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.