69 courses with the subject HIST, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
HIST 124History of Modern South Asia, 1700 to the Present
This course will explore the history of South Asia between the eighteenth century and the present. Using a combined chronological and thematic approach and against a historical canvas that engages such diverse issues as gender, political economy, conquest, resistance, state formation, economic exploitation, national liberation, and identity politics, the aim of this course is to interrogate the impact of British colonialism and South Asian nationalisms on the state, society, and people of the subcontinent. Using primary and secondary sources, we will address both the most significant historical moments of modern South Asian history and the historiographical debates that surround them.
A comparative history of China, Japan, and Korea from the early seventeenth century to the present, with strong focus on regional interaction. After an introduction to early modern histories and cultures, we will examine the struggles of these countries to preserve or regain their independence and establish their national identities in a rapidly changing, often violent modern world order. While each of these countries has its own distinctive identity, their overlapping histories (and dilemmas) give the region a coherent shape. We will also look at how individuals respond to and are shaped by larger historical movements.
This course provides an introduction to African history over the past three centuries. Venturing beyond the stereotypes, we will explore the complex histories that constitute a diverse continent. Special attention is given to spotlighting the voices of African people through a range of primary and secondary sources, including memoirs, film, music, cartoons, speeches and photography. Students will gain knowledge of African geographies and histories, develop the skill of primary source analysis, and be able to connect events in -- and narratives of -- present-day Africa to a deeper historical past.
HIST 142Introduction to Pre Colonial African History
This course surveys the social, political and economic history of Africa from earliest times to 1750. We will consider developments in early significant units of the continent such as Ethiopia, Kush, Zimbabwe, and Egypt. We will focus on themes such as human origins, agriculture, migration, Islam, gender, slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. By the end of the course, students will have a sound understanding of key developments in African history from ancient times to the eve of European expansion in Africa.
Surveys the major movements and developments in Europe during the era of European expansion and dominance -- from the devastations of the Thirty Years War to the Second World War -- and up to the current era of European Union. Topics include: the French Revolution and the birth of nationalism; the scientific and industrial revolutions; the modern history of international relations; imperialism, fascism, the Holocaust, the two World Wars, and the present and potential roles of Europe at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
This course is an introduction to the expansion, consolidation, and eventual disintegration of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine this history with an eye to understanding the causes and legacies of empire. We will discuss British attitudes and policies toward empire and the imperial foundations of the British economy. Cutting an arc of territory from the Caribbean to Africa and from South Asia to the Pacific rim, we will consider the role of culture and gender in informing anticolonial resistance. We will interrogate how legacies of colonialism manifest in the contemporary period by shaping post-colonial identities and perceptions of the world.
This course surveys the history of Indigenous worlds, colonial projects, enslavement, and the contested transformation of lives and communities in North America through the U.S. Civil War and wars in the West. How did Indigenous people and people of African descent assert sovereignty, create new bonds, and partake in the creation of new nations in landscapes of violence and subjugation? How did settler political and economic strategies shape the land and life upon it? Topics include cross-cultural encounters, competing religious and social visions, the formation of the United States and its political system, gender, migration, the development of racial capitalism, and the Civil War.
This course introduces the history of the United States and Native North America from the latter half of the 19th century to the present. Themes include the consolidation of the U.S. nation and the reservation system; struggles over land, citizenship, and sovereignty; the transformation of the federal government and of capitalism; immigration; the evolution of racial, gendered, and class hierarchies; and changing forms of domestic life, work, politics, social protest, and cultural expression from Reconstruction to the present. How have concentrations of wealth alongside democratic ideals and struggles for liberation shaped the possibilities of national existence and self-determination?
What are the origins of modern science and the scientific method? How have the ways of gaining and securing knowledge of the world among different cultures and societies changed over time? How has scientific knowledge been related to the enterprises of art, commerce, and empire? We will ask these questions and more through a broad survey of many crucial moments in the development of science from the Middle Ages to the present. Topics and figures will include Ibn Sina, Galileo, Chinese natural history encyclopedias, imperial botany and Linnean classification, Darwin's reception outside the west, the anti-racist science of W.E.B. Du Bois, eugenics, biotechnology, and the human genome project.
This course examines the histories and cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean from the sixteenth century to the present, using an interdisciplinary approach. Students explore confrontations and transformations among Indigenous, African, and European cultures. The course provides insight into contemporary political, economic, social, cultural, and artistic realities. By analyzing cultural products, we address colonization, nation formation, geography, the environment, immigration, migration, race, ethnicity, and gender in these societies.
HIST 207Feminist and Intersectional Science and Technology Studies
Gender and race are social categories, yet science had often treated them as natural kinds. This course joins the history and anthropology of science with studies of sex, sexuality, gender, and race to examine how Western science has constructed, sustained, and critiqued these categories over time. Moving chronologically, the course will introduce students to central texts, theories, and research methods in feminist and intersectional science studies, asking: What is the genealogy of such categories as sex, gender, sexuality, and race? How have such classifications shaped scientific ideas of "life," "nature," and "reason"? How have these categories been used to mark sameness and difference, and how have subjects impacted by those differences shaped the field of feminist science studies?
HIST 208The Consumer Revolution: A History of Shopping
This seminar surveys the history of shopping from the seventeenth to early-twentieth century. From its origin as a term for wastefulness, consumption is now understood as an essential feature of prosperity in modern society. How did shopping change over this period to occupy such an important place in our world? Using primary, secondary and material sources, students will examine the commodities, shopping habits, business strategies, consumer politics, marketplaces, and identities that shaped and sustained the rise of retail. Set primarily in a European context, the course will also emphasize the global and imperial dimensions of consumption and the systems of power that enabled it.
HIST 213History of Turtle Island: Introduction to Native North America
This course surveys the history of Turtle Island, or Native North America, from origins to the present day. It provides an introduction to the many hundreds of diverse Nations across the continent through the use of specific case studies, as well as Indigenous methodologies and interdisciplinary methods such as oral history, art and material culture, literature, film, and more. This course covers themes such as land, sovereignty, survivance, gender, kinship, race, identity, diplomacy, and colonialism.
HIST 215Decolonization and the Historical Imagination in South Asia
Was the British Empire a force for good and, if not, what should happen to its legacy? What explains the renaming of Indian cities? Is archeology a neutral science or a tool of political power? These questions feel urgent amid ongoing efforts to decolonize history and their populist hijacking. This course uses the paradoxes of postcolonial politics to introduce students to changing interpretations of South Asia's past. By asking if South Asians are indeed a "people without history," whether chronicles should count as historical sources, and how Marxist frames translate to a reading of regional societies, it casts history as a terrain where claims to the past are contested in the present.
HIST 226Bread and Circuses: The Politics of Public Entertainment in Ancient Rome
Bread and circuses (panem et circenses) was a catchphrase in the Roman empire that described the political strategy of controlling an unruly populace through free bread and public entertainment. Against a backdrop of Roman social and political institutions, this course focuses on the imperial ideology, aristocratic ethos, and cultural practices that underpinned this catchphrase, as well as questions concerning the careers of entertainers--gladiators, charioteers, and actors--who were at once celebrities and social outcasts; the rules of spectatorship at the games; the use of these games as a form of social control; and the logistics of feeding the city population.
This course will trace the emergence and expansion of Greek civilization in the Mediterranean between the Bronze Age and Alexander the Great. Among themes to be explored are political structures, trade, slavery, gender relations, and religion, as well as the contributions of ancient Greeks to literary genres (drama, rhetoric, historiography, philosophy) and to the visual arts. Throughout we will consider how the history of the ancient Greeks can speak to modern concerns. Sources will include works of ancient Greek literature and history (e.g., Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plutarch) as well as archaeological and epigraphic evidence.
Ancient Rome and its empire can be viewed both as a measure of human achievement and a cautionary tale of the corrupting effects of unbridled power. This course covers the history of Ancient Rome from its mythologized beginnings (753 BCE) to the rise and spread of Christianity under the Emperor Constantine (312 CE). Topics include the creation and development of Rome's republican form of government as well as its eventual transition to monarchy, the causes and consequences of the acquisition of empire, the role of the army in administering the provinces and defending the frontiers, the image of emperor, the economy, and religion.
An introduction to the study of history through law, using a comparative approach to group rights. Case studies, rooted in landmark court decisions and legislation, concern racial segregation in America before the civil rights era ('separate but equal') and in Europe during the Nazi era (the Nuremberg Laws, German 'national groups' in the East), as well as affirmative action in America and attempts at promoting equality among national groups in Austria before the First World War.
Using interdisciplinary and Indigenous methodologies, this course explores Native American (hi)stories, philosophies, and thought. This course explores the benefits of using Indigenous stories to gain a better understanding of the histories and futures of Turtle Island. We will use specific case studies to take a close look at various stories, historical methodologies, and wisdom found in a variety of Nations and communities across Turtle Island (Native North America).
HIST 239CDTopics in Asian History: 'Chinese Diasporic Communities in the World: Race, Empire, and Transnationalism'
This course examines the experiences of Chinese diasporic communities in Southeast Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean within the historical context of empire building, colonization, war, transnationalism, and globalization. The period covered spans from the 1600s to the present, and focus will be given to how dominant groups attempt to localize and discipline Chinese diasporic subjects and how the latter negotiate, manipulate, and challenge such efforts. Themes include racism, transnationalism, ethnicity, gender, class, empire, and nationalism.
HIST 239HHTopics in Asian History: 'History of Humans and Other Living Beings'
This course investigates the relationships that humans have developed with other living beings in history. Course materials explore how humans have interacted with wild animals, domesticated some, imagined them in literary works, exploited animal labor, used them in scientific research, trained animals to perform, and co-lived with some as pets. These topics will help us think about how humans have developed ideas about animals and humans ourselves. The course will introduce histories worldwide with a specific focus on East Asia. Students who take this course must do research projects on East Asian topics, though comparative themes are welcome.
HIST 239MCTopics in Asian History: 'Borderlands and Ethnicity in Modern China'
This seminar investigates the processes through which borderlands were imagined and ethnicities were made in twentieth-century China. Drawing from texts and films about and by the people living on the borderlands, students in the seminar are to explore the intersecting relation between the two pressing issues and how Chinese states dealt with them. Furthermore, how did all these concerns originate? To that end, the seminar begins by examining how the central state in early modern China formed a multicultural empire in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
HIST 239METopics in Asian History: 'Cities in Modern East Asia'
This course asks: what are cities in the history of modern East Asia? Cities were cosmopolitan, centers of commerce, and sites of social movements in late imperial China, Tokugawa Japan, and late Chosǔn Korea. How did the roles of cities change in the nineteenth century when East Asia became more integrated into the global system? How was urban life affected in the first half of the twentieth century when the central states dealt with domestic turmoil and external pressures? How did the state work to redefine cities and urban culture in the postwar era? To answer these questions, this seminar encourages students to position cities historically and comparatively.
HIST 239TBTopics in Asian History: 'Travels and Tibet in the Modern Era'
The seminar focuses on the global history centered on the Tibetan Plateau. Often referred to as "the Roof of the World," the plateau has been a magnet for missionaries, pilgrims, merchants, botanists, and military powers for centuries. Students will read travelogues of those who journeyed to Tibet since the early modern era from the 1600s. These travelers not only documented their expeditions but also brought back objects they believed represented Tibet. These materials will complement the textual sources, and the textual and material representations tell a history of Tibet that reflects both the travelers and Tibet itself, despite the potential distortions and incompleteness in these materials. To that end, students will also explore materials by Tibetans and about their world to provide a well-rounded perspective.
An attempt at understanding the Nazi-led assault on Europe's Jews. Course units include an exploration of origins, both German and European; an analysis of the evolving mechanics of genocide (mobile killing squads, death camps, etc.); comparisons (Germany proper vs. Poland, the Holocaust vs. other instances of state-sponsored mass murder); legal dimensions; and an introduction to the politics of Holocaust remembrance since 1945.
In 1968, the USSR commenced a strategy of consumerist depoliticization in its European satellites. Around the same time, states on the other side of the Iron Curtain saw the postwar era of rapid economic growth and social consensus close. This course, reaching across the revolutionary break of 1989 up to the present, raises questions of convergence and continuity in European public policy, West and East. Paired case studies from a variety of countries in fields such as energy, the environment, minority rights, and housing serve to clarify rules and patterns to the politics of policy, from Cold War to European Union and beyond.
HIST 245EUTopics in African History: 'European Expansion in Africa'
Between the 1870s and 1910s, Africa was conquered by and divided among European powers. Why were European powers interested in informal and formal control of Africa? Why were they in competition with one another? How did Africans respond to European conquest and rule? What were the impacts of colonial rule in Africa? This course answers these and many other questions. The course is divided into two phases. The first focuses on the activities of the European powers in the late nineteenth century. The second examines the post-conquest period and examines African responses to the European conquests and rules in the early twentieth century.
HIST 245EVTopics in African History: 'Society and Environment in Africa'
This course is an introduction to the environmental history of Africa. It examines how Africans adapted to diverse environmental changes in areas including climate variability, agriculture, landscape, and spiritual ecology from early times (ca. 6 million years ago) through the recent past (ca. 1900). We will practice being historians by thinking and writing with nonconventional sources/methods such as oral traditions, archeology, and historical climatology. Ultimately, students will be challenged to place contemporary conversations about climate change in Africa into the context of the continent's long environmental history in order to shape more informed perspectives.
HIST 245MWTopics in African History: 'Modern West Africa, 1800 to the Present'
This course examines historical developments in the West African sub-region from 1800 through colonial period to the formation of the Economic Community of West African States. The course focuses on themes such as the abolition of the slave trade, legitimate trade, European expansion, and colonial rule, and examines the social, political, economic, and cultural changes in West Africa during the period. This course will place Africans at the center of historical development. By studying these important themes, students will have a sound understanding of key developments that shaped Modern West Africa and appreciate the problems and potentials of West Africa.
From the Himalayas in South Asia to Mexico's Chiapas and from North Carolina's Grandfather Mountain to the Uluru in Australia's Northern Territory, mountains represent more than just a geographical feature. They have been long viewed as transcendental spaces, served as a canvas for epic struggles between humans and nature, shaped cultural attitudes and been at the heart of political struggles. This course traces the history of various political and cultural meanings attached to mountains. Using examples from around the globe, it seeks to argue that rather than a metaphor for remoteness and primitivism, mountains are constitutive to our understanding of modernity.
What is money? Is it the same in all times and places? If money could speak, what stories would it tell of the past? This course is about the history of money and money as an object of history. Using primary and secondary sources, students will learn about the social, political and cultural meaning of money at different times in the history of the western world. In addition, students will interpret the history of money using a variety of coins and money-related objects held in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. This is a course on the history of money, not the economics of money, but it will be of interest to anyone curious to learn more about the meaning of money in the past and today.
What is history? How and by whom is history produced? What is the relationship between history and other ways of understanding the past? This course is designed primarily for those majoring or minoring in history (but welcoming of others), and will explore the discipline of history and the philosophies and methods that have shaped its formation over time. Taught each fall semester by different members of the department, the themes and topics will vary, but will include diverse readings from across the discipline, along with opportunities to engage with practitioners within and beyond the department.
HIST 255DEIdeas and Society in Europe: 'Decentering Europe: An Introduction to Critical European Studies'
Europe embodies crossroads of multiple cultures, memories, migrations, and political demarcations. What remains of the ancient and modern regimes? How have global movements, historical upheavals, and shifting boundaries within and adjacent to European borders, from early empires to contemporary global networks, affected the transformation of lives? How do ideological projects such as democracy, pluralism and fascism interact within Europe and the global scale? Taking a critical view of conventional paradigms of European nation states and "master" narratives, this course studies shifting European cultures and identities through multiple perspectives across time and space.
HIST 259Mary Lyon's World and the History of Mount Holyoke
What world gave rise to Mary Lyon's vision for Mount Holyoke and enabled her to carry her plans to success? Has her vision persisted or been overturned? We will examine the conditions, assumptions, and exclusions that formed Mount Holyoke and the arrangements of power and struggles for justice that shaped it during and after Lyon's lifetime. Topics include settler colonialism and missionary projects; northern racism and abolitionism; industrial capitalism and the evolution of social classes; debates over women's education, gender, and body politics; religious diversity; and efforts to achieve a just and inclusive campus. Includes research based on primary sources.
HIST 260HHTopics in the Recent History of Europe: 'The Habsburgs, Hitler, and the Law'
This course explores the complex, often comic, and ultimately tragic history of Bohemia, a territory located today in the Czech Republic, but previously a part of the Habsburg Monarchy, then of Czechoslovakia, and then of Hitler's Third Reich. Students will complement historical studies with autobiographical material and contemporary fiction, beginning with the Revolution of 1848, progressing through the achievements and worrisome trends of Emperor Francis Joseph's 68-year reign, and concluding with the world wars. Emphasis on the interplay among Czechs, Germans, Jews, and other pivotal players: the House of Habsburg and its supporters, and the political elites of neighboring countries.
This course explores the use of revolutionary terror by the state. More specifically, it examines policies of terror pursued by Communist dictatorships in Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the early years of the Cold War. Who did what to whom, and why? What insights do secret police work and public propaganda, knitted together in macabre show trials, allow us into Stalinist rule, European politics, and maybe ourselves? How did memories of terror shape politics after Stalin's death? Students should deepen their understanding for the discipline of History, improve their reading and writing, and develop a working knowledge of Central European politics at the middle of the twentieth century.
During the Cold War, as tensions raged between the U.S. and Soviet Union, policymakers of both ideological persuasions oversaw rural development projects across the Third World. Their actions were premised on knowledge that villages were underdeveloped places. Mainly a colonial idea, this thought also had curious antecedents such as the Indian anti-colonialist Gandhi who saw villages as reservoirs of tradition and bulwarks against modernity. This course questions the received wisdom of this dichotomy. Drawing on classic works and case studies from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it asks how the city and countryside became symbols for understanding social and economic development.
HIST 275CHTopics in Native American and Indigenous Studies: 'Duyukdv: Cherokee Studies'
This course explores in-depth the history, culture, philosophies, and strong futures of one Indigenous community, the Cherokees, from origin stories to the present day. Today, there are three federally recognized Cherokee nations: the Cherokee Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. We will look at oral (hi)stories, the Cherokee tradition of duyukdv (the right way, the right path), art and material culture, literature, traditional ecological knowledge, and Cherokee memory of various major historical events such as the Trail of Tears, allotment, the invention of the Cherokee syllabary, and much more.
This course considers the historical evolution of women's private lives, public presence, and political engagement within and beyond the borders of the United States, from the 1890s to the present. How have U.S. racism, consumer capitalism, immigration, and changing forms of state power shaped women's experiences and possibilities? How have regimes of gender, sexuality, bodily comportment, and reproduction evolved in relation to national and global changes? Emphasis will be placed on the experiences and perspectives of working-class women, women of color, and Indigenous women.
We live in an age of energy crises, in which the future of energy is questioned in countless headlines and Twitter feeds. These concerns often include other assumptions about energy's past, in particular the idea that social change invariably follows the discovery of new energy technologies. From food to fuel cells, this colloquium charts a more complicated and interesting history, a history in which people have continually shaped and made meaningful the energies that fuel the modern world.
Sit-ins, marches, strikes, Supreme Court decisions, and the passing of landmark legislative acts filled the news headlines across the country during the 1950s and 1960s. This introductory-level survey course will examine the diverse strategies and philosophies of political, social and cultural figures that led to and fueled the modern civil rights movement in America. By drawing on a range of primary sources such as films, organizational records, and memoirs, this course will explore the origins of the movement, well-known and lesser-known protests and activists to reveal how anti-war efforts, gay and lesbian liberation, neighborhood rights, ethnic nationalism and even grassroots conservatism laid claim to the rhetoric and tactics of the civil rights movement.
HIST 280DETopics in North American History: 'The Social and Cultural History of U.S. Democracy since the Great Depression'
The institutions of political democracy do not operate in a vacuum. They are shaped by the distribution of wealth, the durability of social solidarities, spaces for public deliberation, and protest. Since the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, how have those excluded from or forced to the margins of US democracy fought for consideration of their lives, perspectives, and sovereignty? How have Asian American, Black, disabled, Indigenous, Latine, poor, and young people; gender, religious, and sexual minorities; immigrants; women; and workers used art, direct action, faith coalitions, grassroots organizing, popular culture, and public space to build solidarities and push for change?
HIST 281African American History, Precolonial to Emancipation
This course will examine the cultural, social, political, and economic history of African Americans through the Civil War. Topics covered include the African background to the African American experience, the Atlantic slave trade, introduction and development of slavery, master-slave relationships, the establishment of black communities, slave revolts, the political economy of slavery, women in slavery, the experiences of free blacks, the crisis of the nineteenth century, and the effect of the Civil War.
HIST 282African American History from Emancipation to the Present
This course will examine the social, cultural, political, and economic history of African Americans from emancipation and Reconstruction through the present. Emphasis will fall on postwar southern social and economic developments, the rise of segregation, northern migrations, black class stratification, nationalism, the twentieth-century civil rights movement, and current trends in African American political, social, and economic life.
HIST 296NTWomen in History: 'Histories of Native American Women'
This course explores the histories of Native American women, from origins to the present day. This course also introduces students to Indigenous methodologies. We will look at topics such as origin stories, Indigenous feminism, the fur trade, Removal, reservations, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. Major themes include kinship, community, gender, race, material culture, sovereignty, reproduction, matrilineal societies, survivance, and diplomacy.
The recession of 2008 has drawn scholars to the subject of long-term capitalist transformation around the globe. Examining the phenomenon that is 'global capitalism,' they have studied its effects on markets, structures of government, and increasingly, the environment. A global approach, however, is inadequate for understanding the particular lifeworlds shaped by capitalism at the local and regional levels. This colloquium uses examples from South Asia to emphasize how capitalist transition in the region was entangled with developments elsewhere, yet asserted a quite distinctive influence in areas of trade, agriculture, property norms, law, labor relations, migration, and consumption.
HIST 301MTColloquium: 'Materials and Their Sciences'
Materials matter for scientific inquiry. From the physical objects scientists investigate, the concrete models they build to explain abstract phenomena, to the instruments they use for observation and measurement, materials are the medium through which scientific knowledge is sought. This course will examine how the sensory properties of various materials -- crystals, yeast, soap bubbles, fossils, textiles fibers, among others -- have critically shaped the questions, theories, and practices of those sciences that have historically engaged them.
Caligula was a god (or so he thought); Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Commodus dressed as a gladiator and fought man and beast in the arena. The historical tradition of Rome is replete with stories about eccentric and insane emperors whose scandalous reigns raise questions about the nature of the emperor's power and his role in administering the empire. A close study of Roman imperial biography and historiography-the source of so many of these stories of bad emperors-weighed against documentary evidence and material remains reveals the dynamic between the emperor, his court, and his subjects that was fundamental to the political culture of imperial Rome.
This course offers a sweeping history of how the people in China have interacted with the natural world. Students will investigate historically specific social, economic, and political forces that have shaped environmental transformations in China. The course is organized thematically within a chronological framework. The course concludes with a closer look at the development of environmental practice in the modern era.
HIST 333WPResearch Seminar in American Women's History: ' Women, Politics, and Activism in United States History'
From the Revolution to the Nineteenth Amendment, the denial of women's right to vote shaped their activism across a wide range of movements and initiatives. Patterns of mobilization and leadership that emerged in that era left powerful legacies. We will consider forces that have driven women to polarized political views and efforts that have united them across differences, from the 1770s to the present. How have the actions of Indigenous, African American, and immigrant women shaped the nation's political landscape? How have race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration, and empire informed women's activism? Student efforts will culminate in the production of a substantial research paper.
HIST 341ADTopics in African History: 'Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa and the Diaspora'
This course deals with the origins, definitions, and nature of African slavery as an already developed kin-based organization before the (Islamic and) Atlantic influences of the early modern period. The course begins from Africa and follows enslaved Africans into the Diaspora. It then traces the African origins of identities, cultures, and societies created by the formerly enslaved and their descendants. We will achieve this by deeply examining secondary sources as well as contemporaneous materials created by both Africans and foreigners. Students will have the chance to grapple with the painful legacies of the slave trade both in Africa and the Diaspora.
This is a research seminar, designed to introduce students to classic and recent debates on the "history of capitalism" and to support original research on a broad array of topics related to the social and cultural history of economic life. Rather than take British capitalism as exemplary of modernization we will situate that which was particular about the British case against the pluralities of capitalism that have evolved over the past three centuries. Topics include revolutions in agriculture, finance, commerce and manufacturing; the political economy of empire; the relationship between economic ideas, institutions and practice; and, the shaping of economic life by gender, class and race.
This course introduces students to oral history. We will discuss oral history from a variety of perspectives and think about ethics, memory, community histories, and the lives of stories. We will include oral history approaches from diverse communities across Turtle Island/North America. Students will conduct oral history interviews and write a research paper.
HIST 372Material Cultures of Turtle Island/North America
This course explores the histories of material culture on Turtle Island/North America from origins to the present day. We will explore the stories that live inside objects and the relationships people have with material culture. We will explore case studies from a variety of cultures, including Indigenous, Euro-American, and African-American perspectives, but with a heavy emphasis on Indigenous material cultures. Students will be exposed to a variety of research methodologies for studying material culture. This course will culminate in the production of a substantial research paper.
HIST 381BERecent American History: 'Black Labor Since Emancipation'
This research seminar will attempt to accomplish two goals; to examine some of the significant issues in the history of African American workers since Emancipation and to introduce you to some of the most recent scholarship addressing those issues. We will begin with general studies of the history of capitalism in the U.S. and Black workers then proceed to a study of: 1) The role of Black labor in several industries, 2) Black women as workers, 3) Black labor and the Black power movement and 4) Herbert Hill's critiques of organized labor and the labor history establishment. As a key part of this course, students will prepare a significant primary-source research paper.
HIST 383Research Seminar in North American History: From Unsettlement to Reconstruction
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, how was America both settled and unsettled? How did Indigenous peoples and newcomers build and rebuild lives, communities, and possibilities for the future? We will consider themes of settlement, unsettlement, creation, violence, and rebuilding as we examine early contact between Indigenous and European peoples, trans-oceanic relationships, migration, slavery, the state, war, post-Civil War Reconstruction, and other topics students select. We will focus on research practices that produce insight into the ways people lived in their bodies, on the land, and with one another. Students' efforts will culminate in the production of a substantial research paper.
