The Department of History will be offering the following second 8-week HIST courses (meets October 20 – December 10). Registration is now open!
HIST 258: 20thC World to Midcentury
Humanities & the Arts AND Western Comparative Cultures Gen Ed
Section: B
CRN: 54190
Meets: MWF 9:00-10:50
Location: 106B3 Engineering Hall
Instructor: David Harris, Teaching Assistant
Description: This course examines the historical impact of events of the first half of the 20th century on contemporary and future global history. While critically evaluating events in Europe itself from World War I onward, we will also seek to broaden the discussion by looking outward to how such events had a ripple effect on issues such as global decolonization, nationalism, cultural and economic imperialism and a general shift in concepts of identity and the role of the individual in a new and vastly changed world.
HIST 259: 20th C World from Midcentury
Humanities & the Arts AND Western Comparative Cultures Gen Ed
Section: A
CRN: 43297
Meets: MWF 11:00-12:50
Location: 106 David Kinley Hall
Instructor: Zsuzsanna Magdo, Teaching Assistant
Description: Most commonly perceived as dangerously escapist, fantastic dreams about perfect societies, utopias often evoke dismissal for lying perpetually in another time and place. Yet, as the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring or Hollywood movies about impending global apocalypse remind us, utopian desire for a better society constitutes a critical engagement with the historical present in the attempt to transform it into a plausible future. Over the course of times, utopias have led ambivalent lives, often inspiring revolutionary change and global affinities across racial, class, gender, religious and national hierarchies, while descending on occasion into worldwide wars, violence, and oppression. Hence, this course will explore utopia/dystopia in world history through a series of integrated and overarching themes: politics, revolutions, war, and everyday utopianism in society and culture. After pausing briefly on the late 19th century, when the utopian imagination went around the globe, the course will examine radical thought and politics after 1945 up to the early 1980s, when utopia’s death was hastily announced. We will trace the global roots and routes of such visions and practices across the global north (Europe and North America) and the global south (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) as they sought to remake historical presents in hope of alternative, better futures. Students will explore utopianism’s relationship to history, ideology, and global modernity; revolutionary movements, wars and the politics of exclusion; the arts; everyday practices of sexuality, nutrition and consumption; and the spaces of utopia, whether the state, the built environment, intentional communities or cyberspace. This course includes an undergraduate research component. The main assignment is a group multimedia project that will enable students to practice history as a processual and collaborative form of intellectual exercise. Published in the framework of a class e-book, such projects will allow students to involve a wider audience in thinking about utopia/dystopia and historical scholarship and will make their work portable beyond the classroom.
HIST/AAS 283: Asian American History
Sections: B (HIST) / B (AAS)
CRNs: 64343 (HIST) / 64344 (AAS)
Meets: TR 3:00-5:50
Location: TBA
Instructor: Jeannie Shinozuka, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Humanities & the Arts AND US Minority Cultures Gen Ed
Description: Exploration of the migrations of peoples from the Asian continent into the United States, their attempts to build family and community, and their subsequent impact on American history.
HIST 381: Urban History
Topic: The City in Colonial Spanish America
Section: A
CRN: 64307
Meets: MWF 12:00-1:50
Location: 393 Bevier Hall
Instructor: Ryan Bean, Teaching Assistant
Description: The aim of this course is to provide students with an understanding of colonial Latin American cities and the diverse populations who inhabited them. Focusing on a vast region from Mexico to the Andes, the common histories and regional differences of cities such as Lima, Mexico City, Cusco, Potosí, and Puebla will come to the fore as we investigate the urban world of Spanish America. In the first part of the class, we will examine the ways in which Spaniards envisioned cities and towns to function within the Empire. In particular, we will explore how imperial officials endeavored to reorder colonial space through the establishment of cities as well the mechanisms of power employed by Spaniards as they attempted to leverage power over urban populations from 1492 to 1810.
In contrast to the first portion of the course, the second half of the semester will focus on the Indigenous, African, Jewish, and Casta populations who inhabited colonial cities. We will analyze the ways these groups shaped and were shaped by the colonial urban experience as well as the ways they reshaped Iberian urban imaginaries through resistance and negotiation. Indeed, colonial Latin American cities were not simply constructed from above, but also from below. Our discussions of the common people who inhabited colonial cities will allow us to reflect both on their work as political and social actors and on the nature of the Spanish Empire and its power and authority in urban society. At the end of the semester, we will reflect upon the legacy of Spanish colonial cities in modern Latin America.
Prior knowledge in Latin American history is a bonus but is not required.
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