Spring 2026

AIHS, FSHT, HINA

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Southerner Quentin Compson’s Harvard roommate asks: “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all?” The questions posed by Compson’s Canadian roommate underpin this class. We will explore the history of the American South from its earliest origins in the period of European exploration to the period known as the “New South” ending in the early twentieth century. This discussion-based course is not meant to be an exhaustive study of the region. Instead, we will focus on a variety of topics and themes. Students will consider the separate regions of the South—lowcountry, piedmont, and mountains—and how these areas change over time. A central focus of the course will be the development and changes in Southerners’ thinking about race and racial difference. We will also consider other ways that Southerners identified and organized themselves—by gender, class, religious beliefs, political ideologies, and residence.

AIHS, FSHT, HINA

This course explores American world diplomacy and foreign relations from the United States’ founding in the late eighteenth century to its ascent to a global hegemonic power by the First World War. We will examine the global dimensions of the American Revolution and the republic’s development through the diplomacy of the Washingtonian and Jeffersonian administrations, the early U.S.-China trade, the War of 1812, the Age of Jackson, the U.S.-Mexico War, westward migration and territorial expansion, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Second Industrial Revolution, the New Manifest Destiny and the Spanish-American War, and the diplomacy of the Roosevelt administration at the outset of the “American Century.” We will end at the outset of the First World War. Students will reflect on the meaning and consequences of the American “experiment” worldwide and consider how historical forces shaped (and continue to shape) our present-day world.

AIHS, FSHT, HIAL, HILA

The 2026 Men’s FIFA World Cup is just around the corner. What a better way to get ready for the most important and most widely viewed sporting event in the world than by studying the history of soccer in Latin America. In this course, we will explore the relationship between soccer, social inequality, gender, race, and politics to think about how the sport gradually became so engrained into Latin American society. We’ll get started talking about the arrival of the sport to the region in the late 19th and its fast growth amidst historical processes of migration, industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of populism in the early 20th centuries. In doing so, we will reflect on the racial tensions of the time and how soccer both exacerbated and appeased those frictions. The course then moves on to the ways in which Southern Cone dictatorships, from the 1960s to the 1980s, used soccer (for instance, World Cup victories and renown stars such as Pelé) to boost their popularities. Yet, amidst the rise of authoritarian governments, some used soccer as a medium of resistance. The course moves on to study Latin America’s economic crises of the 1980s and the advent of Maradona as a national hero. Towards the end of the semester, we will explore the world of “barras bravas” (hooligans) and other unfortunate instances in which crime and corruption have infiltrated the realm of soccer. By the end of the semester, students will get a sense of why many Latin Americans claim that soccer is not just a sport, but a central part of life.

AIHS, FSHT, HINA

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.

AIHS, FSHT, HINA, HIPR, AMER

Our course will explore the causes, course, and outcomes of the American Revolution, from 1763 to the 1790s. We will study the war both as a struggle for political independence from Britain and as an internal conflict over what kind of nation the United States would become. How did British colonists become revolutionaries? Why did so many people remain loyal? How did people experience and cope with war? And ultimately, who was included in the promises of independence? We will answer these questions from a variety of perspectives, analyzing the experiences of revolutionary leaders, ordinary people, Indigenous people, African Americans, women, soldiers and loyalists. We will search for the American Revolution in unexpected places like the Gulf Coast and the trans-Appalachian West. At the heart of our work is the understanding that history is never just academic. This is particularly true for the study of the American Revolution, which has carried symbolic weight in defining the character of the United States for two hundred and fifty years. The stories that we tell about the origins of the nation shape the kind of democracy we envision today. War stories have power.

AIHS, FSHT, IFPE, HINA

This course will introduce you to major questions, themes, and events in African American history. It will move from the seventeenth century to the present, following the perspectives and actions of African Americans during the era of slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, the civil rights and Black Power movements, the 1980s and 90s, into the 21st century. We will consider how major historical events were interpreted and influenced by African Americans as they navigated social, political, and economic change. Using primary and secondary sources, our main objective is to deepen our understanding of how African Americans actively shaped the past. Doing so enables us to understand the diversity and complexity of the African American experience, and to examine the historical and sustained impact of African Americans on contemporary society.

AIHS, FSHT, IFWC, HINA, WGHP, WGSS

This class asks what might seem, at first, to be a simple question: Why did the US Supreme Court rule in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) 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 and then analyze these facts to make arguments about the past. We will consider how others have answered this question by critically analyzing works by historians, and as well as scholarship about the past from other academic disciplines. Finaly, we will consider what’s at stake in the different answers to this question in order to understand how historical arguments and interpretation shape the present. Student in this class will conduct research in historic LGBT newspapers to write a paper about efforts by activists to overturn these laws.

AIHS, FSHT, IFPE

Survey of United States political and social movements in the late twentieth century. Does not focus exclusively on Ronald Reagan himself but rather the time period, the development of new conservatism in America, and the political climate that led to the Reagan Administration and its legacies. Topics include The Great Society, race and racism, the rightward shift in American politics, second wave feminism and abortion politics, the rise of the "moral majority," AIDs, and welfare reform.

CLEL, HIEU, HIPR, ITEL

Rome’s imperial period traditionally begins with the princeps Augustus consolidating an empire stretching from Spain to Persia, Ethiopia to Russia, under attempted bureaucratic control. The period ends with Rome’s Islamic successor driving two tiny survivors, Byzantium and Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, back under cover. This course will outline the evolving imperial strategies and their social effects. It will also attempt to explain the vast shift from Augustus’ laissez-faire conglomeration of peoples and kingdoms to Diocletian’s vision for a centralized state, from the great pax romana (Roman peace) to the endless battles with wave after wave of barbarians, from syncretic polytheism to the theocracy of Justinian and his Muslim followers, in short, from antiquity to the "middle age.

AIHS, FSHT, IFWC, HIEU, GSEE, GSCP, GSGP, RSEL

This course concerns the history of the lands of the former Russian empire and Soviet Union, surveying a thousand years of regional history from Kyiv Rus’ to the fall of 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 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.

AIHS, FSHT, IFPE, WGSS, IFPE, WGTP, HICT, GSCP, PPLW

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.

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

This course surveys modern European history from the emergence of the Cold War through the fall of Communism (1945-1991). Along the way, it addresses postwar reconstruction and the creation of ​state socialism in eastern Europe and Eurosocialism in western Europe. Particular attention is given to the Cold War standoff and geopolitics, ideological competition (the interplay between neoliberalism and state socialism), everyday politics, propaganda, consumer culture, popular movements and mass entertainment. Class and gender are analyzed within the context of the course, as are issues concerning historical methodology and historiography.

AIHS, FSHT, IFWC, HIAS, HIAL

The “Opium War” of 1839-1841 is the popular shorthand for the first Sino-British War, a pivotal event in modern Chinese history. It is the first war that the China fought with a Western power in the modern era and is commonly cited as the beginning of China’s “One Hundred Years of Humiliation,” a century in which China suffered greatly at the hands of rapacious Western imperialists, and which continues to inform Chinese understandings of its place in the world today. This course examines this conflict in detail, while providing an introduction to the field of historical studies.

AIHS, FSHT, HIAL, HILA, AMER, GSHC, GSLA

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.

AIHS, FSHT, IFPE, GSHC, HIAL, HICT, HIME

This course explores the history of the Ottoman state from the late 13th century until its downfall following the First World War. The Ottoman state, which inherited a complex set of imperial legacies from the Turco-Mongolian, Persian, Islamic, and Byzantine traditions and empires, started as a small frontier principality. By the 16th century, it had grown into a world empire spanning three continents. We will examine the empire’s economic structures, cultural forms, and social patterns. The course emphasizes the empire’s diverse social makeup, the relations between imperial and provincial governments and various socio-cultural groups, legal practices, elite military slavery, and inter-communal relations.

AIHS, FSHT, IFPE, HIAL, HIME, HICT, GSME, GSCP

This course focuses on the "long" Great War in the Middle East from 1914 to 1922. Approaching the history of the war from social, cultural, and political perspectives, we cover 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.

AIHS, FSHT, IFPE, HIAL, HICT, GSCC, GSCP, GSD2, GSGP, HSHP

Ill people. 

Complicated science. 

Difficult governance... 

We live in a world where public health and biomedicine matter—and are debated. This course offers 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 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” before, during and after imperial interventions. 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 examine change over time, what makes it, what doesn’t, and how slow (or fast) it can be.

HIAS, 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. “How People Became the Problem” 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. We begin with the original prophet of overpopulation, Thomas Robert Malthus, and explore 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.

AIHS, FSHT, IFPE, HINA, EVEL

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 the 21st.

AIHS, FSHT, IFPE, HINA

This course will examine and interrogate the American Jewish experience: What are its origins and key narratives? How did American Jews experience the opportunities and the challenges of life in the United States? How did those experiences shape how American Jews interacted with other Americans? Students will learn about the first Jews to arrive in North America, the expansion of the Jewish community in the US, immigration, race and racism, antisemitism, religious diversity, postwar suburbanization, and Jews in popular culture. Note: This is not a course in Judaism or religious studies.

AIHS, FSHT, HIAL, HIAS 

Despite the long-standing conventions of Confucian patriarchy that sought to discipline and restrict women’s place in East Asian society, women have always acted as political subjects who inhabit, negotiate, articulate, and resist relations of power. This course pays particular attention to women’s experiences in the turbulent nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when older cultural structures were reinforced and reshaped by the emergence of patriarchal modern nation-states in Japan, Korea, and China. We will interrogate how Confucianism, nationalism, and colonial modernity constructed ideals of womanhood, and how women’s political subjectivity emerged both within and against these systems. This class is interested in how East Asian women understood and navigated encounters with the patriarchal family, the modern state, and colonialism, how they conceived of their own power and possibilities, and the strategies they pursued and the imagined futures they developed in response.

HIPR, WGSS, HIEU 

300-level requirement, AFST2, HICT

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 20th 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.

IFWC

This course will explore the Atlantic World and the migrations that connected Africa, Europe, and the Americas from the fifteenth century to the age of Atlantic revolutions. Touching down in multiple locations over time, we will examine how European colonization, the development of plantation commodities, an increasing demand for consumer goods, the forced migration of enslaved people, and the extraction of natural resources spurred conflicts over land, labor, and trade. How did imperial conflicts and the movements, forced and free, of Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans produce new worlds for all three groups? Taking an Atlantic approach to this question means widening our frame of reference to treat the Atlantic basin itself as a zone of cross-cultural contact between peoples. The first part of the course will introduce students to the major questions and texts that have defined the field of Atlantic History. The majority of this course will be devoted to crafting and executing a substantial research project examining some aspect of the Atlantic World before the Age of Revolutions.