60 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.
A review of the history of the Greek world from the beginnings of Greek archaic culture around 800 B.C. through the classical and hellenistic periods to the definitive Roman conquest in 146 B.C. with concentration on political history, but attention also to social and cultural developments.Field(s): ANC
This course, designed for newcomers to American history, tells three interconnected stories. The first is about the European colonization of North America between the 1500s and the 1750s. The second is about the wars for empire and independence that reshaped the North American continent between 1754 and 1815. The third story is about the creation of the United States and its destruction and remaking during the US Civil War. At the end of the class, you will be able to tell these stories and talk about why they matter. Along the way, you will meet all kinds of people from North America's past: enslaved voyagers, visionary women, costumed parade-goers, and land-hungry presidents. You will get a sense of how they made early America such a wild and unusual place, and at the same time, how they shaped the United States that we live in today
This course will explore the struggle to control the continent of North America from an Indigenous perspective. After a century of European colonization Native peoples east of the Mississippi River Valley formed a political confederation aimed at preserving Native sovereignty. This Native confederacy emerged as a dominant force during the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. At times Native political interests aligned with the French and British Empires, but remained in opposition to the expansion of Anglo-American colonial settlements into Indian country. This course is designed to engage literature and epistemology surrounding these New World conflicts as a means of the colonial and post-colonial past in North America. We will explore the emergence of intersecting indigenous and European national identities tied to the social construction of space and race. In this course I will ask you to re-think American history by situating North America as a Native space, a place that was occupied and controlled by indigenous peoples. You will be asked to imagine a North America that was indigenous and adaptive, and not necessarily destined to be absorbed by European settler colonies. Accordingly, this course we will explore the intersections of European colonial settlement and Euro-American national expansion, alongside of the emergence of indigenous social formations that dominated the western interior until the middle of the 19th century. This course is intended to be a broad history of Indigenous North America during a tumultuous period, but close attention will be given to use and analysis of primary source evidence. Similarly, we will explore the necessity of using multiple genres of textual evidence – archival documents, oral history, material artifacts, etc., -- when studying indigenous history
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
This course is designed to introduce students to the study of premodern history, with a substantive focus on the variety of cultures flourishing across the globe 1000 years ago. Methodologically, the course will emphasize the variety of primary sources historians use to reconstruct those cultures, the various approaches taken by the discipline of history (and neighboring disciplines) in analyzing those sources, and the particular challenges and pleasures of studying a generally “source poor” period. The course queries the concepts of “global history” and “world history” as applied to the “middle millennium” (corresponding to Europe’s “medieval history”), by exploring approaches that privilege connection, comparison, combination, correlation, or coverage
This course is designed as travellers guide to medieval Europe. Its purpose is to provide a window to a long-lost world that provided the foundation of modern institutions and that continues to inspire the modern collective artistic and literary imagination with its own particularities. This course will not be a conventional history course concentrating on the grand narratives in the economic, social and political domains but rather intend to explore the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants, and attempts to have a glimpse of their mindset, their emotional spectrum, their convictions, prejudices, fears and hopes. It will be at once a historical, sociological and anthropological study of one of the most inspiring ages of European civilization. Subjects to be covered will include the birth and childhood, domestic life, sex and marriage, craftsmen and artisans, agricultural work, food and diet, the religious devotion, sickness and its cures, death, after death (purgatory and the apparitions), travelling, merchants and trades, inside the nobles castle, the Christian cosmos, and medieval technology. The lectures will be accompanied by maps, images of illuminated manuscripts and of medieval objects. Students will be required to attend a weekly discussion section to discuss the medieval texts bearing on that weeks subject. The written course assignment will be a midterm, final and two short papers, one an analysis of a medieval text and a second an analysis of a modern text on the Middle Ages
Early Russian History is the first semester of a full-year survey of Russian history; the second semester, Modern Russian History (Since 1800), will be offered in 2017-18. (Each may also be taken independently.) During this semester, we will first look at societies in the Black Sea region and Eurasian plain – their formation, evolution, and sometimes demise – until the emergence of an early modern empire centered in Moscow. The history of the Russian Empire proper begins with the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in 1552, and culminates in the modern European empire of Peter I and Catherine II. We will examine, in turn, the Black Sea civilizations of antiquity and the medieval age; the Mongol Empire and its westernmost projection, the Golden Horde; the city of Moscow and the Muscovite Empire (15th –17th centuries) over which it presided; and, finally, the new imperial capital of St. Petersburg and the monarchs, the empire, the foreign policy and society of the eighteenth century. We will pay special attention to religion, cultural interaction, myth, monarchy, empire – all themes essential to current historical scholarship. Fall 2026: HIST UN2213 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment HIST 2213 001/11190 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm 417 Mathematics Building Catherine Evtuhov 4 12/30
An introductory survey of the history of Russia, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union over the last two centuries. Russia’s role on the European continent, intellectual movements, unfree labor and emancipation, economic growth and social change, and finally the great revolutions of 1905 and 1917 define the “long nineteenth century.” The second half of the course turns to the tumultuous twentieth century: cultural experiments of the 1920s, Stalinism, World War II, and the new society of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Finally, a look at very recent history since the East European revolutions of 1989-91. This is primarily a course on the domestic history of Russia and the USSR, but with some attention to foreign policy and Russia’s role in the world
This course surveys the history of Ukraine from the nineteenth century to the present, tracing its transformation from a contested imperial borderland into an independent nation-state at the center of European and global politics. Topics include Ukrainian national awakening under Russian and Habsburg rule, the Revolution of 1917–1921 and the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic, Soviet nationality policies and the Holodomor, World War II and the Holocaust in Ukraine, Soviet late socialism and Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan, and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. Students will engage with primary sources — state documents, literary texts, memoirs, maps, and photographs — alongside secondary scholarship, and will develop skills in historical argumentation and source analysis. No prior knowledge of Eastern European history is required
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.”
This course provides an introduction to some of the major landmarks in European cultural and intellectual history, from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the 1970s. We will pay special attention to the relationship between texts (literature, anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, art, and film) and the various contexts in which they were produced. Among other themes, we will discuss the cultural impact of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialism, colonialism, modernism, the Russian Revolution, the two world wars, decolonization, feminism and gay liberation movements, structuralism and poststructuralism. In conjunction, we will examine how modern ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, imperialism, fascism, totalitarianism, neoliberalism) were developed and challenged over the course of the last two centuries. Participation in weekly discussion sections staffed by TAs is mandatory. The discussion sections are 50 minutes per session. Students must register for the general discussion (“DISC”) section, and will be assigned to a specific time and TA instructor once the course begins
Adopting a long-term perspective that centers on the dynamic interplay of economy, space, and political power, this course investigates how Ukraine's geography – its richness in natural resources and trade routes; its centrality as a crossroads between sea, settlement, and steppe, and between rival religious, imperial, and national projects; its vastness, which fostered divergent developmental trajectories and deep regional diversity; and its openness, which offered few natural barriers to contact and conquest – have shaped the country’s history from antiquity to the present
This course covers all aspects of British history – political, imperial, economic, social and cultural – during the century of Britain’s greatest global power. Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of liberalism as a political and economic system and as a means of governing personal and social life. Students will read materials from the time, as well as scholarly articles, and will learn to work with some of the rich primary materials available on this period. Spring 2026: HIST UN2323 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment HIST 2323 001/11658 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm 313 Fayerweather Susan Pedersen 3 34/60 HIST 2323 AU1/19957 T Th 2:40pm - 3:55pm Othr Other Susan Pedersen 3 9/10
This lecture course comparatively and transnationally investigates the twentieth-century communism as a modern civilization with global outreach. It looks at the world spread of communism as an ideology, everyday experience, and form of statehood in the Soviet Union, Europe, Asia (Mao’s China), and post-colonial Africa. With the exception of North America and Australia, communist regimes were established on all continents of the world. The course will study this historical process from the October Revolution (1917) to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986), which marked the demise of communist state. The stress is not just on state-building processes or Cold War politics, but primarily on social, gender, cultural and economic policies that shaped lived experiences of communism. We will closely investigate what was particular about communism as civilization: sexuality, materiality, faith, selfhood, cultural identity, collective, or class and property politics. We will explore the ways in which “ordinary people” experienced communism through violence (anti-imperial and anti-fascist warfare; forced industrialization) and as subjects of social policies (gender equality, family programs, employment, urban planning). By close investigation of visual, material and political representations of life under communism, the course demonstrates the variety of human experience outside the “West” and capitalist modernity in an era of anti-imperial politics, Cold War, and decolonization, as well as current environmental crisis. Spring 2026: HIST UN2336 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment HIST 2336 001/11663 T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm Cin Alfred Lerner Hall Malgorzata Mazurek 4 103/120
World economy, Empire and War: 1900-1950 covers the dramatic upheavals in the world economy that brought nineteenth-century era of globalization to an end an initiated a new era of national economics and global geopolitics. The course will cover the age of imperialism, the crises of the interwar period, the arms race of the 1930s, World War II and the Cold War
We are often led to believe that Ireland is a place defined by timeless tradition: ancient songs and stories, a rural way of life, persistent and mysterious religious antagonisms. The real history of modern Ireland, however, is defined by dramatic and restless change: political, social, economic, even environmental. This lecture course will introduce you to the broad sweep of modern Irish history, acquainting you with a rich historical literature and striking primary sources covering everything from the contentious and deadly politics of potato-farming to the secret lives of combatants in the Northern Ireland Troubles. It will view Ireland not as a place out of time but as somewhere from which we can gain a unique perspective on some of the historical forces that have shaped our world: empire, capitalism, religion, migration, and nationalism
This course will offer a survey of French history from the Wars of Religion to the Revolution, when the kingdom was the predominant power in Europe. Topics to be addressed include the rise of the Bourbon monarchy, the crystallization of absolutism as a political theology, the spectacular rise and collapse of John Law’s financial system, the emergence of the philosophe movement during the Enlightenment, and the gradual de-legitimation of royal power through its association with despotism. Thematically, the course will focus on shifting logics of representation—that is, the means by which political, economic, and religious power was not only reflected, but also generated and projected, through a range of interrelated practices that include Catholic liturgy, courtly protocols, aristocratic codes of honor, financial experimentation, and the critical styles of thinking and reading inculcated by the nascent public sphere
This course examines the political culture of eighteenth-century France, from the final decades of the Bourbon monarchy to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Among our primary aims will be to explore the origins of the Terror and its relationship to the Revolution as a whole. Other topics we will address include the erosion of the kings authority in the years leading up to 1789, the fall of the Bastille, the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793, civil war in the Vendee, the militarization of the Revolution, the dechristianization movement, attempts to establish a new Revolutionary calendar and civil religion, and the sweeping plans for moral regeneration led by Robespierre and his colleagues in 1793-1794
It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the American Civil War as an event in the making of the modern United States and, indeed, of the western world. Indeed the American Civil War and Reconstruction introduced a whole series of dilemmas that are still with us. What is the legacy of slavery in U.S. history and contemporary life? What is the proper balance of power between the states and the central government? Who is entitled to citizenship in the United States? What do freedom and equality mean in concrete terms? This course surveys the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in all of its aspects. It focuses on the causes of the war in the divergent development of northern and southern states; the prosecution of the war and all that it involved, including the process of slave emancipation; and the contentious process of reconstructing the re-united states in the aftermath of Union victory. The course includes the military history of the conflict, but ranges far beyond it to take the measure of the social and political changes the war unleashed. It focuses on the Confederacy as well as the Union, on women as well as men, and on enslaved black people as well as free white people. It takes the measure of large scale historical change while trying to grasp the experience of those human beings who lived through it
This course traces, from the colonial era to the present, the development of policies toward immigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Key topics include assimilation and integration; the daily lives of im/migrants and multi-status families; guestworkers and labor; xenophobia and pro-immigrant rights movements; twenty-first century debates over immigration; and the impact of economics and foreign policy upon border and citizenship legislation
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
2026 marks the 400th anniversary of the famous transfer of the island of Manhattan from its native inhabitants to the Dutch West India Company, allegedly for goods worth approximately $24 guilders or $1000. No formal bill of sale exists and there is no record of what this might have meant to the Lenape (or Munsee) people who lived on the island prior to Dutch settlement, but this shadowy real estate transaction marks the formal establishment of the settlement that would eventually grow into New York City. This special version of the History of the City of New York will explore the history of the city on its 400th birthday. In a year when the nation will be commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this unique lecture course will ask how American history looks different when we take New York as a starting point. Trade, conquest, diversity, immigration, finance, industry, radicalism, conservatism, gender, sexuality, art: New York City has been a center of exploration of all of these throughout its history, a place where generations have asked what it means to live together democratically. Featuring field trips, walking tours, and guest lectures by leading Columbia historians of the city who approach New York from multiple vantage points, this course will bring together Columbia undergraduates and members of the broader Morningside community to explore the city that is home to us all
A survey of the history of the American South from the colonial era to the present day, with two purposes: first, to afford students an understanding of the special historical characteristics of the South and of southerners; and second, to explore what the experience of the South may teach about America as a nation
How can history help us understand the current AI hype? And when would a history of AI begin? This course turns to the past to better understand the present. Rather than beginning with the dawn of digital computers, the course situates contemporary artificial intelligence within a longer tradition of attempts to build automata and calculating machines. The course interrogates three interrelated ideas that have been instrumental in the development of AI: Intelligence, Automation, and Fiction. The course will consider questions such as: How have ideas about what intelligence is and who possesses it been inscribed in the computing devices researchers design and build? How in turn have computational approaches shaped what does and does not count as intelligence? What can earlier efforts to automate labor tell us about contemporary conversations about the end of work? And what role has speculative fiction, the promissory, and fictive futurity played in the development of AI?
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 aims to give a portrait of the development of Latin America from the first contact with the Europeans to the creation of independent states. We will focus on society and interaction among the various ethnic and socio-economic groups at the level of daily life. For each class, students will have to read sections of a core text as well as a primary source, or document, from the period; before the end of every class there will be 15 minutes to discuss the document together. In addition, students will enroll in discussion sections held by TAs
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
This course is an introduction to the medieval Middle East, starting from the Abbasid caliphate at its peak and ending with the establishment of the Timurid empire. It explores political, social, and intellectual trends that configured the region’s later history, emphasizing both its complexity and interconnectedness. The course will feature not only on the Middle East and North Africa, but also other regions such as North India and Andalusia, considering the role of the Islamicate world in global history. Special attention will be given to political formations, intellectual and social diversity, and Islam as a cultural system. Students will be introduced to a large number of primary sources from different regions, languages, and religious communities, including objects, art, and music. Students will learn to analyze these materials and understand how history is written and made. This course does not presume any foreknowledge of the topic
“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
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement This course offers a survey of main themes in West African history over the last millenium, with particular emphasis on the period from the mid-15th through the 20th century. Themes include the age of West African empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay); re-alignments of economic and political energies towards the Atlantic coast; the rise and decline of the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves; the advent and demise of colonial rule; and internal displacement, migrations, and revolutions. In the latter part of the course, we will appraise the continuities and ruptures of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Group(s): C Field(s): AFR Fall 2026: HIST UN2772 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment HIST 2772 001/12952 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm 313 Fayerweather Gregory Mann 3 47/60 HIST 2772 AU1/20159 M W 4:10pm - 5:25pm Othr Other Gregory Mann 3 5/5
This lecture course explores the Indian Ocean worlds of the nineteenth century and twentieth century by tracing networks of trade, labor, capital, pilgrimage and science. It offers an overview of how these networks were forged and who formed them, mapping their ebbs and flows across Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Zanzibar, Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Indonesia, and Australia. It begins with a brief overview of the premodern Indian Ocean and the seaborne empires of sixteenth centuries and the first encounters with Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonization and then looks at a range of different topics from the spice trade and caravan routes in the age of sail to the abolition of slavery and establishment of indenture as steamships began to take over oceanic journeys. We look at the travels of botanical specimens scrounged from tropical forests in the nineteenth century to the surveying of the ocean floor in the twentieth. At the end of the lectures, which will also feature active learning components using primary sources, we will learn how to reframe regional histories through the lens of oceanic mobilities
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 surveys the second half of the most violent century in human history. It examines the intersection of war and human society in the years after 1945 by focusing on two monumental and intertwined historical processes: Decolonization and the Cold War. While the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union would fail to produce any general wars between two belligerents, this superpower rivalry would help to make the global process of decolonization in the developing a particularly violent affair
This course surveys some of the major historiographical debates surrounding the Second World War. It aims to provide student with an international perspective of the conflict that challenges conventional understandings of the war. In particular, we will examine the ideological, imperial, and strategic dimensions of the war in a global context. Students will also design, research, and write a substantial essay of 15-18 pages in length that makes use of both primary and secondary sources
Spring 2026: HIST UN3021 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment HIST 3021 001/11807 T 10:10am - 12:00pm 311 Fayerweather Richard Billows 4.00 13/15
This course considers how identity increased, limited, controlled, or otherwise shaped the mobility of individuals and groups in the Roman world, including women, slaves, freedpeople, and diaspora communities. We will identify the structures that produced differences in mobility and consider how such groups understood and represented themselves in a variety of media as possessing a specific, shared identity and community. The course will draw on a range of primary sources, including inscriptions and literary texts (both poetry and prose), and cover the period from the second century BCE to the third century CE
Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. SEE UNDERGRADUATE SEMINAR SECTION OF THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT'S WEBSITE.
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
The aim of the course is to introduce students to the highly heterogeneous ethnic and religious relations of Central and Eastern Europe and the interrelationship between them. By Central and Eastern Europe, I mean primarily the territory of the former Habsburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its neighbors. The end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century were, for all ethnic groups, a time of both the birth of modern nations and the general secularization. Religions and churches played different roles in the birth of each nationalism. During the semester, students will learn about the most important religions and denominations, their history, spread, structure, teachings, role in the organization of societies: Roman Catholic Church, Greek Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox Church; Protestantism (Calvinist, Lutheran, Unitarian Churches); Judaism and Neo-Protestant denominations. Students will learn how the role of Catholicism in Polish or Croatian nationalism, Greek Orthodoxy in Serbian nationalism, and the presence of several dominant denominations in the Hungarian, Romanian or Slovakian nations became decisive. Conflicts between denominations often expressed conflicts of an ethnic, social or political nature. The laws enacted by the state made several attempts to ensure the coexistence of the denominations. Until 1918, all this took place within the framework of the Habsburg Empire, hence the importance of the relationship of the Empire and the Churches (especially the Catholic Church) to the state, and the phenomenon of Josephinism
Nothing seems to hold our attention quite like Britain’s early-nineteenth century and the women who wrote about it. But why are so many of the stories most resonant with modern audiences love stories? How can we account for the tenacious staying power of the Regency romance? What is lost, and gained, in the reinterpretations (or reinventions) of these works, and what does it say about the legacy of Britain and its empire? These are some of the questions to be explored in this course, which will engage with the original texts and put those texts in conversation with recent adaptations
Examination of the development of U.S. carceral systems and logics from the late 18th century through the present. Through course readings and class discussion, students will explore the changes and continuities in technologies of punishment and captivity over time, interrogating how the purpose and political economy of captivity and policing shifted over time, and analyzing the relationship between carceral institutions and constructions of race, gender, and sexuality
This reading and writing-intensive course explores the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through prisms including those of race, labor, politics, gender and sexuality, the environment, the law, indigeneity and citizenship, and migration and mobility. What is the definition of a “borderland” and who or what creates one, physical or imagined? What makes the U.S.-Mexico borderlands a unique space, and how has it changed from the Spanish colonial period to the present day? By the end of the semester students will have enough experience in analyzing primary documents and secondary sources to produce their own original research papers related to some aspect and era of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history
A remarkable array of Southern historians, novelists, and essayists have done what Shreve McCannon urges Quentin Compson to do in William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!--tell about the South--producing recognized masterpieces of American literature. Taking as examples certain writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, this course explores the issues they confronted, the relationship between time during which and about they wrote, and the art of the written word as exemplified in their work. Group(s): D Field(s): US Limited enrollment. Priority given to senior history majors. After obtaining permission from the professor, please add yourself to the course wait list so the department can register you in the course
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
The superpower competition between the US and the USSR dominated international affairs during the second half of the twentieth century. Though this Cold War was born from ideological differences and initially focused on Europe, it soon became entangled with the concurrent global process of decolonization. In this way, the US-Soviet rivalry shaped events on every continent. This course will examine the intersection of the superpower competition and the emergence of the postcolonial world. Through course readings and class discussion, students will examine the global dimensions of the Cold war. Each student will prepare a research paper on a topic to be chosen in consultation with the instructor. Spring 2026: HIST UN3490 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment HIST 3490 001/11815 T 10:10am - 12:00pm 302 Fayerweather Paul Chamberlin 4.00 11/15
The United States was founded on Indigenous land and in conversation with Indigenous nations who shared possession to most of the territory claimed by the republic. The expansion of the U.S. beyond the original thirteen states happened in dialogue, and often in open conflict with the Native peoples of North America. This course will examine the creation and expansion of the American nation-state from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous history. Most histories of the Republic equate the founding of the U.S. with the severance of colonial ties to Great Britain and the proceed to characterize America as a post-colonial society. We will study the U.S. as the first New World colonial power, a settler society whose very existence is deeply intertwined with the Indigenous history of North America
Caribbean literature offers complicated and vivid portrayals of the Caribbean’s past, and grapples with difficult histories lived by its people that compromised colonial archives can only partially capture. Literary works far exceed the limited narratives of Caribbean history by imagining entire worlds that official documents could never contain, rich selves, cultures and communities built by many generations of Caribbean people. This course is aimed at bringing forth a broader understanding of Caribbean history by examining a body of creative works by feminist and womanist writers that continuously remain attuned to the complexities of the past, which are either underrepresented or absent in the record. Chosen literary texts will also be paired with historical works that will illuminate and contextualize the multiple themes with which these Caribbean authors frequently engage, including slavery, and colonialism, racism and colorism, migration and immigration, gender and sexuality, poverty and globalization. From these pairings, students will explore both the divergences and alignments in how writers and historians approach the work of retelling the past, and will acquire reading and writing skills that will foster thoughtful critical analysis of the ever-changing contours of the Caribbean’s history
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
Historians often approach the late 20th century through the lens of politics and economics, tracking the rise of conservatism, neoliberalism, and the dominance of global capitalism following the end of the Cold War. These narratives, however, leave little room for the arts during a time when American culture became a worldwide export and artists around the country produced inventive work that transformed the culture industry. How does our understanding of the late 20th century change when we focus on the arts? What do we learn from artists about those more familiar subjects of politics and economics. This seminar seeks to answer such questions, exploring cities that emerged as artistic hubs around the United States from 1968-2000. We will survey New York, California, the Sun Belt, and Pacific Northwest, examining subjects such as the rise of Wall Street and the art market; the national “culture war” between conservative politicians and artists; changes in the Hollywood studio system; the development of Silicon Valley, the internet, and tech-culture; the cultural hybridity of the Borderlands/la frontera; the utopian, free-market aspirations of Disney; and artistic responses to globalization. A goal of this class is to practice doing cultural history across artistic genres. Rather than focus on a single type of art, this course encompasses a variety of forms and media so that students can learn to make connections between different modes of cultural expression. We will pair these primary sources with works of historical scholarship so that we can contextualize the role of art in society and think about how it changes at the end of the 20th century. There are no prerequisites for this course, which will enrich majors in History and American Studies, as well as Ethnicity and Race Studies, AAADS, Urban Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Art History, Film and Media Studies, Drama and Theatre Arts, and Dance
This course examines 20th-century American political movements of the Left and Right. We will cover Socialism and the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century; the Communist Party and right-wing populists of the 1930s; the civil rights movement, black power, and white resistance, 1950s-1960s; the rise of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s; the Women's liberation movement and the Christian right of the 1970s; and finally, free-market conservatism, neoliberalism, white nationalism and the Trump era. We will explore the organizational, ideological and social history of these political mobilizations. The class explores grass-roots social movements and their relationship to “mainstream” and electoral politics. We will pay special attention to the ways that ideas and mobilizations that are sometimes deemed extreme have in fact helped to shape the broader political spectrum. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the present political dilemmas of our country in light of the history that we study
This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to the present. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish thought, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include: the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, and Zionism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and American Jewish religious thought
A seminar on the historical, political, and cultural developments in the Jewish communities of early-modern Western Europe (1492-1789) with particular emphasis on the transition from medieval to modern patterns. We will study the resettlement of Jews in Western Europe, Jews in the Reformation-era German lands, Italian Jews during the late Renaissance, the rise of Kabbalah, and the beginnings of the quest for civil Emancipation. Field(s): JWS/EME
This course examines how Africa’s climate has changed in the past and with what consequences for the people living on the continent. It looks at the scope, duration and intensity of past climate events and their impacts, while using these historical climate events to teach fundamental climate concepts. Central to the course is the human experience of these events and the diversity of their responses. The major question underpinning this course is, therefore, how have people responded to past climate events, whether short-term, decadal or longer in scope? This question is predicated on the complexity of human society and moves away from the binary of collapse vs. resilience that dominates much thinking about the impact of climate changes on past societies. This framing recognizes the significance of climate for food production and collection, as well as trade and cosmologies. It does not take climate to be the determining factor in history. Rather it foregrounds the myriad ways people acted in the face of, for example, multi-decadal below average rainfall or long periods of more reliable precipitation
For many centuries, historians have adhered to an unwritten rule – history is made by using textual documents. But how can we uncover the histories of those not included in the textual sources, and how can we complement and enrich the textual archives? This course interrogates one answer to these questions – that of material culture, and narrate the history of Africa through things. Borrowing methods from a variety of disciplines, most notably women’s and gender studies, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, historians have begun to use artifacts and objects to uncover the untold historical narratives. The course refers to the entire African continent, challenging the common division between North Africa (which is usually more closely associated with the Middle East in modern scholarship) and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as many other divisions. In response to its decades-long marginalization in modern scholarship, Africa, in all its various subdivisions, is places at the center. As the course unfolds, the centrality of Africa in the international movement of things will become clear
This seminar explores the making and unmaking of citizenship, adopting regional and global histories from South Asia. Beginning with a brief overview of early twentieth century debates over imperial citizenship involving the Britain, its colonies, and North America and the making of a global color line in the years leading up to the formal end of empires, we look at how important political events (the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, the 1971 War of independence for Bangladesh among others) were important inflection points in the rethinking of the relationship between national identity, belonging and formal-legal citizenship and its impact on people’s understanding of citizenship. Our discussions of citizenship after empire will include readings on citizenship debates involving the former Portuguese and French possessions in India in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a discussion of the broader debates over citizenship and belonging involving the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will also look at how debates over indigeneity and authenticity mark citizenship debates in Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka as well as parts of Southeast Asia, and how this shapes global citizenship and refugee regimes. Returning to India, we consider how unmaking citizenship affects both people who stay behind and engage with state structures as well as those who are on the move, pursuing education or employment opportunities beyond it, shaped by uneven access to rights and shaping their social and political identities
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?
A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors. Field(s): ALL
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
Source: Teachers College at Columbia University's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
