Course

HIST 1001   Revolution

Professor

Robert Culp / Gregory Moynahan

CRN

17032

 

Schedule

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

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed:  Human Rights

What is revolution? Why does it happen? Where and when have revolutions occurred, and to what effect? This course addresses these questions by exploring a range of revolutions in Europe and Asia during the past five centuries. A primary focus of the course will center on analyzing and comparing some of the most iconic and influential revolutions in world history: the French Revolution of 1789, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1921-1949. In addition, we will analyze the causes and impact of a range of other revolutionary moments, including the German Peasant Revolt of 1525, the Taiping Rebellion, the Meiji Restoration, the 1905 Revolution in Russia, the 1911 Revolution in China, China's Cultural Revolution, the protests by students and intellectuals that rocked continental Europe in 1968, and the "velvet revolutions" and near revolutions that transformed state socialism in 1989. As we compare revolutions over time, we will try to discern links or lines of influence between revolutionary movements. We will also explore how particular revolutionary movements contributed to a shared repertoire of revolutionary thought and action. No previous study of history is necessary for this course; first-year students are welcome.  On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 102   Europe from 1815 to present

Professor

Gennady Shkliarevsky

CRN

17041

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   1:30 -2:50 pm      OLIN 309

Distribution

OLD: C/D

NEW: History

Related interest: Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Victorian Studies

The course has two goals:  to provide a general introduction to European History in the period from 1815 to 1990 and at the same time to examine a number of especially important developments in greater depth.  The first half of the course will range in time from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.  The following issues will be emphasized:  the rise of conservative, liberal and socialist thought; the establishment of parliamentary democracy in Great Britain; the revolutions of 1848; Bismarck and the Unification of Germany; European imperialism; and the origins of World War I.  The second half of the course will stress the following problems:  World War I; the Russian Revolution and the emergence of Soviet Russia; the Versailles Treaty; the Great Depression; the rise of fascism, especially Nazism; the Holocaust; the emergence of a new Europe with the "European Community"; the Cold War; the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; and the reunification of Germany. On-line registration 

 

Course

HIST  131   The Politics of Culture

Professor

Mark Lytle

CRN

17037

 

Schedule

Wed Fr       10:30 - 11:50 am  OLIN 201

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: American Studies

This course develops the assumptions that Americans define their differences more through their culture than their politics.  Those differences are sometimes muted and at others inflamed by the role of culture in the market place. The Scopes Trial over the teaching of evolution is a telling example. Over the semester we will focus on the development of modern media, popular cutlure, advertising, architecture, gender roles, and official efforts to suppress cultural differences. The readings will include novelists like Twain, Fitzgerald, Salinger, and Mary Gordon who have had a keen sense of the sources of cultural conflicts.

On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 140   The Land of the Golden Cockerel: Introduction to Russian Civilization

Professor

Gennady Shkliarevsky

CRN

17043

 

Schedule

Tu Th          4:00 -5:20 pm      OLIN 303

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies, Russian and Eurasian Studies

This course examines the origins and evolution of Russian civilization from the founding of the first Eastern Slavic state through the eighteenth century, when Russia began to modernize by borrowing from Western culture. Among the topics to be considered are the ethnogeny of early Russians, the development of state and legal institutions, the relationship between kinship and politics, the role of religion in public and private spheres, economic organization, social institutions, family, gender relations, sexuality, popular culture, and the impact of the outside world (both Orient and Occident) upon Russian society. The sources include a variety of Russian cultural expressions (folk tales, literature, art, film, music), original documents, and scholarly texts. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 141   A Haunted Union: Twentieth Century Germany and the Unification of Europe

Professor

Gregory Moynahan

CRN

17042

 

Schedule

Mon Wed   1:30 -2:50 pm      OLIN 305

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

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

Related Interest: STS

The development of the German nation-state has been at the center of nearly every dystopian reality and utopian aspiration of modern continental Europe. This course will examine the history of the German-speaking lands from Napoleon's dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, through the development of the German state in 1871, the cataclysmic initiation by this state of the two twentieth-century World Wars, and the creation of the new political entity of the European Union.  Attention will placed throughout on the dialog of Germany and Europe in relation to regional structural issues, particularly state form and Realpolitik, capitalism and communism, the 'second-industrial revolution' and institutional development, and state control or surveillance and systems of rights.  Using an array of primary documents, including an optional weekly film series, we will examine Germany's pivotal place in the ideological divisions, political catastrophes, and -- more optimistically -- theoretical, political, and scientific innovations of modern Europe. As a guiding theme, we will use the paradox that even as Germany is chronologically perhaps the most 'modern' of European states, its definition - and with it the identity of its citizens - has been haunted since inception by its heterogeneous past.  Topics of particular importance will include: the multiple 'unifications' of Germany (as a culture, a state, a racist 'greater' Germany, a reunified power within the European Union), the role of 'German' and 'European' identity in colonial expansion and Nazi propaganda, 'scientific' racism and the Holocaust, the development of the DDR and BRD, the consolidation of the European Union since 1951, and the student protests of 1968. No previous courses in history are required, but if space is limited preference will be given to history majors or potential majors. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 2032   Indochine: On Love and Empire

Professor

Tabetha Ewing

CRN

17035

 

Schedule

Tu Th          4:00 -5:20 pm      OLIN 201

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed:  Asian Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, French Studies

French 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. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST / ANTH 2103  Global Core Course: Cultural Politics of Empire: The Case of British India

Professor

Laura Kunreuther / Lia Paradis

CRN

17494

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:00 -2:20 pm      OLIN 102

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: Anthropology, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Victorian Studies

The focus of this course is the reciprocal impact that Britain and India had on each other as a result of the British imperial presence in India from the mid- 19th Century until decolonization in 1948. No other colony was more prized or the object of more fantasy than India, “The Jewel in the Crown.” It is important, however, to acknowledge that imperialism did not only profoundly change the cultures of the Indian subcontinent but also the British people themselves – both those who were first-hand participants (soldiers, administrators, entrepreneurs, etc.) and those citizens who never left Britain. Domestic politics, science, popular culture and education were all changed irrevocably by the imperial project. In India, sites of resistance to the imperial project were also sites of negotiation, where the rhetorical model of the Enlightenment and the central tenets of British liberal ideology were adopted and recast to give voice to the Indian nationalist movement. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 2133   Making of the Atlantic World

Professor

Christian Crouch

CRN

17206

 

Schedule

Tu Th          9:00 - 10:20 am   OLIN 306

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: American Studies, SRE

The Atlantic: an English lake, an African lake, a Dutch lake, a French lake, a First Peoples lake, an Iberian lake, an American lake, a connector, a barrier, a source of trade, a source of sorrow. The Atlantic World encompasses the histories of the peoples, economies, ideas, and products that interacted around the oceanic basin in the early modern period. This was an international arena that shaped or destroyed new communities and developed as a result of voluntary and involuntary movement. If the rhetoric of empire ushered in the birth of the “Atlantic World”, today we live with the mature, and lasting, effects and memories of these vital interactions. Students will consider not only the histories of the actors and agents who shaped or were shaped by Atlantic systems but they will also investigate what the implications are of how we write or remember that history. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 2301   China in the Eyes of the West

Professor

Robert Culp

CRN

17221

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:00 -2:20 pm      OLIN 205

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Human RightsEuropean Enlightenment thinkers viewed the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) as the world's most enlightened despotism, but by the turn of the twentieth century most Western thinkers considered China to be the "sick man of Asia." This course will reconstruct the visions of China formulated by Europeans and Americans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore how and why those visions changed over time. We will approach these issues with the goal of understanding how certain portrayals facilitated Western imperialism toward China, even as imperialism generated the social, cultural, and political contexts in which those portrayals were produced. We will also explore how changing relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Euro-American world during the past three decades have generated new images of China, even as images from earlier periods continue to shape popular conceptions. Shared readings in theoretical literature discussing Orientalism, cross-cultural observation, and the politics of modernization theory will provide a common framework for our work. We will analyze representations of China in a wide array of sources, including popular histories, news reports, travel writing, academic works, novels, photographic essays, documentary and feature films, websites, blogs, and list-serves. The course will culminate in individual research projects on a particular text, film, or depiction. Open to first year students. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 238   The Conservative Revolution: America from Watergate to Cyberspace

Professor

Mark Lytle

CRN

17218

 

Schedule

Tu Th          1:00 -2:20 pm      OLIN 202

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: American Studies

One historian wrote of the 1970’s, “It seemed like nothing happened.” We now know that in that decade and the period that followed America was transformed in profound ways that this course intends to examine. In some ways the informing dynamic of this period was the struggle over the legacy of the 1960s in both politics and culture. What would happen to affirmative action, sexual liberation, freedom of cultural expression, and cultural experimentation in the age of limits that began in the 1970s? It turns out a great deal did happen in the 1970s and after: The New Deal Coalition collapsed during the Reagan Revolution, cable transformed television, the personal computer and internet created a new information culture, fundamentalist Christians became a defining force in American politics; the sexual liberation movement confronted AIDS, the Cold War ended, and the United States struggled to understand its role in the New World order. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 297   Beyond Witches, Abbesses, and Queens: A History of European Women,  1500-1800

Professor

Tabetha Ewing

CRN

17222

 

Schedule

Tu Th          6:00 -7:20 pm      OLIN 201

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: Gender and Sexuality Studies

Women make history – as historical actors and as historians. In this course, we will read about the “woman question” in the medical, legal, religious, and political discourses of the early modern period through processes such as the centralization of European states, Protestant and Catholic reformations, explorations, and colonial settlement. Many of our readings examine how social, economic, and other material circumstances shaped the history of working and bourgeois women. However, where possible, we will focus on women’s cultural production – literary, musical, and artistic. The course will also serve as an opportunity to reflect upon the history of women’s studies, both as a field of inquiry and as an academic institution. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 3102   Research Seminar: US Urban History

Professor

Myra Armstead

CRN

17205

 

Schedule

Mon            9:30 - 11:50 am   OLIN 303

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed:  American Studies, SRE

Ideally, students in this course will have taken History 232, American Urban History, although this is not required.  The course will provide an opportunity for students to pursue specialized study and research in American urban history.  Students interested in urban space and its meanings, urban planning and design, new urbanism, suburbanism, the postmodern city, urban politics, urban infrastructure, and urban culture are especially invited in this course to bring their individual topics to the table, although additional subjects can be imagined. The class will initially consider a common set of readings having to do with urban historiography.  Class organization will then shift to focus on individual student research projects, and the literature and methods informing them. All students will produce a long research paper. 

On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 3105   Migration & Identity in the Modern World

Professor

Lia Paradis

CRN

17226

 

Schedule

Wed            9:30 -11:50 am    OLIN 301

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed:  Human Rights, SRE

Migration has been happening since before recorded history. For the purpose of this course, however, we will be concentrating on the age of Modernity, roughly between 1850 and the present day, which is defined, in part, by the increased volume and speed of people’s movement. Rather than focus on immigration, we will be more concerned with the experiences of moving through space and across cultures.  We will examine articles, primary source documents, film and photography to try and better understand the impact of movement on the identity of individuals and communities and whether that impact is historically significant. We will try to decide what difference it has made whether people migrated voluntarily or not, and whether that migration thought of their identity before and during their journey and ask whether that journey ever reaches an end.

On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 3142   Violence in Colonial America

Professor

Christian Crouch

CRN

17220

 

Schedule

Th               4:00 – 6:20 pm    OLIN 310

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: American Studies, Human Rights

The frontier is one of the great underlying constructs of North American identity. This nebulous, turbulent borderland has been marshaled to defend everything from the natural expansion of the United States to the hallowed memory of our colonial past. But what was the violence of colonial America really like? Who participated, who suffered, who fought, and what did it all mean?  What constituted “exceptional” or “daily” violence? This seminar investigates the violent interactions – between Native Americans and Europeans, between competing European empires, between slaves and masters, and all will be considered in addition to the primary and secondary colonial sources in order to understand the role violence plays in social and cultural formations. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST 3143  Perspectives of War: The Pacific War Through Japanese and American Eyes

Professor

Ian Buruma

CRN

17503

 

Schedule

Tu   1:30 – 3:50 pm  OLIN 307

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: Human Rights

In this course we will look at the same historical period through Japanese as well as US eyes. This will include histories, eye-witness accounts, novels, and films made during the war itself and afterwards. Various types of propaganda, as well as national and political biases, will be analyzed. Controversial events, such as the Nanjing Massacre, Pearl Harbor, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, will be looked at from different national and political perspectives, giving the student a grounding in history, as well as culture. US debates on the first atom bombing will be part of the course, as will the continuing controversies in Japan over school textbooks and memorials. Although classified as a history course, the students are expected to attend the film screenings, even when they take place outside normal class hours. Individual research will be encouraged, and participation in class discussions will be valued as highly as written work. Books to be used will include John Dower’s War Without Mercy, Ian Buruma’s Inventing Japan, as well as novels by Endo Shusaku and Oe Kenzaburo. Wartime Japanese films, such as Sea Battle in Hawaii and Malaya (about Pearl Harbor), will be analyzed, as well as postwar anime films, such as Grave of the Fireflies (about US bombing), Hell in the Pacific, Hiroshima’s Children, and The Burmese Harp.

 

Course

HIST 3235   War, Old Media & Performance

Professor

Tabetha Ewing

CRN

17223

 

Schedule

Fr                9:30 - 11:50 am   OLIN 310

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History

Cross-listed: Human Rights

This course traces the history of the militarization of European society and its close relationship to the rise of new media on the eve of the modern era. Against the backdrop of its unspeakable enactment, war incited discourse and, perhaps, invented the modern public. We study how that invention and how the ethos of war entered into such everyday and pleasurable practices as listening to music, theater-going, dancing, sex, and gambling. The seminar is structured around intensive readings in its first half. Individual student projects will be workshopped in the second half. On-line registration

 

Course

HIST / SOC 3335   America, its Jews & Israel

Professor

Joel Perlmann

CRN

17246

 

Schedule

Th               4:00 -6:20 pm      OLIN 203

Distribution

OLD: C

NEW: History / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: American Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies

This course deals with ethnicity, domestic politics and foreign policy. First, it deals with themes of American ethnicity by tracing striking shifts in American Jewish attitudes towards Israel since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. Second, the course deals with American politics by illuminating the changing role of Israel in the American Jewish voting patterns, lobbying efforts, and financial contributions for politics. The course will also take up various non-Jewish domestic pressure groups that call for or oppose strong support for Israel – for example, in recent years the religious right has been an important supporting force, while Arab-American organizations have typically opposed such support. And third, this course deals with American foreign policy itself, evaluating the dramatically shifting history of American involvement with the Jewish state, a history in which domestic interest groups comprise only one among several important components.