering in society in terms of causes, consequences, and obligations it creates within in the larger community. It begins with the development of humanitarianism in the context of American antislavery debates. It continues through the late-19th and early-20th centuries when the emergence of total war, systemic poverty, industrialization, and public health crises provoked widespread moral concern and political response through new media technologies that brought images of suffering to wider audiences. In studying the post-WWII era, the course revisits ongoing debates over the causes and consequences of poverty in an age of affluence, explores the role of suffering in nonviolent direct action movements of the civil rights and Vietnam era, and examines the sources of modern discourses on just war, humanitarian interventionism, torture, and human rights in the present. Students will have options to explore one or more of these themes in-depth through research projects.
Prerequisite: History majors must have HIST 200. Other majors must have taken one History course or permission.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 319 — Joan of Arc & Medieval Warfare
Joan of Arc has fascinated for centuries, yet continually eluded easy description. She is one of the most famous and best documented of all medieval individuals, yet she participated in public events for only two years, and died while still in her teens. This course explores Joan's history and legacy, through sources generated during her lifetime, and those, including film, created in later centuries. It also examines the 115-year-long conflict between England and France and their allies, known as the Hundred Years' War (1340-1455), in the context of medieval warfare in general. One unit.
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 327 — Cultures of Cold War
The superpower struggle that shaped the world post-1945 involved a competition not only for military might, but also for moral supremacy. During this time, the United States and the Soviet Union came to define themselves in opposition to each other, both seeking to demonstrate the superiority of their respective social and political systems and advertise the alleged degeneracy of those of their arch-rivals. This course looks at how each country portrayed its own society and imagined that of its major global foe, and the way these representations often differed from reality. Because the major emphasis is on the shaping and re-shaping of values and identities, it draws heavily on cultural sources such as novels, short stories, films, cartoons, and music lyrics, as well as other more traditional primary and secondary historical texts. One unit.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or one 200-level course in 20th C U.S., European or Soviet history.
GPA units: 1
HIST 329 — Collapse of Communism
What led to the surprise collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and how has Russia defined itself since the USSRs sudden disintegration? What has replaced the Soviet system and how is the capitalist Russia of today different from the country as it was under Communist rule? What kind of lessons about power, ideology, and freedom are to be found in the fate of the former Soviet superpower? This course will explore Russias troubled transition from one political and economic system to another, and the consequent evolution of Communist and post-Communist identities and values. In addition, the course will examine the politics of history, looking at the different accounts of Russias past, present and future that have been championed by different groups with different agendas at different times.
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 352 — Rebels & Radical Thinkers
This course examines revolutionary movements in Latin America from the early 1900s to the present, focusing on the radical ideas that inspired the rebels. The course will discuss both the words and actions of some of the most salient radicals of the region--e.g., Emiliano Zapata, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara, and their relevance today. We will also trace some of these ideas/rebels as depicted in films-produced either in Latin America, the United States or Europe-analyzing their significance in popular culture. This course fulfills one cross cultural requirement.
Prerequisite: History majors must have HIST 200. Other majors must have taken one History course or permission.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 361 — Germans, Jews and Memory
Explores the place of Jews in German life before, during, and after the Nazi period. Commences with an examination of the centuries-old issue of assimilation. Explores the 20th-century "German world" of Einstein and Freud, everyday Jewish life in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, survivors and their problems, the place of Jews in divided Germany after 1945, the growing Jewish community in contemporary reunified Germany, and the changing relationships among the children and grandchildren of the Holocaust's perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Special attention is given to memory issues in postwar Germany. These issues too have a history. How have Germans dealt with their past? How has the passing of generations affected this issue? Are Jews and non-Jews in today's Germany comfortable with each other?
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or HIST 255 or HIST 256 or HIST 261 or 262 or 267 or 324 or permission of the instructor.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 365 — Resistance & Rev in Mod Africa
A critical study of anti-colonial nationalist struggles and their outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. The course traces the political economy of colonialism; the origins, rise and dynamics of anti-colonial nationalism; the strategy of armed insurrection and the role of revolutionary socialism. Lastly, it grapples with aspects of post-colonial Africa that reveal the changing balance between internal and external forces in specific African nations, the ambiguities of African independence, and post-colonial debates on nation and nationalism.
Prerequisite: History majors must have HIST 200. Other majors must have taken one History course or permission.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Spring
HIST 392 — Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict is often defined in terms of competing Palestinian and Israeli national ambitions in the land of Palestine. Yet this was not always the case. In the early years of Israel's existence, Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir allegedly declared that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land" thus drawing on a highly polemical argument originally coined in the mid-19th century to describe the relationship between the Jewish diaspora and the Holy Land. It implied, on the one hand, that the Palestinian people did not exist in the land of Palestine and on the other, that the Jewish people had a special/ primordial right to this land. This course takes this expression as a starting point for considering the history and historiography of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the British Mandate period through the 1967 Six Day War and its aftermath. Through intensive reading and discussion about the rise of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, the demise of the Ottoman empire, the advent of the British Mandate for Palestine, and the broader conflict between the Arab states and Israel, this course will consider the historiographical revisions that Israeli and Palestinian historians have offered in order to address the "land without a people for a people without a land" polemic. We will investigate the reasons for the emergence of such historical revisionism and more broadly, the implications of newer historical paradigms for the history of the conflict and for its resolution.
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 399-F01 — Colonialism, Law, and Gender
Historian Nicholas Dirks argues that British colonialism in India was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest . In this seminar we will test the applicability of his insight by interrogating how and why the control and regulation of gender may have been a critical cultural technology of rule and perhaps one of the foundational elements of colonialism. While our primary focus will be the Indian subcontinent, we will also explore some key regions of the world where early colonial interventions had a profound and lasting impact on gender relations. As such, our historical investigation will take a global and comparative approach to understand the genealogies of colonial governance of gender and manyfold local resistance against their encroaching power in everyday life.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 399-F02 — Disaster History in East Asia
This course examines the social, cultural, and environmental history of early modern and modern China and Japan through the perspective of disaster studies. We will explore the conditions of state-building, economic imperatives, human migration and settlement, climate change, war and revolution as well as relief and reconstruction in the context of a number of natural and human-made disasters such as earthquakes, famines, floods, epidemics, and nuclear disasters. Case studies include the North China Famine of 1876, the Great Manchurian Plague of 1911, the 1923 Kanto Earthquake in Tokyo, wartime floods in 1930s-40s China, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Great Leap Famine in 1950-60s China, the SARS outbreak in 2003, the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, and the 2011 Triple Disaster in Fukushima. While discussion and specific assignments will focus on East Asian experiences, students will have an opportunity to write a research paper focused on any aspect of a disaster event in world history.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or permission.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 399-S01 — Gilded Age--U.S. in the World
The era from the 1870s to the 1920s witnessed the global integration of markets, technological change (known as the Second Industrial Revolution), a new wave of imperialism, and a crisis of rising inequality. People, commodities, ideas, and cultural currents crossed borders at an unprecedented rate and scale. We will investigate how those who experienced the Gilded Age and First Globalization reckoned with free and coerced migrations, pursued international investment and endured economic panics, participated in the transnational transfer of social policy, elaborated and contested imperial civilizing missions, and reimagined theories of society.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or instructor permission
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 399-S02 — Indigenous Latin America
Latin American history did not begin with the arrival of the Europeans on the shores of the New World. Rather, the history of the Americas is as old as the Indigenous societies that have inhabited these lands. This seminar traces Indigenous history over the course of the late medieval and early modern periods from approximately 1400-1800 A.D. The course will focus on five geographical case studies: Southern U.S. borderlands, Central Mexico, Mesoamerica, the Amazon Basin, and the Andes. We will examine the pre-contact history of each geographical case study and then examine how conquest and colonialism shaped the lives of Indigenous men and women. The course delves into several historical processes: the growth and decline of Indigenous empires, the impacts of disease and warfare that accompanied European conquest incursions, the formation of colonial economies that hinged on Indigenous labor, and the creation of hierarchies based on race, class, and gender. As Indigenous communities did not exist in isolation, we will explore how they engaged with historical actors of other ethnic backgrounds: Spanish and Portuguese settlers, free and enslaved Black people, and individuals of mixed ancestry. Students will assess the variety of historical methods that scholars.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or instructor permission
GPA units: 1
HIST 401 — Seminar
An intensive research-oriented study on various themes; offered each semester; limited to 12 participants.
GPA units: 1
HIST 408 — Tutorial
Reading of selected sources, with individual written reports and discussion, under the direction of a member of the department. Students enrolled in a tutorial must receive the approval of the instructor. One unit.
GPA units: 1
HIST 420 — Fourth Year Thesis
An individual, student-designed, professor-directed, major research project. Usually available only to outstanding fourth-year majors. A lengthy final paper and public presentation are expected. Students engaged in a thesis may be nominated for Honors in History.
GPA units: 0
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 421 — Fourth Year Thesis
An individual, student-designed, professor-directed, major research project. Usually available only to outstanding fourth-year majors. A lengthy final paper and public presentation are expected. Students engaged in a thesis may be nominated for Honors in History.
Prerequisite: HIST 420
GPA units: 2
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 422 — Advanced Research & Writing Colloquium
This course is required of all History thesis writers who are working on research-based projects during their senior year. The colloquium has two aims: first, to assist students in developing and adapting the skills they will use in the course of researching, writing, and revising a 60-100 page manuscript and presenting their work orally to a broader audience (an advanced form of The Historian's Craft); and second, to alleviate, as much as possible, the isolation of the thesis writing process by offering students both formal and informal opportunities for peer support and review.
GPA units: 0.5
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 423 — Advanced Research & Writing Colloquium
This course is required of all History thesis writers who are working on research-based projects during their senior year. The colloquium has two aims: first, to assist students in developing and adapting the skills they will use in the course of researching, writing, and revising a 60-100 page manuscript and presenting their work orally to a broader audience (an advanced form of The Historian's Craft); and second, to alleviate, as much as possible, the isolation of the thesis writing process by offering students both formal and informal opportunities for peer support and review.
GPA units: 0.5
Typically Offered: Annually