29 courses with the subject HIST UN, 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 UN1002Ancient History of the Middle East4.00
The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the ancient histories of the region in western Asia that is today called the Middle East. There we find the earliest cultures in world history documented with an abundance of sources, including numerous written texts, which allows us to study the first attestations of many elements of life we take for granted, such as writing, cities, laws, empires, and much more. The course aims to provide you with a knowledge of the most important empirical data about these histories and to confront you the impact some of the developments made on human life as well as the difficulties we confront trying to study them
HIST UN1786History of the City in Latin America4.00
This course covers the historical development of cities in Latin America. Readings, lectures, and discussion sections will examine the concentration of people in commercial and political centers from the beginnings of European colonization in the fifteenth century to the present day and will introduce contrasting approaches to the study of urban culture, politics, society, and the built environment. Central themes include the reciprocal relationships between growing urban areas and the countryside; changing power dynamics in modern Latin America, especially as they impacted the lives of cities’ nonelite majority populations; the legalities and politics of urban space; planned versus unplanned cities and the rise of informal economies; the way changing legal and political rights regimes have affected urban life; and the constant tension between tradition and progress through which urban society was formed. There are no prerequisites for this course. Attendance at weekly Discussion Sections required
HIST UN2004The Mediterranean World After Alexander the Great4
The conquests of Alexander the Great spread Greek Civilization all around the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. This course will examine the Hellenised (greek-based) urban society of the empires of the Hellenistic era (ca. 330-30BCE).
HIST UN2222NATURE ＆ POWER: ENV HIST NORTH AMERICA4.00
Environmental history seeks to expand the customary framework of historical inquiry, challenging students to construct narratives of the past that incorporate not only human beings but also the natural world with which human life is intimately intertwined. As a result, environmental history places at center stage a wide range of previously overlooked historical actors such as plants, animals, and diseases. Moreover, by locating nature within human history, environmental history encourages its practitioners to rethink some of the fundamental categories through which our understanding of the natural world is expressed: wilderness and civilization, wild and tame, natural and artificial. For those interested in the study of ethnicity, environmental history casts into particularly sharp relief the ways in which the natural world can serve both to undermine and to reinforce the divisions within human societies. Although all human beings share profound biological similarities, they have nonetheless enjoyed unequal access to natural resources and to healthy environments—differences that have all-too-frequently been justified by depicting such conditions as “natural.”
April 30, 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Upon the semicentennial, this special edition lecture course will reflect on the half century of scholarship and art to examine war’s history, including its origins, evolution, and conclusion, and assess its legacies today. Rather than just view the war as an event in American or Vietnamese history, this course will examine the war from a multitude of perspectives by inviting special lecturers, analyzing primary documents, dissecting novels and memoirs, screening war films, and drawing from the rich historiography of that oft-studied war. Throughout this course, we will ask questions that continue to elicit fierce debate: What brought the United States and Vietnam to war? What impact did the war have on North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and American politics? How did decisions made in the corridors of power on both sides of the Pacific affect everyday people on the battlefronts and homefronts? Why did it end the way it did? What lessons can we draw from the Vietnam War? Attendance and participation in lectures and weekly discussion sections is mandatory. All the readings and episodes are available online through Butler Library (CLIO) or Canvas (C)
Through assigned readings and a group research project, students will gain familiarity with a range of historical and social science problems at the intersection of ethnic/racial/sexual formations, technological networks, and health politics since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; benign neglect; urban renewal and gentrification; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; and environmental justice. There are no required qualifications for enrollment, although students will find the material more accessible if they have had previous coursework experience in United States history, pre-health professional (pre-med, pre-nursing, or pre-public health), African-American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, or American Studies
This course explores the social, cultural, and political history of lesbians, gay men, and other socially constituted sexual and gender minorities, primarily in the twentieth century. Since the production and regulation of queer life has always been intimately linked to the production and policing of “normal” sexuality and gender, we will also pay attention to the shifting boundaries of normative sexuality, especially heterosexuality, as well as other developments in American history that shaped gay life, such as the Second World War, Cold War, urbanization, and the minority rights revolution. Themes include the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as categories of experience and identity; the changing relationship between homosexuality and transgenderism; the development of diverse lesbian and gay subcultures and their representation in popular culture; the sources of antigay hostility; religion and sexual science; generational change and everyday life; AIDS; and gay, antigay, feminist, and queer movements
This lecture course examines the history of the relationship between the United States and the countries of East Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first half of the course will examine the factors drove the United States to acquire territorial possessions in Asia, to vie for a seat at the imperial table at China’s expense, and to eventual confrontation with Japan over mastery in the Pacific from the turn of the century leading to the Second World War. The second half of the course will explore the impact of U.S. policy toward East Asia during the Cold War when Washington’s policy of containment, which included nation-building, development schemes, and waging war, came up against East Asia’s struggles for decolonization, revolution, and modernization. Not only will this course focus on state-to-state relations, it will also address a multitude of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese perspectives on the United States and American culture through translated text, oral history, fiction, and memoir. Participation in weekly discussion sections, which will begin no later than the third week of classes, is mandatory
Field(s): ANC Spring 2026: HIST UN2611 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment HIST 2611 001/11677 M W 10:10am - 11:25am 140 Uris Hall Seth Schwartz 4.00 14/30 HIST 2611 AU1/19961 M W 10:10am - 11:25am Othr Other Seth Schwartz 4.00 3/3
This course explores major themes in Latin American history from the independence period (ca 1810) to the present. We will hone in on Latin Americas “chronic” problems of social inequality, political polarization, authoritarianism, incomplete democratization, and troubled memory politics. The course covers economic, social, and cultural histories, and gives special weight to the transnational aspects of Latin American ideological struggles – from its dependency on Western capital to its ideological “inner Cold War” – and the way they influenced the subaltern strata of society. The section discussions are a crucial component of the course, and will focus on assigned historiography. While the lecture centers on constructing a cogent meta-narrative for Latin America’s modern era, in the section we will explore not only the historical “facts,” but will instead ask: how do historians know what they know about the past? What sources and analytic methods do they use to write history? And what ethical dilemmas do they confront when narrating politically-sensitive topics?
This lecture offers a comprehensive view of the Cold War in Latin America and zooms in on those places and moments when it turned hot. It understands the Cold War as a complex and multi-layered conflict, which not only pitted two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—against one another, but also two ideologies—capitalism and socialism—whose appeal cut across societies. In Latin America, the idea of socialist revolution attracted a diverse set of actors (workers, students, intellectuals, politicians, etc.) and posed a significant challenge to both capitalism and United States hegemony. We will probe what the Cold War meant to people across the region, paying particular attention to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary events in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, all the while examining the diplomatic and cultural battles for the hearts and minds of Latin Americans
This course examines the history of cities in the Americas in the colonial era, c. 1500-1800, organized around three large themes. First, we study the precolonial origins of American urban systems, focusing especially on Mesoamerica and the Andes, and exploring questions of urban continuity, disruption and change, and the forms of indigenous cities. Second, we study various patterns of city foundations and city types across the Americas, examining Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch and French colonial urban systems. Third, we focus on the cities more closely by looking at key issues such as urban form, built environment, social structure. Specific themes include a critical analysis of the Spanish colonial grid, the baroque city, and 18th-century urban reforms, as well as race and class, urban slavery, and urban disease environments.
This course will cover the seven-century long history of the Ottoman Empire, which spanned Europe, Asia, and Africa as well as the medieval, early modern, and modern period. The many levels of continuity and change will be the focus, as will issues of identities and mentalities, confessional diversity, cultural and linguistic pluralism, and imperial governance and political belonging of the empire within larger regional and global perspectives over the centuries. The course also seeks to cultivate appreciation of the human experience through the multifarious experiences culled from the Ottoman past
HIST UN2717The Ottoman Empire and the West in the 19th Century4.00
“The Ottoman Empire and the West” is a course designed to familiarize undergraduate students with the major developments concerning the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the West throughout the ‘long’ nineteenth century, roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The course will adopt a predominantly chronological structure but will address a wide range of themes, from politics and ideology to economics and diplomacy, and from religion and culture to gender and orientalism
This course will cover the history of the Middle East from the 18th century until the present, examining the region ranging from Morocco to Iran and including the Ottoman Empire. It will focus on transformations in the states of the region, external intervention, and the emergence of modern nation-states, as well as aspects of social, economic, cultural and intellectual history of the region. Field(s): ME
This course explores Korea’s history from the late nineteenth century to the present with a particular focus on caste/class, gender, war and industrialization. Using primary and secondary texts as well as documentary film and literary ephemera, the seminar analyses such topics as the relationship between imperialism and rebellions in the nineteenth century; the uneven experience of Japanese colonial rule; Korea’s early feminist movement; how North Korea became a communist society; the deep scars of the Korean War; cultures of industrialism in South and North Korea; counter-cultural movements in 1970s, 1980s and 1990s South Korea; and contemporary challenges facing the peninsula. This course will give students a thorough grounding in modern Korean history and introduce them to major interpretative currents in the study of Korean history
This course examines the history of Vietnam in the World and serves as a follow-up to ASCE UN1367: Introduction to East Asian Civilizations, Vietnam (though it is not a prerequisite). This course will explore Vietnam’s multifaceted relations with the wider world from the late 19th Century to present day as war – ranging from civil, imperial, global, decolonization, and superpower interventions – forged the modern imperial polity to the current nation-state
Unsettling Science invites students to do exactly that: ask big questions about science and interrupt preconceived ideas about what science is and who does it. This course is an introductory dive into the interplay between science, technology, health, environment, and society. By offering deep historical and contemporary perspectives, this course equips students with skills essential to critically exploring not only longstanding questions about the world but also urgent issues of our time. Unsettling Science will provide students with the critical and methodological tools to think creatively about local and global challenges and develop interventions. To do so, the course focuses on a series of fundamental questions that underpin the study of science and society from a variety of perspectives
HIST UN3030IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP IN AMER HIST4.00
This course explores the meaning of American citizenship in connection with the country’s immigration history. Topics include historic pathways to citizenship for migrants; barriers to citizenship including wealth, race, gender, beliefs and documentation; and critical issues such as colonialism, statelessness, dual nationality, and birthright citizenship. We will ask how have people become citizens and under what authority has that citizenship been granted? What are the historic barriers to citizenship and how have they shifted over time? What major questions remain unanswered by Congress and the Supreme Court regarding the rights of migrants to attain and retain American citizenship?
This course explores the encounter between Europe, broadly conceived, and the Islamic world in the period from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. While the Latin Christian military expeditions that began in the late eleventh century known as the Crusades are part of this story, they are not the focus. The course stresses instead the range of diplomatic, commercial, intellectual, artistic, religious, and military interactions established well before the Crusades across a wide geographical expanse, with focal points in Iberia and Southern Italy. Substantial readings in primary sources in translation are supplemented with recent scholarship. [Students will be assigned on average 150-200 pages of reading per week, depending on the difficulty of the primary sources; we will read primary sources every week.]
This seminar explores the modern history of Southeast Asia, a diverse region of nearly a dozen nations that includes an extraordinary ethnic mix, all of the world’s major religions, and a broad spectrum of political systems. Considered one of the “main crossroads of the world,” we will explore the region’s modern history, including western colonial conquest, resistance struggles for decolonization, differing modes of economic development, thorough-going revolutions, and inter-ethnic violence set against the backdrop of increasing globalization
HIST UN3277History of Urban Crime and Policing in Latin America in Global Perspective4
This seminar will examine the social construction of criminality and the institutions that developed to impose and enforce the criminal law as reflections of Latin American society throughout the region’s history, with a particular emphasis on the rise of police forces as the principal means of day-to-day urban governance. Topics include policing and urban slavery; policing the urban “underworld”; the changing cultural importance of police in urban popular culture; the growth of scientific policing methods, along with modern criminology and eugenics; policing and the enforcement of gender norms in urban public spaces; the role of urban policing in the rise of military governments in the twentieth century; organized crime; transitional justice and the contemporary question of the rule of law; and the transnational movement of ideas about and innovations in policing practice. In our readings and class discussions over the course of the semester, we will trace how professionalized, modern police forces took shape in cities across the region over time. This course actually begins, however, in the colonial period before there was anything that we would recognize as a modern, uniformed, state-run police force. We will thus have a broad perspective from which to analyze critically the role of police in the development of Latin American urban societies—in other words, to see the police in the contemporary era as contingent on complex historical processes, which we will seek to understand. Fall 2026: HIST UN3277 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment HIST 3277 001/11066 M 4:10pm - 6:00pm 311 Fayerweather Amy Chazkel 4 15/15
In the decades since the publication of Silent Spring and the rise of the environmental movement, public awareness of the impact of industrial products on human health has grown enormously. There is growing concern over BPA, lead, PCBs, asbestos, and synthetic materials that make up the world around us. This course will focus on environmental history, industrial and labor history as well as on how twentieth century consumer culture shapes popular and professional understanding of disease. Throughout the term the class will trace the historical transformation of the origins of disease through primary sources such as documents gathered in lawsuits, and medical and public health literature. Students will be asked to evaluate historical debates about the causes of modern epidemics of cancer, heart disease, lead poisoning, asbestos-related illnesses and other chronic conditions. They will also consider where responsibility for these new concerns lies, particularly as they have emerged in law suits. Together, we will explore the rise of modern environmental movement in the last 75 years
In this course, students will write original, independent papers of around 25 pages, based on research in both primary and secondary sources, on an aspect of the relationship between Columbia College and its colonial predecessor Kings College, with the institution of slavery
The early sixteenth century rise of the Mughal authority in North India coincided with the arrival of the Portuguese in South India, the emergence of Safavid empire, and the dominance of the Ottoman empire. Within the first hundred years, even more claimants to imperial power in India – the British, the French, the Rajput, the Maratha – were engaged in political negotiations, resistance and accommodation with the Mughal. We will follow the course of the development of Mughal political thought, economic and environmental impact and courtly culture through to their official demise in 1857. The first four emperors of Mughal India left various accounts for us. Babur (r. 1525–1530), the founder of the dynasty, wrote an autobiography. Memoirs of the second, Humayun (r. 1530–1556), were written by his sister, and others in his army. The third, Akbar (r. 1556–1605) was the subject of the most amazing regnal history-- written by his minister and aide Abu'l Fazl. His son Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), recorded his daily activities and thoughts in his own journal that was published by him. To best engage with this complex universe, we will use the semantic vocabulary of ‘seeing’. This course will delve into how Mughal emperors saw their world and how they narrated it. This course is almost exclusively focused on primary readings. We will read large portions of the texts written by the Mughal elite. We will read them to examine their treatment of sacral landscape, nature and environment, gender, social networks, power and violence, agency and interiority, performativity, usage of history and memory. This focus on memoir and autobiographical writing would allow us to delve far deeply into the socio-cultural worlds of the Mughal then is possible via a perfunctory reading of secondary sources
This course explores the relationship between law and society in colonial India. It features cases relating to marriage and divorce, property and inheritance, sedition and criminal conspiracy woven through the lives of ordinary people in nineteenth and twentieth century India. Through a range of materials, we will explore how British colonial officials reformulated what “law” was and how it was to be interpreted. We will also explore how these interpretations were understood and challenged. We will encounter judges, lawyers, and notaries that mediated the relationship between law and society, courts, and litigants, while catching a fascinating glimpse of what arguments, evidence, and sentencing looked like in these courts. As we go through our readings and attend classes, we might ask: how does this perspective from India shape our understanding of the relationship between law and colonialism, and what are its contemporary implications?
This course will analyze the wars for Vietnam in the Cold War era from a multitude of perspectives, vantage points, and mediums. Using the award-winning documentary, The Vietnam War, as the basis of the seminar, students will explore this violent period in Indochinese history that witnessed decolonization movements, revolutionary struggles, state and nation-building, superpower interventions, and devastating warfare. At the same time, the battles that unfolded in mainland Southeast Asia posed geostrategic challenges to former imperial powers and the superpowers of the Cold War era. The class will not only familiarize students with Vietnam's tumultuous history, it introduces the latest debates, newest research, and most recent documentary films on this oft-studied topic
This seminar investigates the experiences of slavery and freedom among African-descended people living and laboring in the various parts of the Atlantic World. The course will trace critical aspects of these two major, interconnected historical phenomena with an eye to how specific cases either manifested or troubled broader trends across various slaveholding societies. The first half of the course addresses the history of slavery and the second half pertains to experiences in emancipation. However, since the abolition of slavery occurs at different moments in various areas of the Atlantic World, the course will adhere to a more thematic and less chronological structure, in its examination of the multiple avenues to freedom available in various regions. Weekly units will approach major themes relevant to both slavery and emancipation, such as racial epistemologies among slaveowners/employers, labor regimes in slave and free societies, cultural innovations among slave and freed communities, gendered discourses and sexual relations within slave and free communities, and slaves’ and free people’s resistance to domination. The goal of this course is to broaden students’ comprehension of the history of slavery and freedom, and to promote an understanding of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Americas as creating both continuities and ruptures in the structure and practices of the various societies concerned
