Spring 2025 Course Descriptions

TR 10:30-11:45am | Watts

AIHS, FSHT

This course surveys the French in the world beginning with one of the most successful colonizers of New France, Samuel Champlain, and ending with the rise and fall of the First Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte. It focuses on the historical study of French exploration, settlement, and conquest of lands across North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Asian subcontinent to better understand France’s imperial project and how it worked. It examines the social, political, economic and environmental changes that indigenous people, local polities, and French subjects encountered in this early period of colonization and empire-building.

MW 3-4:15pm | Summers

AIHS, FSHT

How have South Africans tried to re-make South Africa? This course focuses on activism and explores the trajectory of South Africa from the 1400s to the present, drawing on primary and secondary works to understand how South Africans worked individually and collectively, successfully and unsuccessfully, to make change.  We will also consider how the histories themselves were and are political acts. What was conquest, settlement, and frontier life? How did people pursue their own ideas within segregated institutions? How did racism shape capitalist economic development? Was ethnicity a valuable cultural resource or a racist imposition? How did South Africans make and then end apartheid? What have been the challenges of the “rainbow nation”?

TR 3-4:15pm | Ardila

AIHS, FSHT

This course studies the main conflicts and tensions that shook Spanish and Portuguese America during the second half of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources, we will reflect on the different meanings and implications that reform, revolution, and independence had throughout the region. During the semester we will look at the Bourbon and Pombaline Reforms, the Tupac Amaru Rebellion in Peru, the Comunero Revolt in present-day Colombia, the French Revolution in Latin America, the Haitian Revolution and its impact throughout the region, the dissimilar processes of independence that shook Spanish and Portuguese America, and the many challenges the new nations faced following independence, including their gradual processes of abolition and manumission. The course invites students to reflect on the idea that the formation of new republican nations throughout the Americas was not an inevitable outcome nor was it something desired by all its inhabitants. It encourages students to think about the social and political reforms that the Age of Revolutions brought about as well as on the persistence of colonial and monarchic structures following independence.

TR 9-10:15am | Traugh

AIHS, FSHT

This course explores the history of decolonization in Africa as told by the anticolonial activists who made African independence possible. The course examines the crucial decades after World War II, when European empires moved to reinvent colonialism in Africa for a postwar world. It looks at how different African activists—from women writers to guerilla fighters—tried to seize the political opening to imagine a new Africa altogether, free from European rule. We will learn about how to end an empire from the activists themselves. We will read the material they produced in the historical moment: a theory of peasant revolution in Algeria, conferences on African unity in Britain, pamphlets on African socialism in Tanzania. The course shows how African activists remade their world as well as the wider international order in the twentieth century.

WF 10:30-11:45am & 1:30-2:45pm | Mack

AIHIS, FSHT, HIUS

Making and Breaking America explores an especially turbulent century in American history from the founding of the American union in the eighteenth century until the breaking of that union by 1860. Our class will begin by exploring the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), a global conflict some scholars have coined the real “First World War,” and determining how this war influenced the founding of the American Republic. We will go on to examine the forces that formed the social, economic, and political structures of early American society during the first half of the nineteenth century, such as national politics, global immigration and trade, westward expansion, the growth of industrial capitalism, and the parallel extension of free and unfree labor systems. Finally, we will consider how these varied forces over time eroded national bonds and eventually broke apart the union by 1860. Students of Making and Breaking America will learn how to contextualize the past, imagine how different peoples experienced historical change, and consider how historical forces shaped (and continue to shape) our present-day world.

TR 1:30-2:45pm & 3-4:15pm | Mack

AIHS, FSHT, HIUS

This course explores the evolution of the American presidency from the Washington Administration—at the outset of the new republic—to the modern presidency of the twenty-first century. It places a special emphasis on the role of historical precedent in transforming the executive office. We will examine the evolution of the executive branch by exploring pivotal American presidencies, including the administrations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. We will consider the presidency within the context of its times, considering how presidents acted both inside and outside their proscribed constitutional duties, often responding to extraordinary times with unprecedented measures both in domestic affairs and foreign affairs. We will consistently discuss the importance of historical precedents set by earlier presidential administrations, and ask how the study of past presidential behavior might help us better understand the American presidency of our modern age.

MW 10:30-11:45am | Seeley

AIHS, AMER, FSHT, HINA, HIPR

This course will examine the uncertain beginnings of the United States to ask what kind of republic early Americans envisioned and what kind of empire they made. Our conversations will begin in the era of the American Revolution and end in the 1830s. We will range over broad terrain to think about the many ways that the founding of the United States changed life in early North America. We will explore key debates about high and popular politics, slavery and emancipation, Indigenous sovereignty, African American and women’s rights, constitution-making, immigration, and culture, and political economy. We will investigate revolutions in religion, science, technology, and sexuality. Many of these foundational debates still reverberate in politics today. At the center of our inquiries will be the question of how early North Americans conceived of the rapid transformation of the lands east of the Mississippi River from Native ground to U.S. states and territories. 

TR 12-1:15pm & 1:30-2:45pm | Broomall

AIHS, AMER

The poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren said that the American Civil War is “our felt history, history lived in the national imagination.” “It draws us as an oracle,” he contended, “darkly unriddled and portentous, of personal as well as national fate.” The war proved to be a watershed moment that resulted in the freedom of nearly four million enslaved people and transformed the scope and scale of the federal government. The conflict also brought unparalleled destruction and resulted in the deaths of 750,000 Americans. This class is an overview of the causes, fighting, and outcomes of the Civil War and the period after the war known as Reconstruction. We will explore the political and military goals of both sides (the Union and the Confederacy) in the war, the methods they used to achieve those objectives, and how the contingencies of war required changes in both means and ends. Last, we will examine the political and social ramifications of Reconstruction, connecting the themes of this period back to the war years and ahead to the last decades of the nineteenth century.

In our consideration of the conflict itself, we will balance military, political, and social developments. We will discuss battle tactics and strategy as they relate to the larger goals of each side. The course will explore the experiences of both the home front and battlefront in distinct parts of the Confederacy and the North. We will, furthermore, be attentive to shifting historical interpretations and how the conflict is currently presented at public history sites.

MW 9-10:15am | Holloway

FSHT, HINA

This course explores cases decided by the US Supreme Court in the 20th century, with a focus on free speech; race, gender, and sex discrimination; voting rights; sexual privacy; and national security/habeas corpus. In order to think historically about courts and the law, we will consider the social, political, and cultural context in which cases are brought to the court; how the court’s opinions on certain issues changed over time due to shifting historical circumstances and developments in legal reasoning; and the impact of court opinions on society. While our focus is on the past, we will also keep an eye on the present, monitoring arguments before the Court and opinions it issues during the Spring 2025 term, particularly cases that relate to the thematic areas of this class.

TR 10:30-11:45am & 1:30-2:45pm | Yellin

AIHS, FSHT, HINA, HIUS, IFPE, WGGV

An examination, in its historical context, of a famous legal case in which nine Black teenagers were accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. The course’s goal is to use this profound event as a means to explore the historian’s craft and introduce students to several subfields in US History, including the histories of race and racism, gender and sexuality, and law and society.

MWF 10:30-11:20am | Stevenson

CLEL, HIPR, SLPA

The classical period in Greece will always be remembered for its awe-inspiring innovations in political systems, art, literature and philosophy. Democratic Athens cannot help but be at the center of the course, but we will also try to understand the context of Greek-speakers’ classical achievements within their global context: how the independent city-state (polis) evolved, what role Persia and the Near East played in this development, and the conditions that led to the imperialistic decline of the independent city-state. Particular attention will be paid to the first written histories, Herodotus’ and Thucydides’, that not only chronicle the period lucidly, but also create a new type of political discourse. Archaeological evidence will also be explored in conjunction with the historical narratives. 

TR 9-10:15 am | Drell

AIHS, FSHT, HIEU, HIPA, IFWC

The crusades are an extremely popular topic for researchers and students. The crusades to the Holy Land lasted from 1095 until 1291, but the movement also encompassed a much wider array of military expeditions.  A complex web of factors motivated people to participate in the Crusades, and the Crusading movement developed into a phenomenon which was at the very center of the Medieval world.  Focusing largely but not exclusively on the First Crusade, this course examines the roots of the crusading movement; the ways in which the crusades brought three world cultures (the West, Byzantium, Islam) into contact and confrontation; the vitality of the crusading idea in Western Europe; and how crusade history has moved from a very Christian-centered view to take into account the experiences of those non-Christians who encountered the crusaders.  This course combines short lectures with discussions of primary and secondary texts, such as religious edicts, chronicles, law codes, literary works, saints’ lives, visual art, documentaries and film.

MW 10:30-11:45am | Brandenberger

FSHT, GSCP, GSEE, GSGP, HIEU, IFEB, SLPA

This course concerns the history of modern Russia and the former Soviet space, surveying a thousand years of regional history from Kyiv Rus’ and Muscovy through the Russian empire and the USSR. Although the course is organized in chronological order, its units are intentionally diverse and varied. Political and ideological history flank diplomatic and dynastic concerns. Empire, nation, class and gender, as well as all of their “isms,” play major thematic roles in this course, as do methodology and historiography. Particular attention is cast on the political culture of the region that has led repeatedly to conflict and war, most recently since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

MW 10:30-11:45am | Watts

AIHS, FSHT, GSHC, HIEU, IFEB, SLPA

This course examines French society and politics from the fall of the French monarchy through a decade of revolution that ended with the rise of Napoleon. It focuses on the ideas and events that propelled France from an absolutist monarchy to constitutional monarchy, and later from a democratic republic to a European empire. The political ruptures that reinvented France as a modern state took place alongside economic crises and many violent social conflicts. Political factions solidified powerful ideologies about where authority resided: in the body of the King? in a constitution based on The Rights of Man and of the Citizen? or in the General Will? In addition, this course addresses the contested meanings of the French Revolution through a critical reading of its many, historical interpretations.

TR 10:30-11:45am & 12-1:15pm | Kahn

AIHS, FSHT, GEEL, GSDW, GSEE, GSWE, HIEU, IFWC, ITEL, SLPA

Propaganda. Spies. Bombs. Nukes. The Iron Curtain. Communism. Capitalism. “East” versus “West.” When we think of Cold War Europe, these enormous geopolitical tensions are usually what comes to mind. But to what extent did the Cold War actually impact the way ordinary Europeans experienced their lives? How did Europeans living under hyperpolarizing ideologies psychologically process, conform to, and resist their indoctrination? How did the Cold War intersect with other vast political, social, and cultural transformations of the time, such as decolonization, migration, feminism, and gay liberation movements? How has Europe transformed since the end of the Cold War? What new challenges does Europe face today, particularly amid the rise of far-right extremism and the Russia-Ukraine War? And finally, to what extent is it reasonable to argue that we are in a “new Cold War” or a “second Cold War”? **This course fulfills the gen-ed requirements in Historical Inquiry (formerly FSHT) and Written Communication, and it can count as an elective for Global Studies, German Studies (with a CLAC), Jewish Studies, and Italian Studies.

MW 9-10:15am | Loo

AIHS, CHIN, GSHC, HIAS, SLPA

One of the most enduring motifs associated with China’s recent history is that of “revolution.” After a period of long peace that stretched through the 17th and 18th centuries, China underwent profound social, cultural, political and philosophical  transformations in rapid succession in the 19th and 20th centuries. Each of these was a key moment in modern Chinese history in which people watched their worlds change in intense ways. This class examines the significance and impact of a series of revolutions and investigates how different actors in Chinese society recognized these moments of radical change and responded to them. In contrast to the more commonplace focus on political revolutions led by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, this course is concerned with some of China’s “other” revolutions: the massive civil war of the “Taiping Rebellion” 1850-1864, the so-called “Boxer Rebellion” of 1905, the May 4^th Movement of 1919, and the feminist revolutions of the 1920s and 30s.

TR 9-10:15am & 10:30-11:45am | Ardila

AIHS, AMER, FSHT, GSHC, GSLA, HILA, SLPA

This is an introductory course to Latin American history from the early nineteenth century to the present. During the first half of the semester, the course studies Latin America’s dissimilar processes of independence, its gradual and irregular processes towards abolition, the new nations’ projects of state formation, their efforts to build national identities, the rise of caudillos, and the region’s uneven immersions into the global economy. During the second half of the semester, the course explores Latin America’s processes of industrialization and urbanization, the emergence of populist leaders, the region’s periods of revolution and counterrevolution, the Cold War in Latin America, the political instability that has shaken the region in recent decades, and the central role of soccer in Latin American society. The course stresses Latin America’s cultural diversity, its social and racial divisions, its continuous struggles for progress and development, its political fluctuations, and the region’s persistent economic and social inequalities. The course invites students to reflect on how legacies from the past continue to shape Latin American society. Students will have the opportunity to engage with numerous primary sources that will enrich their understanding of Latin American history and will enhance their critical thinking skills.

MW 3-4:15pm | Yanikdag

AIHS, GSHC, HICT, HIME, IFPE, SLPA

This course examines the history of the Ottoman state from the late 13th century to its demise after World War I in the 20th century.  Inheritors of Turkic-Mongolian, Perso-Islamic, and Roman-Byzantine imperial legacies, the Ottoman state began as a small frontier principality surrounded by much larger rivals, but quickly evolved into a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and polyglot world empire spanning three continents.  We will examine its institutions, economic structures, and cultural and social forms and patterns. Special emphasis will be placed on its diverse social composition, the evolution of imperial and provincial governments’ relations with various ethno-religious groups, legal practices, elite military slavery, and intercommunal relations.

TR 12-1:15pm & 1:30-2:45pm | Traugh

AIHS, FSHT, IFQD, HICT

In 1968, the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve in the 1970s. Since 1968, the year that Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb, the world’s population has more than doubled, from 3.5 to roughly 8 billion today. Ehrlich’s name now features on the list of experts who wrongly predicted a reckoning with so-called “overpopulation.” This course looks at how people became a problem for experts like Ehrlich, and why after so many failed predictions, some commentators continue to insist that “overpopulation” is a threat to our planet. “How People Became the Problem” begins with the original prophet of overpopulation, Thomas Robert Malthus, and explores the influence of his ideas through generations of population control advocates from around the world, stopping to look closely at birth control in Puerto Rico, sterilization in India, and the one-child policy in China. The course also examines how ideas of population “quality” fed the rise of the modern insurance industry in the United States and inspired anti-poverty campaigners in the Third World. The course concludes by looking at population dynamics in Africa today.

MW 12-1:15pm | McCommons

AIHS, IFPE

How do we understand the environment as its own actor in American history? How do contests over the environment relate to social issues like race, class, gender, and disability? Climate events and changing landscapes shape the country we inhabit as much as humans do, and new environmental histories are establishing the study of human interactions with the environment as fundamental parts of historical inquiry. Moving from the late nineteenth through twentieth centuries, this course examines the relationship between the human and nonhuman world in the United States over time. We will discuss different approaches to environmental history, analyze shifting ideas about the natural world, and examine the national environmental justice movement. Students will be encouraged to place the environment at the center of their analyses of American history.

TR 12-1:15pm | Sackley

AIHS, EVEL, HIUS, IFPE

This course examines how the United States became dependent on coal and oil and the ways in which that dependence has impacted the environment, social movements, geopolitics, and everyday life since the early 19th century.  We will also explore representations of "carbon culture" in film and media. From the cult of the automobile to US interventions in the Middle East, this is a story about power, empire, and hegemonic culture. But, it also about resistance--from the “coal wars” of the 20th century to the pipeline and anti-fracking protests of today.

TR 10:30-11:45am | Brandenberger

AIHS

Modern states and mass movements often refer to history in order to mobilize social support and public opinion. “Patriotic Histories” examines this instrumental use of the past by a variety of modern political actors in countries such as the US, Great Britain, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, China and Japan. Course participants analyze these case studies at the nationalist intersection of political campaigning, mass culture and public education and then extend upon them, developing research papers on a populist movement of their choice.

TR 1:30-2:45pm | Drell & Montesano

AIHS

This course examines the medieval world through the experiences of travelers.

Students learn about the adventures of pilgrims, crusaders, missionaries, traders, diplomats and explorers who journeyed to and beyond the limits of their known world, from western Europe and the Mediterranean to Asia and Africa. This course analyzes the motives for and logistics of medieval travel.  Why did medieval Europeans take to the road, where did they go, and how did they get there?  Students learn how medieval people viewed their world and how their perceptions changed in this period of cross-cultural interaction and exchange.  Course readings draw on a wide range of primary evidence, including travelogues by Marco Polo, Benjamen Tudela, Ibn Battuta, and William of Rubruck, among others. Moreover, students read modern scholarship on the Global Middle Ages, a field in part developed through the lens of medieval travel literature. 

T 3-5:45pm | Sackley

AFSB

History 398 explore key approaches, philosophies, and methodologies that have shaped the craft of writing history. We begin with “the history of history,” examining evolving conceptions of “history” and how history developed as a professional, academic practice in the 19th and early 20^th centuries.  The rest of the course will focus on historiography—the study of historical scholarship—in more recent decades. We will explore foundational questions about sources, archives, and power and read illustrative examples of different approaches to writing history, including gender and sexuality, material studies, subaltern, social, cultural, legal, and public history, and transnational history.

MW 12-1:15pm | Summers

WGHP, WGTP

African women’s experiences, ideas, initiatives... what sort of a history of Africa do we get when we focus on these? This course will draw on primary and secondary works to explore how African women’s various ideas and experiences of gender and gendered institutions challenge assumptions and Western-based models of universal gender norms, or of the continent’s issues in both past and present. We will look at contentious microhistories of individuals, larger scale explorations of social and economic change centered on the complexities of women’s actions and roles, and provocative investigations into women’s institutions such as female husbands and kings, Queen mothers, women’s initiation age grades and societies, concubinage, market women’s unions, Christian marriage, domesticity, gendered development, and more. We will also contextualize such initiatives in discussions of manhood, marriage, men’s work, husband’s roles, and changing sexual expectations. This long and complex history of women and gender in Africa provides a rich background for understanding current developments, politics and policies around issues such as misogyny, sex, and gender based violence. And it celebrates women’s efforts to survive, thrive and innovate.

MW 1:30-2:45pm | Yanikdag

GSME

The Turkish Republic was established in 1923 from the Anatolian (Asia Minor) remnants of the Ottoman Empire, which had ceased to exist in 1922. Rejecting their Ottoman heritage, the Republic’s leaders almost immediately undertook a series of Jacobin political, religious, linguistic, cultural, and social reforms to "modernize" and "westernize" the country and distinguish it from its immediate predecessor. This course brings together historical and other disciplinary scholarship to examine a range of issues from historiographical perspectives: political and religious identities; contested processes of nation-building and nationalism; secularism; ethnic conflict; and the legacies of Kemalist ideology and the Ottoman past. 

W 3-5:45pm | Seeley

 This course will explore the history and public history of two cities—Richmond and Philadelphia. Setting the two cities side-by-side is illuminating. Philadelphia’s public history has long centered the American Revolution while Richmond has privileged the Civil War. Both cities have been short-lived capitols—one of the new United States and the other of the Confederacy. Both cities have an important place in African American history—one as an abolitionist center and the other as one of the most significant sites of slavery and the domestic slave trade in the country. What has seemed worthy of preservation over time, and what does that suggest about the meaning of the past in both places? 

Most of our work will be hands-on and spent in the field rather than in the classroom. We will use class time to visit Richmond museums, archives, monuments, and historic sites and cemeteries, and we will make connections with area history professionals working in a variety of fields across the city. Finally, this course includes a fully funded trip for all students to travel to Philadelphia to visit historic sites for three days in March (the first weekend of spring break). This class will be co-taught with Dr. Whitney Martinko of Villanova University, and we will also host Dr. Martinko’s class here in Richmond. This is a special course offering for Spring 2025, and it will not be offered again.

M 1:30-4:15pm | 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 15^th 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 20^th 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.