History Department

HIST 205 - The Twentieth-Century Middle East through Music

This course is a survey of the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa region, using the lens of music to approach that history, from the early twentieth century to the present. The course will focus on the Arabic-speaking countries of the region, particularly the Maghrib (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Egypt, and the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Jordan). Taking a critical cultural approach, we will learn how music can be a window into a broader understanding of political and social histories, and how musical traditions have shaped and been shaped by their historical contexts. Special attention will be given to race, gender, class, religion, colonialism, nationalism and state building, Orientalism, and the politics of knowledge production in the region's history.

HIST 206 - Anti-Colonial Movements in Africa and the Middle East

This course is a survey of anti-colonial movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on various political and social movements that arose in response to European colonial rule. Topics will include but are not limited to the Mahdi rebellion in the Sudan, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, and the Algerian War for Independence. We will also consider acts of rebellion and resistance that do not always fit into textbook narratives of nationalism, and thus are not always engaged with as "anti-colonial." In the process, students will learn to think critically about the nature of resistance; the construction of nation, race, and identity; the role of violence; and the significance of cultural and intellectual debates in political struggles. We will also be attentive to global contexts and material and ideological connections between decolonizing movements within and between these regions, and how anti-colonial solidarity fostered transnational exchanges and globalized worldviews.

HIST 207 - Gender in the Middle East

This course will explore the topic of gender, as well as women, sexuality, and the family in the Middle East and North Africa region, spanning a chronology from the height of the Ottoman Empire (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will explore a wide variety of scholarship, including feminist literature, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and discuss current and developing trends in Middle East studies that have sought to apply these lenses to Arab and Islamic societies. Questions we will explore include: how has gender defined the social and political subject? How have Western feminist lenses influenced or distorted depictions of Muslim women? How were gendered categories transformed under colonialism and globalization, and what did precolonial conceptions of gender and sex look like? Topics will include precolonial gender and sexual categories in Islamic societies, women in the Ottoman Empire, the making of gendered nationalist subjects in Egypt, Palestine, and North Africa, Orientalist fetishization, and feminist political movements, among others.

HIST 210 - Educating Americans in the Long Nineteenth Century

What does it mean to be educated? Is education a system of social control or a pathway to liberation? Should schooling cultivate collective values and traditions, nurture democratic citizens, or encourage economic productivity? What is the relationship between "education" and "school"? In this course, we will investigate how Americans from the revolution to the end of the nineteenth century grappled with these questions. We will examine a variety of educational institutions (such as chartered academies, female seminaries, Native American boarding schools, and freedpeople's schools), but we will give special attention to the rise of public education (the common school system), considering both why some Americans in the early republic thought that mandatory public schooling was essential and why others resisted it. We will also study the myriad ways that Americans were educated outside formal schooling, including apprenticeship and the "binding out" of children, the lyceum and Chautauqua movements, libraries and reading societies, Sunday schools, settlement houses, and clandestine education under slavery. Along the way, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which educational practices and philosophies in the United States either exacerbated or mitigated social inequalities along the lines of gender, race, and class. By closely considering how education worked (and didn't) in the nineteenth century, we will aim to develop greater insights into what we want from education-on an individual and societal level-in the twenty-first century.

HIST 220 - Late Imperial China

This course surveys the history of late imperial China (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries) by examining several critical issues in the historiography of this period. Weekly discussions will address the following topics: despots, ritualized rulers and the growth of a "bureaucratic monarchy"; global economic crisis, peasant rebellion, and the Ming-Qing cataclysm; ethnicity, violence, and exchange on Chinese frontiers; lineage formation, strategic marriages, and the consolidation of gentry rule; local magistrates and scholars and their popular tales; migration, mobility, and social anxiety in a prosperous age; gender and sexuality in Qing Confucian ideology; exploration, trade, and emigration on the south China coast; and the challenge of seaborne imperialists in the nineteenth century.

HIST 223 - Early Modern China and the World: 1300-1900

This course surveys the history of China from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, tracing the rise and fall of the Ming dynasty, the Manchu conquest, and the disintegration of the Qing empire. This course will not only "discover history in China," but also situate China in a global context by discussing the flow of peoples, goods, and ideas into and out of China. After the Silk Road connecting the Eurasian continent declined with the end of the Pax Mongolica, China continued to be an engine of the Afro-Eurasia network and began to interact with the Americas. However, since the Great Divergence in the 1750s, China has scrambled to join a new international order. By analyzing the exchanges between China and other regions, students will understand how the concept of China was in flux and the dynamic role of China in the early modern world.

HIST 224 - Modern China through Foreign Eyes: 1800-1980

This course investigates the history of modern China, from the last century of the Qing dynasty to the post-Mao reform era, through the eyes of missionaries, diplomats, adventurers, scholars, tourists, etc. In these two centuries, China was transformed from an empire to a modern state. At the same time, it had to face a new international order and resituate its relationship with the rest of the world. In the era of revolutions and reforms, China was more than once at the crossroads, asking which direction it should take. It chose its paths to address not only domestic needs, but also the vicissitudes of international environments. In this course, we will examine travel diaries, missionary reports, maps, political treaties, literary compositions, and other documents produced by people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Through "foreign" eyes, we will explore a series of the "old" (e.g., demographical pressure and ethnic conflicts) and "new"  (e.g., high mobility of goods, capital, and people; urban-rural disparity; and environmental deterioration) questions that China has encountered and how it has responded to them. By focusing on non-Chinese sojourners and observers, we will think about how China becomes China and the role of China in the global era from an alternative perspective.

HIST 231 - Crime and Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

How are societal norms defined and transgressions proven and sanctioned? Why are some wrongdoers forgiven for violating the law and reintegrated into the community, while others are deemed "criminals" who merit stern (even capital) punishment? How can the study of criminal justice and the law help us better understand medieval and early modern European societies and cultures? Through an analysis of law codes, court records, and other historical sources, this course will trace the development of criminal law and justice in premodern Europe. In particular, we will examine how medieval practices such as trial by ordeal, feuds, and the payment of blood prices (weregelds) gave way to more "rational" processes, such as trial by jury, inquisitorial procedure, and the use of judicial torture. We will also discuss the importance of religious attitudes and community norms in shaping the practical application of criminal justice in this period, as well as Enlightenment efforts to standardize criminal justice, abolish torture, and eliminate capital punishment.

HIST 240 - World Environmental History

This course approaches the study of "world environmental history" as a fascinating problem of historical methodology. We begin by introducing environmental history at its largest scales of time and space, investigating how climate, biodiversity, natural resources, and commodities have affected human history on a global level. We will then move on to a series of more specific case studies that complicate these large-scale historical analyses. As we visit the pastoral landscapes of Nazi Germany, the toxic waters and fields of modern Japan, the denuded countryside of imperial China, and the socially stratified villages of northern India, we will see how culture, memory, religion, and power shape reciprocal relationships between humans and their geographically unique surroundings in a number of different ways. Finally, we will investigate how these different valances of environmental history have informed a twentieth-century regime of global environmental governance-a regime born of good intentions, but one replete with problems of efficacy, equitability, and justice.

HIST 242 - The Love and Destruction of Nature: Romanticism in the Time of Settler Colonialism

This course studies the history of the idea of nature in American thought, from the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century to the development of environmentalist thought and organizations in the twentieth century. The course will contextualize that history in two ways: in relationship to the formation of the United States through settler colonialism and the death and displacement of Indigenous peoples, land, and culture; and in relationship to the capitalist exploitation of nature that has fundamentally reshaped the ecological communities that live in and across US political space. The course will ask what it means-politically, ethically, and philosophically-to love nature in the wake of environmental and cultural destruction.

HIST 251 - Slander, Censorship, and Surveillance in Modern European History

This course seeks to historicize and interrogate the limits on, and protections for, free speech in modern Europe. We will explore topics including libel laws, censorship and public morality, the development of ideas about natural rights, and the influence of changing technologies on practices and beliefs surrounding the liberty of expression. The class will focus on France and Britain between 1644 (the publication of Milton's crucial text, Areopagitica) and 2016, when the EU adopted a code of conduct for regulating online hate speech.

HIST 256 - Migration Histories in the British Imperial World

The British Empire was built on migrations both forced and free, and in this course we will examine particular migration stories in wider imperial and global contexts. Some of the migrants that we will examine include settler colonists, enslaved persons, transported radicals, colonial officers, missionaries, and indentured and migrant laborers. The course will present a broad chronological survey of the British imperial world since 1700, paying attention to political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics. The final project for this course will be a digital exhibition to which students will contribute content and explanatory material.

HIST 270 - Introduction to American Environmental History

This course introduces students to the major themes, questions, and methods in American environmental history. Environmental historians see the natural world as both a material place and a historical and cultural idea. This course considers how human societies have shaped the natural world, how the natural world has shaped human societies, and how ideas about nature have been created, challenged, and changed in American history.

HIST 271 - U.S. Politics and Culture, 1964-2004

Like most of U.S. history, the 40 years between the 1964 presidential election and Illinois state senator Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention were times of change and conflict. We will explore this time period using secondary works and primary documents. The last baby boomers were born in 1964; Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z were still to come. U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was underway; after September 11, 2001, a war on terror would be waged. Women's labor force participation (including that of married women and married mothers) was on the rise. Americans grappled with grassroots protests and political partisanship, persistent economic inequality, divisive foreign policies, and the so-called culture wars. In 1964, network TV and national and local radio and newspapers provided entertainment and news; by 2004, digital technologies would democratize and fragment access to information. We will examine all these changes, and more.

HIST 272 - Gender and the American Family

Historians can chart the numbers: from the changing demographics of birth and marriage rates to the rise in divorces and the number of households headed by single parents (usually mothers), families in the United States have changed dramatically in the past century. This course will explore the changing forms and meanings of "family." We will examine changing family and household structures and look at how gender roles are built into and reproduced through social, legal, and political discourses. Topics include the shifting meanings of marriage and singlehood and the social value placed on children. Policy makers and social scientists privileged some families over others, and we will consider how constructions of race and ethnicity determined welfare benefits. We will also consider adoption practices and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

HIST 282 - The Mexican Revolution

This course examines the roots, development, and effect of the Mexican Revolution (1910-17), from the Porfiriato through the institutionalization of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rule. Principal themes include regionalism and tensions caused by centralization; industrialization, economic development, and dependency; class conflict; gender, race, citizenship, and political participation; and the production of a modern Mexican identity.

HIST 283 - Latin America and the United States

Since their respective independence, relations between the United States and the Latin American republics have been of great importance to the domestic politics in both, and have disproportionately affected the political and economic trajectory of the latter. Topics addressed will include competing visions of the proper relationship between the two regions; overt and covert U.S. military intervention; foreign investment in economic ties; and popular attitudes toward the United States in Latin America, and vice versa.

HIST 284 - Latinx History in the United States

This course is a survey of Latina/o/x history in the United States from the pre-Columbian period to the present. It will examine the historical, social, political, cultural, and economic roots of several Spanish-speaking communities that reside in the U.S. Attention will be given to issues of race, class, gender, labor, immigration, community building and identity, political activism, and transnationalism. The class will focus primarily on the histories of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, the three largest Latina/o/x groups in the U.S.; but it will also discuss the histories, experiences, and contributions of communities of Central American, South American, and Caribbean backgrounds to U.S. society, culture, politics, and the economy.

HIST 286 - Histories of Immigration and Migration in the United States

This course will cover U.S. immigration and migration histories from 1882 to the present. We will discuss forces that brought people from various parts of the globe to the U.S. and the movements of people within the country; their experiences in migrating and, in subsequent generations, enduring racial and ethnic hierarchies; and the impact of immigration and migration histories on U.S. economics, politics, culture, and society.

HIST 298 - Music and the Cold War United States

See MUS 238 for description.

HIST 303 - The History of the Sahara

This course will examine the history of the Sahara, a region that is often treated as a "blank space" or only peripherally included in histories of the Middle East/North Africa and Africa. Beginning in the early Islamic period and the heyday of the trans-Saharan trade (eighth to seventeenth centuries), we will trace the region's history up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the formation of nation-states and (often contentious) political borders. Employing textual primary sources, literary and cultural representations, ethnographies, and music, we will outline a history that counters the myth of a "blank space" and instead reveals a vibrant and diverse region characterized by long histories of exchange and mobility. While being attentive to themes of race, religion, colonialism, state formation, trade, and environment, we will also problematize the depiction of the Sahara as a natural "borderland" between an imagined North and sub-Saharan Africa, instead bringing the histories of these two areas together.

HIST 307 - War and Peace in Europe, 1700-1914

This course examines the cultures of war in Europe in the period leading up to World War I, and explores changes in the historiography as well as the history of warfare in this critical period. We will examine theories of peace and the rise of philanthropic organizations alongside developments in military recruitment, technology, and mobilization to question the relationships between military and society, and between pacifism and militarism. Key themes will include the influence of the press and public opinion on European wars, the role of women in modern warfare, and the relationship between war, diplomacy, and the development of national and European identities.

HIST 310 - Water and the American West

This course uses the environmental and political history of America's rivers, streams, reservoirs, and aquifers to introduce students to important issues in water history and contemporary water policy. We will begin by exploring a series of different frameworks for understanding the complex relationships between water, labor, land, and political power as those relationships have changed over time. As we build a deeper and more critical understanding of water as a natural, cultural, and political entity in American history, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which history has helped to shape the way we allocate and regulate water across a geographically and politically diverse continent. Armed with the dual weapons of history and basic legal doctrine, we will then begin to tackle some of the key issues in twentieth-century American water policy, starting with the Columbia and Colorado River basins. Looking toward the future, we will also explore the problems and potential solutions on the cutting edge of water politics both in the Colorado River basin and elsewhere, including groundwater policy, water marketing, and an extended discussion of the potential water implications of global warming.

HIST 313 - Wildlife in America

Humans and wild animals have lived together in North America for more than 14,000 years. During that time, around 150 native species have gone extinct, and thousands of exotic species have colonized the landscape. Some formerly rare species have become common, and some common ones have become rare. Wild animals have served as food, clothing, shelter, servants, companions, weapons, and totems. This course will explore the turbulent, contested, and colorful history of wildlife in North America. It will span from the Pleistocene to the present and cover the entire continent. The goal of this course is for students to develop a sophisticated understanding of the changing relationships between people and wild animals over time. There are no easy answers for why things happened the way they did, and no simple lessons for what we should do in the future. But it's a good story, and one that offers myriad, often unexpected insights for serious students of history and environmental studies.

HIST 315 - Defining and Defying Difference: Race, Ethnicity, and Empire

From the origins of the British Empire in the sixteenth century, the encounter between Britons and colonial subjects demanded explanations of human difference. In this course, we will consider race and ethnicity as contingent and contested categories shaped by political and economic circumstances. Topics will include the international slave trade and abolition, caste and community in South Asia, color and class in the twentieth-century Caribbean, and immigration and multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Britain. Throughout we will pay attention to gender.

HIST 317 - The American Earth: U.S. Environmental History in the Twentieth Century

This course will address the concurrent histories of American environmental politics and the changing environment itself in twentieth-century U.S. history. We will approach the American continent both as a unique constellation of material and geographical spaces and as a changing and historically contingent cultural construct dependent on ideas about power, labor, identity, and morality. Topics will include nature and American nationalism, cultural constructions of nature, the American environmental movement, science and environmental management, and climatic change and sustainability in modern environmental politics.

HIST 320 - Merchants and Mariners on the Water Frontier, 1400-1820

Indigenous mariners and merchants had traversed the oceans of East and Southeast Asia long before Europeans first ventured into those seas. By 1600 Chinese and Japanese sea lords and interlopers had created vast networks of migration and exchange, peppered with conflict and violence, from Siam and Malacca to Ryukyu and Nagasaki. This seminar explores the social and cultural history of this early modern maritime world. Selective topics include Zheng He's Indian Ocean voyages; designated ports and unruly hinterlands; seaborne migrations and translocal connections; regional cults and sea goddesses' miracles; merchants, supercargoes, and the vicissitudes of maritime trade; competing maritime cartographies; pirates and the business of violence; ocean archaeology and mariculture ethnographies; and hybrid identities in a maritime world.

HIST 322 - China's Frontiers since 1600

The Qing empire (1644-1911) more than doubled the territory of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and bequeathed its vast territory to twentieth-century China. How did the Qing become an empire that straddled Inner and East Asia? How did China manage to claim and retain these non-Han frontiers in its transition from an empire to a modern state? How did these frontiers and ethnic minorities become "problems" for contemporary China? These are the central questions we will explore in this course. In the first half of the class, we will chronologically investigate how the Qing empire originated from Manchuria and then annexed Manchuria, Mongolia, Taiwan, the southwestern borderlands, Tibet, and Xinjiang. In the second half, we will explore how the Qing empire and the Chinese state ruled these non-Han frontiers.

HIST 323 - Rice in East Asia

This course examines the history of rice in East Asia as crop, food, commodity, genetic resource, and symbol. How were institutions of social cohesion in China and Japan influenced by the particular demands of, and a commitment to, small-scale, labor-intensive riziculture? When and how were relations between consumer tastes and rice markets mediated by "rice masters"? What roles has rice played in linking the histories of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the world between 1000 and the present? How did the "green revolution" alter that regional regime of rice cultivation, exchange, and consumption? These and other questions will be explored in multidisciplinary fashion with a broad range of original data and recent historiography.

HIST 325 - History of Technologies in Imperial and Modern China: 1500-2000

In this course, we will explore the development of technologies from imperial China through the end of the twentieth century. Rather than a chronological overview, we will discuss one thematic topic each week by reading translated primary sources together with secondary literature. These topics include but are not limited to cartography, hydraulic engineering, printing, communication technologies, and medicine. The focus is on China, but its neighbors, Japan and Korea, and China's encounter with the West will also be discussed. How technologies evolved in a non-Western society and how Indigenous technological traditions struggled for "modernity" in the twentieth century constitute the two themes of this course. By examining the trajectory of technological development in China, we will probe two broad questions: how to approach technology as a social construct rather than as a value-free existence, and how technology in turn plays a crucial role in the making of an interconnected modern world.

HIST 329 - Cameras and Photography in Nineteenth-Century East Asia

This course examines the early history of photography in China and Japan. Attention will be given to the complex (and disparate) technological histories of the medium, the varied uses to which the camera was put, and the impact of this new technology upon visual cultures in China and Japan. The dissemination of photographs into other media and the impact of consumer preferences upon content and style will also be examined. Travel landscapes, studio portraits, ethnographic photographs, and documentary images by Euro-American, Japanese, and Chinese photographers are among the visual data to be analyzed. Other sources include optical treatises, travel literature, government reports, and early ethnographies.

HIST 334 - Race and the Politics of Decolonization

This course examines how the struggle for decolonization in the British Empire was shaped by the politics of race. How did colonial subjects imagine freedom, and how were those visions of freedom constrained by the racial hierarchies of empire? How did they look to other movements within and without the British imperial world to theorize what political, economic, and intellectual decolonization might be? Topics will include intellectual critiques of empires, transcolonial movements, the transfer of power, the postcolonial nation-state, and the Commonwealth. We will pay attention to gender throughout and consider the legacy of the formal era of decolonization in the present day.

HIST 335 - Development: An Imperial History

Improvement and welfare have not always been the work of government. This class traces the origins and uneven history of development through the moments when colonial governments in the British Empire became interested in raising the material and social quality of life of colonial subjects. More than a matter of administering policy, attempts to better conditions arose through political circumstances and impacted the lives of colonial subjects in ways that administrators could not have foreseen. We will consider development as a broad category through efforts to manage and improve education, the economy, and maternal health. We will pay attention to the importance of colonial ethnography to know populations; the way development emerged as a rationale for empire; the international contexts of development; and continuities of colonial development after formal decolonization through nongovernmental organizations such as the World Bank and Oxfam International. Our examples will be drawn from metropolitan Britain; subject colonies such as India, Kenya, and the West Indies; and international organizations working with postcolonial nation-states.

HIST 338 - Crisis & Catastrophe in Modern Europe

Between 1720 and 1870, a series of natural and manmade crises forced Europeans to question the purpose of violence in a supposedly "improving" society and the role of rational individuals in a world sometimes beyond their control. This course will consider the political, religious, intellectual, and cultural ramifications of disaster and crisis, including financial collapse, revolution, war, earthquakes, disease, and famine. These crises disrupted the political and intellectual worlds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, threatening and transforming their ideas about risk, progress, religion, and political authority, and restructuring the relationships between man and the natural world.

HIST 341 - An Intellectual History of Animality

This class traces a genealogy of ideas about animality as they have emerged in Western thought and culture. The narrative of the course proceeds from ancient ideas about animality, soul, and dominion to their reception in medieval philosophy and theology, and later in early modern and Enlightenment philosophy, science, and law ("animal trials"); to the Darwinian revolution; to post-Darwinian arguments about animal lives (intelligence, interests, experience), deaths (food, slaughter), laws (rights, legal status), and loves (companion species). Throughout, we will consider the question: How has recourse to the notion of animality helped make sense of what it means to be human?

HIST 343 - The Human Condition

See POL 390 for description.

HIST 344 - Freud and the Psychoanalytic Tradition

This class explores how the psychoanalytic tradition inaugurated changes in what we mean when we call ourselves human beings. The first half of the course reviews Freud's thought as it evolved in the context of clinical practice. The aim is to consider how influential ideas about the unconscious, love and sexuality, dreams, fantasy, and the organization of the psyche developed in response to the peculiar kind of suffering Freud called neurosis. The second half of the course asks what is to be learned by situating psychoanalytic thought in its scientific, cultural, and social contexts, and by following its international dispersion in the work of those who extended (and revised) Freud's ideas in ways he did not foresee.

HIST 345 - Whole Earths, Globalizations, and World Pictures

Hear the word "Earth" and the image likely to flash through the mind is the descendant of a photo commonly known as "Blue Marble" (1972), which reveals the disk of our terraqueous planet suspended alone in the void. It is reputed to be the most widely disseminated photograph in human history, and together with other views of the Earth from beyond has prompted a revolution in the global imagination. The aim of this seminar is to assess the plausibility of that claim, by situating these images in their diverse historical contexts. These contexts include the history of humankind's imaginative self-projection in to the beyond from ancient times to our day; how the "whole earth" image has been mobilized by environmental campaigns, political movements, and commercial enterprises; howe the view of Earth has figured in economics ("globalization theory"), aesthetics (earth art, architecture, mapping and visualization techniques), philosophy (especially in the phenomenological tradition), and the natural sciences (the Gaia hypothesis, the Biosphere projects, earth systems science); and how this pictorial imaginary has become integrated into the unthought ways we inhabit our natural and human-built worlds-what has happened once its ubiquity meant that we ceased, in a fashion, to see it. Arrangements will be made to enable students to explore new media and research tools for analysis and presentation, should they wish to do so.

HIST 355 - Heretics, Witches, and Inquisitors: Deviance, Orthodoxy, and the Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

This course will examine the evolution and operation of one of medieval and early modern Europe's most infamous religious and legal institutions-the Inquisitions of Heretical Depravity. Initially established in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to affirm the Roman Church's spiritual authority and to repress religious heterodoxy, Inquisitions could be found across much of Catholic Europe by the early sixteenth century. This course will examine several of the most prominent examples: the Inquisition of medieval Languedoc, the Roman and Venetian Inquisitions, and the Spanish Inquisition, to compare how they functioned as hybrid legal and religious institutions in distinct historical contexts. We will also explore the complex interplay between inquisitors, secular authorities, and the populace by looking at their treatment of a specific heretical crime-witchcraft-during the early modern period.

HIST 362 - Revolutionary America

In the late eighteenth century, 13 North American colonies severed their colonial ties to Britain and constituted a new nation. This course will assess the causes of these changes, as well as the extent to which they altered the political, economic, social, and cultural landscape of North America. We will address major conflicts of the period from 1763 to 1815, including the tensions between libertarian ideology and institutionalized slavery, household dependence and national independence, centralized authority and local control, enlightenment rationalism and evangelical religion, private property and communal interests, and Indian sovereignty and American expansionism.

HIST 363 - American Social Reform from Revolution to Reconstruction

Countless nineteenth-century Americans participated in movements for social reform. What made it possible for ordinary people to believe that they should and could change their world? What were the boundaries of their reformist visions? How did reformers balance radical and conservative impulses within their movements? This course considers these questions with reference to temperance, abolitionism, women's rights, health reform, and other reform agendas. In contextualizing these movements, the course will consider the transnational dimensions of American reform, as well as connections between social reform and the rise of market capitalism, evangelical Christianity, and democratic politics in the early republic.

HIST 364 - Slavery, Freedom, Anarchy: The Politics of Abolition

This course studies the resistance to slavery in the nineteenth-century United States, tracing the practical and theoretical politics of abolition. How could enslaved people become free, and what would freedom entail? The course will trace various and tangled answers to these questions, from direct resistance to slavery through rebellion and flight, to attempts to win political power and reshape the national state, to non-resistance and the rejection of state power. For some abolitionists, slavery remained the central and primary problem, while for others, the problem of slavery generated criticism of other forms of social and political hierarchy. The course will examine the variety of abolitionist thought and its intersection with feminism, anarchism, and labor radicalism.

HIST 369 - Race and the Law in American History

Ranging from the colonial period to the recent past, this course examines the role of the law and the courts in the construction of racial categories and the production of racial inequality in the United States. We will read scholarship from history and other fields concerning the relationship between law and social practice and the possibilities and limitations of law as a means for resisting racism and securing equality. While we will engage a range of primary source material, we will devote particular attention to landmark Supreme Court decisions concerning civil rights, segregation, and immigration and naturalization. Other topics include regional variations in racialization in the United States, race making beyond the Black-white binary, and historical methodology applied to the realm of law.

HIST 370 - The Tragedies of American Diplomacy: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1893

Building from the framework laid out in William Appleman Williams' hallmark essay, "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy," this course will explore the history of American foreign policy since Frederick Jackson Turner declared the end of the American Frontier in 1893. Beginning with Turner's "Frontier Thesis" and John Hay's famous "Open Door Note," we will investigate how the flexible, economically oriented policies of the late nineteenth century became the sacred political ideologies at the heart of twentieth-century American imperialism. Topics will include the Spanish-American War, policies leading up to each of the two world wars, the advent of and decision to drop the atomic bomb, the Marshall Plan, and a variety of political, economic, and military issues associated with the Cold War, including its origins, its institutions, its many phases, and its ultimate end.

HIST 371 - Sports in Modern America

This course explores the history of sports in modern American culture and life, beginning in the nineteenth century but focusing predominantly on the twentieth century. From the "sport" and spectacle of waterfall jumping in nineteenth-century New England to the Cold War Olympic doping challenges of the 1950s and '60s to the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s, students will explore the structures and meaning of individual sports, as well as sports as a broader category of social engagement, as the nature of sports in America has changed over time. Beyond the history of sports themselves, students will also consider how sports have both reflected and influenced the constructed categories and lived experience of race, gender, class, ability, and identity among a variety of American publics, leveraging sports as a lens for approaching other dominant cultural, social, and political themes in American history.

HIST 372 - U.S. Women's History, 1890-1990

This course examines transformations in women's economic status, political participation, educational opportunities, and familial and reproductive lives from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century in the United States. We consider how structural changes and political movements involved and affected women of different classes, races, and ethnic groups. Major topics will include: women's increased participation in the paid labor force, especially wage work by married women with children; political struggles for equal rights (e.g., woman suffrage, pay equity); the separation of sexuality and reproduction; and the intellectual origins and development of feminism, as well as the arguments of those who opposed it.

HIST 374 - Gender and Sex

Examination of the changing ideas about gender and sex roles in the context of key transformations from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries in America. These include the second industrial revolution, which enabled women and men to live on their own outside of household economies; the emergence of modern consumer culture; service in same-sex militaries during two world wars; the rise of social scientific and psychological experts who named and quantified "deviant" and "normal" sexual practice; and the so-called sexual revolutions of the 1960s and beyond.

HIST 375 - Hannah Arendt and Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is habitually invoked as one of the century's most important works of nonfiction. The aim of this class is to provide entry to Arendt's thought and to the history and theory of totalitarianism by way of a close reading of her seminal work and some of its historical and philosophical intertexts. Arendt's work addresses topics like the rise of anti-Semitism and race thinking in nineteenth-century Europe, mass politics, propaganda, mob-elite alliances, the concentration camp, and terror as a mode of government. We will also consider texts from some of the leading thinkers of Arendt's time attracted to authoritarianism, such as Carl Schmitt, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jünger, and the Italian futurists. Last, we will consider the reception and extension of Arendt's work in postwar arguments about Zionism, Nazi criminality, and the Cold War. Throughout, we will ask if Arendt's work can help us understand contemporary movements in the United States and Europe that explicitly or implicitly seek a renovation of totalitarian rule.

HIST 376 - The United States in the 1970s

For many years U.S. historians neglected the 1970s to focus on the political and cultural shifts in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on a wealth of new historical studies, we will look at the 1970s to assess the successes and defeats of movements that originated in earlier decades. These include civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, environmentalism, and organized labor. We will examine transformations in party politics in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, and chart the changing fortunes of liberals and conservatives. This was a time of economic turmoil and anxiety, and we will consider how inflation, deindustrialization, and the oil crises in 1973 and 1979 influenced the lives of working Americans. We will also look at the changing demographics of families, households, and suburbs in this epoch.

HIST 379 - The Fifties in America

We will use a range of secondary texts and primary documents to focus on key events and different historical approaches to the study of this era. The '50s were shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, and we will look back at those cataclysmic events. Topics include the Cold War and its effects on domestic politics; the baby boom and the ideology of the American family; civil rights battles in the legal and political arenas; medical and public health responses to polio; and the political and economic ramifications of postwar consumer culture.

HIST 381 - Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. since 1865

The course focuses on the construction of race and the practices of racial oppression in the U.S. since 1865. We will discuss how racialization, racism, and constructions of race and ethnicity were experienced by different groups at significant points in U.S. history; race relations among groups; and how gender, sexuality, and class intersect with race and ethnicity to shape identities and life experiences. Each week, we will analyze, compare, and contrast the experiences of different groups: Native Americans, European Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx, as well as their complex interactions and interracial and interethnic relations.

HIST 383 - Race and Oral Histories in the United States

This course examines the history of race and ethnicity in the U.S. through a number of different texts-oral histories, autobiographies, testimonies-to gain insights into the different lived experiences of individuals and communities in the past and present. Students will encounter sources that use oral histories as a method to gain insight into the impact of race and ethnicity on society, preparing them for an oral history project of their own centered on race and social justice in the present.

HIST 386 - The Incas

This course examines the Incas of the central Andes, from their emergence in the thirteenth century as a small clan alliance through their imperial apogee, their colonial reconstitution, and their republican demise; the class concludes with a brief look at the Inca legacy in modern Peru. Topical emphases are archaic imperial organization, Andean history and cosmology, and Spanish colonialism and evangelization. Methodologically, the class focuses on the challenges of studying nonliterate civilizations and of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts as historical and ethnographic sources.

HIST 388 - Race and Ethnicity in the Andes

This course explores the ethnic and racial organization of Andean society from Inca times to the present, and Andean discourses on race. Beginning with the ethnic pluralism of the Inca Andes, we turn to the creation of the colonial categories of "Indian" and "Spanish" and the imposition of two racialized legal republics from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. We then examine the development of "creole republics" that instituted unified republics with deeply racialized hierarchies; the indigenista critiques of that ordering in the twentieth century; and the emergence of Indigenous and ethnic politics over the past few decades. While attention will be paid to Afro and Asian Andeans, the course focuses on the categories of Indigenous and European. The central focus is on Peru, although ethnicity and race in Ecuador and Bolivia will also be considered.

HIST 389 - Labor in Modern Latin America

This course examines the social relations of labor, labor organization and militancy, and the political and cultural importance of the working classes in twentieth-century Latin America. Particular topics include the emergence of organized labor and its relation both to earlier guild-based relations and to oligarchic rule in the early twentieth century; the role of organized labor in Mexican, Bolivian, Peruvian, and Chilean revolutionary movements; alliances between labor and bureaucratic-authoritarian states; the position of rural laborers in these modernizing economies; the relationship between race, ethnic, and class identities; and the effects of the vast "informal" working class on postmodern Latin American societies.

HIST 390 - Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865-1965

See MUS 360 for description.

HIST 391 - The Greek World from 776 to 404 BCE

See ANME 371 for description.

HIST 392 - The Hellenistic World: Egypt, the Middle East, and Central Asia after Alexander the Great

See ANME 372 for description.

HIST 393 - The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic

See ANME 373 for description.

HIST 394 - The Athenians and the "Other"

See ANME 374 for description.

HIST 397 - Women in the Ancient World

See ANME 377  for description.

HIST 411 - Junior Seminar

Latin America and the United States, From Independence to the Cold War
Since their respective independence, relations between the United States and the Latin American republics have been of great importance to the domestic politics in both, and have disproportionately affected the political and economic trajectory of the latter. Topics addressed will include competing visions of the relationship between the two regions; U.S. military intervention; trade, foreign investment and economic ties; and popular attitudes toward the United States in Latin America, and vice versa. 

Law, Culture, & Society in Europe & its Empires (c. 1200-1800)
From its revival as an intellectual discipline and profession in the early twelfth century, law, its practitioners, and its institutions came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the cultures and societies of pre-modern Europe and its overseas empires. Aptly described by one historian as a "conduit between discourse and practice," law became a mechanism for debating "what is right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, just or unjust," and a means for negotiating and contesting "the small politics of daily life." As Europe and its imperial spaces became increasingly "legalized," nobles and commoners, men and women, free and unfree people alike turned to courts of law in disputes over property, honor, and other concerns. Expanding state authorities, meanwhile, sought to harness law and its resources to maintain public order and regulate deviance. This course aims to introduce you to some (though by no means all) of the rich and fascinating body of historical scholarship on the relationship between the world of the law and the cultures and societies of Europe and its empires during the late medieval and early modern periods. At the same time, we will examine how historians' examinations of legal processes and legal records have profoundly influenced the study of European and Imperial history in recent decades. 

HIST 421 - Topics in Historiography

Gender and Labor in the U.S.
This course examines classic and recent historiography on gender and labor in the U.S., with a focus on continuity and change in women's unwaged and waged labor from the 19th through the 20th centuries. We will study how enslaved black women's labor, and free women's unpaid household work, sustained their families and shaped 19th century capitalism. We will examine how gendered and racial conventions and familial obligations kept most female wage-earners in agriculture and domestic service, sex-typed and segregated factory jobs. Educated single women trained for feminized professions (teaching, nursing, and clerical work) but were routinely fired if they married. While women's labor sustained families during the Depression and helped win World War II, government jobs programs and postwar entitlements mainly benefited heterosexual family men. Single workers, straight and queer, found new ways to make their livings. Married women with children remained in the paid workforce throughout the postwar period; their number steadily increased through the end of the century, yet they remained underpaid and concentrated in feminized jobs. While wage-earning mothers became the norm, the ideal and symbol of the male breadwinner persisted. Labor historians have covered all of these topics, and more-we shall do so as well.

HIST 470 - Thesis

HIST 481 - Individual Study

Individual study in fields either more specialized than the regular courses or not covered by them. Individual reading also may be done in connection with a regular course for one or two units additional to the course.

HIST 546 - Whole Earths, Globalizations, World Pictures

Hear the word "Earth" and the image likely to flash through the mind is the descendant of a photo commonly known as "Blue Marble" (1972), which reveals the disk of our terraqueous planet suspended alone in the void. It is reputed to be the most widely disseminated photograph in human history, and together with other views of the Earth from beyond has prompted a revolution in the global imagination. The aim of this seminar is to assess the plausibility of that claim, by situating these images in their diverse historical contexts. These contexts include the history of humankind's imaginative self-projection into the beyond from ancient times to our day; how the "whole earth" image has been mobilized by environmental campaigns, political movements, and commercial enterprises; how the view of Earth has figured in economics ("globalization theory"), aesthetics (earth art, mapping and visualization techniques), philosophy (especially in the phenomenological tradition), and the natural sciences (the Gaia hypothesis, the Biosphere projects, earth systems science); and how this pictorial imaginary has become integrated into the unthought ways we inhabit our natural and human-built worlds-what has happened once its ubiquity meant that we ceased, in a fashion, to see it. Arrangements will be made to enable students to explore new media and research tools for analysis and presentation, should they wish to do so.