GEN ED HIST COURSES
*HIST/EALC 120: East Asian Civilizations
Gen Ed Credit: Non-Western Cultures and Historical & Philosophical Perspectives
Instructor: TBA
Description: Surveys the three major East Asian civilizations from ancient and classical times, through the period of Western influence, political revolution, and modernization, to the contemporary age and the emergence of East Asian superpowers.
*HIST 140: Western Civ to 1660-ACP
Gen Ed Credit: Historical & Philosophical Perspectives, Western/Comparative Cultures, & Advanced Composition
*HIST 141: Western Civ to 1660
Gen Ed Credit: Historical & Philosophical Perspectives and Western/Comparative Cultures
Instructor: Professor Clare Crowston
Description: This course will survey essential developments in Western Civilization from Antiquity through the seventeenth century. It will focus on the evolution of political institutions from the city-states of Ancient Greece, through the Roman Empire, the feudal system of Medieval Europe and, finally, the emergence of nation-states in the seventeenth century. We will also study the philosophies or religious beliefs that helped men and women understand their society and the world, as well as the social structures and conflicts that characterized different periods of history. In particular, we will examine how relations with supposed “outsiders” – such as Jews, Muslims, indigenous peoples of the New World, enslaved Africans, and women – brought essential contributions to Western Europeans and helped them define their own identity. In the process, we will gain a new understanding of the cultural fusions and conflicts that continue to define, and challenge, our world. Another key element of the course will be to understand the role that history itself – stories about the past – has played in the creation of what we think of as Western Civilization. As much as a “real” historical entity, Western Civilization consists of the traditions and identities communities have taken on and the continuities they have claimed with earlier cultures and societies.
*HIST 142: Western Civ Since 1660
Gen Ed Credit: Historical & Philosophical Perspectives and Western/Comparative Cultures
*HIST 143: Western Civ Since 1660-ACP
Gen Ed Credit: Historical & Philosophical Perspectives, Western/Comparative Cultures, & Advanced Composition
Instructor: Professor Harry Liebersohn
Description: We will be examining the development of recent Western civilization in this course — the extraordinary transition from a world of peasants, artisans, and aristocrats to the democratic, industrial world that we inhabit today. What have been the driving forces behind the birth of the modern world? How did liberty, equality, and fraternity become its watchwords, and what has been their fate? These are among the central questions that the course will address. Although the focus is on Western Europe, we will also examine the impact of Europe on the rest of the world. This is a course about politics: about the conflict-ridden emergence of modern democracies, their struggle against traditional authority and modern dictatorship, and their inner dilemmas as they have chosen among competing principles of liberty, equality, and community. It is a course about people: some of them highborn and famous, like haughty Frederick the Great and passionate Mary Godwin Shelley, but also ordinary men and women — peasants, slaves, artisans, factory workers, soldiers, and housewives. We will consider how all of them shaped the world we live in today.
*HIST 170: US Hist to 1877-ACP
Gen Ed Credit: Historical & Philosophical Perspectives, Western/Comparative Cultures, & Advanced Composition
*HIST 171: US Hist to 1877
Gen Ed Credit: Historical & Philosophical Perspectives and Western/Comparative Cultures
Instructor: Professor Kristin Hoganson
Description: Although this is an introductory course, covering U.S. history through Reconstruction, it is not your high school history class. The course focuses on several interpretive questions, chief among them: how do we make sense of conflicting evidence, arguments, and views on what matters about the past? We will explore how historians pick their topics, find their sources, and transform their research into knowledge. Going well beyond traditional political history, this course will introduce you to recent historical approaches with a greater social, cultural, environmental, transnational, and economic bent. To provide some thematic unity within this analytical extravaganza, the course will focus on the concept of freedom: how has it been understood over time? How have various individuals and groups struggled to obtain and redefine it? How can History help us understand this fundamental concept? This course will meet for two lectures and one discussion section each week.
*HIST 258: 20thC World to Midcentury – Topic: “World War I and the Making of the Global 20th Century”
Meets with CWL 199, FR 199, GER 199, and REES 296
Gen Ed Credit: Historical & Philosophical Perspectives and Western/Comparative Cultures
Instructors: Professor Tamara Chaplin & Professor Peter Fritzsche
Description: “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” —Kaiser Wilhelm II to German soldiers, August 1914. This year, 2014, marks the hundredth anniversary of the onset of World War I. Lasting from 1914 to 1918 and known as “The Great War” to those unaware that more carnage would soon blight the history of the twentieth century, World War I stands as the first incarnation in human history of modern industrial warfare on a truly global scale. This bloody conflict permanently recast the ways in which nations and peoples have considered, experienced and commemorated not just military conflict, but both Western and global culture, society, industry, politics and economics writ large. Our class, which will be team-taught by Professors Tamara Chaplin and Peter Fritzsche, attempts to come to grips with World War I’s astonishing historical legacy. Our canvas is broad: we will not only learn about the chronology of the war—from its origins and military operations, to its political ramifications (including the demise of imperial empires and the rise of Soviet socialist communism), to competing experiences of battlefront and home front (with their technological and industrial innovations—including such diverse aspects as aerial and trench warfare, the use of gas and chemical weapons, food rationing, war bonds and the feminization of the workforce), but we will also study the war’s psychological and embodied effects (shell-shock, trauma, amputation, prosthetics, plastic surgery and disability) as well as the artistic and cultural attempts to acknowledge, represent and memorialize its devastation (in poetry, art, music, dance, theatre, film and literature). Our sources will be equally varied; we will read history, fiction and memoir, examine newspaper coverage, cartoons, propaganda posters, photographs and film and analyze geographic, architectural and cartographic evidence of World War I’s destruction and commemoration. We also hope to think hard together about how this history has shaped our present concerns, from our attitudes towards such issues as terrorism and human rights, to our understandings of masculinity, sexuality and gender, to our ideas about peace-making, revolution, religion and global apocalypse. To aid us in our work, our class will benefit from a series of guest lectures and presentations from specialists in other disciplinary fields. If you are interested in exploring the ways in which modern warfare continues to shape the world in which we live, this class is for you.
SCIENCE/PRE-MED STUDENTS: CHECK THIS COURSE OUT!
*HIST 367: History of Western Medicine
Instructor: Professor Rana Hogarth
Description: This course will examine the social history of medicine, from antiquity to the present. Specifically, we will examine the development of the medical profession, the formation of medical institutions, and the acquisition of medical knowledge. Students will gain an understanding of competing theories of disease and therapy; challenges to professionalization and institution building; and the relationship between medicine, society, and government. Students will consider the evolving role of the physician and will address how race, gender, nationality, religion, and class have shaped, and continue to shape the doctor patient relationship. In addition to providing students with a broad overview of the social history of Western Medicine, this course will also address challenges to medical authority, shortcomings within the healthcare system, and nontraditional forms of practice. This course will include class discussions as well as a midterm, a 10 page paper, and a final exam. Prerequisite: One year of college biology or chemistry, one year of college history, or consent of instructor.
NEED ADVANCED OR ELECTIVE HOURS? – TAKE A LOOK AT THESE GREAT HIST COURSES!
*HIST/MACS 300: Topics in Film and History – Topic: “Fading to Black: African American History Through Film”
Instructor: Jason Jordan, Teaching Assistant
Description: This course examines the varied representations of black Americans in film throughout the 20th century. It addresses the ways in which, at any given moment, the history of blacks in film has mirrored the broader historical trends surrounding racial knowledge in American society. However, this course also makes the case that such trends have in turn been directly influenced by black filmic history. This course covers a host of topics including blackface minstrelsy and the earliest popular depictions of blackness, the “race films” of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s that grappled with the decline of Jim Crow and the birth of Civil Rights, and the emergence of Black Power as a political ideology in the late 60’s and 70’s alongside the rise of so-called “blaxploitation films.” Ultimately, this course has in mind the goals of reevaluating what historical sources are and can be while challenging us to find new ways to “read” such sources in order to learn about the past and contemporary society.
*HIST 365: Fict & Historical Imagination – Topic: “Gendering War, Migration, and Memory: Fact and Fiction in Modern South Asian Histories”
Instructor: Julianne Laut, Teaching Assistant
Description: Within our shared popular culture, historical fiction and historical films provide some of the most potent representations of historical events most of us will ever encounter. Writers and directors create versions of histories designed to entertain, provoke, and inform, all the while filtered through their own subjective stances and the circumstances of the present. Consider some of the most recent films nominated for Academy Awards in the United States that have prompted fierce debate over the history of slavery and racial inequalities, such as “The Help” and “Lincoln” (both nominated, 2012), and “12 Years a Slave” (nominated, 2013). This course is designed to explore the ways in which these different forms of fiction impact our historical memories and historical imaginations with a special focus on South Asian women and gender. In each of three main units of the course, we will consider a film and a novel alongside historical scholarship around a particular topic. The units will be generally chronological and move from a “bounded” South Asian regional topic (the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan) outward to include the impact of violence and war on women’s lives after the Partition of South Asia, and how modern migration has impacted questions of race and gender in the United States. Together we will ask: What does fiction teach us about the past? What stories does it obscure or misrepresent about the experiences of women? How are histories told through film and in novels? And how does reading or viewing fictionalized history alongside more “traditional” forms of history affect our understanding about particular historical events? To put it simply: what is the relationship between “fact” and “fiction”?
*HIST 373: Origins of the Civil War
Instructor: Professor Bruce Levine
Description: This course examines changes in economic, social, cultural, and political life in the United States that ultimately plunged the nation into the bloodiest and most important war in its history. Particular attention is paid to the way in which diverse segments of the country’s population– North and South, urban and rural, rich and poor, slave and free, black and white, male and female–affected, and were affected by these changes. This is an intensive course, and course requirements (including substantial weekly reading assignments) reflect that fact. The course also assumes a basic familiarity with the history of the U.S. in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Students without such a familiarity may wish to take the first half of the US history survey before taking this course.
*HIST 396 B: Special Topics – Topic: “Making Poverty History”
Instructor: Professor Antoinette Burton
Description: In this course we grapple with two big questions: How can we eradicate poverty in our own time? And, how does knowing about histories of poverty help us understand and work to end it in the present? Our syllabus uses several case studies—hunger, health and homelessness—and draws on historical accounts to develop strategies for addressing the persistence of these social conditions today. The goal of the course is to enable students to understand the deep roots of current issues and devise solutions that speak to contemporary challenges.
*HIST 472: Immigrant America
Instructor: Dorothee Schneider, Lecturer
Description: This advanced undergraduate seminar covers all aspects of the history of immigration to the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. After a one week introduction on European immigration to pre-industrial America, the first half of the class will focus on immigration from Europe and Asia during the period 1840-1924. During the second half of the semester the history of immigration law and the social and cultural history of immigrants in the twentieth century United States will be the focus of lectures, readings and discussions. Contemporary topics such as undocumented migration, the second generation and transnational cultures will be discussed in the last weeks of the semester. The class format will combine lectures and discussions. Readings will include historical materials, fiction and scholarly articles from the social sciences. A research paper is required.
*HIST 479: 19thC US Intel & Cultr Hist – Topic: “Making American Cultures in the 19th Century”
Instructor: Professor Kathryn Oberdeck
Description: How did diverse residents and newcomers in the United States imagine and produce the new nation’s varied nineteenth-century cultures? What institutions did they make that shaped shared and disputed values in later centuries? This course addresses this question by examining popular culture, religious revivalism, educational institutions, reform movements, art, science, and literature and the roles of cultural elites, women, working-classes, African Americans, Native Americans and immigrants in shaping national, regional and local cultures. It will focus on both the ideas and beliefs of various groups inhabiting the region that became the United States and the ways such groups shared and debated their ideas–that is, on the dissemination and exchange of “culture” as well as its content. Readings will be in primary sources from the period as well as secondary sources interpreting the significance of particular practices of religion, social thought, literature, art, performance, as well as the material culture of daily life. Participation in class discussion, a midterm, two papers, and a final exam required.
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