37 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 103American Political History3
This course examines politics in British North America/United States up to the present day. Topics include: the politics of empire and independence; the emergence of an American political culture; the Confederation era and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution; the origins and workings of the party systems; the changing concept of citizenship especially in regard to race, class, and gender; and the liberal state.
This course is a survey of the dynamic of race and ethnicity from the colonial era to the present day. Topics include: Native Americans and the project of colonization; the rise of slavery and the birth of African American culture; race and republican citizenship; the politics of "whiteness," labor and immigration; the operation of a black/white racial binary in a multiethnic society; the rise of scientific racism; and strategies of opposition and resistance.
This course surveys American history from its colonial beginnings through the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It explores a continent-wide struggle for land and power among Native American nations and the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and Russian empires. We will examine the sources of eventual British success and the reasons for the loss of thirteen of the empire’s colonies. This course will introduce students to the shaky creation of the American republic, the emergence of party politics, struggles over freedom and slavery, and the economic and social transformation of the first-half of the nineteenth century. Our study ends with the Civil War and its unfinished reinvention of the American nation.
This course offers an overview and analysis of U.S. history since 1877. It focuses on the era's three defining features: the social and economic transformations wrought by industrialization; the rise and fall of the New Deal order; and struggles over lines of inclusion, identity, and citizenship. The course also charts the country’s changing role in the world, as it grew from a regional power to a global colossus over the course of the century, exploring how this growing global role helped shape American politics, society, and culture at home. To make sense of this past, we will consult academic works of history as well as a variety of historical sources including journalism, speeches, oral histories, memoirs, films, and television programs.
A survey of major developments in world history with an emphasis on how these developments shaped and were shaped by disease and human efforts to control it. Major themes will include the biological consequences of exploration and increased encounters between the world's populations; comparative systems of explaining disease and humanity's relationship to the natural world (science, philosophy, religion); the legacy of industrialization for environmental and individual health; and the role of imperialism in creating global power imbalances and disparities in access to health and well-being.
This course is intended to survey the history of Latin America from the Iberian conquest in the early 16th century to the emergence of new states during the nineteenth century. We will discuss historical processes by which both the powerful and the powerless actively participated in making Latin America as a part of the New World. We will also examine how race, ethnicity, gender, and class were interwoven into colonial Latin American history.
This course is structured around the imposing and extraordinary changes that have taken place in Latin America and the Caribbean from independence until the present day. We will increase our knowledge and understanding of Latin America and the Caribbean. Furthermore, the course will place the region within the economic, political, social, and cultural complex of the entire hemisphere.
This course traces the emergence of Europe through the synthesis of Greek, Christian, Roman and Germanic cultures. The survey will begin with the collapse of the Pax Romana in the third century and conclude with the crisis of the 14th century and its immediate aftermath. The survey will focus on Western Europe, but the class will discuss Byzantium and Islam as unique civilizations, which profoundly influenced European culture.
This course first examines the birth of modern Europe in the Italian Renaissance. It then considers the religious and political forces, which shredded the fabric of Christian unity and ushered in an age of religious and dynastic warfare that produced the modern constitutional and absolutist states. The survey will then examine the cultural, economic and political impact of overseas exploration, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The survey culminates with a close examination of the French and Industrial Revolutions.
How did Europe make the transition from a collection of hereditary monarchies ruling over predominantly rural societies to a group of nation-states whose systems of representative government were increasingly controlled by urban middle classes? This course will focus on key political, economic, and social revolutions in nineteenth-century Europe, from the French Revolution of 1789 and its introduction of popular sovereignty to European political institutions, through the economic and social transformations of industrialization, to the emergence of nationalism and the modern nation-state. We will consider how contemporaries grappled with the meaning of "liberty" and "equality," and whether all people were included in these radical new concepts. Attention will also be devoted to the prevailing cultural assumptions about race, class, and gender that defined Europeans' sense of identity and that imperial powers like Great Britain and France used to justify their conquest of peoples in Africa and Asia.
This course will trace European society from the peak of its global dominance, when aristocrats waltzed and military parades cultivated a sense of national greatness, to its implosion in war, political extremism, and genocide. It begins in 1870, with emergence of the German Empire and growing tensions between the major European powers (Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) over their regional and global influence. We will examine how national identity was cultivated through public schools, state-directed campaigns at suppressing ethnic or religious minorities, and even through newspapers, clubs, sports, and holidays. We will consider the paradox in the claim of European imperialists that European civilization was the peak of all human achievement even as European imperial rule in Africa and Asia contributed to famine and disease and factored into Europe's rush to war in 1914. We will explore the First World War in depth for its pivotal changes in international relations, in industrial production, and in the scale of modern warfare, and conclude with the cultural anxiety and political extremism of the 1920s and 1930s that would culminate in fascism, Nazism, and a Second World War that left much of Europe shattered in 1945.
The Second World War was catastrophic for Europe and produced a level of destruction unparalleled in European history. This has led some historians to describe 1945 as "Year Zero" for a new Europe that had to rebuild not just cities but governments, economies, and cultural mindsets. This course will explore Europe as it emerged from the ruins of 1945 and adapted to new global realities, from the political polarization of the Cold War to the end of Europe's colonial empires in Asia and Africa. We will also consider the challenges of European integration, from the creation of the European Union and the Eurozone to contemporary questions about Islam in Europe.
Rather than a familiar focus on a specific nation-state or its antecedents, this course explores the emergence of the first “Global Web.” We begin with the legacy of the crusades, the rise of Ottoman power, and the centrality of China’s economy. Frustrated by Ottoman strength to the East, Europeans turned west. Prior to 1492 the Atlantic Ocean existed as a barrier that separated two old worlds, which had developed independently for more than 10,000 years. After 1492, European vessels turned this former barrier into a web of exchange, migration, and violence that created much of the modern world. We will examine the interrelated political, social, and cultural histories of these continents from the fifteenth to mid-eighteenth century. This course will survey the origins of the modern capitalist world economy and subsequent ecological changes, the struggle for land and power, the development and consequences of the slave trade, the limits and legacy of cross-cultural exchanges, and the emergence of modern fiscal-military states as global powers.
This course examines the major transformations that have shaped the world—and the planet—since 1750. It asks why the last two and a half centuries brought unprecedented economic development while also widening inequality, inciting armed conflict, and pushing humans to the brink of environmental catastrophe. That wide frame will help us explain large-scale phenomena such as empire, migration, capitalism, communism, war, and globalization. To make sense of them, we will read widely from contemporary scholarship and historical sources, weighing competing interpretations of the modern world—its pasts, presents, and possible futures.
This broad overview covers our country's environmental history from pre-conquest to current, sampling history from each region, and from a diversity of views. Throughout the course, we strive to understand our individual and our nation's relationship to the environment/nature. We not only examine changing historical interpretations and relationships, but race, ethnicity, class, and gender as well, as they influenced and were influenced by environmental forces. While our focus is the historical record and its analysis, we do not ignore nature writing and art/photography, past and present. Because environmental history is as current as today's newspaper headlines, we consider current environmental issues. Throughout our readings, we will analyze the historical connection between the degradation of people, e.g., communities of color, and degradation of the environment, that is the link between racism/poverty and pollution.
In director John Ford’s classic film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper editor utters “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes a fact print the legend.” From the colonial period through the twentieth century, the “West” and its legends have loomed large in American imagination. Legend and reality blurred in traveler’s accounts, novels, paintings, and photography. Films have continued this long tradition of inventing the West as a region of dichotomies and contradictions: a place of outlaws and heroes, a wasteland and a utopia, a landscape of America’s dreams and nightmares. During this class we will consider these themes in the light of recent work by historians. We will explore not simply what really happened, but why it matters how we tell the stories. This course considers the West as broadly defined in geography and landscape, from the deciduous forests of the first American West to twentieth-century cities on the Pacific Coast.
This course examines and interprets African-American history through the lens of film. Moving chronologically and thematically, it traces African-American life and culture from the colonial era through the present day, delving into topics such as slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the long civil rights movement, and their contemporary legacies. Across our study, we will focus on how African Americans and others defined and contested the meaning of freedom. To make sense of those dynamics, we will consult a series of films as well as cutting-edge scholarship, primary sources, music, images, and other texts.
An introduction to the history of the peoples and societies of India, Arabia, and East Africa, with an emphasis on the role of trade, religion, and cultural exchange in shaping the civilizations of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, cities of the East African Swahili Coast and the Ottoman Empire. The course will examine the thriving indigenous shipping and other exchange networks before the arrival of Europeans in 1498, with a primary focus on the Indian Ocean as a hub of human exchanges between India, Arabia, and Africa in the era of the classical Islamic world.
From the peopling of the New World some 20,000 plus years ago to 1700, the rise of civilizations, the differentiation of cultures and the impact of European civilization on Indian America are mapped out and probed. The first third of the course will emphasize Indians' world views and their relationships with each other and their varying environments. The course will then examine the social, religious, technological, ecological, and political changes that impacted Indian societies between 1492 and 1830.
The interaction between Native Americans and the United States from 1830 to the present. The topics covered include wars and alliances, trade patterns, revitalization movements, Federal-Indian relations, philanthropic and missionary activities, the reservation period, and the Red Power movement in the U.S. civil rights era.
Medicine and healing have changed much since the time of Black Death, when contemporaries blamed the disease on God's wrath, planetary alignments, and even on Jews. The quest for evidence of how the healthy body functions and what causes disease intensified after the Renaissance and the anatomist Andreas Vesalius's call to "see for oneself." This course will explore the evolution of medicine and healing since the plague pandemic of 1348-52, with particular emphasis on how political and cultural views have shaped who could practice medicine, who had access to care, and how societies responded to the threat of disease. We will also explore how health evolved from a personal matter to a national priority in modern states and the effect this had on the rights of individual citizens. Drawing upon health-themed short stories, plays, films, documentaries, art, written sources, and case studies, participants in the course will engage with past issues in health and medicine that still resonate in healthcare debates today.
This course will not be a chronological survey; instead it will cover the origins of the idea of the “Renaissance” and how this concept has framed Western perceptions of modernity. It will investigate the functional practicality of applying this concept to Italian culture and society between 1350 and 1550. The course has two goals: to provide an understanding of the world of the Italian Renaissance and to critique the values we have associated with that world. Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based research paper on a topic of their choosing.
World War I and World War II have long held a morbid fascination for many who have been both amazed and appalled at the scale of devastation that left millions dead and much of the continent in ruins. However, the impact of these wars extended beyond the battles to transform European views about the government, about women, about technology, and even about the nature of good and evil. This upper-level seminar will engage these issues through a critical examination of the historical debates about totalitarian dictatorships in Europe, the "failures" of the Versailles Treaty, anxieties about femininity, masculinity, and identity during the inter-war period, as well as other topics. Although there are no pre- requisites for this seminar, it is strongly recommended that students have some background in 20th century European history. Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based research paper on a topic of their choosing.
This course will undertake an in-depth examination of major social, political, intellectual and cultural developments in modern European history, from the Revolution of 1789 and its origins to the present. The themes and content addressed will vary, and may focus on the Cold War in one year, the Industrial Revolution in another year, and Humor & Satire in European Political Culture in still another year. The seminar may also focus in-depth on one specific country (ex. Great Britain) or on a comparison of two countries (ex.Germany and France). Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based paper on a topic of their choosing.
This course introduces the students to the fundamental skills of historical research. Students work with primary and secondary source materials in the archives, online, and in print. They learn to distinguish primary from secondary sources, to understand the problems that various sources pose to interpretation, and to identify the types of questions particular sources can answer. They learn to read these sources critically and to think historically. Students learn the identifying characteristics of monographs and are introduced to historiography. They learn how to quote properly, to summarize, and to annotate sources. Finally, they apply their skills in both a series of short writing assignments, including review essays, interpretive source critiques, précis, and a substantial research paper based on primary and secondary sources. From the skills acquired in this course, the student should have the methodological foundation needed to conduct research in any course that involves historical analysis. We recommend that this course be taken a student's second year, or in the first semester at Hartwick for transfer students.
This course examines North America, with an emphasis on the region that became the United States, from the time of Columbus to 1763. Topics include the historiography of early America; encounters between Europeans and native peoples; European settlement; the development of regional economies and societies; gender and women's lives; the emergence of slavery and the roots of racism; imperial politics; resistance and dissident movements; research methods; and historical writing. Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based research paper on a topic of their choosing.
This course will examine the American Revolution and the Early Republic, 1763-1815. Topics include the historiography of the American Revolution; the imperial crisis; republicanism(s); the War of the Revolution; the Confederation Era and Constitution; the first party system; slavery and race; women and gender; research methods; and historical writing. Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based research paper on a topic of their choosing.
This course examines the United States between 1815 and 1848. Topics include the historiography of the period; Native and white America; the construction of “democracy” and citizenship; transformations in labor; evangelical religion; the emergence of reform movements; expansionism; women’s lives and the woman movement; the growth of plantation agriculture; slave resistance; research methods; and historical writing.
This course examines the United States between 1848 and 1877. Topics include the Civil War historiography; slavery and sectional politics; the major military campaigns; wartime politics; African American resistance and the collapse of slavery; the transformation of household and gender relations; Reconstruction and the realignment of the American political system; and labor in the post- emancipation South. Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based research paper on a topic of their choosing.
This course examines the string of armed conflicts that unfolded in Vietnam in the middle part of the 20th century, focusing on their military, political, cultural, and social dimensions. It explores how, when, and why war broke out in Vietnam, and why major powers such as France, the United States, China, and the Soviet Union intervened. It examines how combat shaped the lives of everyone it touched and how the wars sparked fierce debates about nationhood, imperialism, and armed struggle across the globe. And it ponders the legacies war left. In so doing, this course seeks a fuller reckoning with the causes, costs, and consequences of the Vietnam Wars.
Examines the interaction between Europeans, Africans and Asians from 1750 to the present. Issues addressed will include the European use of science and religion to justify their rule over other societies; how the culture of imperialism shaped perceptions of gender and race; how certain Indian and African nationalists argued against imperial rule; and the challenges of the post-colonial era. Because of the scope of the subject, a substantial portion of the course will focus on British and French imperialism in Africa and India from 1850 to 1970. Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based research paper on a topic of their choosing.
HIST 378American Foreign Relations, 1898 to the Present4
The goal is to better understand the underlying philosophies, concepts, and tensions present in our foreign relations; the domestic and international context of events and policies, and the continuity and change over more than a century. Students analyze patterns, concepts/theories and the historians’ changing interpretations of foreign relations, i.e., historiography. Students learn to employ lenses/perspectives to analyze topics: Liberal Commercial World Order and Mission; National Security, Core Values, and Power; Bureaucracy and Politics; World Systems and Hegemony; Race and Ethnicity; Gendering of Peoples and Nations; and Cultural Interactions and Personality. Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based research paper on a topic of their choosing.
Epidemics are more than diseases, they are social phenomena involving populations. As such, they have historical, political, economic, cultural, and religious dimensions. This seminar will delve into the historical context of epidemics in Europe and its colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Industrialization and urbanization increasingly concentrated the population of Europe in cities, raising the specter of water-borne diseases like cholera and communicable respiratory diseases like tuberculosis. At the same time, political democratization within European states and intensified national rivalry between them elevated the health and well-being of their citizens to a national priority. Many European states thus looked to medical science and public health reforms to safeguard their citizens from epidemics and promote political stability and national prowess. Students will be required to complete a major primary source-based research paper on a topic of their choosing.
For the senior thesis, students draw upon their knowledge of historical subject areas and research methods, as well as their particular interests and general curiosity about the past, to craft their own piece of original research on a topic of historical significance. This capstone research project and essay entails the development of a hypothesis or argument, which is then supported or revised, based on an analysis of the relevant primary source evidence. It is expected that each student will develop the initial idea for his or her senior thesis out of a 300-level history seminar in the same area, and in regular consultation with a thesis advisor.
