Upcoming Course Descriptions

Fall 2024

HIST 199-01: Elements of Historical Thinking: Tokyo Trials (Loo)

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (officially known as “The International Military Tribunal for the Far East”), which was conducted between 1946 and 1948, is an important event for several reasons. For the international community, it was a way to hold Japan accountable for its actions in WWII by meeting out “a stern justice” as punishment for war crimes. For many Japanese people, the trial was a first step in their rehabilitation from a militaristic and ultranationalistic past, a start on their journey to becoming a “democratic” country. However, the outcomes and consequences of the trial were ambiguous and contested. This class aims to come to an understanding of not only the trial itself, but also of its significance for Japan and the world today.

HIST 199-02: Elements of Historical Thinking Maps, Indigenous Dispossessions, and Political Imaginations in Latin America (Ardila Falla)

Maps are more than mere visual representations of space. Many of them are accounts of conflicts, power struggles, and negotiations. Others tell stories of political dreams and aspirations. This course studies maps of Latin America with two goals in mind. First, the course explores processes of Indigenous territorial and cultural dispossessions in Latin America. In doing so, the course highlights the different ways in which Indigenous people have resisted and tried to defend their territories and culture. Second, the course studies the diverse political imaginations that have come to life in Latin America. Through maps, historians can grasp the ways in which those political imaginations have shaped and guided the region’s imperial and national projects. Throughout the semester, the course offers students the opportunity to explore Indigenous maps and notions of space and territory.

HIST 203: Slavery and Freedom (Seeley)

Explores the history of slavery and freedom in Early America, from the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade to the eve of the Civil War. Pairs primary and secondary sources to ask how historians locate, interpret, and write about slavery’s archive. 

HIST 206: African American Women’s History (McCommons)

From social movement calls to Say Her Name and Protect Black Women, the public cry to acknowledge the social, political, and cultural importance of Black women is stronger today than it has ever been. Studying African American women in historical context is one way to trace this growing consciousness on Black women's lives. Through the burgeoning field of Black women's history, this course centers the experiences of African American women in the history of the United States from the seventeenth century to the present. Through primary and secondary sources, we will explore their histories as leaders, organizers, and theorists. We will examine their position at the intersections of race, class, and gender, and their local, national, and international activism. We will also trace their intellectual contributions, especially their theorizations on the meanings of democracy and women’s rights.

HIST 225: Medieval Italy [aka “Popes, Poetry and Plague”] (Drell)

This course traces the historical evolution of Italy from communes to courts during a period of tremendous social, economic and political change.  While Italy’s renown is most commonly associated with the Renaissance, it was during this medieval period that Italian cities experimented with new systems of government and economy that would later profoundly affect the rest of Europe. Particular attention is paid to the development of the Western European commercial economy in Italy, the contrasting fortunes of Northern and Southern Italy, the emergence of a strong Papal state, and the causes and effects of the Black Death. Through the use of primary and secondary materials, this course exposes students to major historical problems, issues, and debates about the Middle Ages. In addition to chronicles, legal tracts and diaries, the works of Dante and Boccaccio are used to illuminate daily practices as well as the extraordinary events in the region’s history. 

HIST 213: Lawrence v. Texas (Holloway)

This class asks what might seem at first to be a simple question: Why did the US Supreme Court rule in Lawrence v. Texas that sodomy laws are unconstitutional? Answering this question requires that we undertake the basic tasks of historical interpretation. We will gather facts by interpreting primary sources, including amicus briefs and court opinions, and then analyze these facts to make arguments about the past.  We will consider what’s at stake in the different answers to this question in order to understand how historical arguments and interpretation reflect and shape the present. And, finally, we will consider how others have answered this question by critically analyzing works by historians, as well as scholarship about the past from other academic disciplines. 

HIST 240: Human Rights in the Atlantic World (Watts)

This course examines the Western concept of Human Rights and how it emerged in an era of revolution. Born of philosophical inquiry, political debates, public protests, and mass uprisings, the claims of political and civil rights for marginalized peoples took center stage for newly declared nations in France, America and Haiti. On what basis were rights claimed? Under what means could equality and liberty be guaranteed to all people? This course focuses on the rights of women, Jews, free blacks and enslaved peoples, drawing on case studies to emphasize how radicals disrupted and disputed prejudice and sought (sometimes violent) change.

HIST 250: Modern East Asia, 1600-1960 (Loo)

Exploration of the journeys that China, Korea, and Japan took that have resulted in the shape of East Asia as we know it today, examining their long history of interconnection and philosophical, cultural, and political traditions and the different ways they respond to similar issues at the same time.

HIST 260: Colonial Latin America (Ardila Falla)

Exploration of the multiple meanings and impacts of the complex, cataclysmic and often times bloody encounter between conquering Iberians (people from Spain and Portugal), Africans and the indigenous people of the Americas and the development of Latin America colonial societies until their national independence in the early nineteenth century.

HIST 270: Early Islamic World (Yanikdag)

Introduction to the major institutions that evolved under the aegis of Islamic Civilization from the advent of Islam in the early seventh century C.E. through the Mongol invasion in 1258. Since “Islam” in this context encompasses an entire cultural complex, the course will examine religious, political, economic, and social institutions.

HIST 273: The Great War in the Middle East (Yanikdag)

Focusing on the Ottoman Empire, this is a social, cultural, and political history of the war and the mandate period from 1914-1922. Covers a range of topics, including the experiences of the common soldier, changing gender roles, the home front, public health and disease, famine, ethnic violence and how the war has been remembered in the post-war years.

HIST 281: Africa c1500-c1900 (Summers)

Africa and Africa’s people changed their continent and were foundational to the making of the modern world. This class will examine this history through evidence and case studies documenting and interpreting experiences in West Africa, West Central Africa, and East Africa. This era included the arrival of new forms of economies and connections with Europe, the Americas, and South Asia, including the transatlantic slave trade, and its end. It brought new ideas and faiths as innovative spirit and healing strategies, as well as Jihad states and Christianity, that offered changing models of faith, economics and political power. It brought new forms of political stratification and subordination as consumer goods, guns, and the rise of enslavers, slave states and their opponents who arguably transformed relationships between subordinates and those with power. During these centuries, people challenged social institutions and relationships, reworked space and time with new ideas of travel and exchange, built new alliances, suffered dependence, famine, war, destruction, debilitation, and sometimes conquest by aliens. There were lots of events.

HIST 291: Histories of Public Health and Biomedicine in the Global South (Summers)

Ill people. Complicated science. Difficult governance...

We currently live in a sometimes scary world where public health and biomedicine matter. This course will introduce a historical context for how to understand people’s management of life and pursuit of health in a recognizably dangerous and unhealthy world, with evidence-based discussions of how ecology, evolution, science, governance, economics, values and culture have come together in the past. We will be looking at what happened, how we know about it, and what we can learn from past experiences, crises, and innovations. The focus here will be on the Global South—the Caribbean and Southern America, India, Africa, and Asia where empire and colonialism fostered dramatic and ambitious efforts to transform life, and where biomedicine was a vital part of this “living experiment”. With a timeline that extends from the 1500s to the present, incorporating a range of perspectives both from primary and secondary sources, and explicitly comparing and contrasting values, choices, resources, and experiences, we will use case studies to enhance understanding of change over time, what makes it, what doesn’t, and how slow (or fast) it can be. What evidence do we have about what people valued? Who were these people? What did they do? How do historians interpret that evidence? How can the perspectives and experiences of Africans illuminate historians’ understandings of big issues such as enslavement, capitalism, religious movements, exploitation, abolition, and conquest?

HIST 299 Special Topics: U.S. Empire (Seeley)

In 1776, American revolutionaries made a case for independence by portraying the United States as a virtuous republic in a war against empire. Nevertheless, the United States has also always acted as an empire – from its beginnings as a confederation of settler states to its engagements with overseas colonialism in the nineteenth century to its positioning as a global power in the twentieth. This course examines what it means to be an empire by considering key topics in U.S. history across the long nineteenth century. How did people resist, enable, and live amid U.S. colonialism? How did imperial thinkers imagine the places they eyed for territorial, commercial, or military expansion? In particular, we will make comparisons across time and space, exploring how Indigenous dispossession in North America informed imperialism elsewhere, from Liberia and Hawai‘i to the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

HIST 306: American Identities (Yellin)

Thematic exploration of historical issues of identity, development and construction in the twentieth-century United States, focusing on such questions as: What do historians mean by “identity”? How do they use categories like race, class, and gender to understand the American experience? How have they approached issues of status, power, and individuality?

HIST 341: History and Memory: World War II in East Asia (Loo)

Examination of the lingering controversies surrounding the history of WWII in East Asia. The focus is on the intersections of history and memory, and the politics of remembering and representing difficult historical events associated with the war. Issues include the Nanjing Massacre, comfort women, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Battle of Okinawa.

HIST 399: Special Topics: Early French Empire (Watts)

Explores the historical study of French colonial possessions and merchant company lands in North America, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, and the Far East from the sixteenth century through the period of the First Empire under Napolean. Themes include settler colonialism, cultural syncretism, republican imperialism, and the military enlightenment.

HIST 400 (Fall 2024): 1950s (Yellin)

For many Americans—including professional historians—the 1960s stands as the pivotal post-World War II decade.  But what came before would have as much, if not more, impact on how we live our lives today.  In this research seminar, students will design and pursue original research projects looking at key events and topics from the 1950s. How did the movement for Black freedom emerge from World War II with new tools and renewed vigor, in the US and around the world? How did postwar, suburban consumerism come to symbolize America’s “happy days,” even as so many around the world and in the US could not or would not fit themselves into that mold? How did the Cold War shape political, social, and economic possibilities? Through specific topics of their own choosing, students will explore the political, social, and cultural history of the 1950s. 

HIST 400 (Spring 2025): Empires in Asia (Loo)

Asia has a long history with empires. Asian powers themselves built empires but Asia has also been – and continues to be – the site in which empires have been made. By the 15th century, Asia had already seen the rise and fall of the Sri Vijaya and Majapahit empires that stretched across Southeast Asia. The Chinese empire dominated social, political, economic, and intellectual life in the region well into the 20th century. Japan, a late-comer to the imperial game, created a pan-Asian empire in half a century. Asia was also the site of imperial ambitions and imaginations of Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain and France. The vast mercantile and political European empires in Asia lasted until the end of WWII, after which they were replaced by American power. Recognizing that empires in Asia have taken many different forms, this seminar asks participants to explore the history of imperial power in Asia and examine what their effects on the region has been.