67 courses with the subject HIST, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
An examination of the theory and methodologies of the historical discipline and classic works of historiography.
The purpose of this course is to explore the place of the natural environment in the late medieval and early modern world. It does so by revisiting classic episodes in world history, from the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century until the volcanic eruptions of Laki (1783) and Tambora (1815), and reinterpreting them through the lens of environmental history. Topics considered include climate change, plague epidemics, wetland drainage, urbanization, malaria, forestry, colonization, and the commodification of nature. Horses, mosquitoes, and rats will come under the spotlight as active participants in the great transformations of world history. Central to our inquiry throughout the semester is the perennial problem of historical agency; how humanity's freedom to think and act interacts with the limits that nature imposes. Along the way, students will be given an overview of the concepts, methods, and sources of environmental history.
Readings and research in major themes of the history of medieval Britain.
This course provides students with an overview of the political developments of church and secular government in medieval Europe.
This graduate seminar explores the major scholarly developments in the study of women's history, masculinity, and gendered representations in early modern Europe (1400-1800) and several colonial areas. Topics covered include the family, women's health, work, sodomy, witchcraft and the reformation, honor, slavery, missions, monasticism, and the Inquisition. Through weekly discussions, students will become familiarized with the various methodological and archival trends in recent and more classic scholarship.
This course covers the basic historical information, historiographical orientation, and theoretical discussions of the major problems of global history between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern world. It covers the history of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, as well as Oceania in a thematic and chronological manner.
A graduate seminar examining selected topics in early modern European history through readings, discussions, and research papers.
A critical analysis of gender and theories of gender in selected American historical contexts.
The course examines the possible use of social theory by historians and explores how theory could inform historical writing. It provides an outline of canonical theoretical perspectives on modernity, class, race, gender, nationalism, totalitarianism, and the public sphere. Students will learn to navigate between theoretical perspectives that differ in the answers they give to fundamental questions, along several continuums: from emphasizing material processes as shaping human history to prioritizing the power of ideas; from accrediting the autonomous free will of humans to ascribing more influence to constraints set by social structures; from considering human history a sphere of endless conflicts to seeing it as a site where consensus and harmony are gradually built; from recognition of the existence of objective social reality to the acceptance of merely various subjective points of view; from the explicit ambition to make theory a tool for advancing certain political goals to an ambition to be politically neutral. Various scholars provide different answers to these questions. While analyzing them the course addresses, in particular, the following questions: What are some of the strengths and weaknesses in each of these positions? How are particular ways of theoretical thinking related to the specific social positions and biographies of the theorists? How have the foundations of each of these views changed over time?
Over 100 million people were victims of mass killings, including genocide, in the 20th century. And yet, episodes like the Holocaust were not the first instances of state-sponsored mass death; on the contrary, mass killings and mass death have been a distinguishing feature of colonialism and its aftermaths for at least the last five centuries. How and why did these acts and processes occur? What forces caused humans to kill others on a massive scale? How have slower or less sudden processes-like death via slavery or disease-been reinterpreted and debated as foundational to genocide? What do these episodes reveal about the nature of race, religion, colonialism, technology, and modernity? HIST 523 is a graduate seminar that gives students an overview of the key literatures, methodologies, and debates in the historical literature on colonialism and mass killings, from genocide to epidemiological collapse, from the fifteenth century to the present. Its broad temporal framing and comparative framework reflects debates over the place of violence in European expansion in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, while also allowing for more subsequent, more local mass killings in places where colonization retreated. Before delving into specific historical examples, we will explore definitions of colonialism, mass death, and genocide. The course is then organized chronologically and examines episodes across a broad geographical spectrum, including early modern France, the early Columbian New World, the 19th century American West, 19th century Australia, Congo and Namibia during the "Scramble for Africa," East Asia in the early-mid 20th century, 1980s Guatemala, and the Darfur Genocide of the early 2000s. It familiarizes students with the re-reading of colonial and post-colonial histories since the coining of the term 'genocide' in 1944, by Raphael Lemkin, and the debates that the application of the term outside of Europe, outside of the Holocaust, have engendered. Students will be prepared to: teach on the history of mass death, mass killings, and genocide outside of Europe; more efficiently read and review academic texts; and find and interpret primary sources. This course is open to students across departments, and highly recommended for students minoring in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Historiography of deviance, crime, and madness in Europe from the late-18th century to the present. HIST 524 Deviance, Crime and Madness in Modern Europe (3) Historians and social scientists have shown that societies have persistently established certain standards and ideals for human conduct and being. At the same time, the natural variation in human phenotypes has meant that individual, groups, and institutions within these societies have been faced with those deviating from these norms. The deviations may sometimes present themselves physically (e.g., in the form of a somatic lesion or disability), intrapersonally (e.g., in eccentric thinking or affect), or interpersonally (e.g., in criminal or anti-social conduct). As historians, anthropologists, and other have demonstrated, while there are noteworthy continuities in how these deviations have often been manifested (e.g., seizures accompanying epilepsy), there have been considerable differences across time and place in how deviance has been expressed, perceived, understood, and handled. This seminar examines this constellation of problems as they have emerged in Europe since the 18th century. Posing, as they do, complex human problems, the historical study of deviance, crime, and madness requires paying attention to the scholarly contributions of multiple disciplines beyond the field of history. Thus, the course will attend to both social theory and historiography. Each week, readings from social theory will be paired with a historical work, in order to bring broad theoretical analysis and empirical disciplinary research more deliberately into conversation with one another. Some examples of the course readings include Emile Durkheim's On Suicide, Erving Goffman's Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity, Janet Oppenheim's "Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England," Norbert Elias' The Civilizing Process, Reviel Netz's Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity, and Jan Gross' Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Weekly topics will center on key social processes and prominent conceptual frameworks: social control, self-control, marginalization, pathologization, criminalization and de-criminalization, representation, punishment, extermination, and enhancement. Students will be required to write an interdisciplinary research paper (i.e., a paper accessible to multiple scholarly audiences), calling on both theoretical and empirical scholarship from various disciplines. The course will culminate in a seminar conference in which students will present their research and field questions and comments.
This course provides students with an overview of the processes of constructing borders in a variety of forms, ethnic, religious, trade, and linguistic, in a European imperial context. HIST 525 Imperial Borderlands in Modern Europe (3) This course exposes students to the latest developments in colonial studies and new paradigms for considering European imperial history in terms of its borderlands. Using the methodological tools applied in recent years to the history of Western colonial empires, this course expands the scope of European history to encompass the complex interaction between the conquered peoples and their rulers by broadening imperial history to include the study of ethnic and religious differences that emerged from the European encounter with peoples whose cultures differed profoundly from their own. In particular, the material covered in this course will build an awareness among students of the role of states, and especially imperial states, in confronting the polyethnic/multinational character of populations they sought to rule. The theoretical and historiographical works assigned will focus on how imperial European states crafted or erased cultural differences and how borderlands posed particular challenges in these endeavors. Building on these insights, students will gain an awareness of imperial policies and conceptions of colonial rule and of the impact of imperial domination on colonial peoples. Students will learn to recognize and identify the means by which Imperial rule brought irreversible changes to the way of life of the borderlands peoples, who adapted to and resisted imperial rule by a variety of means that they had at hand. Such an approach will yield an awareness of the methods by which historians formulate questions, choose sources, use theory to interpret the material they collect, and the variety of rhetorical and other means available to historians to present findings. Students will conduct their own analyses of scholarship by reflecting on the assigned readings and presenting their thoughts and evaluations in the form of weekly critiques and a final paper. This will be invaluable in helping students to acquire the necessary methodological and theoretical tools to formulate questions for their own research projects. This course fulfills the requirement of a topical graduate course in History. It is open to students within and outside of the History Department.
The social and cultural history of warefare in modern Europe, with specific emphasis on the First and Second World Wars.
This course exposes students to the current state of scholarship from the standpoint of historical, legal, sociological, and literary analyses of science in the early modern period. The inadequacy of long-accepted notions of "science" and "modernization" to describe the rapid changes of scientific thought in the early modern era require students to assess the specific value given to such notions by the state, religion, and society in specific cultural and historical contexts. The seminar will also explore the reconceptualization of society and nature in the early modern period and the way in which discoveries in natural philosophy inspired those changes. The exchanges between European and non-European centers of authority during the early modern period helped to shape many of these disputes and scholars' current interpretive frameworks. In particular, we will challenge triumphal narratives of the Scientific Revolution by examining the ways in which geography and local context affected ideas about the natural world, the role of gender in knowledge-making, and how non-elite and artisanal practices also contributed to the creation of early science. A focus throughout the course will be on how the exchanges between European and non-European intellectual communities shaped contemporary understanding of the natural world. The seminar is intended for graduate students in history and related fields who are preparing for the field in Early Modern studies. The seminar is intended for graduate students in history and related fields who are preparing a field in early modern studies.
This course is a research seminar covering the historiography of early modern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, Warring-State and early Tokugawa Japan, Choson Korea, and the history of Ming and Qing China with a focus on the interaction between religious and political history.
No description.
This course provides students with an overview of the contribution of intelectual and cultural historians to the field of "body history." HIST 535 History of the Body (3) This course exposes students to the contribution of intellectual and cultural historians to the field of "body history." Ranging from the late medieval to early twentieth century, the course will focus attention on the early modern period. Inspired by the writings of Ernst Kantorowicz, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler, among others, historians have demonstrated that bodies are not exempt from social, cultural, or ideological regimes of power. As a metaphor for the body politic or an instrument of power, the corporeal order is shown to have physical, social, symbolic, and political effects. As historians continue to demonstrate, the body has a history: which involves health, sickness and food, gestures and movement, sartorial codes and sumptuary regulations, gender taboos and sexual prohibitions. Studies of the body demand a multidisciplinary perspective. Thus, this course explores how historians have drawn upon visual as well as textual sources, and crossed disciplinary boundaries in order to better appreciate the entire range of bodily representations in the past.
This seminar provides an overview of early modern Atlantic history from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Like other seminars in the Early Modern Global curriculum, it builds on the knowledge and skills acquired in the core seminars. HIST 537 offers an overview of Atlantic history, an orientation to important research questions and problems in the field, and methodological training in the critical use of primary sources and its relationship to the important multidisciplinary concepts underlying historical research in the Atlantic field.
Studies in the history of wars and of the political, social, economic, diplomatic, and theoretical foundations of warfare.
Surveying Native American history from the pre-colonial era to the present, this course examines key historical events, including: Indigenous civilizations before colonialism; the invasion of North America by Europeans; colonial epidemics; the Indian slave trade; the Pueblo Revolt; the Seven Years' War; the development and impacts of U.S. Indian policy; Indigenous sovereignty. Methodologically, this course exposes students to a range of historical subfields, such as social history, cultural history, political history, military history, and gender history. Additionally, History 539 gives students an overview of ethnohistory, an interdisciplinary field that draws on techniques and sources from History and Anthropology. By studying ethnohistory, historians will become better acquainted with cultural anthropology and archaeology. This seminar introduces students to major questions, themes, and problems in Native American history. These include: How can we study pre-colonial Indigenous history? What impact did colonization have on the Americas? How did Indians, Europeans, and Africans attempt to navigate cultural differences? How did the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and Africans impact race in North America? How do Native-centered histories transform our understanding of the American past?
The study of the causes, conduct, and political, social, diplomatic, cultural, and economic consequences of war from 1500 to the present. HIST 541 War in the Early Modern and Modern World (3) This course offers an introduction to the complexity of war in the early modern (1400-1850) and modern world (1850 to the present). Since war has been experienced across the entire world, the course will draw readings and examples from North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. It brings together the two major approaches to the study of war, both the traditional emphasis on the battlefield and the more recent consideration of both the battlefront and the political, social, economic, and cultural homefronts. Specifically, this course considers the various methodologies that have shaped the ways in which historians have asked and answered such fundamental questions as how and why wars start, have been averted, and ended. The study of military theory provides the intellectual framework that shaped the study and conduct of war at specific periods of history and in specific cultural context. The evolution of a nation's military theory over time reflects the impact of changes in technology, the changing social composition of its armed forces, the strength of the economic support the national government will supply, and much more. Thus, this course considers issues relevant to armies (technology, soldier experience in battle), to the government (laws of war, revolutions in military affairs, military doctrine, war and national identity), and to the people (issues relating to race, class, and gender; antiwar activism, popular literature) for a fuller understanding of the overarching impact of war in the modern and early modern world.
This course provides graduate students with an introduction to the field of American borderlands studies. It devotes a great deal of coverage to the most important of the nation's international frontiers, the U.S.-Mexico border, by detailing the various positions of Native Americans, Anglos, Asians, and Mexicans as they struggled over competing visions of an American future. But the course also attends to other major American frontiers, including the Atlantic littoral, the Canadian border, and the Pacific rim; it also examines all these in international context. In order to get a broad survey of the state of the field, we will examine how cross-cultural encounters shaped policy, changed the landscape, and heightened racial tensions. Using a variety of texts-documentary and feature films, magazine and newspaper articles, travelers' accounts, academic monographs and articles, and popular literature-we will explore a range of topics: territorial expansion, Native dispossession, racial formation and anxiety, Mexican, Asian, and Canadian migration and labor, and cultural change and negotiation. The course will begin with a close examination of the political, economic, and military conflicts that defined America's eastern, southern, northern, and western boundaries and then follow a series of selected historical events that led up to the current political and cultural debates that continue in the borderlands today. Drawing on these items, we will ultimately reflect on how past and present collide in all the nation's borderlands, shaping the United States in countless ways.
Primarily a reading seminar, this course focuses on United States history from the 17th century to 1877, emphasizing the profound ways that the British American colonies and then the United States changed through numerous social, cultural, economic, and political revolutions. In particular, the course investigates transitions from the colonial period through the road to the Revolution, the Early National period, the Jacksonian Era, the sectional conflict, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Students will examine the growth and impact of the institution of slavery; territorial expansion; cross-cultural encounters; social, cultural, economic, and political revolutions; the consolidation of capitalism; and the impact of reform movements on the colonies and nation.
Background and impact of the Civil War and the two succeeding decades, with emphasis on historiography and selected topics.
Primarily a reading seminar, this course focuses on United States history from 1877 to the present, emphasizing the profound ways the nation changed socially, culturally, economically, and politically since the late nineteenth century. In particular, the course investigates and builds an awareness of the transition from the Gilded Age through the two world wars, and onward through the social protest and civil rights movements of the 1960s. This seminar will address a variety of topics: industrialization; evolving ideas about individual rights; the role of government in social and economic affairs; the emergence of the nation as an economic and military power; as well as social and labor movements. On a methodological level, the seminar will expose graduate students to a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and subfields of history, ranging from political, economic, social, ethnic, religious, cultural, and environmental history.
Readings and research in major themes of the history of the United States in the twentieth century.
Slavery in South America, the Caribbean, and North America from 16th century European colonization through the 19th century abolition movement. HIST 547 Slavery in the Americas (3) This course provides a broad exploration of slavery in the Americas from the beginning of European colonization to abolition. From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French colonists in the Americas created the largest slave societies the world has ever known. Slaves in the New World produced tropical commodities such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and coffee that, in turn, contributed to the foundation of capitalist and consumer societies in the Atlantic world. The staple crops produced by slaves were among the first goods to transform elite luxuries into common necessities. The Age of Revolution was a watershed in the history of slavery in the Americas, transforming the terms of struggle between slaves and slaveholders, of debate about slavery, of the ideology of slavery. While the Age of Revolution catalyzed a century-long process of abolition, it also began a new period in the expansion of slavery. Slaveholders developed new policies, practices, and doctrines to reconcile slavery and liberalism. The adoption of modern technology and industrial techniques of production resulted in dramatic increases in the productivity and exploitation of slaves, as well as the wealth and power of slaveholders. The simultaneous growth of slavery and antislavery heightened political divisions over slavery and made its destruction a protracted struggle marked by slave rebellion and civil war as well as landmark acts of state. This course investigates the origins of slavery, race, and abolitionism; transformations in plantation production, the culture of Africans in the Americas, and the ideologies of slavery; and the relationships among slavery, liberalism, capitalism, and modernity. Students will apply a range of concepts from the human sciences, such as creolization, ideology, and human geography, to major problems in the history of slavery.
This course offers a survey of American history from roughly the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Students will read and discuss studies employing the lenses of physical space and place to examine the changes in the American landscape over time. They will learn to read the built environment as an historical text, assess how changes in landscape and spatial practice reveal larger shifts in social and economic structures, and identify the multiple practices of spatial arrangement that existed among diverse groups who came to make up the United States. They will be encouraged to recognize, identify, and apply the social scientific theories of "the spatial turn" and the tools of spatial analysis to place. At the conclusion of the course, students will come to recognize the way analysis of place can reveal the values and power relations in society. They will articulate the importance of physical space in shaping social interactions and how that has changed over time, while also achieving a better understanding of the diverse characteristics of peoples, societies, and institutions in U.S. history.
This seminar provides students with an overview of important topics and debates related to the African American Freedom Struggle from Reconstruction to the present. The course is organized chronologically and thematically to highlight the changing and distinctive concerns related to African Americans' efforts to secure the rights and benefits of American citizenship. Special attention is given to the ways in which high politics intersect with grassroots actions. The course considers African American mobilization throughout the entire country and does not simply address the more familiar southern post-WWII struggle. Not only will students gain a critical understanding of some central debates in this field, but also, they will begin to think about how they might teach this material to undergraduates.
This course considers the political, cultural and social history of the United States from 1975 to the present.
This course offers a survey of the history of the place that became the United States through the lens of the environment. Through attention to changing ecologies, conflicting resource-use regimes, differing ideas about what nature is and should be for, students will come to understand the many ways in which natural systems have shaped and been shaped by people in North America over the past five centuries.
Surveying Social and Cultural History in the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States, this course examines key themes and topics in the history of the field, including: race, class, gender, sexuality, labor, migration, citizenship, incarceration, and environment. This seminar gives students an overview of major questions and problems in American Social and Cultural History such as What is culture? How does society produce culture? What is the relationship between culture and politics? How do we write history from the bottom up? How do our methods constrain what histories we can tell? Methodologically, this course exposes students to a range of theories and subfields including political history, gender history, history of capitalism, labor history, urban history, and legal history. Additionally this seminar examines journalistic historical writing, biographies, and opinion editorials in order to examine the multiple forms history writing can take.
This course introduces graduate students to key historiographical and methodological literatures and debates in the field of modern Middle Eastern history. Drawing on a variety of historical approaches and methods from related disciplines, we analyze the transformation of the Middle East in the modern era as part of broader global processes. The rise of capitalism and the incorporation of the Middle East into the world economy led to wide-ranging transformations in agriculture, urbanization, the creation of new social classes, and migration within and to the region. The expansion of imperial, colonial, and national states occurred congruent with the emergence of mass politics, new technologies, and new public spaces. All of the above developments contributed to changing intercommunal relations, new gender roles, and a reassessment of the role of religion in political and social life. Graduate students will thus acquire deep knowledge about the history of the region while at the same time developing comparative skills and a broader understanding of the Middle East within world history.
This course provides a thorough grounding in the relationship between colonialism and nationalism in the Middle East, as well as in the emergence of modern nation-states and national identities. Topics will include but are not limited to: Visions of Middle Eastern modernities and the role of colonialism in shaping them; the place of religion and secularization as sites of colonial hegemony or national resistance; popular culture as contested terrain in the colonial era; the various ways the colonial encounter shaped social norms and patterns related to gender and sexuality; and the nature and effects of colonial violence.
This course investigates the history of mass movement within and out of the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present day. We will examine multiple manifestations of such movement: emigration and reverse emigration, forced population transfers and exchanges, the making of refugee communities and their movements around the region, and the influence of diaspora communities on political, social, and economic movements in the homeland. As well as investigating the role migrants and refugees have had in the making of the modern Middle East, this course will give students the opportunity to engage with major issues surrounding diaspora, transnationalism, and citizenship, as well as broad historical questions of identity and belonging.
This course offers an overview of the historiography of the Ottoman Empire. The weekly readings will include a combination of classic and recent scholarship and will acquaint students with some of the historiographical questions, research methods, and theoretical framings that have shaped the field since the early twentieth century. Students will acquire the foundational knowledge to teach courses on the Ottoman Empire or conduct original research. The course will appeal to students of early modern history, Middle East history, and world history. Knowledge of a Middle Eastern language is not required.
The course provides an in-depth examination of key topics in recent research on the study of women, gender, and sexuality in the Middle East and an investigation of changes in the field. The course promotes theoretical, analytical, and methodological approaches that redirect understanding and research away from a legacy of essentializing norms identified with orientalism and colonialism. The course begins with a discussion of how and why women, gender, and sexuality of the Middle East became a distinct field and the challenges imposed by its origins in an era of colonial empires and missionary activism. The course examines pioneering studies in women's history and gender and sexuality and investigates some of the most recent scholarship thematically. Readings include monographs and articles from an array of locations and perspectives to provide a view of the complexity of topics and of regional, social, economic, racial/ethnic diversity, and to develop a foundation for comparative analysis. Topics include but are not limited to women, gender, orientalism, and Islam; women, gender, sexuality, and social disruption; women, gender, and sexuality in literature, art, and popular culture, contemporary feminisms and queer studies.
This course provides an analysis of the modern Middle East in a global context. The students will learn to read the history of the region in international and transnational frameworks. This course will position the Middle East in relation to Southeast Asia, Europe, the Americas; and in the context of imperialism, decolonization, World Wars, the Cold War, and other global phenomena, such as emigration, economy, and global networks. It will be of interest to students of Middle East history, Global History studies, and Asian Studies.
The course provides an in-depth examination of key topics in recent research on the study of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and theory (usul) and an investigation of changes in the field. This class also offers a thorough examination of two or three topics within Islamic law with an emphasis on their development in recent history. Topics will be selected in consultation with students, and they will be approached from various disciplinary perspectives, including literary, documentary, and anthropological approaches. They should be of broad interest and could include subjects within family law, international relations, ritual, colonialism, democratization, and so forth. Readings include monographs and articles from an array of locations and perspectives to provide a view of the complexity of topics and of regional, social, economic, racial/ethnic diversity, and to develop a foundation for comparative analysis. Reading knowledge of Arabic is helpful but not required.
This course provides a thorough grounding in the state of the field of the history of Palestine/Israel. It examines the encounter between Palestinians and Israelis from a perspective that questions our ability to understand them separately and it emphasizes interdependency between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and internal tension within Palestinian and Israeli societies. Topics will include but are not limited to: Palestine/Israel as case of settler-colonialism, the place of religion in defining national identities and boundaries, intra-ethnic divides, competing discourses of citizenship, the fragile status of Palestinian citizens and non-citizens under the Israeli control system, struggles over collective memory, and the place of gender and sexuality in the conflict. The course emphasizes the intersection of politics and culture, demonstrating the political relevance of cultural fields such as music, cinema, and sports.
Latin American colonial history was defined by exploitation for profit; the efficiency of state control over Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations established economic profit or loss. In the face of independence, abolition, and widespread immigration, racial hierarchy and exploitation continued to shape modern Latin America, but often under a fictive constitutional promise of equality, citizenship, and democracy. In the nineteenth century much of Latin America experienced the rise of caudillos, military strong men, and dictators who often rule through a limited or truncated form of democracy but come to represent the interests of the political, industrial, and landed elite who consolidate their control over much of Latin America in the early twentieth century. In response to this control, we see a rise of popular revolution throughout twentieth century Latin America. Some succeed while others fail; they include national and regional movements, they are shaped by labor, agriculture, populism, democracy, nationalism, socialism, communism, and military uprising. We later see-often but not always in direct response-a conservative backlash in the form of military dictatorships, neo-colonial and neo-liberal economies, torture, disappearance, murder, and anti-communist fervor driven by Cold-War ideology. We will examine these events through various lenses: that of participants, through analysis of regional and national outcomes, and through the intervention of global powers. We will ask what social, political, and/or racial conditions led to revolutionary situations? How successful were revolutionary leaders at shaping policies, administrations, and nations? What did revolutionaries seek to accomplish and what were the outcomes of their reforms? Conversely, what did counterrevolutionaries seek to accomplish and what were the outcomes of their reforms? We cannot address every "revolution" or every conservative backlash that occurred in modern Latin America. By addressing these themes in Cuba, Mexico, Central America, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, we will emphasize forms of revolution, nationalism, "bureaucratic-authoritarian." state formation, imperialism, agrarian reform, immigration, industrialization, labor movements, and citizenship.
This graduate course explores the history of medicine, science, and technology in early modern Latin America and Iberia, integrating interdisciplinary approaches and local/global contexts. It is designed to give students an overview of some of the key historiographical debates and research in these fields for Latin America and Iberia, and to provide a basic familiarity with the forms that this field of historical/interdisciplinary inquiry has taken in recent years. Some of the themes that we will explore are the role of empire building in shaping medical, scientific, and technological knowledge; how "non-Western" (indigenous, African, Asian, and mixed race) healers, artisans, and scientists innovated, developed, and recreated their practices and societal roles under colonial rule; the historical development of public health in Latin America; and the interactions between global processes of Western knowledge production and local-level multi-ethnic Latin American knowledge production. This course will be of interest to those studying colonial Latin America, those who wish to understand the colonial legacies of issues important to modern Latin America research topics, those interested in the early modern era in a comparative and/or global perspective, and those who wish to prepare for the Latin America or Early Modern World fields of their comprehensive exams.
HIST 569 gives students an overview of key literatures, methodologies, and debates in the historiography of Latin America (the writing of Latin American history), from the 1490s to the Independence period (mostly, but by no means solely, the 1820s). Its primary focus is Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil, especially Iberian interactions with indigenous American and Africans/African-descended people. But some attention is given to all regions of the Americas and to roles played by British, French, and other colonizers. Chronologically, it is a prequel to HIST 570 (but not an official prerequisite). The course comprises five sections, each based on an historical sub-field and its historiography within the larger field: (1) the indigenous civilizations of the Americas and their responses to European invasion, including the shift from traditional Eurocentric Conquest narratives to the New Conquest History; (2) the political and economic institutions, as well as the culture, of Spanish and Portuguese colonization; (3) the changes and continuities in indigenous civilizations during the colonial centuries (usually termed "Ethnohistory," and explored more fully in HIST 571); (4) the history of trans-Atlantic slavery and the experience of African-descended peoples in Colonial Latin America; and (5) a sub-field that will vary according to instructor, examples being the history of science and medicine in the region, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of religious change (or "the Spiritual Conquest").
This seminar gives students an overview of central literatures and debates in the historiography of Latin America (the writing of Latin American history) and the Americas more broadly, from approximately to 1800 to the present. Its framing reflects the chronology of mainland Spanish American Independence, but it reaches backwards and outwards as needed. It looks to prior Andean and Haitian bids for self-determination and subsequent exports and imports - of empire, capital, people commodities, science, and instruments of terror - to and from the United States and Africa. It connects those nodes by tracing continuities in political, social, and environmental relationships, and by identifying the ways that peoples in the region (in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, Colombia and the Andes, Brazil and the Southern Cone) have thought and acted their way out of colonialisms. Chief among the seminar's goals is the preparation of graduate students to teach post-1800 Latin American History to undergraduates. Students will develop a grasp of the field's key historiographical developments, and think about new ways to teach a subject that many - but not all - North American undergraduates meet with stereotypes. Graduate students of other historical geographies and from other disciplines are welcome too, given that it is also designed to survey approaches to thinking historically after 1800, to question assumptions that those methodologies make, and to address the politics of researching and writing a post-colonial history of a place that has always been "modern," where "Latin America" came into being as a means of anticipating questions crucial to past and present imperialisms, global histories, and politics
HIST 571 gives students an overview of key literatures, methodologies, and debates in the historiography of Latin American ethnohistory, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. "Ethnohistory" is defined here as the historical study of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The course comprises four sections, each based on an historical sub-field and its historiography: (1) the indigenous civilizations of the Americas in the pre-Contact and Contact periods, primarily fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including but not necessarily limited to the civilizations of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas; (2) indigenous responses to European invasion, with particular attention to regions of Spanish and Portuguese activity - and including the historiographical development of the New Conquest History, with attention also given to regions where colonies were not established; (3) the indigenous experience of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, and indigenous contributions to new colonial-era societies, including changes and continuities in indigenous civilizations during the colonial centuries - and including the historiographical development of the New Philology); and (4) the indigenous experience of the long Independence period, taking the seminar to a point in the nineteenth century, as determined by the instructor.
From initial colonial contact, Latin America represents a site of violent conquest by European colonizers over indigenous populations and exploitation of both African and indigenous labor; white control over black and brown bodies was at the very core of colonial economic success or failure. In turn, racial hierarchy and exploitation define both colonial and modern Latin American history. Our focus is not the overall study of race and slavery throughout Latin American history. Instead we will examine the role of race in Latin American nation-building following independence through the age of twentieth century nationalism. As the ideas of scientific racism swept Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century, the United States established economic, and at times military, dominance over much of Latin America from the neo-colonial period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Increasingly, as cultural and economic ties were broken with the Iberian empires-even in the case of Spain's last American colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico-Latin American elite sought modernity through trade with and cultural borrowing from the United States and Europe. In response to the scientific racist ideology that in the US led to segregation, Jim Crow, convict lease systems, lynching, and widespread disenfranchisement, Latin American elite consciously engaged these racist ideas as they granted or restricted non-white populations access to their rights as citizens. Nineteenth century luminaries such as Cuban revolutionary José Marti, Argentine journalist and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and even Venezuelan military and political leader Simón Bolívar had introduced radical ideas on race and citizenship. In the first half of the twentieth century Latin American intellectuals famously built on those ideas by embracing, renegotiating, and/or rejecting North American racist ideologies-often all within the same work-as they optimistically and proudly recognized and rehabilitated the place of the nonwhite, indigenous, mestizo, and mulatto populations into their national narratives. We will focus on three of the best known of these authors (Mexican Jose Vasconcelos, Cuban Fernando Ortiz, and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre) as well as scholarship that will help us contextualize their works, and allow us to better understand the broader theme of race in modern Latin America. The object here is to consider how the subject of race-in large part defined by the role of Afro-Latin Americans, the indigenous, mestizo, and mulattos-is situated in relation to broader considerations of nation, power, violence, and identity. The goal of the course is to lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary understanding of modern Latin America and the modern black Atlantic: To consider the consequences of colonization, slavery, and the slave trade, both historically and contemporarily, on modern intellectual formations and institutions.
HIST 573 gives students an overview of key literatures, methodologies, and debates in the historiography of empire and society in Latin American history, fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The course comprises five sections, each based on an historical sub-field and its historiography: (1) the empires and societies of the Americas in the pre-Contact and Contact periods, primarily that of the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas; (2) the culture and society of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism in Iberia and the Americas (3) the culture and society of the Spanish conquistadors, including roles played by indigenous and black conquistadors; (4) the impact on the Americas of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism in East Asia, and the cultural and social ramifications of trans-Pacific exchanges during the colonial centuries; and (5) the comparative history of imperialism in the Americas by other European powers, most notably the British, Dutch, and French, including the differing experiences of indigenous and African-descended peoples. The seminar will end at a nineteenth-century point determined by the instructor.
This course focuses on East Asian religious history, starting with the formation of several major traditions in ancient China and ending with major religious trends in the modern era. The course examines major religious developments and traditions in China, Japan, and Korea and ways that these religious traditions influenced each other. The course examines connections between religion, intellectual currents, political transformations, gender roles and social customs, the natural environment, and, in the modern era, national identity formations. Students will explore the multiple approaches that historians have taken in interpreting East Asian religions and will consider how such approaches shape the production and reception of historical scholarship.
This course offers a foundation in early modern Asia from roughly the fifteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Students will examine the constitution of centralized and bureaucratic empires, ideological movements, and practices associated with Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, and Hindu thought, and the formation of syncretic socio-cultural spheres in different parts of Asia. Through an exploration of key political, cultural, and intellectual developments in Asia, students will assess Asia's place in the global network of thought, commerce, and exchange. Central to this analysis is how such contact with overland and maritime cultures deeply affected mainstream Asian societies. By tracing such interactions, students will be encouraged to recognize, identify, and apply the roles of frontier and borderlands in the creation and reification of identity and culture in different parts of Asia. Through this multifaceted approach to Asian history, students will come to recognize the strategic role of Asia within the pan-Eurasian sphere of interactions while also achieve a better understanding of the diverse characteristics of Asian peoples, societies, and institutions in history.
Primarily a reading seminar, this course focuses on Chinese history from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to the present, emphasizing the profound ways that the Ming Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, Republican China, and then the People's Republic of China changed through social, cultural, economic, and political transformations and revolutions. The course investigates topics such as the rise of commercial culture, urbanization, imperialism and empire-making, conflicts with the West, nationalist revolutions, and communism and the establishment of socialist China. Students will examine the role of gender in Chinese society, the relationship of humans to the environment, the shifting notions of ethnic and religious difference, and the effect of successive political movements on China and the Chinese peoples. Students will explore the multiple approaches Chinese historians have taken to reading and presenting historical work, including economic, political, social, and cultural history, and will consider how such approaches shape the production and reception of historical scholarship.
Examines the historical literature on women and gender in late imperial and twentieth century China. HIST 582 Women and Gender in Modern Chinese History (3) The roles of women and men have undergone major shifts in late imperial and modern China, affecting all aspects of daily life. Just the titles used to describe feminine ideals give an indication of these shifts - from the "talented women" of the late imperial period to the "new women" and "modern girls" of the early twentieth century to the "iron ladies" of the Communist period to the "factory girls" of the new millennia. Masculine ideals, too, have shifted, from the literary scholar-official of late imperial China to the patriotic worker of the Mao years to the entrepreneurial party member of the late twentieth century. But beyond the ideals, the day-to-day lives of Chinese people have been fundamentally altered as well, changing the way people relate to family and to society. This course examines the historical literature on these shifts from the late imperial period to the present. Misperceptions and stereotypes about Chinese gender roles and, in particular, the status of women are widespread. In the past several decades, historians of China have sought to place our understanding of these topics on firmer historical ground by exploring topics from homosexuality and law in imperial China to widowhood and the imperial cult of female chastity to new marriage practices in post-economic reform village China and, in doing so, to undermine the "orientalism" that informed, for instance, investigations of footbinding and the "women's quarters." Through a wide range of readings, this course will introduce students to the major works and topics in the field of Chinese women's and gender history, including: women and family, women's legal history, gender and nationalism, "new women" (xin funü), gender and revolution, gender and demographics, gender and labor, women's liberation, and love and sexuality. Students will be expected to demonstrate their familiarity with the major themes and topics for Chinese women's and gender history through discussion and written work.
A research seminar, this course focuses on rebellion and revolution in Chinese history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In particular, the course investigates not only the myriad forms of revolution experienced in China including the 1911 Revolution, the Warlord period, the Nanjing Decade, Second World War, the Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution, it seeks to see these through the lens of the political ideologies such as nationalism, anarchism, communism, and feminism. Students will examine the manner in which the tide of rising expectations predicated the social and economic motivations lingering in the more overt political demands. Understanding the dramatic shifts in Chinese culture as well as its relationship to global politics will shape much of the seminar's focus.
This course focuses on theoretical and applied medical knowledge as it developed in ancient China, spread to Japan and Korea, and developed over time to the modern era. The course also examines the closely related topics of evolving concepts of the human body and responses to outbreaks of epidemic disease. Course participants will examine the social and scientific contexts of East Asian medicine, and relationships between medical theory and practice and the natural environment and major religious traditions. Students will explore the multiple approaches that historians have taken in interpreting East Asian medical history and will consider how such approaches shape the production and reception of historical scholarship.
This course provides a thorough grounding in the state of the field of environmental history in Asia, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. It will begin with an introduction to methods and trends in environmental history in general and Asian environmental history's place within the larger field, followed by an overview of foundational works in the field. Students will come away with sufficient knowledge to teach courses in Asian environmental history or conduct original research. It will be of interest to students of Asian history, environmental studies, and the history of science. Knowledge of an Asian language is not required.
This course focuses on Japanese history from the early development of a state in the seventh century to the present. The course emphasizes major changes and turning points such as the rise of warriors and the establishment of military governments, the early-modern bakuhan state, the modern Meiji state, the wartime state, and the postwar state and society. The course also examines exchanges and relations between Japan and other states and regions of East Asia over time. The course may also investigate topics such as the rise of premodern warrior culture, cultural interactions with China and Korea, the rise of commercial culture, urbanization, imperialism and empire-making, conflicts with the West, and its role in the modern world. Students will examine the role of gender in Japanese society, the relationship of humans to the environment, and the construction of modern national identities. Students will explore the multiple approaches historians of Japan have taken to reading and presenting historical work, including economic, political, social, and cultural history, and will consider how such approaches shape the production and reception of historical scholarship.
Research and readings in the history of South Asia since the late eighteenth century.
A research seminar, this course examines Chinese history from a multi-ethnic perspective. Major topics to be covered include the theoretical development (and evolution) of the terms frontier and borderlands; ethnicity in the imperial period; the centrality of ethnicity in China's conceptualizations of itself; and ethnicity in the People's Republic of China. After successfully completing this course, students will be able to: to demonstrate their familiarity with the major themes and topics for Chinese imperial history and how it relates to the intertwined conceptualizations of ethnicity through discussion and written work. Students will have the option to use this course as a research seminar, conducting primary document research alongside their historiographic readings.
This course provides students with the thematic and theoretical foundation for the study and teaching of world history. HIST 589 World History: Themes and Approaches (3) This course will provide students with the thematic and theoretical foundation for the study and teaching of world history. Because world history is a crucial secondary field for historians, with increasing emphasis on it as a necessary "teaching field," this course seeks to equip students to teach world history at the undergraduate level. The course will be divided into five primary units, each of which will address a major theme in world history, such as the rise of civilizations, great land empires (particularly the Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire), the Silk Road, the spread of world religions, the Mongol invasions, European exploration, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the nation-state, and globalization (specific units will be determined by the instructor). Within each of these units, students will be exposed to both substantive historical literature on the topic as well as major theoretical works that have influenced historical scholarship. In this way, students will be encouraged to think about the ways historians use theory to frame and inform their scholarship and teaching. By the conclusion of the course, students will be expected to demonstrate the integration of content, theory, and pedagogy.
Supervised off-campus, nongroup instruction, including field experiences, practicums, or internships. Written and oral critique of activity required.
Creative projects, including nonthesis research, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.
Formal courses given on a topical or special interest subject which may be offered infrequently; several different topics may be taught in one year or term.
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Students enrolled will lead discussion sections, grade papers and examinations, given an occasional lecture, and assist instructors in planning survey level courses.
Foreign study and/or research constituting progress toward the degree at a foreign university.
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Source: Pennsylvania State University-Penn State Lehigh Valley's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 59
