131 courses with the subject HIS, 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.
HIS 101History in the Headlines
Instructor Mangan This course studies how history unfolds in current headlines. The course content uses events in the news from the previous calendar year. It analyzes the way history is invoked in news coverage of those events and the historical context behind the events. Students will read news media, primary source documents, and scholarly histories centered around four units, one for each news event. Specific case studies will change each time the course is taught to reflect current issues in the news. Each iteration of the course will be global rather than limit itself to one world region. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Kabala Medieval Europe from the late Roman era to the 15th century, with emphasis on the importance of the medieval period in the shaping of Western civilization. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Kabala HIS 113 (High & Late Middle Ages) is the second half of a 2-semester sequence beginning with HIS 112 (Early Medieval Europe). Chronological coverage will be roughly from 1000-1400. Topics covered include the development of feudalism, crusades to the Holy Land, emerging towns and monarchies, the twelfth-century Renaissance, new spiritual movements (Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans, Beguines), Gothic architecture and scholastic philosophy, fourteenth-century Black Death, and late medieval mysticism. Over the course of the semester, each student will read, write about, and discuss a number of primary sources, including a major text of interest to the student, not on the syllabus but chosen in concert with the instructor. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Dietz Political, constitutional, religious, and social history of England from Roman times through the medieval and early modern periods. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
Instructor Dietz The rise of the first urban industrial society, its period of world dominance, and the effects of its subsequent loss of status as a world power. Special emphasis on the political and social development of Britain since the Revolution of 1688. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
Instructor Staff Significant political, socio-economic, and intellectual currents in European history from the Renaissance through the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
Instructor Tilburg This course examines the history of Europe from the late eighteenth century through the 1960s, and assesses how modern entities such as the nation state and the individual fared in the face of industrialization, urbanization, the rise of nationalism, imperialism, two world wars, and their aftermath. These histories are read through the eyes of writers, artists, politicians, workers, and others, as we attempt to discern how Europeans in each era perceived, described, and made sense of the experience of modern life. We also trace the development and deployment of modern Western categories of race, class, and gender. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Benjamin The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought an end to the world’s largest land empire, and the autocratic rule of the Romanov dynasty over vast territories and diverse peoples. How did the Russian empire manage the many groups within its borders as it expanded its imperial holdings, from the Far East to Central Asia, to the Caucuses, to Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, and Baltic lands? This survey course covers the rise and dramatic fall of the Russian empire, from 1801-1917, by looking at the Tsarist state from the perspective of its peripheries and borderlands. We will pay special attention to the makings and workings of empire, and the changing social, political, economic, and cultural life over the long nineteenth century. How did a diverse group of subjects articulate new kinds of identities and forms of belonging, both before and after imperial collapse? We will also consider the relationship between the Russian empire, and the various states which emerged from its borders. Students will have the chance to explore these questions through historiography and primary sources, and by engaging with paintings, photographs, and other cultural artifacts. Paying special attention to the empire’s diversity, we will uncover the long history of the many groups and peoples who lived within Russia’s borders, and the current uses (and misuses) of the Russian imperial past. Satisfies Russian Studies major requirement. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Staff Survey of modern Russia from the “Great Reforms” under Tsar Alexander II up to the struggles of the “Second Russian Republic” headed by President Boris Yeltsin. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
Instructor Heesoo Cho This course examines the history and cultures of North America, beginning in the decades before the arrival of European empires and ending with the Seven Years’ War. It considers the varied experiences of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans as they came into contact and conflict over this extended period. We will examine the development of European settlements and colonies in relation to Indigenous nations and peoples across the continent and situate them within the broader changes of the Atlantic world. We will also examine how early Americans made sense of each other by paying close attention to changing relationships between Natives and colonists, men and women, slaves and slaveholders, and political leaders and their constituents. In doing so, we will examine how ideas and systems about ethnicity, race, freedom, household, and slavery developed in this period. By the end of the course, students will think of early North America as a dynamic place comprised of various and interconnected polities, ideologies, cultures, and peoples. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructors Guasco, Nguyen, Stremlau This course will introduce students to advanced concepts in historical thinking and selected topics in nineteenth-century US history. Students will explore secondary literature and primary sources organized into five case studies. Although the specific case studies will evolve, one each will generally explore the following major topics: 1) gender and sexuality; 2) white supremacy and racism; 3) immigration and naturalization/citizenship; 4) settler colonialism and expansion; 5) industrialization and urbanization. Students will create a sixth case study in teams. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.
Instructors Aldridge, Nguyen, Stremlau, Wertheimer American history since the end of Reconstruction up to the modern day. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Mangan A survey of Latin American history from the eve of Spain’s conquest of the Americas to the era of Latin American independence from Spain. An introduction to the societies of the Americas and the major social, political, and economic themes following the arrival of Europeans to the Americas. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Gasparowicz This course introduces students to Latin American history through themes related to place and space. Newly independent nations were eager to defend, define, and regulate territory as well as public and domestic spaces. By following the hows and whys of space and place from Independence to the late 20th century, we chart important political, social, economic, and cultural changes. Topics will include museums, schools, parks, prisons, transportation, maps, and borders. Through learning about the actions of governments and people in these places and spaces, we will analyze how national identity was defined and contested by individuals of multiple classes, races, genders. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Latin America/Caribbean). Satisfies a requirement in the Latin American Studies major or minor. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies a cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Wiemers Introduction to the major civilizations and cultures of Africa from prehistoric times through the Transatlantic slave trade, examining changes in economy, ecology, and societies as Africa became involved in the global economy. Fulfills a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Africa). Satisfies interdisciplinary minor requirement in International Studies. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Wiemers Survey of African history from the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the present, emphasizing major trends in economic, political, and social life in colonial and post-colonial Africa. Introduces students to critical historical debates and a range of historical artifacts including oral histories, African literature, and popular culture. Fulfills a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Africa). Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies a requirement in the International Studies interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Chaudhuri This course is a historical introduction to the history of South Asia, from the end of the Mughal empire through to decolonization. It is a survey of major social and political struggles throughout the British colonial period threaded through historical debates about about religious reform, political representation in an colonial context, the political economy of empire, the limits of law, environmental justice and the reproduction of caste society. In order to understand the complexity of the social and political discourse of the period (roughly 1818-1947), we will read primary texts, including autobiographies, speeches, dialogues, treatises, ethnography, and literary fiction. We will analyze, among other things, what was at stake in formulations of “tradition” and “modernity.” As the course progresses into the era of decolonization, we will examine the legacies of these contestations in shaping the nation-states of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri-Lanka and Nepal through to the early 21 st century. The course will be oriented though India in the post-1947 period while being alert to the spatialized historical legacies that shape India’s overbearing role in the geopolitics of the modern subcontinent. How do concepts such as gender, caste, religion, indigeneity and nation change over time? Using film and digital resources, we will draw on representations of South Asian culture and history to complement our analyses throughout the semester. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement. Satisfies interdisciplinary minor requirement in South Asian studies.
HIS 175The Middle East, 610-1453: The Formation of Islam
Instructor Staff Political, social, cultural and religious history of the Middle East from late antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. Cultural identity and political legitimacy within Classical and medieval Islamic civilization. Satisfies a requirement in the Arab Studies interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Middle East interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
HIS 176The Middle East, 1453-Present: Islam in the Modern World
Instructor Staff History of the Middle East from the end of the Middle Ages to the present day. Cultural aspects of contact and conflict between the Middle East and the West and of Islam’s response to the challenge of modernity. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies a requirement in the Arab Studies interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Middle East Studies interdisciplinary minor Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement. .
Instructor Mortensen This course provides a broad overview of the important intellectual, cultural, economic, and political developments in China, Japan, and Korea from prehistoric times until 1850. Particular attention will be paid to philosophical traditions, political dynamics, material culture, the Mongol Empire, trade, women’s roles in society, literature, and social change. Counts as a pre-modern course in the History major and minor. Satisfies a requirement in the East Asian Studies major and minor. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Mortensen What economic, social, and political challenges did individual East Asian states and the East Asian region as a whole face between 1850 to the present? To address this question, this course traces the modern history of political, economic, social, and cultural change in China, Japan, and Korea. We will focus on state building, women’s roles in society, economic development, colonialism, social change, war, revolution, nationalism, communism, globalization, and environmental issues. We will examine each state not just in the context of its own historical development, but also as part of the broader East Asian region. Counts as a “Non-Western” course in the History major. Counts as an elective in the History minor. Satisfies a requirement for the East Asian Studies major and minor. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Kabala A course on the exercise of power in Europe, ca. 750 - 1100 C.E In the absence of what we would call state or public institutions, power in the Early Middle Ages was personal, fluid, expressed through elaborate rituals, and tied closely to the land. Students will investigate these topics through a careful study of primary sources as well as the historical scholarship they have inspired. Satisfies a major requirement in History. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Staff A study of the history of religious violence. Topics include the relationship between religion and violence in a number of different traditions, with a special focus on the history of violent conflict between the Islamic world and the West. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement. Satisfies the Middle East Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Instructor Dietz Food - its production, its consumption, and ideas about it - has inspired global trade, cultural encounters, environmental change, and systems of slavery and labor. This course explores the relationship between food and empire, focusing on the connections between consumption, taste, power, identity, exchange, and culture in a range of British colonial contexts. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.
HIS 225Women and Work: Gender and Society in Britain, 1700-1918
Instructor Dietz An examination of British women’s lives and social relations with regard to production-artistic, domestic, industrial, intellectual, etc.-in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies
HIS 226Repression & Liberation in the Soviet Union: Minorities and the Soviet Project
Instructor McQuinn This course looks at the promises, failures, hopes and disappointments of the Soviet project through the lens of minority groups. What appeal did the communist ideology have to marginalized populations, both in the Soviet Union and across international borders? How did minority groups help to shape Soviet policy, propaganda, and international outreach? What responses did minority groups have, upon realizing that the Soviet Union was not the bastion of minority rights that they had expected? How were minorities mobilized by both the East and the West in the Cold War? This class explores these questions, which are central to understanding the Soviet project, the Cold War, and the rise of socialism and leftist values among educated minorities around the world. It focuses on groups like Jews, Central Eurasians, American black intellectuals, linguistic minorities, and Muslims and their hopes, beliefs, and disappointments in the Soviet project, as well as historiographic debates around repression and agency of minority groups in the USSR. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Center for Interdisciplinary Studies major requirement. Satisfies Russian Studies minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
HIS 228Modern Bodies: Gender, Sex, & Race in France
Instructor Tilburg One of the greatest “discoveries” of modern historical thought has been that even the human body has aspects which are historically contingent. Perceptions and attitudes toward bodies are necessarily raced, sexed, and gendered, and reflect shifting historical definitions of these categories. This course examines the way historians of modern France have tackled this topic, and the way they have interrogated the role of modern European definitions of race, gender, and sex in establishing inequitable hierarchies of social and political power. We explore images, discourses, and anxieties regarding the modern French body from the 18 th -20 th centuries. In discussing and depicting the human body, artists, politicians, and medical practitioners were also discussing and depicting problems facing modern French society, such as women’s emancipation, homosexuality, class unrest, colonial violence, and industrial and political change. This course is also an introduction to historical methods. We assess historical studies of French race, gender, and sexuality in the modern era, and evaluate the research and methodological difficulties inherent in such studies. We learn to use race, class, sexuality, and gender as categories of historical analysis, particularly in the study of the history of the body. Students will also gain experience “doing history,” by producing their own piece of historical research in the final paper project. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Counts as an elective in the French & Francophone Studies major ( prior departmental approval required ). Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement. Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Instructor Tilburg This course explores the construction, articulation, and politics of queer sexual desire in Europe from antiquity through the present, and assesses the methodological and archival challenges and possibilities of doing queer history. This course centers the evolving experiences of gay, lesbian, non-gender-conforming, and trans Europeans, and traces the shifting legal, medical, and psychological discourses on homosexuality and gender normativity in which they lived. The geographic borders of the course stretch beyond Europe through assessment of queer lives through the prism of European empire, decolonization, and migration. We also explore the important intersection of feminist and queer civil rights battles with those of transgender Europeans. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
HIS 230African Diasporas, German Encounters: Histories, Conflicts and Movements
Instructor Weimers Provides new perspectives on African Diasporas and Germany by exploring how Germans interacted with and impacted the lives of African Americans in North America and indigenous peoples on the African continent and how, in turn, African Americans and Africans in the German lands profoundly reshaped things German since the eighteenth century. The course will examine these complex histories with a particular emphasis on the Black Atlantic, migration and labor, cultural practice and political activism, gender relations, racism, violence, war, and genocide. Satisfies a major or minor requirement in History. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Africa). Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
HIS 233Soviet History and the Cold War: Interpreting Revolution
Instructor Benjamin The Soviet Union, the longest lasting and most dramatic enactment of state socialism, drew scholarly attention from its sharpest free-market critics to its deepest communist admirers. This course introduces students to the practice of history writing and historical methodology through the bitter battles fought by Soviet and Western historians after WWII. For much of the twentieth century, historians interpreted the Russian Revolution, and the Soviet state it gave birth to, against the backdrop of the Cold War and its political and ideological currents. Was the 1917 Revolution a minority coup, and the Soviet Union a totalitarian empire which oversaw the murder and starvation of millions? Or was the Revolution a triumphant overthrow of a crumbling Old Regime and the Soviet Union a great Socialist experiment? Through our studies of Soviet history, students will learn how to evaluate primary and secondary sources and develop their own research projects over the course of a semester. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Russian Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor L. Henry According to a 2018 survey, over half of millennials have never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi’s most famous death and labor camp system. However, even Auschwitz represents just one of the myriad experiences that we now understand as the Holocaust. This course introduces students to full, complex, and largely forgotten array of phenomena that we understand as part of the Nazi-led program of mass murder. Beginning with the rise of fascism across Europe and discriminatory policies against Nazi Jews in Germany, it follows the ways in which local populations - both Jewish and non-Jewish - responded to and shaped the realities of the Holocausts in local contexts. Topics will include the role of war in the development of the Final Solution, ghetto life, various forms of resistance, hiding and escape, the often-forgotten death camps of the East, the “Holocaust by bullets,” the interconnected realities of Nazi race hatred and eugenics, the role of prisoners in the concentration camp system, partisan warfare, and complicity of local populations. This course will provide students access to the most complicated and ever-present debates in history, including the role of memory and memorialization, how to record and study trauma, morality in war, systemic vs local racism, and responsible practices of historical methodologies. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
Instructor Guasco An introduction to the main events, ideas, and issues that have shaped the history of the American South from the era of first contact and colonial settlement through the era of Civil War and Reconstruction (1580s-1870s). Major topics include Anglo-Indian relations, colonialism, plantation agriculture, race and slavery, regionalism, violence, and warfare.
Instructor Stremlau How have Indigenous, American Indian, Native American, and First Nations women constructed their identities, participated in their societies, and responded to common experiences, particularly those resulting from colonization? How did Indigenous women’s ancestors live, and how have cultural traditions and identities been lost, maintained, and reconfigured over time? Through historical scholarship, films, fiction, and autobiography, the voices of Indigenous women and their allies speak eloquently about the diversity and complexity of these women’s lives over time and across place. Meets the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement. Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies Satisfies a minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies
Instructor Staff An examination of three controversial issues connected with the settlement of the American West-gender, race, and environment. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement. Satisfies depth or breadth course requirement in the humanities track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor.
HIS 245Digital History of Early American Knowledge
Instructor Shrout This course explores communication technologies and knowledge production in the antebellum United States, while introducing students to newer methods afforded by digital studies. By the end of the course, students will understand how people parsed information, talked, wrote, and signaled one another in the past. They will also understand how new tools help us to communicate both with other scholars and with the public today. Throughout the course they will engage in formal historical writing - historiography, primary source analysis, historical interpretation - as well as with the new opportunities for public engagement afforded by digital history. We will examine both elite and non-elite modes of knowledge production and transmission, and how communication was used both to exert power and as a form of resistance. Over the course of the semester, students will engage with primary sources, historical monographs and popular culture representations of communication and knowledge production in America’s past. Satisfies a major requirement in History Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement Satisfied an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Communication Studies
Instructor Stremlau This course is an interdisciplinary analysis of the history of the Indigenous peoples of the U.S. South. Throughout the semester, we will develop a sophisticated understanding of the development of Southeastern Native societies over time and across place since prior to the arrival of Europeans and Africans through the Removal Era. We seek to understand how Native people in this region formed, maintained, and evolved as distinct groups united (and sometimes divided) by experience, belief, and action. This class is an immersion into the sixteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries as lived by the ancestors of those Native communities that call the South home today or look to it as their ancestral homeland. This course also introduces students to key concepts and skills essential to the work of professional historians. This includes critical reading and analysis of primary and secondary sources; efficient and ethical research practices; writing and revision skills; documentation; presentation and public speaking skills; and dissemination of information to broad publics. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement
Instructor Wertheimer This course explores the U.S. experience in World War II, history’s largest and deadliest war. Major themes include the politics and diplomacy that preceded U.S. involvement; U.S. military and diplomatic history during the war itself; the U.S. home front; and the war’s consequences for the United States, at home and abroad. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Instructor Wertheimer An examination of United States history and controversies about it from World War II to the present. Topics include the Cold War, the upheavals of the 1960s, the “New Right,” and the War on Terror. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Instructor Nguyen This course introduces students to Critical Refugee Studies, which is a multidisciplinary field that incorporates both the humanities and the social sciences. Critical Refugee Studies subverts the dominant narrative that regards the figure of the refugee as simply an object to be rescued. Instead, Critical Refugee Studies reconfigures the refugee as the paradigm through which a larger set of problems can be made more intelligible. In this class, refugees are understood to be complex historical actors whose movements and actions reveal processes and legacies of imperialism, colonialism, militarism, displacement, and resettlement. The literature, documentaries, and podcasts that we will be reading, watching, and listening to in this course will focus on how particular populations of displaced people negotiated their refugee status to critique and make demands of the various nation-states and international organizations with which they interacted. In addition, this class will be attuned to how refugees, with limited resources, were able to create social networks and cultural productions that enabled them to act and remember collectively. Satisfies History major and minor requirement Satisfies Historical Thought requirement Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement
Instructor Aldridge American popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include sports, popular music, theatre, motion pictures and television. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor.
Instructor Mangan This course contends that we cannot understand the history of the US without studying the history of Latin@s from the colonial-era Spanish possessions to the US-Mexican War era to the Bracero era and, finally, the beginnings of Latino Charlotte in the late 20thc. Themes include migration, labor, religion, cultural identity, political organization. Students will learn about the cultures and experiences of Latinos with the US as well as US government responses to Latinos. Emphasis on Mexican-Americans with some attention to the Caribbean and South American experience. Satisfies a major and minor credit in Latin American Studies. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies a cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Heesoo Cho As the United States prepares to commemorate the 250th anniversary in independence, this course explores how independence came to be. The American Revolution was a multi-sided conflict with wide-ranging meanings and consequences beyond North America. The title of this course is intentionally plural to emphasize the multiple and clashing visions of revolution pursued by the diverse peoples in the Western Hemisphere. We will consider divisions between Patriots and Loyalists, confrontations between Euro-Americans and Native and African Americans, and competing notions of independence and freedom among men and women, rich and poor, white settlers and African Americans (both enslaved and free). In doing so, we will consider the participants’ different objectives and how they shaped the course and meaning of the American Revolution. We will also consider the global implications of the event by studying how it sparked a series of revolutions in the Atlantic world. The course is divided into three parts: Part I. The Road to Division Part II. The War for Independence Part III. The Age of Revolutions. In this course, students will read pamphlets, journals, letters, and newspapers, as well as study material and visual culture to understand how the American Revolution unfolded. In addition, students will engage closely with books and articles to learn how historians have written about the event. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Guasco An examination of the history of piracy in the Atlantic world, primarily in the 17th and 18th centuries. Special consideration given to the emergence of the sea rovers, the social composition of pirate communities, and the ongoing fascination with swashbucklers and peg-legged captains. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Mangan In depth study of Latin American history. Emphasis on traditional and digital methodologies. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Wiemers Histories of health, healing, and disease control in Africa from c. 1500 to the present. Explores the ways African people and states have conceived of and responded to relationships between human and natural environment, between individual and collective well-being, and between bodily and social health. Satisfies a major or minor requirement in History. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Africa). Satisfies Public Health major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
Instructor Chaudhuri Race, Caste and Inequality is a class that demonstrates how caste and race are particularly illuminating lenses to reconstruct history with a capital H, not just histories of caste and race. Specifically, the course will help students unpack how, historically, they have been invisibilized in the narrative of history writing. The course necessarily engages social theory, not only because these narratives of erasure reveal larger, abstract structures at play but crucially because social theory until recently also failed to account for how race and caste shape modern society. There is a very clear and direct line of reasoning that connects critical caste studies to studies of race in modern America, slavery studies and queer studies. This is precisely because racial domination and caste domination correlate so closely to white supremacy and Hindu supremacy. The course grounds students in a deeply historicized understanding of caste and the bases - not all of them productive - of its comparison to race. The ahistorical understanding of caste as an enduring, unchanging, ancient tradition that has passed on through millenia corresponds with the ahistorical understanding of race and racism as somehow innate to societies, and natural as a form of conflict, opposed to produced. Modern racialization and modern caste are systems of oppression that differ significantly from pre-modern caste for example precisely because capitalism structures and deepens these existing social forms of inequality. Students will learn the changing historical contexts for the operation of caste in South Asia and across the global diaspora. Crucially, they will learn to denaturalize caste and to read caste as very specific modern form of structural inequality alongside race. Students will also gain familiarity with the historical conditions of production for race and caste critiques which now form the content of critical caste studies and Black studies as social critiques and social theory that are necessarily in conversation with each other. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Chaudhuri Debates over property encapsulated the sphere of the political and the contending meanings of freedom in the modern world. For imperial Britain, the quite diverse overseas contexts of early America, Jamaica, India or Australia often presented new types of claims to property, and thus legitimacy and sovereignty. Company-men, migrants and bureaucratic administrators attempted to sort through preexisting and often overlapping property-based claims as materially grounded issues of land settlement and resource allocation. More abstract thinkers of political economy from Mill to Malthus or Marx, produced fresh perspectives on property with its implications for who was deemed productive, worthy and possessing the capacity toward freedom. The development of political economy would point towards new theories about the nature of land’s value which transformed understandings of what real property consisted of, while new theories about the nature of value transformed understandings of what economic life consisted of, particularly across the empire. Economic policies to govern these colonial populations were in turn closely bound to arguments about racial, cultural and gender differences, as well as to debates in Britain and its colonial contexts itself about the limits of political participation and the capacity for civic life. This course will thus focus on the history of conceptions and practices of property in the British Empire, with a special but by no means exclusive emphasis on British India. The aim is to think about how conceptions of property shaped conceptions of freedom, the emergence of international law and the hierarchizations of race, caste and gender that continue to mark contemporary life. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies South Asian Studies minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
HIS 271History of Science and Technology in Modern South Asia
Instructors Chaudhuri, Tilburg Ever since historians began to suggest that science “has a history,” they have been arguing about when it began, what constitutes it and what lies beyond the edges of “the West” or the strict purview of “colonial” technologies and systems of knowledge. More recently, scholars have asked why these histories of science and technology should be anthropocentric, thereby pushing beyond the edges of the human itself. In the context of modern South Asia, debates about the historical, geographic and nonhuman constitution of science has, in turn, proven crucial to critical analysis of science itself. This reading-intensive course will cover a range of cutting edge and classic works that represent distinctive positions on questions of originality and derivative frameworks; the relationship between science and the state, technology and progress, empire and modernity and the status of science and technology in the contested political arena of the postcolonial nation. Throughout, the course will pay close attention to the ways in which big data, technologies of financial inclusion and the structural casteism that shapes the social bases of science education and indeed, what is accorded the status of “science” reproduce exclusionary access along the fissures of gender, caste, race and class. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies South Asian Studies minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity Ways of Knowing requirement.
HIS 272Massacres and Migrations: India Partitioned
Instructor Staff Examines the causes and consquences of Partition of India in 1947. As centuries of British rule drew to a close, chaos enveloped South Asia. India and Pakistan were born out of genocidal violence that left over a million people dead as millions escaping turmoil traversed to new lands. Focuses on a people’s history of Partition, in South Asia’s unprecedented territorial division into nations along religious lines. Satisfies a requirement in South Asian Studies minor. Fulfills the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement Meets the Historical Thought requirement
HIS 273Inventing India: Nationalism, Myth & Politics
Instructor Chaudhuri Nationalism is an old fashioned topic which has seen a resurgence in public political discourse in recent years from the United States to India, Russia or the United Kingdom. Debates about what constitutes an “authentic past” are front and center again as battles over who is an “authentic” claimant to national identity are played out in social media, news channels, and in the violence experienced by those who do not adhere to the version of “authentic identity” in vogue at any given moment. Experts chart a global turn towards a revanchist ethno-religious nationalist conservatism. The long history and complexity of the question in India make it an excellent case study for how to historicize the “nation” concept and trace the the often contradictory valences of “nationalism” as a lived ideological framework. This course will equip students from across the social sciences to analyze the new global context of the renewed relevance of nationalism. Students will learn the skills that historical methodology offers for making sense of the world around them by focusing in on the specific historic context of the “nation” concept in India and the ways in which it is shaping contemporary everyday life in India, diasporic identity abroad and shaping the international political frame for engaging India as an important element of the global international order at a time when “decolonization” has become important as a political rhetoric. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Statisfies the Historical Thought Requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity Requirement. Satisfies a South Asian Studies interdisciplinary minor requirement.
Instructor Mortensen This global history course explores the fascinating causes and dynamics of revolutions and social movements in India, China, Iran, Egypt, and the United States. Students will investigate how and why young people participated in revolutions and social movements around the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Key themes of the course include anti-colonialism, nationalism, communism, democracy, religion, youthful rebellion, race relations, and social media. Satisfies a major requirement in History and East Asian Studies. Satisfies a minor requirement in Chinese Studies. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in East Asian Studies and International Studies. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies a cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Staff This is an introduction to the history of addiction and psychoactive substances - opium, tobacco, and alcohol - in East Asia from 1600-present. Questions involving the consumption, circulation, perception, and regulation of psychoactive substances will be discussed. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement. Satisfies requirement in Asian Studies, International Studies, Public Health, and Neuroscience Interdisciplinary Minors.
Instructor Lipsker For more than a century, the land of Israel/Palestine has been a site of contestation and resistance. Local, regional, and global dynamics have shaped the modern history of this place and its people, as well as a confluence of colonial, national, and religious factors. Beginning in the nineteenth century and drawing on both influential works of scholarship and newer directions and approaches, this course surveys topics of ongoing historiographic discussion in the entangled histories of Zionism, the formation of the Israeli state, and the Palestinian Nakba. Conflicting visions of the land’s political future invariably rely on divergent accounts of its past, and historians have done much to shape perceptions of what is commonly described as the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Therefore, an additional aim of this course is to consider how political commitments inform historical methodology, or how the present shapes the past as much as the past shapes the present. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Staff This course is an introduction to common topics and methodologies used in the professional study of Chinese history. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement. Satisfies Asian Studies and International Studies Interdisciplinary Minor.
Instructor Mortensen This course explores the fascinating dynamics, causes, and pathways of student movements and revolutions in China. The course is divided into four units, each of which covers a different period of student activism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century China: student involvement in the May Fourth Movement (1919), Red Guard activism during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1968), the Tian’anmen Square protest and its aftermath (1989), and student involvement in the Hong Kong democracy protests (2014). We will examine not only how each of these movements affected individual Chinese citizens, but also how these movements shaped the way the Chinese government explained, re-evaluated, condemned, celebrated, or silenced previous revolutions. Students in this course will analyze primary source documents from each of these periods and critically engage with a variety of other less conventional texts, such as films, memoirs, literature, propaganda posters, song lyrics, and blogs. Key themes of the course include nationalism, anti-imperialism, communism, capitalism, youthful rebellion, and democracy. Satisfies the 200-level methods course requirement in the History major and minor. Satisfies the research methods course requirement in the East Asian Studies major. Counts as an elective in the Chinese Studies minor Counts as an elective in the East Asian Studies interdisciplinary minor. Counts as an elective in the International Studies interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
HIS 287Memory and Identity in the People’s Republic of China
Instructor Mortensen This course explores how the government of the People’s Republic of China historically has defined and managed ethnic and religious diversity within China, and how in turn, various ethno-religious groups in China have negotiated their own sometimes fraught positions. How have local understandings of identity in China been influenced by state-driven narratives about China’s collective past? How is historical memory in China incarnated in physically tangible and symbolically meaningful places, such as museums and memorials? This course draws on historical and anthropological approaches to identity, ethnicity, language, modernity, religion, nationalism, and memory to explore these questions in detail. Satisfies a requirement in the History major and minor. Satisfies a requirement in the East Asian Studies major. Satisfies a requirement in the Chinese Studies major and minor. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
HIS 288Environmental China: Nature, History, and Crisis
Instructor Mortensen What are the historical roots of China’s contemporary environmental dilemmas? This course examines China’s environments as created by and mediated through historical, cultural, political, economic, and social forces both internal and external to the country. As a class, we will explore China’s humanistic traditions regarding the concept of nature, its history of environmental practices, 20th-century environmental crises resulting from rapid regional development and globalization, and most recently, Chinese environmental activism and innovations in green technology. There are no prerequisites for this course. Satisfies a major requirement in History. Satisfies a major requirement in East Asian Studies. Satisfies a major requirement in Environmental Studies. Satisfies a minor requirement in History. Satisfies a minor requirement in Chinese Studies. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in East Asian Studies. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Environmental Studies. Meets the Historical Thought requirement. Meets the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Stremlau and Mortensen Since the mid-nineteenth century, Honolulu has been a site of political, economic, and cultural significance. Designated as the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii by Kamehameha III in 1850, Honolulu now serves as a capital of a settler state. While Honolulu’s population is nearly a quarter Indigenous and Pacific Islander, the city’s diverse population today also reflects a complicated history of migration from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. This course explores the production of historical narratives about this complex city. How have different groups created, explained, memorialized, and remembered the past in Honolulu? Course materials include scholarly monographs, essays, and articles in addition to primary sources, films, music, literature, and site visits. Students will design and complete an independent research project, which can be a paper or other creative product, on a topic of historical significance and personal interest about Honolulu. Course members will spend spring break on a trip led by faculty and conduct research in some of Honolulu’s many archives. Davidson College will finance all course-related travel. Satisfies a History major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Prerequisites & Notes Intended for History majors and minors and will require permission to enroll.
Instructor Stremlau The history of women in what is now the United States, beginning prior to European colonization and ending after the at the turn of the twentieth century. Comparison and contrast of the experiences of female people with attention to race, class, and religion in shaping women’s lives, with emphasis on changing social roles, labor, and suffrage. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
HIS 307Women and Gender in U.S. History Since 1900
Instructor Stremlau The history of women in the United States from 1900 to the present, with emphasis on educational and work experiences, the suffrage movement and the ongoing struggle for women’s equality, family and sexuality, and differences of race, class, and sexual orientation. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor J. Kabala, R. Zamir Ethnogenesis, slavery, conversion, state building, sanctity, economic life, family relations and learned culture in medieval Germany, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary 800-1250 CE. Satisfies a major requirement in History Satisfies a requirement in Historical Thought
Instructor Staff Basic social and cultural shifts in Italy, northern Europe, and Iberia from the 14th century to the 16th century. Special attention to the varieties and implications of humanism, and the effects of the printing press, religious and political conflicts, and encounters with the world beyond Europe. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
HIS 321Port Cities in the Maritime World, 1500-1800
Instructor Heesoo Cho This course examines port cities’ role in making the maritime world in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Oceans structured human experiences of space and time, and port cities functioned as sites where people mitigated the vastness and uncertainty of oceanic travel and trade. Five themes are central to this course: 1) material exchange, 2) movement of people, 3) knowledge production, 4) contests for power, and 5) cultural imaginings. While the course will primarily focus on the Atlantic world, we will also learn how goods, ideas, and people moved across the Indian and Pacific oceans. We will also discuss coasts, harbors, and islands that performed functions similar to port cities. The course is divided into two parts. Part I will focus on the role port cities played in the development of the maritime world. Part II will focus on how port cities shaped the everyday lives of the people involved. This course is of particular relevance to students interested in how economics, technology, migration, and geopolitics shaped the currents of early modern globalization. Satisfies History major and minor. Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity Requirement.
Instructors Guasco, Mangan Exploration of the European voyages of discovery, cross-cultural encounters, and the conquest of the Americas in the early modern period. Special attention to issues of race and ethnicity and the roles of religion, disease, technology, and the circulation of ideas throughout the Atlantic world. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Dietz The evolution of British society and culture during the “Long Eighteenth Century,” with emphasis on the reaction to an age of revolution-the Glorious Revolution, Industrial Revolution, American Revolution, and French Revolution. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
HIS 328Rebels and Radicals: Art and Politics in France, 1789-1940
Instructor Tilburg Rebels and Radicals: Art and Politics in France, 1789-1940 weaves together the history of the French artistic and intellectual avant-gardes with the upheaval of political, social, sexual, and anti-colonial/anti-racist revolutions. From the barricades of 1830 to the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s to Americans in Paris in the 1920s, we explore the connection between art and politics in France, particularly in the countercultural artistic realms known as Bohemia. We investigate the shifting relationship in French culture between political radicalism and artistic rebellion from the Revolution of 1789 through the Jazz Age. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Counts as an elective in the French and Francophone Studies major ( prior departmental approval required.) Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Lipsker This course surveys the Jewish diasporic experience over five centuries through the lens of the Yiddish language and its many cultural, political, and religious expressions. The majority of Jews today speak either Hebrew or English, but before the Nazi Holocaust, most Jews in the world, wherever they lived, spoke Yiddish. A one-thousand-year-old language, Yiddish was, and remains, more than a vernacular; in the late 19th and early 20th century, it was a site of contestation over the very meaning of Jewish identity in the modern world. For many, Yiddish was a kind of non-territorial homeland, a national culture without a nation-state or borders. Using methods of cultural history, students will access this global ‘Yiddishland’ through a range of primary sources in translation, from early modern women’s prayer books to political manifestos and modernist fiction and poetry. Our multi-century excursion through the lost worlds of Yiddishland will take us to estate towns of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and the rise of a mystical current known as Hasidism; to worker strikes and barricades in the borderlands of the Russian Empire; to the shores of Ellis Island and the Lower East Side of New York; and to the bustling interwar centers of Yiddishland in Vilna, Warsaw, New York, and Moscow. We will look also at the fate of Yiddish language and culture in the wake of Nazi genocide during WWII, and the ways in which Yiddish was discouraged in favor of Hebrew in the early state of Israel. Finally, we will examine the many ways in which Yiddishland has been pronounced dead from the late 20th century to the present, only to reinvent itself anew. Along the way, we will think about big ideas like diaspora and nationalism, as well as questions relating to language preservation, the politics of language, multilingualism, translation, and the practice of digital humanities. Satisfies a History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historitcal Thought requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Tilburg This course explores the political, cultural and intellectual history of the turn of the nineteenth century through the prism of several glittering European cities: Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and London. We examine the political and social landscape of these fin-de-siècle urban centers- including labor unrest in Barcelona, the devastating impact of the Franco-Prussian War on Paris, suffrage movements in London. The class grapples with the particular problems of urban life-from the new realms of consumer pleasure to the depths of the city dweller’s psyche. We approach the turn-of-the-century European metropolis through the eyes of Charles Baudelaire and Otto von Bismarck, Jack the Ripper and Sigmund Freud, the Victorian prostitute and the bourgeois housewife. The City at the turn of the century was the testing ground for modern life, from nationalism to art nouveau to industrialization. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Benjamin For centuries, Jews in Europe lived as a largely urbanized and literate religious and social minority amidst majority agrarian, often Christian societies. Within these imperial and feudal structures, Jews enjoyed broad communal and religious autonomy while lacking political power, and a few managed to gain wealth as merchants, traders, financiers, or leaseholders. As a result, some scholars have classified Jews in European history as a ‘middleman’ or a ‘rural service’ minority, who were, as the scholar Yuri Slezkine has argued, ‘modern’ before modernity, and ‘capitalist’ before capitalism. As Europe industrialized and more and more people began to urbanize, they became in Slezkine’s formulation ‘Jewish,’ leading him to describe the twentieth century as “The Jewish Century.” Using Slezkine’s provocative thesis as our starting point, this course surveys the history of Jews in Europe, focusing on Jews’ changing social and economic position. Taking the long view, this course considers the makings of Jewish communities in European lands and interrogates the category of ‘Jewishness’ across the early modern and modern periods. Considering the changing state and popular attitudes towards Jewish populations, we will ask: how have Jews been shaped by the political economy of empires? What does it mean to trace legacies of legal, social, and religious separateness, discrimination, privileges, and discourses of prejudice across time and place? By reconstructing Jewish life, we will seek to uncover the variety of lived experiences within diverse contexts, from Iberian, to Ottoman, to Polish, German, and Russian lands. Using a rich array of secondary and primary sources, from songs, short stories, memoirs, and other cultural artifacts, this course will introduce students both to Jewish history and major themes of the twentieth century, from histories of mass politics, state formation, mass migration, secularization, nationalism, war, genocide, and displacement. Satisfies a History major and minor requirement. Satisfies a Russian Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
HIS 334World War II in European History and Memory, 1939-1990
Instructor Henry The devastation of Europe following World War II almost defies comprehension: between 35 and 40 million Europeans killed; millions more missing, homeless, or displaced; and entire countries in ruins. In this course, we will explore how the war transformed three combatant nations in particular: France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. In each country, we will examine the conflict as it was experienced by everyday citizens, both civilians and soldiers alike. We will then turn our attention to the postwar period, and examine how the war’s memory has shaped politics and culture in Europe ever since. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor McQuinn How did the catastrophic consequences of World War II shape the European continent and its place in the world? This course looks at the period from 1945 to the early post-communist period as the “Postwar” - in other words, a period where Europeans were shaped by the legacies of war and atrocity. It will examine the lingering influence of war in three interrelated cases. First, the role of international legal institutions in defining now-fundamental concepts such as genocide and human rights, and how these concepts and institutions in turn played a role in the dismantling of European colonial empires. Second, how the aftermath of war shaped and continued to play a role in the Cold War until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Third, how awareness and representation of the Holocaust developed over the course of the 20th Century - and both influenced and was shaped by larger political and social movements. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
HIS 336Sexual Revolutions:Women, Gender, & Sex in Modern Europe
Instructor Tilburg We examine the history of debates about the nature and place of women in the history of modern Europe, and how gender difference has been employed in the construction and negotiation of political and social relations. We investigate the birth of feminism, as well as other cultural discourses and political movements that engaged shifting notions of gender and sexuality: homosexuality and the “invention” of heterosexuality, labor activism, reproductive science, race and empire, prostitution, revolution, and fascism. This course also explores the experience of sexuality in the modern era-how women and men viewed and managed their bodies and sexual lives, including tension-ridden norms of masculinity. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Henry L This class examines anti-Semitism and its opponents in 20th Century Europe, beginning with the Dreyfus Affair and continuing until the post-communist Jewish culture boom in Eastern Europe. It considers how anti-Semitism has motivated European political and social movements, as well as how both Jewish and non-Jewish political, cultural, and social movements have envisioned their work as responses to anti-Semitism. Topics include: the Dreyfus Affair; Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the most enduring anti-Semitic pamphlet of all time); Nationalism and anti-Semitism; Zionism, Bundism and other Jewish political movements as “answers” to anti-Semitism; Nazi propaganda, rescue, uprisings, and other forms of resistance during World War II; reckoning with the Holocaust; the complicated reality of Jewish life under communism; and recent Jewish culture festivals and tourism in Europe.
Instructor Guasco Foundation and development of the British North American colonies to 1763. Examines colonial America as the product of Old World elements in a unique New World environment. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
Instructor Staff Origins of sectional conflict; the battle front and home front, military, political, and social transformations of the war years; the upheavals of the Reconstruction era; and the legacies of the era for modern America. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
Instructor Wertheimer This course explores U.S. thought from the Founding era to the present, with special emphasis on how U.S. thinkers, at different points in time, have reflected on what it means to be human. Topics include: enlightenment-era debates about the moral sense and what it means for “all men” to be “created equal”; the intellectual history of slavery and the extent to which enslaved laborers qualified as human; debates about Darwinian evolution and what distinguishes humans from other living beings ; debates about feminism and whether women and men are equally human; Native American conceptions of humanity; debates about reproductive rights and when human life begins; tensions between universalism (as in universal human rights) and cultural particularism; debates sparked by environmentalism; debates sparked by advances in artificial intelligence; conceptions of human identity in an imagined cosmos containing other advanced life forms; and competing claims to authority over what it means to be human made by organized religions, legal system, academic disciplines, and the like, each of which has enjoyed different degrees of cultural authority at different points in time. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Aldridge This course covers the history of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, its impact on American society, and its influence upon the United States’ role in the world. The course will cover topics including the policies of political leaders such as Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon toward Vietnam, the experience of the soldiers who fought in the war, the struggles at home between the anti-war movement and those who supported the Vietnam War and the impact of the war on how Americans view their engagement with the world. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement.
Instructor Stremlau This course is an interdisciplinary survey of American Indian history from the period immediately prior to contact with Europeans and Africans until the end of the removal era. We will learn how Native people have survived the colonization of their homelands, and we will focus on key reasons explaining cultural continuity despite change over time. Likewise, we will seek to understand the “big picture” of Indigenous North America, but we will not attempt to create a “master narrative” that summarizes the stories of all Native peoples. Rather, because we take cultural and experiential diversity as our starting point and recognize that what brings Native American people together today is not a monolithic past or a uniform present, we will draw comparisons among the Indigenous nations of the United States. Our goal is a nuanced appreciation for the range of Native American experiences and not a simplistic chronology. Course content will expose students to the histories of many Native societies in relationship to their arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions. We will cultivate a respect for diversity and an appreciation of the values and ethics of Indigenous civilizations. Counts towards the Western History (Europe & US) requirement in the History major. Satisfies a requirement in the History minor. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Stremlau This course is an interdisciplinary survey of American Indian history covering expansion into the trans-Mississippi West in the mid-nineteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century. We will learn how Native people have survived the incorporation of their homelands into the United States, and we will focus on key reasons explaining cultural continuity despite change over time. Likewise, we will seek to understand the “big picture” of Indigenous North America, but we will not attempt to create a “master narrative” that summarizes the stories of all Native peoples. Rather, because we take cultural and experiential diversity as our starting point and recognize that what brings Native American people together today is not a monolithic past or a uniform present, we will draw comparisons among the Indigenous nations of the United States, including rural and urban communities and Alaska and Hawaii. Our goal is a nuanced appreciation for the range of experiences and not a simplistic chronology. We will cultivate awareness of the values and ethics of Indigenous civilizations by learning about the range of ways that Native peoples have responded to attempts to assimilate them and are currently revitalizing their cultures. Satisfies the Western history (European & US) requirement in the History major. Satisfies a requirement in the History minor. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Nguyen This is a survey course of Asian American history from the founding of the United States to the present day. We will explore the histories of Asian Americans within regional, national, and global contexts. Central questions that we will address are: What forces have driven Asians to migrate to the United States? How have Asians figured in U.S. racial formations? What factors have unified and stratified Asian American communities? How have Asian Americans struggled for democracy and justice? Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity graduation requirement. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Aldridge American foreign relations during a period of global political, economic, and military leadership. Topics include World War II, Cold War and detente, Vietnam War, and relations with the Third World. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Wertheimer Law in American history from English settlement to the present. Topics include the origins and evolution of the U.S. legal system; law and economic development; race, sex, and the law; the legal profession; industrialization and the regulatory state; and individual liberties and civil rights. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Wertheimer This course examines U.S. presidents and first ladies - their backgrounds, personalities, strengths, weaknesses, goals, policies, successes, and failures - from George and Martha Washington to the present. Students will study these figures in their own right, will contextualize them historically, and will compare and contrast them to others who held the same offices. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement.
HIS 357The Civil Rights Movement in the United States
Instructor Aldridge An examination of the American civil rights movement’s origins; its diverse strains of thought; its legal issues, strategies, and grassroots efforts; and its legacies. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America). Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Wiemers Examines how projects for “development” have been conceived and carried out in colonial and post-colonial Africa, and how they have been represented and understood by African people, governments, and international actors. Explores the interaction of ideas and experience-from changing economic and political theories to the daily practices of farmers, bureaucrats, activists, and scholars. Satisfies a major or minor requirement in History. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Africa). Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
Instructor Staff This course covers environmental interactions large and small, tracing the changing ways that Americans have shaped and thought about the places where they live and work. Course focuses on US environmental history from the colonial period to the present, including national parks, preservation, conservation, and wilderness; the relationship between the US and the rest of the world; and debates over what nature is, who it is for, and how it should be used. Satisfies a major requirement in Environmental Studies Satisfies a major requirement in History Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Environmental Studies Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement
Instructor Wiemers Explores slavery and slave trades in and out of Africa from the 5th to the 20th centuries, as a way of understanding changing relationships between trade, personhood, and social belonging. Special attention to ideas of and debates about, race, slave status, and diaspora. Satisfies a major or minor requirement in History. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Africa). Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Staff This class is a survey of the history of Egypt, from the rise of the first unified kingdom circa 3,000 BCE (actually, from just before that development) down to the present day. Satisfies History major and minor Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in International Studies. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Middle East Studies. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
HIS 375Nationalism and Colonialism in the Modern Arab World
Instructor Staff European colonialism and American involvement in the Middle East and the Arab response. Great Power politics, nationalist ideology, and cultural identity in the Arab world. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement. Satisfies the Middle East Studies interdisciplinary minor.
Instructors Chaudhuri Have you heard the terms “late capitalism”, or “neoliberal capital” and wondered what they meant exactly, even as you perhaps felt you had a vague sense of their meaning in your own life? In this class, we make sense of the historical development of globalizing forces from the nineteenth century through to the present in order to understand the racial, economic and political logics of capitalism. Students will learn to analyze that which they intuitively know: that capitalism is not merely an economic system, but a social form that penetrates the most intimate realms of our lives. Using crisis as a lens allows us to connect the granular experience of ordinary folks to large scale global power shifts and the abstract realm of finance. It allows us to illuminate the deep structures of history. A key theme running through the way we follow this connected human history will be to observe the ways in which established grand narratives privilege or center European/Western experiences even if they’re talking about the connections between far flung corners of the globe. One of our main tasks will be to correct this sometimes overt, and very often implicit, bias even as we track how crises have historically shaped and been shaped by the dynamics of globalization, from black sharecroppers in Reconstruction era U.S. to cotton farmer in India and Egypt in the 1890s, to the age of U.S. hegemony in the 20th century and the race for a new global primacy in the post-Covid era. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
Instructor Staff This course will explore the long and complicated history of Islam in South Asia, from the arrival of the Arabs in the eighth century to the emergence of Pakistan and Bangladesh in the twentieth, through both lectures and visits to sites of historical and artistic importance. Satisfies a major requirement in History. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in South Asian Studies. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies history requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
HIS 381Asian Diasporas to Latin America, 16th Century to the Present
Instructor Luis The history of Asians in the Americas dates to the 16th century in Central Mexico. Though Asian American history is most often bound to U.S. national borders, this course takes an expansive and transnational approach by examining the formation of Asian communities in Latin America from the 16th to 21st centuries. These are histories of migration coinciding with indigenous struggles for survival, as well as the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlives. In this course, we will privilege scholarly approaches that foreground migratory histories as told from migrants themselves. By examining the long chronology of diasporic Asian mobility to places like Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Brazil, we will cover questions central to migratory experiences like assimilation, transculturation, and racial formation. Satisfies Latin American Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
HIS 382Science and the Body II: Public Health in East Asia
Instructor Staff This course employs an interdisciplinary approach by drawing upon and applying history, anthropology, gender studies, and philosophy to the study of science and medicine. Designed for students interested in a) the history, philosophy, and anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, b) East Asian studies, and c) history of public health, this class offers students opportunities to analyze and critically assess the politics of the body in East Asia, 1800-present. Satisfies a major requirement in History. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Medical Humanities. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Staff Japanese history from ancient times to 1868. Topics include the origins of Japanese civilization, state and society, economy, law, connections to the outside world, daily life and customs, family, sexuality, warfare and the samurai, arts, literature, and religion. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Mortensen This course covers the history of the city of Shanghai from the nineteenth century until the present day. Readings and assignments focus on Shanghai’s transformation from a sleepy fishing village into an international treaty port in the nineteenth century, the development of the city’s innovative fashion, music, and media industries in the early twentieth century, the Communist Party’s vilification of the city’s capitalist culture, and its post-Mao reemergence as a vibrant, cosmopolitan, and truly global city. Key themes of the course include imperialism, international trade, war, communism, fashion, literature, film, and gender and sexuality. Counts as an elective in the History major and minor. Counts as an elective in the East Asian Studies major and minor. Counts as an elective in the Chinese Studies minor. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Staff Survey of late imperial Chinese history with topics covering the environment, daily life, family, kinship, sex, government, law, military, economy, science, medicine, print culture, and travel. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Mortensen This course explores the major political, social, economic, religious, and cultural developments in China from the late imperial period until the present day. Course readings, films, and assignments focus on how Chinese intellectuals, women’s rights activists, farmers, artists, and environmentalists defined what it meant to be “modern,” and how their understandings of “modernity” shifted over time. Counts as a “Non-Western” course in the History Major. Counts as an elective in the History major and minor. Counts as an elective in the East Asian Studies major and minor. Counts as an elective in the Chinese Studies minor. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies a Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Staff This course examines the impact of the First Great East Asian War, involving Korea, China, and Japan. Current tensions in East Asia continue to be understood through the memorial lens of this conflict. Some issues discussed are: war and memory, dead bodies, martyrdom, and subjecthood. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Mortensen This course explores gender dynamics and the lives of women in Japan from the nineteenth century to the present day. It introduces students to the gendered dimensions of Confucianism, marriage, paid employment and unpaid work, parenting, war, political activism, structural power, and popular culture in Japan. Other topics include the political, social, and economic challenges that Japanese women and the Japanese LGBTQ community continue to face. Satisfies a requirement for the History, East Asian Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies majors. Satisfies a requirement for the Gender and Sexuality Studies minor. Satisfies a requirement for the East Asian Studies and International Studies interdisciplinary minors. Satisfies an Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
HIS 390Davidson Summer Program at Cambridge University
Limited to thirty students, the Davidson Summer Program at Cambridge focuses on the history and literature of late 18th- and 19th-century Britain. Students may receive credit for either English or History. Students entering 2012 and after: satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Students entering before 2012: satisfies History requirement.
Instructor Wertheimer This course teaches students about history by having them research and write original works of historical fiction. The course approaches historical fiction with an emphasis on the “historical.” A paper prepared in this course might be a lousy work of fiction but still a great paper if the historical research and analysis are strong. But no fictional glitter, however sparkling, can redeem a paper marred by weak historical research and analysis. Satisfies a History major requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Wertheimer Spain’s history is long, rich, and very much alive. The meanings of that history are multiple, contested, and politically divisive. This course will explore both Spanish history and Spanish historical memory. After doing some brief introductory readings about the concept of historical memory, students will proceed through a chronological survey of Spanish history. Each unit will include an excursion to a relevant Spanish historical site. Students will prepare for each visit by studying the site’s history. Afterwards, students will reflect about the ways in which the site portrayed the past. Throughout the semester, the course will chew on the following observation from Spanish writer Reyes Mate: “Although memory sharpens the sense of justice, the process of remembering is a long haul, for the painful past that we slowly uncover together surely holds many surprises.” Students in this course should have taken three semesters of college-level Spanish or the equivalent. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Wertheimer Reading and research on a special subject and writing of a substantial paper. Under the direction and supervision of a faculty member who reviews and approves the topic of the independent study. Admission with permission of the professor, who will also evaluate the student’s work. Does not satisfy distribution requirement.
Instructor Staff Reading and research on a special subject and writing of a substantial paper. Under the direction and supervision of a faculty member who reviews and approves the topic of the independent study. Admission with permission of the professor, who will also evaluate the student’s work. Does not satisfy distribution requirement.
Instructor Kabala Students in this research seminar will investigate the medieval past not only through reading and writing about medieval primary sources, but also through contributing to a collective project of digital mapping, network, and/or text analysis on a major medieval source or collection of sources. Along the way, students will acquire basic coding skills; no prior experience required. Satisfies History major requirement. Satisfies Digital Studies minor requirement. Satisfies Data Science minor requirement.
Instructor Dietz An examination of how 17th-century English men and women turned their world “upside down.” Emphasis on the political, social, and religious causes and consequences of the Great Rebellion of 1640-1660.
HIS 422Gender in Early Modern Europe (C. 15th-18th Centuries)
Instructor Dietz From Christine de Pisan to Mary Wollstonecraft. An examination of changing roles, expectations, and desires of men and women, with particular emphasis on their interaction.
Instructor Tilburg This seminar explores the history and historiography of the French Revolution of 1789 as a global event. The Revolution released potent new ideals of political participation and social mobility, and unleashed decades of warfare in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. It marked a decisive and violent rupture between the Old and the Modern, created “sister republics” across Europe, and touched off the revolutions of free and enslaved people of color in the Caribbean, especially in the Haitian Revolution. We consider historical debates about the origins of the Revolution, and investigate the symbols and rituals of revolutionary culture. What were the consequences of the revolutionary moment for groups not included in triumphal rhetoric of liberty, equality and fraternity (women, workers, enslaved and free black people)? And how has the Revolution been remembered and commemorated around the world in the two centuries since the Bastille fell?
Instructor Dietz Society and culture of Victorian Britain through the lens of some of its more captivating personalities and their writings. Possible figures include: Charles Darwin, George Eliot, William Gladstone, William Morris, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
HIS 427European Consumer Culture: 1750 to the Present
Instructor Tilburg This seminar explores the history of consumer culture in Europe from the 18th century through the 1990s. From the luxury consumption of the Old Regime aristocracy to the electric-lit department stores of the 19th-century metropolis, an examination of European consumer culture allows us to trace momentous economic, social, and political transformations of the modern era through tourism, revolutionary fashion, imperialism, and socialist critiques. In the 20th century, we assess the interrelated markets and pop cultures of Europe and the U.S. with postwar “Americanization”- from rock & roll to McDonald’s.
Instructor Benjamin For much of the twentieth century, millions of ethnic minorities across Eurasia were victims of state-led mass killing, aided by the participation of ordinary individuals. This extraordinary violence often took place during moments of political, societal, or economic crisis, such as imperial collapse and war, and within the broader context of European colonialism and imperialism. In the wake of the Nazi-German extermination of European Jews, the Polish-Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin introduced the term “genocide,” to describe the mass killing of a whole or part of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group and as a way to seek means of international justice and protection. This seminar introduces the field of Genocide Studies by looking at three major events of mass killing in twentieth century Eurasia: the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, or the Ukrainian Famine, and the Holocaust. We will approach these three events of mass killing as part of the longer history of European nation-building and the collapse of empires. What was the relationship between genocides and the new nation-state? Did the rise of nationalism and the end of empires produce the kind of state-led killing that marked the twentieth century? How do genocide scholars treat mass violence directed toward political and social groups? We will consider political, legal, and historiographical definitions of the term ‘genocide’ from its origins to the present day, covering debates over which historical events constitute a genocide, and the stakes of these questions. How has the term ‘genocide’ been used to understand terrible histories of violence, and to seek justice or retribution in events of mass violence? To uncover these difficult histories, we will rely on witness testimony, primary sources, documentary films, as well as historical, theoretical, and legal analyses. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Russian Studies major and minor requirement. Prerequisites & Notes A note- in Degree Works this course will default to the ‘western’ area. See the department chair if you want it to count for the ‘non-western’ requirement.
Instructor Lipsker We live in globally interconnected times, facilitated and reinforced by trade networks, pandemics, wars and violence, climate change, migration, and technology. Yet national borders remain a defining feature of our world, structuring our political imagination: we often think of global connectedness as inter-national. At the same time, many politicians, scholars, and commentators have been warning of resurgent nationalism worldwide, implying the end of a brief ‘post-national’ moment. This seminar on the history of nations and nationalism asks how we arrived at this juncture. How, when, and why did our world become an ‘international community’ of nominally sovereign nation-states? Approaching these questions requires us to adopt a global lens and a comparative perspective. Until quite recently, historians narrated the past almost exclusively through the prism of the nation. The seminar will begin by looking at how nationalism’s emergence in the late 18th and early 19th century shaped the rise of history as an academic discipline. We will then read several foundational late 20th-century texts which still inform the basic concepts, timelines, distinctions, and debates in contemporary Nationalism Studies, an interdisciplinary field in which historians play a vital role. We will approach the second half of the seminar thematically. Focusing on comparative case studies from across the global north and south, and spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, we will examine how nations and nationalisms are bound up with histories of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide; mass politics and capitalism; arts and sciences; language and literature; and ideas about race and gender. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement. Satisfies History major and minor requirements.
Instructor Heesoo Cho The Making of the Pacific World, 1700-2000. This course examines the history of the making of the Pacific World, focusing on how people, goods, ideas, and nature moved across the Pacific Ocean. Following transoceanic movements, students will learn the economic, political, and environmental practices that conditioned the interconnection between human and non-human communities. We will pay special attention to the historical experiences of Pacific Islanders and their evolving relationship to Pacific spaces prompted by forces of imagination, violence, globalization, and climate change. The course is divided into three sections. Part I (1700-1850) examines the expansion and integration of the Pacific World through intercultural exchanges, trade, migration, science, and empire. Part II (1850-1945) explores how forces of imperialism and colonialism transformed Pacific spaces and goods, as well as the persistence and resistance of Pacific Islanders. Part III (1945-2000) examines how globalization, capitalism, and climate change created new forms of interconnectedness and interdependence in the Pacific Ocean. Satisfies Depth and Breadth course requirement in the Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major or interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Stremlau In this course, students will study changing constructions and expressions of sexuality in what is now the United States. Considering the evolving spectrum of behaviors and identities that society has defined as normal and deviant, we will challenge notions of human reproduction and desire as timeless, unchanging, and universal. By embedding our analysis of sexuality with that of class, race, gender, age, ability, and other identities, we will examine how sexual experience and expression has varied, defied, reinforced, repressed, and liberated. Informed by the critical consideration of theory and comprehensive reading in the secondary literature, we will engage in primary source analysis of materials created by and about those who lived in our community in the past. Students will share their research via a web-based project we will build together. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
Instructor Guasco The colonial movement from resistance to revolution; early republican thought and the adoption of state constitutions; the War for Independence; political and socioeconomic struggles of the Confederation period; the origins of the federal Constitution; and the Revolution’s social impact. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Staff Presidents and first ladies from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt through Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Emphasis on their goals and policies, their successes and failures, and the changing meanings of “liberalism” and “conservatism” that they represented.
HIS 449Age of Revolution: The United States in the 1960s
Instructor Aldridge A seminar on an important era of changes and transformation in American history. Topics studied include the civil rights movement, the counterculture, the New Left, the Vietnam War, and the women’s movement. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America).
Instructor Nguyen “Cold War Asians and Asian Americans” is a specialized course that discusses the interplay between Asian anticolonial nationalist movements and the development of a pan-Asian American political formation during the Cold War. The Cold War is often conceived as beginning at the conclusion of World War II in 1945 and ending in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. To disrupt that linear timeline, this course considers the longer history of colonial and anticommunist sentiments that influenced America’s treatment of Asia, Asians, and Asian Americans, beginning in the 1910s and extending into the present day. This course will detail how Asians and Asian Americans exploited, manipulated, and subverted the U.S. Cold War agenda and along the way managed to forge understandings and solidarities across ethnic and political lines in the hopes of creating a more liberated future for all. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Wertheimer Students in HIS 454 will work collaboratively to research, write, and produce a documentary film about some aspect of the U.S. South’s history, guided by an instructional team that includes both the course professor and two aspiring filmmakers from the Documentary Film Program at Wake Forest University. Satisfies a requirement in the History major and minor. Counts as an elective for the Film and Media Studies interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructo r Stremlau Title- Body, Story, Memory: The History Of Rape In The United States This course challenges popular views of rape as existing outside of history. Instead of a universal human expression, both the act and idea of rape have histories situated in specific contexts. We will focus on the region that is now the United States from prior to European colonization through the twenty-first century. In doing so, we will center the experiences of women and girls, who have in the past and who now continue to experience sexual violence at higher rates than men and boys, but our study is neither exclusive nor restrictive. Recognizing the limitations of current scholarship, we will consider rape comprehensively with attention to gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, nationality, and sexual orientation. We will distinguish among acts of rape, narratives about rape told in specific moments, and the evolution of broader cultural understandings of rape’s meanings and purposes. We will balance our discussions of violence with those of resistance, and in centering survivors and their resilience, we will rewrite/re(right) narratives that have perpetuated victimization and train ourselves to engage the rape discourses that exist today. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement Prerequisites & Notes Instructor permission required.
Instructor Mangan This course introduces students to major topics in public health history in Latin America including epidemic disease, eugenics, reproductive and maternal health, indigenous medicine, and mental illness. Emphasis on the complex relationship between Latin American society, medicine, and health policies/practices in 20th- century Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Peru. Seminar-style course focuses on reading, discussion, research paper. Counts as an upper-level elective in the History major and minor. Counts as an upper-level elective in the Latin American Studies major and interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies a requirement in the Public Health interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
HIS 469Work, Gender, and Political Imagination in Africa
Instructor Wiemers Investigates how gender and labor have been used to construct and contest the political imaginaries of individuals, communities, and states in 19th and 20th c Africa. Satisfies a major requirement in History. Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Satisfies a major requirement in Africana Studies. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Chaudhuri The course will track the development of the Indian film industry, specifically Bollywood, as a business from the 1930s through the 1990s. It will examine the aesthetics of Bollywood films alongside and as a history of the economic development of the postcolonial nation. We examine the rise of the “new India” and Indian global diasporas and economic liberalization from 1991 onwards. The course charts the transitions from the imagination of the Indian nation as a cosmopolitan, secular hold-all to Hindu nationalism whilst also balancing its new role in a globalized world.. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement. Satisfies a requirement of the Film and Media Studies Interdisciplinary minor . Satisfies South Asian Studies minor requirement.
Instructor Chaudhuri This course will take the global history of neoliberalism as its remit, and students will learn to historicize how “Neo” or “new” liberalism re-imagines what liberalisms’ original object - “good society” must look like. Historically, prescriptive interventions of neoliberal policy have produced a politics of difference across a wide array of political contexts whether that be the receding of the welfare state in Western democracies, post-socialist transformation in Eurasia or global South countries that experience “structural adjustment” through the intervention of the United States, the IMF and the World Bank. We will follow the ideas an actions of historical actors - thinkers, policy-makers, leaders and social movement organizers - in order to build an understanding of neoliberalism beyond the spatial and temporal markers of the Reagan and Thatcher eras in the U.S. and U.K. Even as scholars question its uses, neoliberalism as a concept has been amassing a history, and more recently, that history has acquired a diverse and varying geography. Once understood more through its apparent ubiquity in the Anglo-North Atlantic world from the 1980s onwards, situated histories of neoliberalism now point towards its “unruly historical geographies.” In this way, the analytic diffusionism of a Eurocentric story of a North Atlantic phenomenon moving outwards has stopped being the rule to the exceptional case of Chile as an original laboratory of neoliberalism in the late 1950s. When it comes to chronology too, excellent work by Isabella Weber, Amy Offner and Antina von Schnitzler, to name a few, offer up histories of institutions, ideas and practitioners that push the emergence of neoliberal back into the farther reaches of the twentieth century, to the 1970s and even to the Great Depression. As a consequence of these new directions in the historical scholarship on neoliberalism the question of its origins has been displaced from its spatial and chronological touchstones. In fact, one might say that the transnational perspective on the independent emergence of neoliberal ideology as professed by a variety of different kinds of historical actors who articulate it from within the historically specific configuration of politics that shape their South Asian, Chinese, Latin European or West African contexts displaces the origins question into irrelevance. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Mortensen Why did a war that was fought in the name of a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” result in millions of deaths in Asia and leave Japan’s major cities in ruins? Today, nearly eighty years after the end of the war, why do historical interpretations of the Asia Pacific War continue to be so politically charged in East Asia? To explore these questions, this seminar will analyze Japanese, Chinese, and Korean people’s experiences of wartime Japan. We will also explore how individuals and diverse groups in East Asia have narrated these experiences and how historical memory continues to be put to political use today. The course will start with the colonization of Korea in 1910 and deal with the entirety of the wartime experience to 1945. Next, the course will focus on how memories of the war shaped domestic politics, international relations, and national identity in Japan, China, and Korea in the post-war period. The “Pacific War,” the “Fourteen Year War,” “World War II,” the “Asia-Pacific War,” and the “Greater East Asian War” all refer to the same general time period and series of events, but each of these names has very different political meanings. The various terms used to describe the period during which Japan was at war demonstrate how naming and memory work together. In this seminar, we will consider how imperialism and colonialism of both the Euro-American and Japanese varieties were central to the war’s outbreak, conduct, and resolution. We will also explore various local experiences - rather than simply national experiences and memories - of the war. These will include the experiences and memories of marginalized groups in Japan and its colonies, “comfort women,” victims of war atrocities, Japanese North Americans, and Pacific Islanders. In addition to learning about key issues in the study of the Second World War in the Asia Pacific region, students in this course will also come to critically analyze and reconsider mainstream views of the war. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies East Asian Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Mortensen In this seminar we will explore a variety of historical, ethnographic, and theoretical materials on how gender and sexuality have been culturally constructed and experienced in Japan from the nineteenth century until the present day. Course topics include the gendered dimensions of Confucianism, marriage, paid employment and unpaid work, parenting, war, political activism, structural power, and popular culture in Japan. The course will also cover the political, social, and economic challenges that Japanese women and the Japanese LGBTQ+ community continue to face. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies East Asian Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement. Prerequisites & Notes Juniors and Seniors only until the first day of class.
Instructors Staff Capstone course for history majors. Students define, research, and write a major research paper on a topic of their choice. Required of senior majors not enrolled in History 488/489.
Instructors Wiemers Two-semester research seminar for senior history majors who qualify for honors work and who are selected as Kelley Scholars. Culminates in the researching and writing of a thesis. Admission by invitation of the History Department.
Instructor Wertheimer Two-semester research seminar for senior history majors who qualify for honors work and who are selected as Kelley Scholars. Culminates in the researching and writing of a thesis. Admission by invitation of the History Department.
