Course

HIST 101   Europe to 1800

Professor

Alice Stroup

CRN

95310

 

Schedule

Tu Th          9:00 -10:20 am     OLIN 308

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

The millennium opened a new era of European ascendancy.  For three hundred years, Europe basked in warmer weather.  Northern Europeans improved agriculture and lived longer, and a new middle class revived cities as centers of commerce and culture, on both sides of the Alps.  Inventions like mechanical clocks, cannons, and mills inaugurated a first industrial revolution (complete with water- and air-pollution).  Then came the apocalypse:  a little ice age and the Black Death shaped the material conditions of life for the next five centuries.  After fifty percent of Europeans died (1340-1350), famine and epidemic kept the population in check until the 1700s.  Yet we associate these five hundred years with the invention of the printing press and the rise of literacy; with socio-intellectual ferments associated with Renaissance, Reformations and Counter-Reformations, Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution; with socio-political revolutions that modernized the Netherlands, England, and France; and with the creation of a global empire.  How can we explain the continued ascendancy of Europe in such hard times?  To understand the paradoxical making of Europe, we will read primary sources and modern historical analyses.

 

Course

HIST / CLAS 103   Rise & Fall of Ancient Rome

Professor

Benjamin Stevens

CRN

95006

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     1:30 -2:50 pm       OLIN 201

Distribution

OLD: A/C

NEW: HISTORY

A survey of ancient Rome, from its eighth-century BC “rise” out of prehistoric Italic precursors to its “fall” in the fifth century AD at the hands of barbarians, bureaucrats, and others. Our goals are: (1) to become familiar with the traditional narrative of Roman history including political and military events; (2) to consider social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of life in ancient Rome (e.g. gender and sexuality, food and drink, and literature); and thus (3) to explore what it means to “do Roman history”. We read a modern narrative of Roman history, several ancient narratives and monographs, and modern scholarly works. Participation in this class qualifies students for consideration for Professor Minsky’s Roma In Situ. (January and Spring 2006).

 

Course

JS / HIST 120   Jewishness Beyond Religion: Defining Secular Jewish Culture

Professor

Cecile Kuznitz

CRN

95303

 

Schedule

Tu Th          10:30 -11:50 am    HEG 300

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: HUMANITIES / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

In the pre-modern world Jewish identity was centered on religion but expressed as well in how one made a living, what clothes one wore, and what language one spoke. In modern times, Jewish culture became more voluntary and more fractured. While some focused on Judaism as (only) a religion, both the most radical and the most typical way in which Jewishness was redefined was in secular terms. In this course we will explore the intellectual, social, and political movements that led to new secular definitions of Jewish culture and identity in the modern period. We will focus on examples drawn from Western and Eastern Europe but will also look at American and Israeli societies. Topics will include the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), acculturation and assimilation, modern Jewish politics including Zionism, and Jewish literature in Hebrew, Yiddish, and European languages.

 

Course

HIST 135  “In the Realm of the Son of Heaven”:  Imperial Chinese History

Professor

Robert Culp

CRN

95301

 

Schedule

Tu Th          10:30 -11:50 am    OLIN 306

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-list: Asian StudiesChina’s imperial state, sustained in one form or another for over two millennia, was arguably history’s longest continuous social and political order. This course explores the transformations of imperial China’s state, society, and culture from their initial emergence during the Zhou period (1027-221 BC) through the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, when a combination of imperialism and internal stresses destroyed the imperial system. Through readings in philosophy, poetry, fiction, and memoir, and use of a rich array of visual sources, the course follows several major thematic threads. These include the ever-shifting definitions of and interactions between "China" and Central Asian "barbarians"; the interdependent relationship between the imperial bureaucracy and social elites; literati, consumer, and popular culture; state ritual, religious practice, and folk traditions; gender constructions and the relative social power of men and women; as well as changes in family organization and rural life. A sweeping overview of premodern Chinese history, the course provides a foundation for further study of East Asian history.

Course

HIST 139   City Cultures

Professor

Myra Armstead / Cecile Kuznitz

CRN

95295

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     10:30 -11:50 am    OLIN 203

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

(Global Core Course)Examining the built environment of cities is a powerful method for uncovering the social and cultural dynamics that shaped the past of urban populations.  In this course we will look comparatively at five cities in the U.S. and Western and Eastern Europe, considering a variety of physical structures and spaces from the preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial eras. We will examine features of the urban landscape including parks, tenements, cafes, skyscrapers, streetcorners, world’s fairs, freeways, museums, courtyards, and even sewers. We will “read” these sites for what they reveal about urban life across time, including such issues as economic changes, technological innovation, new forms of leisure, changing relationships to the environment, the development of working class culture, and the imposition of political hegemony. Cities to be studied include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, and Vilna.

 

Course

HIST 146   Bread and Wine

Professor

Tabetha Ewing

CRN

95398

 

Schedule

Tu Th          4:00 -5:20 pm       OLIN 307

Distribution

OLD: E

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed:  French Studies, Theology

Related interest:  Religious Studies

Today the artisanal baguette represents the un-exportable French past; the rich, bottled bordeaux the easy export of the French territorial patrimony.  This course is an exploration of early practices of making bread, breaking bread, and  bread-winning, drinking wine, quaffing ale, sipping coffee, tea, and chocolate.  Alimentation, in general, and bread and wine, in particular, is the central metaphor for consuming or understanding humanistic, religious, and political culture. We will read of medieval and early modern land cultivation (grape and grain); of eating and not eating in medieval women’s religious culture; of new seasonings brought to French culture by returning merchants and explorers; from Rabelais on the gargantuan devouring of liberal education; of massacre and spiritual renewal in the Protestant and Catholic reformations with Montaigne’s retort in his essay “On Cannibals”; of a transfigurative, divine-right kingship under Louis XIV that made into gods men of royal lineage.  We will conclude in the 18th century, with the rise of the café as a space in which elites met and critiqued politics and culture, with taverns and bread riots as sites in which the poor met and critiqued elites. Tastings. No prior course in French Studies required.

 

Course

HIST / CLAS 157  The Athenian Century

Professor

Carolyn Dewald

CRN

95465

 

Schedule

Tu Th          2:30 – 3:50  pm    OLIN 205

Distribution

OLD: A/C

NEW: HISTORY

In the fifth century BCE, Athens dramatically developed from a small, relatively unimportant city-state into a dominant power in the Aegean basin.  Athenian political, artistic, literary, and intellectual traditions continue to reverberate through the world today: democracy, tragedy and comedy, rhetoric, philosophy, and history itself, as well as the classical style of sculpture and architecture stem from this remarkable culture.  The course will confront some of the ambiguities and tensions (slavery, exclusion of women and non-citizens from political power), as well as the glories, of Athenian art, literature, and history during this period.

 

Course

REL / HIST 160   Narrating the  Modern Middle East

Professor

Nerina Rustomji

CRN

95290

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     10:30 -11:50 am    OLIN 301

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HUMANITIES

Cross-listed:  Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights

Related interest:  Africana Studies

In 1979, Iran underwent a revolution that overthrew Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi and replaced his rule with an Islamic theocracy. In an attempt to understand the revolution’s significance within Middle Eastern history, two narratives have emerged: The first argues that the presence of an Islamic state is a divergence from the process of modernization; the second interprets the revolution as a culmination of political and religious resistance against imperialism and colonialism. We examine historical monographs, imperial communiqués, political tracts, ethnographies, novels, and film in order to assess these opposing narratives. The course brings into focus the interrelations between imperialism, Islamic reform and revival, nationalism, and colonialism from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. It analyzes social and political movements of the British, French, Iranian and Ottoman governments, as well as how events influenced and were influenced by the peoples of the various regions of the Middle East.

 

Course

HIST / STS 161   Introduction to the History of Technology and Socio-Technical Systems

Professor

Gregory Moynahan

CRN

95304

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     12:00 -1:20 pm      OLIN 202

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-Listed: Global & Int’l Studies; Science, Technology & Society

Related interest:  Human Rights

This course will survey the history and historiography of technology in the late modern period.  The course will begin by studying how a separate domain of technology first came to be defined, in theory and practice, during the eighteenth century within such diverse activities as agriculture, time measurement, transport, architecture, and warfare.  We will then address how institutional forces such as law, academia, business and government came to define and influence technological change and scientific research during the industrial revolution.  Throughout the course, we will avoid casting the history of technology solely as a history of 'things' and instead focus on technology as a process embedded within research agendas, institutions, social expectations, economics, and specific use -- and thus as part of a broader 'socio-technical system.'  Case studies ranging from the bicycle and nuclear missile targeting to public health statistics and the birth control pill will allow us to develop 'internal' accounts of the development of technology and science in conjunction with 'external' accounts of the historical context of technologies.  The course will conclude with an assessment of recent approaches to the history of technology, such as the influence of systems theory or actor-network theory.  Authors read will include Hacking, Heidegger, Hughes, Landes, Latour, Lenoir, Luhmann, Mokyr, Spengler, and Wise. If course space is limited, preference will be given to History and History of Science concentrators.

 

Course

HIST 163   Inventing the Self in  Early America

Professor

Andrew Needham

CRN

95298

 

Schedule

Tu  Th  4:30 – 5:50 pm             OLIN 205

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-listed:  American Studies

This course will examine how a disparate cast of people – from famous Americans such as Ben Franklin, Mary Rowlandson, and Frederick Douglass to long-forgotten figures such as Andrew Montour, Stephen Arnold and Hannah Bernard – constructed personal identities in the messy world of early American history. We will examine the processes of personal identity formation, question the degree of flexibility people had in making their selves, and work to connect these individual actors to larger changes in understandings of racial, gendered, and national identities. Coursework will include autobiographical writings, visual images, and some secondary historical essays. Written work will consist of three essays and reaction papers.

 

Course

HIST 167  The History of Sexuality

Professor

George Robb

CRN

95449

 

Schedule

Wed   1:30 – 4:20 pm  ALBEE 106

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, Science, Technology & Society

 The purpose of this course is to enable you to develop a crucial understanding of how definitions of human sexuality have evolved in particular social and national contexts, how social concerns about sexuality have been played out in personal and political realms, and how a wide range of sexual identities have been constructed in different historical contexts.  We will explore various issues in the history of sexuality covering a broad range of theoretical and thematic questions, and we will focus primarily on Western Europe and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Course

HIST 168 Czarist Russia

Professor

Gennady Shkliarevsky

CRN

95816

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     1:30 -2:50 pm       OLIN 307

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross listed:  Russian and Eurasian Studies

A semester-long survey will explore Russian history from Peter the Great to the 1917 revolution in a broad context of modernization and its impact on the country.  Among the topics of special interest are:  reforms of Peter the Great and their effects; the growth of Russian absolutism; the position of peasants and workers; the rift between the monarchy and educated society; the Russian revolutionary movement and Russian Marxism; the overthrow of the Russian autocracy.  The readings will include contemporary studies on Russian history and works by nineteenth-century Russian writers.

 

Course

HIST / PSY 172  The History of Medicine and Psychiatry

Professor

Noga Arikha

CRN

95463

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     12:00 – 1:20 pm   OLIN 204

Distribution

OLD: A/C

NEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE

Cross-listed:  Psychology; Science, Technology & Society

This course offers a survey of the history of Western medicine through its changes and continuities, from its beginnings in ancient Greece to the 19th century. The history of psychiatry is considered an integral aspect of the history of medicine: the class charts the development of psychiatry through the key concepts that have shaped assumptions about the nature of emotion, about mental illness, and about the relation of the brain with the mind. The course focuses on how the body and the embodied mind have been mapped and cared for over the centuries, and on the fraught and often inconsistent relation between medical theory and medical practice. It tells the history of reason’s role in identifying correlations between symptoms and causes and in understanding those in whom health or reason has failed. Sessions will be mainly conducted on the basis of the study of assigned primary texts, from antiquity to the 19th century, and informed by relevant secondary literature. They will be structured chronologically but will focus on such key concepts as psyche, pneuma, humour, craniocentrism, spirit, vital force, nerves - all presented as markers to identify the continuities and ruptures in the beliefs that have informed the theory and practice of medicine and psychiatry. 

 

Course

HIST 192  The Age of Extremes: Topics in European History 1789-2000

Professor

Gregory Moynahan

CRN

95467

 

Schedule

Tu Th          10:30 -11:50 am    ASP 302

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies

This course will present a thematic survey of the modern period. Each week we will use methodologies and historiographies ranging from gender and demographic history to diplomatic and military history. It will thus offer both an in-depth presentation of key aspects of modernity and a survey of contemporary historiography. Key issues discussed will include: the relation of the industrial revolution to the creation of new institutions of invention and patent, the role of colonialism in shaping domestic social relations and definitions of race, the role of gender in relation to the demographic explosion of European population and to new attempts at state control of human activity, the development of the ‘military-indistrial-academic complex,’ the role of institutional structure in diplomacy, and the affect of new mass media on citizenship. This course is intended as a complement to HIST 102, the department’s  narrative history of the modern period, but this course is not required if students have a basic grasp of modern European history. Supplemental reading will provide a broad narrative base for students who need a refresher.

 

Course

HIST 2032   Indochine

Professor

Tabetha Ewing

CRN

95399

 

Schedule

Tu Th          2:30 -3:50 pm       OLIN 203

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human RightsFrench Indochina was composed geographically of Vietnam (divided into Cochinchine, Annam, and Tonkin), Cambodia, and Laos.  This course is ordered around the theme of social order, from pre-colonial state structures in the early modern period to the French colonial re-structuring and administration of the built environment, commercial relations, law and punishment in these places.  We end with the famous rout at Dien Bien Phu (1954) that brought a violent end to French rule in Indochina.  Throughout the course, we focus on local cultural exchanges, criticism, and resistance to French ideas (put in practice) of History, progress, and the modern. 

 

Course

HIST 2124   Vietnam and Iraq: Wars of Mass Deception

Professor

Mark Lytle

CRN

95296

 

Schedule

Tu Th          10:30 -11:50 am    OLIN 205

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

Related interest:  Global & Int’l Studies

Since World War II, the United States has fought two controversial and widely unpopular wars--Vietnam and the 2003 War in Iraq.  Both wars began with presidential deception--Gulf of Tonkin and WMDs--to justify a crusade against a global enemy--Communism and terrorism.  In both, US forces became bogged down in battles against an elusive enemy and inflicted serious casualties on the civilians whose hearts and minds would ultimately determine the outcome. My Lai and Abu Graib brought into doubt the legitimacy of each war.  And in both domestic public opinion split between the desire to "protect our boys (and women)" and a sense that the war was both ill advised and unwinnable.  The primary focus of the course will be on Vietnam, with a secondary concern to determine if that war offers "lessons” that help us understand the War in Iraq.

 

Course

HIST 237   The Sixties

Professor

Mark Lytle

CRN

95297

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:00 -2:20 pm       OLIN 203

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights

This course will examine the irony of increasing political dissent and violence in an era of relative peace and prosperity. It will touch on such topics as civil rights, media and politics, narcissism, the Cuban missile crisis, youth alienation, popular culture, the feminist movement, and Watergate. It will take an in-depth look at the three presidents who left their mark on the era--John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon--as well as the most disruptive crisis of the post-war years, the Vietnam War.

 

Course

HIST 2500  From Sun-Tzu to Suicide Bombing: The Evolution and Practice of Military Strategy, Tactics, and Ethics from Ancient Times to the Present

Professor

Caleb Carr

CRN

95484

 

Schedule

Mon  Wed  7:00 – 8:20 pm    OLIN 202

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Science, Technology & Society

Related interest:  Global & Int’l Studies

From Sun-Tzu's China and Caesar's Rome to Cromwell's England and Frederick the Great's Prussia, through the rise of "popular" or "total" war that began with the French Revolution, and on into the unprecedented destruction of global war in the twentieth century, these and related questions have persisted: What constitutes a professional army, as opposed to a band of well-armed criminals?  When if ever should civilians be considered legitimate targets and players in war?  What military means can the international community, or even a single nation seeking the status of legitimate power, reasonably and ethically employ in the face of vital threats? Have professional soldiers advanced or retarded the cause of reforming global conflict? Should their views be given special priority and influence? Can certain tactics in war be labeled "aberrant"? Should their authors be punished by non-participatory organizations and nations?  Is the proliferation of advanced weapons to cultures that have not yet developed them ever a permissible or ethical practice?  Indeed, the roots of the fundamental military debate of the modern era - how to confront the problem and the underlying ethics of international terrorism - can be traced back to the ancient era in every part of the world. Certain times have produced leaders who have met the problem of reforming and controlling war with greater success than others: why? And why has our own ostensibly advanced modern age experienced so little success in this area?

 

Course

HIST / SOC 258   Jews in American Society, 1880 to the present

Professor

Joel Perlmann

CRN

95307

 

Schedule

Tu Th          4:30 -5:50 pm       OLIN 204

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Cross list: American Studies, Jewish Studies, SRE

The great waves of east-European Jewish migration west after 1880 constitute a major event in the modern history of the Jews and of the United States, creating a large and important American social group.   This course examines Jewish social and cultural transformations during the succeeding century.  We will  keep in mind  throughout  two (overlapping) questions.   First, what major developments are shared with other immigrant and ethnic groups and what is distinctive to the Jews (as a people, civilization or religion)?   And second, what meanings does ‘Jewishness’ have for American Jews as their social conditions, and the wider culture, change across generations?   Substantively, the course will consider such major themes as 1) the pattern of migration and cultural amalgam of the ‘Yiddish’ immigrant generation 2) the rapid upward mobility of American Jews as well as their concentration on the political left and explanations for both patterns 3) concern with antisemitism and American Jewish behavior during the European Holocaust, 4) the meaning of intermarriage to couples, their children and the culture of the group and 5) evolving attitudes towards Israel over the past half century, and their impact on American foreign policy.   A term paper will be the major writing assignment in a seminar-discussion context.

 

Course

HIST 280A   American Environmental History  I

Professor

Andrew Needham

CRN

95299

 

Schedule

Tu Th          2:30 -3:50 pm       OLIN 202

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed:  American Studies, Human Rights, Science, Technology & Society

The first part of a two-part survey, this course will examine the interactions and interconnections between human and non-human societies in the era between colonial contact and the construction of the transcontinental railroads. The course will focus on the following issues: the environmental consequences of contact between European and Native societies; the biological exchange between Europe and the New World; differences between European and Native land use patterns; changing ideas of wilderness, the urban, and the pastoral; the environmental effects of early American urbanization, agriculture, and hunting practices; the Market Revolution and its environmental effects; and the effects of the railroad on the co- modification of nature.

 

Course

HIST 3103   Political Ritual in the Modern World

Professor

Robert Culp

CRN

95302

 

Schedule

Wed             1:30 -3:50 pm       OLIN 301

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-list: Asian studies; Anthropology; Global & Int’l Studies Human RightsBastille Day, the US presidential inaugural, Japan’s celebration of victory in the Russo-Japanese War, pageants reenacting the Bolshevik Revolution, and rallies at Nuremberg and at Tian’anmen Square. In all these forms and many others, political ritual has been central to nation-building, colonialism, and political movements over the last three centuries. This course uses a global, comparative perspective to analyze the modern history of political ritual. We will explore the emergence of new forms of political ritual with the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century and track global transformations in the performance of politics as colonialism spread the symbols and pageantry of the nation-state. Central topics will include state ritual and the performance of power, the relationship between ritual and citizenship in the modern nation-state, the ritualization of politics in social and political movements, and the role of mass spectacle in the construction of both fascism and state socialism. Seminar meetings will focus on discussion of secondary and primary materials that allow us to analyze the intersection of ritual and politics in a variety of contexts. These will range from early-modern Europe, pre-colonial Bali, and late imperial China to revolutionary France, 19th century America, colonial India, semi-colonial China, nationalist Japan, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the USSR, Europe in 1968, and contemporary Syria. In addition to common readings and seminar participation, students will write a final seminar paper exploring one aspect or instance of political ritual. Moderated history students can use this course for a major conference. This course may be taken in conjunction with Anthropology 327.

 

Course

HIST 3117   The High Middle Ages

Professor

Alice Stroup

CRN

95397

 

Schedule

Mon             1:30 -3:50 pm       OLIN 308

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed: French Studies, Medieval Studies

The rise of towns is one of many changes that transformed Europe after 1000. The High Middle Ages is an era of cultural flowering, population growth, and political consolidation, occurring between the two cataclysms of Viking invasions and bubonic plague. Primary sources and monographs help us understand this intriguing and foreign world. We will read modern analyses of medieval inventions, heretics in Southern France, the plague, and women’s work. We will also examine medieval texts--including anticlerical stories, epic poetry, and political diatribes--to get a contemporary perspective on values and issues.

 

Course

HIST 3122  The  Making of the Sunbelt

Professor

Andrew Needham

CRN

95300

 

Schedule

Wed             4:00 -6:20 pm       OLIN 308

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed:  American Studies, Science, Technology & Society

This course will investigate the causes and consequences of one of the fundamental changes in American society and politics over the past fifty years: the rise in national power of the region stretching from North Carolina’s Research Triangle to Orange County, California. This area of the nation saw dramatic population increases, contained many of the major federal projects of the post World War II era (NASA’s Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers, the majority of the federally funded aerospace industry), became the location of new cultures for both young and old (from the surfing and skateboarding culture of Southern California to the culture of retirement in Phoenix’s Sun City), served as the location of much of the post-1965 new immigration, and has been the political birthplace of the last eleven men elected President. The region has fundamentally shaped the nation’s ideas about race, labor, upward mobility, and America itself.  The rise of the Sunbelt has also fundamentally reshaped the environment, as new energy and water intensive cities and suburbs have grown from small cities to sprawling metropoli over the course of a few decades. This is a research seminar so that students will have the opportunity to investigate these concerns not only through group readings and discussions but by producing a substantial paper based on original research.

 

Course

SOC / HIST  322   Sociological Classics: Middletown and Ethnic Communities in America

Professor

Joel Perlmann

CRN

95308

 

Schedule

Wed             4:00 -6:20 pm       OLIN 310

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

The course will first undertake a close reading of Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown. It was the product of a research team that lived for months in the 'typical' American community of Middletown in the 1920s (they returned in the Great Depression). The work tries to understand all that is interesting in the social life of the community -- notably class structure and class relations; politics; courtship, family, child raising and schooling; entertainment, religion and other aspects of cultural life. The study has proven very durable, both in serving as a modal that other community studies must confront and in providing an understanding of American society and culture in the twenties and thirties.   But one goal of the study was to zero in on a community that had not been changed by immigration and ethnicity; accordingly later in the course we will turn to several other classic community studies of the period that sought to describe ethnic communities.   Students will write a term paper based on these and other American community studies or on some aspect of America in the twenties and thirties highlighted by the works read in the seminar.

 

Course

HIST / CLAS 333   Tacitus and Gibbon: History as Literature

Professor

William Mullen

CRN

95029

 

Schedule

Wed             1:30 -3:50 pm       OLIN 308

Distribution

OLD: D

NEW: FLLC

On hearing that his granddaughter was reading Tacitus, Thomas Jefferson wrote to her: “Tacitus I consider as the first writer in the world without a single exception.   His book is a compound of history and morality of which we have no other example.”  The translation of Tacitus into English by Trenchard and Gordon, with prefatory essays enlisting him for the Whig cause, contributed significantly to the ideology of the American Revolution.  And the same year Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence Gibbon published the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, often praised both for being the greatest historical work of modern times and for containing the finest English prose of the 18th century. We will read extensive selections from both authors (in the case of Tacitus comparing translations on some key passages), and we will consider what we read at all times from both a historical and a stylistic point of view. Both men found somber irony in their contemplation of the great preponderance of human vices and follies over virtues, and both men are as renowned for the prose styles they evolved as for the passion they brought to their great theme of the loss of liberty to tyranny.  Our task will be to gain a comprehensive view of their subjects  and  to take the measure of the greatness of the literary art with which they set them forth.

As an Upper College Seminar this course requires moderated status in Classics, History or Literature, or else permission of the instructor. Participation in this class qualifies students for consideration for Professor Minsky’s Roma In Situ. (January and Spring 2006).

 

Course

REL / HIST 339   Muhammad and his Wives

Professor

Nerina Rustomji

CRN

95294

 

Schedule

Tu               4:00 -6:20 pm       OLIN 203

Distribution

OLD: A

NEW: HUMANITIES  / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE

Crosslisted: Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theology

Depending on which biography you read, the prophet Muhammad can be either the perfect model of a righteously guided Muslim or the vilest example of tyranny, manipulation, and sexual depravity. In between these two polarities is a vast range of attitudes about Muslim prophecy and Islamic faith. This class studies the politics inherent in biographies of Muhammad and his wives. Its aim is to analyze religious biography as a historical and polemical form of writing and to trace the developing traditions of Muslim and non‑Muslim accounts of Muhammad and his female companions. Muslim will include the first historical accounts of the early Islamic community in the /Sira/ of Ibn Ishaq, traditions found within sayings of the prophet Muhammad, universal histories, devotional literature, and contemporary popular manuals and children’s comic books. Non‑Muslim sources will include medieval European tracts about Muhammad, the first printed biographies in early modern and Victorian England, and early and contemporary books about Muhammad in America.

 

Course

HIST 350   20th-Century Russia: A Society in Turmoil

Professor

Gennady Shkliarevsky

CRN

95392

 

Schedule

Tu               4:00 – 6:20 pm     OLIN 304

Distribution

OLD: C/D

NEW: HISTORY

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies, Russian & Eurasian Studies

The most important force that shaped the contemporary world was the process of modernization initiated by the eighteenth‑century revolution in France and the English industrial revolution. As a result of modernization, many societies underwent a profound transformation that changed them beyond recognition. The seminar will discuss the modernization of Russia and its diverse effects on Russian society. It will cover the period from the reforms of 1861 under Tsar Alexander II to the 1930s. Among the topics to be considered will be political changes in Russia, including the 1917 revolution and the establishment of Stalin’s regime; economic developments in pre‑ and postrevolutionary Russia; and social transformation (the rise of the working class and the bourgeoisie, changes in the position of the peasantry and women). Students will be required to write a substantial paper on a historical problem related to the period. Some prior exposure to Russian or Soviet history will be helpful.