98140

HIST 101   The Making of Europe to 1815

Alice Stroup

. T . Th .

9:00- 10:20 am

OLIN 205

HIST

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.     

 

98133

HIST 130   Origins of American Citizen

Christian Crouch

M . W . .

12:00-1:20 pm

OLIN 202

HIST

Cross-listed:  American Studies; Human Rights;  SRE   The United States is often portrayed historically as emerging triumphantly in 1776 to offer inclusive citizenship and a transcendent, tolerant “American” identity to all its indigenous and immigrant residents.  Yet the reality of American history belies this myth. The nation’s history is transnational and yet we focus mostly on its Anglophone roots, ignoring that the “U.S.” was carved out of the contests of many empires and grew on internationally based forced labor regimes.  It is a story of individuals, alone and/or together, contesting, reacting towards, rejecting, influencing, and embracing the changing notions of what “the United States” and “America” were from the sixteenth century well into the nineteenth century. The course focuses on six moments that definitively challenged and shaped conceptions of “American identity”, “citizen”, and “the United States”: the early colonial period, the Constitutional Convention, Cherokee Removal, the era of the internal slave trade and the “Market Revolution”, the Mexican-American War, and Reconstruction.    

 

98135

HIST 135   Imperial Chinese History

Robert Culp

M . W . .

10:30- 11:50 am

RKC 101

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: Asian Studies   China’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.    

 

98138

HIST 146   Bread & Wine: A History of France to 1800

Tabetha Ewing

M . W . .

3:00-4:20 pm

ASP 302

HIST

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.     

 

98088

HIST 150   Under a Western Sky: The American West in Film, Fact,  and History

Mark Lytle

M . . . .

. T . . .

7:00-9:00 pm

2:30-3:50 pm

OLIN 204

OLIN 204

HIST

Cross-listed: American Studies, Film   Through weekly screenings and lectures, the course will offer an in-depth examination of one of the richest of American film genres, the Western. The films, which make up the central focus of the course, will be studied from a number of perspectives, as characteristic examples of popular narrative cinema and as attempts to understand the complex dynamic of this country's westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the actual history of which will serve as a background for viewing the films. At its best, popular culture serves as a means for society to explain itself to itself. By tracing a number of recurring elements (e.g. the heroic individual, the Western landscape), an attempt will be made to find the redeeming quality of these essentially commercial films, in their ability to forge a national myth and in their unique handling of the contradictions within a democratic society. We will also examine how some of the films use the West as a metaphor to address contemporary political and social issues, as well as compare the filmic treatment of the West with similar themes as evidenced in painting and literature. Though the familiar Hollywood genre film will comprise the bulk of the course, most notably the films of John Ford (Stagecoach, The Searchers, etc.) we will equally emphasize such works of fiction as The Deerslayer, The VirginIan, The Big Sky, Little Big Man, and All the Pretty Horses.   

 

98240

CLAS / HIST 157   The Athenian Century

James Romm

. T . Th .

9:00 -10:20 am

PRE 101

HIST

See Classic section for description.

 

98087

HIST 190   The Cold War

Gennady Shkliarevsky / Mark Lytle

. T . Th .

1:00-2:20 pm

OLINLC 115

HIST

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights, Russian & Eurasian Studies, STS   Like two scorpions, the Soviet Union and the United States warily circled each other in a deadly dance that lasted over half a century.  In a nuclear age, any misstep threatened to be fatal not only to the antagonists but possibly also to the entire human community.  What caused this hostile confrontation to emerge from the World War II alliance? How did Soviet-American rivalry affect the international community?  And why after more than fifty years did the dance end in peace rather than war? Traditionally historians have approached those questions from a national point of view.  Their answers had political as well as academic implications.  To blame the Soviet Union was to condemn Communism; to charge the United States was to find capitalism as the root cause of international tensions.  In this course we try to reconsider the Cold War by simultaneously weighing both the American and Soviet perspective on events as they unfolded.  We will look at Stalinism, McCarthyism, the nuclear arms race, the space race, the extension of the Cold War into the third world, the rise of American hegemony, Vietnam and Afghanistan, Star Wars, and the effort to reach strategic arms limitation agreements.  Finally, we will challenge the claims of American conservative ideologues that the Reagan arms buildup "won the cold war."  Students will examine key documents of the Cold War era and prepare several papers on world areas or events that they chose to explore.    

 

98481

HIST 2012   Lincoln in American Memory

Philip Kunhardt

. T . Th .

2:30 – 3:50 pm

OLIN 201

HIST

Cross-listed: American Studies  Coinciding with the approach of the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, this course will take a sweeping look at Lincoln’s unique place in American history since his assassination in 1865. We will look at the contesting of his memory among northerners and southerners, whites and blacks, conservatives and progressives, east coast elites and western colleagues. We will examine the impact of Lincoln’s emancipationist legacy and see how it faltered during the years of Jim Crow and segregation. We will trace Lincoln’s reputation among African Americans—from reverence, to criticism, to rejection, to rediscovery (the last recently exemplified in the writings of Barack Obama). Following a trajectory from 1865 to 2009 the course will peal back the many layers of the Lincoln legend as it seeks the mainsprings of Lincoln’s ongoing relevance. Assigned texts will include Merrill Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, Richard Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows, David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered, David Blight, Race and Reunion, James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican, Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, and Philip B. Kunhardt et al, Looking for Lincoln.    

 

98139

HIST 2035   The Wars of Religion

Tabetha Ewing

M . W . .

6:00-7:20 pm

OLIN 201

HIST

Cross-listed: Gender & Sexuality Studies,  Human Rights   Religion and revolution have formed an unholy alliance at several distinct moments in history. This course is a journey across the motley religious landscape of early modern Europe in which the ideas and practices of heretics, infidels, and unbelievers nestled in the spaces where orthodox Catholicism held sway. Periodically, heads of state or household sought to bring order to it; and people –royal subjects, wives, children, servants-- resisted. The 16th and 17th centuries were a time in which religious revolution and new ways of ordering spiritual life exploded in a fashion that no one could have anticipated. In the period we now term "the Reformations" Europe would reinvent itself at home and discover itself in the New World. Also, the power of women as a source of threat and of sectarian strength emerges as a primary site for reformation processes. From the expulsion of Iberian Jews and Muslims to European contact with "cannabalism," from Luther in Germany to Carmelites nuns in Canada, from witchcraft to the cult of Mary, from incantation to exorcism, students will trace the personal stories of real people through Inquisition records, diaries and conversion tales, early pamphlets, and accounts of uprisings. We will look at how radical religious ideologies sustained themselves in the face of official repression and, more challenging still, official approval. Open to first year students.    

 

98011

HIST 2122   The Arab-Israel Conflict

Joel Perlmann

. T . Th .

4:00-5:20 pm

OLIN 201

HIST

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, Jewish Studies, Middle East Studies    This course is meant to provide students with an understanding of this conflict from its inception to the present. Considerable attention will be given to the present; nevertheless, the conflict is simply incomprehensible without a solid understanding of its evolution - incomprehensible not merely in terms of details, but in terms of broader themes and aroused passions. Among the themes to be discussed are the following. A Jewish national movement arose in the late nineteenth century to oppose the conditions of Jewish life in Europe, and an Arab national movement (as well as a specifically Palestinian movement) arose to oppose Ottoman and European rule of Arab peoples. Out of the clash of these movements emerged the State of Israel and the Palestinian refugees in 1948. The political character of the conflict has changed over the decades: first it involved competing movements (before 1948), then chiefly a conflict of national states (Israel vs. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, etc), and now it is conceived as chiefly a conflict between Israeli military rule of territories (occupied since the 1967 war) and an insurgent Palestinian independence movement. Military realities also changed greatly, as did the accusations about the role of ‘terror’ as a tactic (from the Jewish Irgun to Hamas) and the role of religion. And not least, the conflict has been shaped by strategic and economic considerations of the great powers (Ottoman, British, American/Soviet, hegemonic American) as well as by considerations of domestic political culture in Israel and in the Arab world.     

 

98144

JS / HIST 216   Jewish Rebels and Radicals

Cecile Kuznitz

. T . Th .

2:30-3:50 pm

OLIN 301

HIST

See Jewish Studies for description.

 

98136

HIST 2306   Gender, Sexuality, and Power

 in Modern China

Robert Culp

M . W . .

1:30-2:50 pm

RKC 200

HIST/DIFF

Cross list: Anthropology, Asian Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, STS   This course explores the roles of gender and sexuality in the construction of social and political power in China over the last 500 years. Our point of departure will be traditional areas of focus for scholars of gender and sexuality in China: footbinding, the cloistering of women, and the masculinization of public space; the transformations of Confucian age-sex hierarchies within the family; the women’s rights movements of the early twentieth century; and the Chinese Communist revolution’s ambivalent legacy for women in the People’s Republic of China. By drawing on recent historical and anthropological literature, we will also analyze gender’s functions in many other aspects of modern Chinese life. These topics will include constructions of masculinity and male identity during China’s late imperial period (1368-1911), the role of gender categories in constructions of Han Chinese relations with both Inner Asian nomadic peoples and Euro-American imperialists, the gendering of citizenship and comradeship in twentieth century China, the impact of global capitalism on gender constructions and sexual relations in contemporary China, and the relation of China’s women’s movement to recent trends in Euro-American feminism and gender studies. This course is open to all students.   

 

98132

HIST 242   20th Century Russia: From

Communism to Nationalism

Gennady Shkliarevsky

M . W . .

3:00-4:20 pm

OLIN 203

HIST

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, Russian and Eurasian Studies, SRE   There has hardly been a period in Russian history which would be more abundant in upheavals and paradoxes than the country's evolution in the 20th century.  In its search for an elusive balance between modernity and tradition, Russian society has experienced many radical transformations that will be the subject of this introductory survey.  In addition to the discussion and analysis of the main internal and external political developments in the region, the course will also include extensive examination of different aspects of the rapidly modernizing society, such as the Soviet command economy; the construction of national identity, ethnic relations and nationalism; family, gender relations, and sexuality; the arts, etc. Course materials will include scholarly texts, original documents, works of fiction and films.    

 

98500

HIST 2505   Insurgency, Revolution and Irregular War

James Spies

. . W . .

7:00 – 9:20 pm

OLIN 205

HIST

Cross-listed:  GIS, STS   The course will work to develop a theoretical, strategic and operational understanding of insurgencies and irregular warfare.  Students will examine the different revolutionary theories that explain how countries become unstable and insurgent movements gain momentum.  This examination will assist students in understanding and determining why states collapse into revolution.  Comparing the exhaustion strategies that typify successful insurgencies against conventional military strategies of annihilation that typify most of Clauswitz and U.S. warfighting strategy, students will learn how and why these strategies can be advantageous and why U.S. governmental forces have been slow to grapple with these dilemmas.  Using the guidance of classical guerrilla leaders, students will investigate examples of insurgent systems in order to understand how these strategies and operational designs translate into tactical and often idiosyncratic methods. The course will review current, emerging and future strategic frameworks that will highlight the strengths and weaknesses and emphasize the future requirements to synchronize there elements of national power to achieve stability, security, transition and reconstruction in modern irregular warfare.  The course will conclude by examining the future national strategy of how the U.S. government could conducts protracted Irregular Warfare to accomplish national strategic objectives in decades to come.   

 

98134

HIST 2631   Capitalism and Slavery

Christian Crouch

M . W . .

1:30-2:50 pm

OLIN 305

HIST

Cross-listed:  American Studies,   Human Rights (core course)   Scholars have argued that there is an intimate relationship between the contemporary wealth of the developed world and the money generated through four hundred years of chattel slavery in the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade. Is there something essential that links capitalism, even liberal democratic capitalism, to slavery? How have struggles against slavery and for freedom and rights, dealt with this connection? This course will investigate the development of this linkage, studying areas like the gender dynamics of early modern Atlantic slavery, the correlation between coercive political and economic authority, and the financial implications of abolition and emancipation.  We will focus on North America and the Caribbean from the early 17th century articulation of slavery through the staggered emancipations of the 19th century. The campaign against the slave trade has been called the first international human rights movement – today does human rights discourse simply provide a human face for globalized capitalism, or offer an alternative vision to it?  Questions of contemporary reparations, rising colonialism and markets of the nineteenth century, and the 'duty' of the Americas to Africa will also be considered.  Readings will include foundational texts on capitalism and a variety of historical approaches to the problem of capitalism within slavery, from economic, cultural, and intellectual perspectives.  There are no prerequisites, although HIST 130, 2133, or 263 all serve as introductory backgrounds.   

 

98142

HIST 2701   The Holocaust, 1933-1945

Cecile Kuznitz

. T . Th .

10:30- 11:50 am

OLIN 201

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed:   Human Rights, German Studies, Jewish Studies, STS    This course will provide an overview of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people during the Second World War. We will examine topics including the background of modern antisemitic movements and the aftermath of World War I; the reactions of German Jews during 1933-1939; the institution of ghettos and the cultural and political activities of their populations; the turn to mass murder and its implementation in the extermination camps; the experiences of other groups targeted by the Nazis; the reactions of  “bystanders” (the populations of occupied countries and the Allied powers;) and the liberation and its immediate aftermath. Emphasis will be on the development of Nazi policy and Jews’ reactions to Nazi rule, with special attention to the question of what constitutes resistance or collaboration in a situation of total war and genocide.    

 

98130

HIST 2702   The History of Liberties,

 Rights and Human Rights, 1215 to present

Gregory Moynahan

M . W . .

3:00-4:20 pm

OLIN 201

HIST

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights (core course), STS   The history of 'human rights' can formally be said to have come into existence only with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the successor conventions that ultimately formed the International Bill of Human Rights. Both the declaration and its later instantiations were created in reaction to the problems of genocide and mass population transfers (and consequent loss of citizenship) during the Second World War. This course will begin by examining the fatal gaps in the previous system of nationally instantiated universal” rights as they were initially developed in Europe and selectively applied to or adopted by its colonies. Beginning with the pursuit of liberties in peasant communes and early modern law, we will examine the creation of national rights from the treaty of Westphalia through the British, American, and French revolutions, and the relation of these rights to colonial administration. The post-war institutions of human rights provided a new justification for a universal and 'open' standard of laws and fealty (often compared to imperial Rome) and ultimately provided new legitimation for the selective intervention of stronger powers in the affairs of weaker political or legal entities. By focusing on case studies, particularly those from the contrasting cases of the European Union and United States, the relation of human rights to hegemonic power will be examined in detail. The course will also examine the relation of politics to the infrastructures that made both widespread human rights infractions and their curtailment possible. The role of media (telegraph, radio, etc.),  systems of organization (passports, criminal archives) and police (secret police, international monitors) will be considered as modern transnational phenomenon that are intimately connected with the development and fate of enforcing human rights norms. The final section of the course will look at the role of international NGO's in both monitoring human rights and criticizing the state of existing human rights law, particularly in their criticism of human rights as a product of a particular north Atlantic perspective and set of biases.     

 

98141

HIST 3117   The High Middle Ages

Alice Stroup

M . . . .

1:30-3:50 pm

OLIN 308

HIST

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. This is a writing intensive course. Students will spend an extra hour a week in a writing lab. The writing component will focus on helping students to develop, compose, organize, revise, and edit analytical prose; to develop the ability to identify and articulate a thesis; to construct an argument; to collect and present evidence and documentation; to interpret and analyze texts; and to become proficient in the mechanics of writing, revision, grammar, and editing. Regular short writing assignments will be required. Enrollment limited to 14.   

 

98131

HIST 3141   The City and Modernity in  Central Europe: Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest

Gregory Moynahan

. T . . .

4:00-6:20 pm

RKC 200

HIST

Cross-listed: Environmental Studies, German Studies, STS   Focusing principally on Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, this research course will use the topic of the metropolis as a means to investigate the central European experience of modernity.  Basic themes will include: the cultural reaction to mechanization and bureaucratization of modern urban life; the metropolis as a new political arena to contest traditional (particularly aristocratic) political and social roles; the role of the city in the development of new sociological and philosophical theories; the place of the city in conflicts of historical memory and modernization; and the new forms of communication, association, and political action in the metropolis.  Although the course will concentrate on the early twentieth century, in some cases we will trace the evolution of topics through the century (e.g., for a study of memory and modernity).  In addition to secondary sources on the relation of modernity to urban life, a number of primary sources will be used including films from the period and the writings of figures such as Benjamin, Capek, Döblin, Freud, Kafka, Kracauer, Krauss, Musil, and Simmel.  Where possible, the extensive resources of the World Wide Web will be used to reconstruct urban histories.  Students are expected to develop an original research paper of approximately thirty-five pages in length using primary sources.   

 

98137

HIST 340   The Politics of History

Robert Culp

. . . Th .

1:00-3:20 pm

OLIN 303

HIST

Cross-listed:  Human Rights, SRE, Global & Int’l Studies   What are the origins of history as a modern discipline? How have particular modes of history developed in relation to nationalism, imperialism, and the emergence of the modern state? How have modern historical techniques served to produce ideology? Moreover, how has history provided a tool for unmasking and challenging different forms of domination and the ideologies that help to perpetuate them? This course will address these questions through theoretical readings that offer diverse perspectives on the place of narrative in history, the historian's relation to the past, the construction of historiographical discourses, and the practice of historical commemoration. Other readings will critically assess the powerful roles that historical narrative, commemoration, and institutions like the museum have played in the processes of imperialism and nation building, as well as in class and gender politics. Some of the writers to be discussed will be Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Michel Foucault, G.W.F. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Joan Wallach Scott, and theorists active in the Subaltern Studies movement. In addition to our common readings, students will write a research paper that builds on the critical perspectives we have discussed during the semester. Students who have moderated in history are particularly welcome.    

 

98482

HIST COL   History Colloquium

Tabetha Ewing

TBA

TBA

TBA

HIST

2 credits  The History Colloquium is required of all moderated History students. The purpose of the colloquium is to create a community of dialogue for students and faculty within the History Program and to help students develop independent research skills for the senior project. The colloquium will consist of several dimensions: introduction of bibliographic tools and research skills; discussion of recent historical work; formulation and development of senior project topics; and presentation of work in progress by students, faculty, and visiting scholars. Students and faculty will exchange ideas about projects at every stage, from the formulation of a research topic to the project’s completion and presentation, giving students insight into the trajectory and process of historical work.