11812

HIST 102 Europe from 1815 to the Present

Gennady Shkliarevsky

M . W . .

11:50am - 1:10 pm

HEG 201

HIST

Cross listed: 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. Class size: 22

11483

HIST 144 History of Experiment: Experience and Scientific Method in the Western World

Gregory Moynahan

. . W . F

3:10 pm– 4:30 pm

HEG 308

HIST

Cross-listed: Experimental Humanities (core course), Science, Technology & Society (core course) The scientific method and the modern form of the scientific experiment are arguably the most powerful inventions of the modern period. Although dating back in its modern form to only the sixteenth century, the concept of the experiment as an attempt to find underlying continuities in experience has numerous origins stretching back to earliest recorded history. In this course, we will look at several different epochs' definition of experiment, focusing on the classical, medieval, and finally renaissance era to the present. Throughout, we will understand the concept of experiment as closely connected with an era's broader cosmology and definition of experience, and as such will see the epistemological problem of the experiment in a framework that includes aesthetics, theology, ethics and politics. We will also assume that "experiment" has taken different forms in the different sciences, and even in fields such as art and law. Authors read will include Aristotle, Lucretius, DaVinci, Leibniz, Newton, Goethe, Darwin, Curie, Tesla, Einstein, Schroedinger, Pasteur and McClintock. Class size: 22

11486

HIST 178 Africa South of the Sahara, 1800 to the Present

Wendy Urban-Mead

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 203

HIST

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Global & Int'l Studies Actual European colonial occupation of sub-Saharan Africa, with the exception of South Africa, lasted a relatively short time - from 80 to 100 years. And yet, the impact of European colonization on African religion, political organization, material culture, and gender relations was profound. How did Africans cope with, resist, and accommodate colonization, decolonization and then nation-building? This course in the modern history of sub-Saharan Africa will approach those questions by using primary materials produced by Africans, including political writings, fiction, autobiography, oral testimonies, and records of Africans' actions and words as rendered by European colonial officials and missionaries. How the discipline of history helps to build understanding about Africa's past is a central element of this course, including discussion of how African history, as an academic discipline in the western academy, is itself a product of the African nationalist movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The course covers the years from 1800 to the present, stopping frequently to undertake case studies of particular events and movements, such as the Maji Maji rebellion in German East Africa, the rise of a millenarian Kimbanguist Christian church in the Belgian Congo, the Negritude intellectual movement of francophone West Africa, the emergence of an independent Ghana, and the Zimbabwean response to the rule of Robert Mugabe's ZANU/PF government. The majority of the course treats anglophone Africa - very brief treatment of Belgian and French colonialisms provide helpful context for acquiring a continent-wide perspective along with consideration of settler vs. non-settler colonial models. The more detailed case studies allow us to explore multiple elements of African intellectual, religious, and gendered social history. In sum, major themes for the course will be politics, gender, and religion and their relation to identity formation in the colonial encounter. Students will emerge with a historically informed understanding of the modern history of Africa and be able to develop skills of historical analysis. Class size: 22

11815

HIST 181 Jews in the Modern World

Cecile Kuznitz

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

ASP 302

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies, Religion In the modern period Jews faced unprecedented opportunities to integrate into the societies around them as well as anti-Semitism on a previously unimaginable scale. In response to these changing conditions they reinvented Jewish culture and identity in radically new ways. This course will survey the history of the Jewish people from the expulsion from Spain until the establishment of the State of Israel. It will examine such topics as the expulsion and its aftermath; social, intellectual, and economic factors leading to greater toleration at the start of the modern period; the varying routes to emancipation in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Islamic world; acculturation, assimilation, and their discontents; modern Jewish nationalist movements such as Zionism; the Holocaust; the establishment of the State of Israel; and the growth of the American Jewish community. Class size: 22

11487

HIST 185 History of Modern Middle East

Charles Anderson

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

HEG 106

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Global & Int'l Studies, Human Rights, Middle Eastern Studies, Science, Technology & Society This introduction to the history of the Middle East covers the period from the Ottoman conquest of the Levant and North Africa until the present. Students explore the social, political, and intellectual history of the region, drawing from a multitude of sources: Sufi poetry, modern novels, memoirs of political leaders, and treaties and works of Muslim reformers. Class size: 20

11811

HIST 190 The Cold War: Enemy/Globalism

Gennady Shkliarevsky / Mark Lytle

. T . Th .

3:10 – 4:30 pm

RKC 103

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: Global & Int'l Studies; Human Rights, Russian & Eurasian Studies, Science, Technology & Society 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. Class size: 48

11475

HIST 2007 James Bond's World

Richard Aldous

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

RKC 101

HIST

The character of James Bond has played a defining role in creating our understanding of what it means to be a spy and an Englishman. This course looks at the reality behind the fiction of one the Britain's most glamorous and enduring exports, as well as the author who created him and the context of the postwar world. Background reading: Ian Fleming, The Blofeld Trilogy (Penguin, 2010); Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain (Picador, 2006). Class size: 22

11480

HIST 2133 Making of the Atlantic World

Christian Crouch

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 202

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, French Studies, Human Rights, LAIS 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. Class size: 22

11488

HIST 215 Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and the Contemporary Middle East

Charles Anderson

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 305

HIST

Cross-listed: Middle Eastern Studies Over the past four decades arguably no two international forces have had more impact on the Middle East than neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Neoliberalism, an economic philosophy propounding the virtues of "free market" capitalism, deregulation, and the privatization of public assets and government functions, was born out of the international crisis of capitalism in the 1970s. Its influence was quickly visible in the region with Egypt's "Open Door" policy, and subsequently spread to other countries, often in conjunction with the so-called "structural adjustment" programs of the IMF and the World Bank. Most recently neoliberal policies have played a critical role in fomenting the Arab uprisings that began in late 2010. Neoconservatism's origins lie in a particular critique of political liberalism. Arising after the carnage of World War II, it held that the scale of death and destruction caused by the war was attributable in part to the weaknesses of liberal democratic governments at the time and to liberalism as a political philosophy. It was the unrest of the late 1960s in the U.S. – as the civil rights struggle reached its crescendo, the counterculture grew, and opposition to the Vietnam war mounted – that finally put it on the political map. Its partisans have advocated an end to the welfare state and "big government liberalism," rekindling an ideology of American exceptionalism, and a militaristic foreign policy premised on unilateralism and preserving American global supremacy. Regarding themselves as "democratic realists," neoconservatives paradoxically have sought to, in their words, "remake the Middle East," and have made the Iraq war of 2003, unqualified support for Israel, and the militant rejection of the theocratic regime in Iran their hallmark policies in the new millennium. This course will trace the development of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism in their U.S. and Middle Eastern contexts and explore their many intersections. We will read exemplary works by neoconservative and neoliberal thinkers, think tanks and institutions, as well as their critics. Class size: 18

11458

HIST/ANTH/LAIS 222 Anthropology and History of Brazil & Mexico

Miles Rodriguez

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 204

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: History, LAIS This is an interdisciplinary course in anthropology and history on the two largest countries in Latin America, Brazil and Mexico. It studies culture, broadly defined, with readings drawn from some of the major anthropological and historical writings on these two countries from the early twentieth century to the present. Each period of twentieth-century Brazil and Mexico will be studied. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss played a foundational role in the development of Brazilian anthropology, and students of the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas established anthropology as a discipline in both Brazil and Mexico. The class examines the scholarship of these and later anthropologists and historians, and problematizes the ethnography and textual production of scholars with distinct relationships to the cultures in question as well as from different gendered and ethnic backgrounds. Topics for study and discussion include: the indigenous community, cultural results of slavery and ethnic mixture, the family and the nation, violence and death, and religious ritual and the sacred, such as in the case of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Class size: 18

11688

HIST 2253 The Ecological History of the Globe

Alice Stroup

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 308

HIST

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies, Science, Technology & Society Human technology and population growth have damaged the Earth through deforestation, erosion, salinization of soil, and species loss. Where our moral sensibilities look to repair or reduce ecological damage, our study of historical and evolutionary processes helps identify the processes, from political to ecological, more likely to succeed in that endeavor. In this course, therefore, we will examine case studies from prehistory to the present, around the world, to reconsider human institutions, cultures, and choices in ecological context. Class size: 20

11776

HIST 2341 Inventing Modernity: Peasant Commune, Renaissance & Reformation in the German & Italian Worlds, 1291-1806

Gregory Moynahan

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 202

HIST

Cross-listed: German Studies, Italian Studies Using as its starting point Jacob Burckhardt's classic account The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, this course will examine the role of the drastic upheavals of the early modern period in defining the origins of such modern institutions as capitalism, political individuality, religious freedom, democracy, and the modern military. The geographic focus will be the towns, cities, and peasant communes of the Italian and German speaking regions of Europe, particularly the Italian peninsula, Holy Roman Empire, and Switzerland. Two apparently opposed developments will be at the center of our approach: first, the role of the autonomous peasant commune, particularly in Switzerland, as a model and spur for political forms such as democracy and anarchism; second, the development of modern capitalism and technology as they came to impinge on the traditional feudal and communal orders. The course will also address the historiography and politics -surrounding the "invention" of the Renaissance in the late nineteenth century, looking particularly at Burckhardt's relation with Ranke, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Class size: 22

11478

HIST 269 Encounters in the American Borderlands

Christian Crouch

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 202

HIST

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies, Human Rights Frontiers and borders have threaded across the Americas like a spiderweb from the late fifteenth century until the present. What did it mean to have an encounter in these borderlands – between Native Americans and Europeans or Africans, or among the American-born descendents of all these groups? Who are the actors who chose to make their homes in these spaces? Are borderlands exclusively a physical space or are they imagined as well and how do they move and change over time? This course provides an introductory overview to borderlands in North America from the Columbian Exchange (1492) to the late twentieth century, considering the possibilities and perils for the men and women of diverse origin living in the zone between empires and nations. Class size: 22

11813

HIST 2701 The Holocaust, 1933-1945

Cecile Kuznitz

M . W . .

10:10am-11:30am

RKC 200

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. Class size: 20

11816

HIST 280B American Environmental History II: The Age of Ecology

Mark Lytle

M . W . .

3:10pm-4:30pm

ASP 302

HIST

Cross-listed: American Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies (core course); Social Policy This course will investigate the history of Americans' interaction with their environment from roughly 1890 to the present. It will explore different strategies that historians have used to examine environmental history. It will also investigate question such as how the role of the federal government has changed from the "conservation" to the "environmental" eras, why the Dust Bowl occurred, how chemical warfare changed the life span of bugs, whether wilderness should be central to the environmental movement, whether you can be an environmentalist if "you work for a living," whether Sunbelt cities are part of the environment, if blocking dams in the Grand Canyon was good for the environment, how the environmental justice movement and Earth First! have impacted the environmental movement, whether you can find "nature" at Yosemite National Park, Sea World, and the Nature Company, and other topics central to how we live in the world. It will include reading of both primary and secondary historical sources as well as two short papers and one longer research project. Class size: 22

11477

HIST 282 The Civil War & Reconstruction

Myra Armstead

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 202

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed: American Studies, Africana Studies This course explores the connections between the American Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction project in the former Confederate states, and the life of its own acquired by that project after the war's end. It will examine competing understandings of the war's goals by contemporaries; the beginnings of Reconstruction during the war itself; Lincoln's, Jackson's and Congress's differing approaches to Reconstruction; the experiences of various participants in Reconstruction (northerners, emancipated slaves, southern whites) ; political and extra-political opposition to Reconstruction; ; the institutional and constitutional legacy of the project; and the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction among various American publics. Class size: 22

11361

HIST / PS 283 Environmental Politics in East Asia

Robert Culp / Ken Haig

. T . Th .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 202

SSCI

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies, History, Human Rights, Science, Technology & Society This class explores the history and politics of environmental change and efforts to manage it across East Asia. China, Japan, and Korea have all undergone rapid economic development in recent decades, leading to dramatic changes in the livelihoods of their people. But rapid development also had steep environmental costs. This class explores the similarities and differences in the ways that each country has approached the environment, from historical themes in the culture, society, and religion of each place, to more modern domestic and international concerns over pollution, waste, energy and food security, population growth, resource degradation, public health, and social justice. We will explore both how the region's strong states have confronted environmental crises and how social movements have created openings for environmental law and policy along with a more vibrant civil society in all three countries, despite post-World War II histories of an entrenched political class resisting popular opposition. Class size: 30

11476

HIST 3137 Urban Disasters & Catastrophes in U.S. History

Myra Armstead

M . . . .

3:10 pm -5:30 pm

OLIN 309

HIST

Cross-listed: American Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies Natural disasters and traumas to the physical infrastructure and built environment—great fires, epidemics, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, blackouts, riots—are conventionally viewed as abnormalities in the presumed flow of a "functioning" city. At the same time, such calamities can reveal shockingly institutionalized patterns of unevenness, gaps, and/or oversights in urban management. Additionally, pivotal improvements in the delivery of public services, efficiencies in the maintenance of the health of urban environments, innovations in the infrastructure of cities and their hinterlands, structural changes in city-state-federal interdependencies, and transformations in urban imaginaries over time are all by-products of these crises.Through several case studies, we will investigate all three of these propositions by considering fictional, first-person, and other primary literature on American cities as well as pertinent monographs on these topics. Students will produce a long research paper in this course. For moderated students only. This course fills the American Studies Junior Seminar requirement. Class size: 15

11479

HIST 314 Violent Cultures and Material Pleasures in the Atlantic World

Christian Crouch

. . . Th .

10:10am - 12:30 pm

OLIN 303

HIST

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, Experimental Humanities, French Studies, Human Rights, LAIS Emeralds. Chocolate. Sugar. Tobacco. Precious. Exotic. Sweet. Addictive. Like human actors, commodities have stories of their own. They shape human existence, create new sets of interactions, cross time and space, and offer a unique and incredible lens through which to view history. This course explores the hidden life of material objects that circulated from the early modern Atlantic into the rest of the world. The life cycle of these products and items reveal narratives of Atlantic violence imbedded into these products: the claiming of Indian land, the theft of enslaved labor, the construction and corruption of gender norms. Course readings will introduce historical methods and strategies to reclaim history from objects found in different parts of the Americas and will culminate with students having the opportunity to do original research and write the narrative of an item themselves. Fulfills History Major Conference/American Studies Research Seminar requirements. Class size: 15

11484

HIST/LAIS 314 Latin American Revolutions

Miles Rodriguez

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

HDR 106

HIST

Cross-listed: History In part because of well-known revolutionaries like Emiliano Zapata and Ché Guevara, Latin America is often thought of in the global popular imagination as a land of revolution. In fact, very few revolutions occurred in Latin America in the twentieth century, but revolutionaries and revolutionary movements were numerous. This class explores the major revolutions in twentieth-century Latin America and their results for other parts of Latin America: the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979. It also examines the more common phenomenon of revolutionary movements that did not participate in revolutions, and major transformations, such as in religion and education, not traditionally associated with the problem of revolution in the region. Using primary sources from the participants in the revolutionary processes and movements, and both historical and popular accounts, goals of the class include understanding why revolutions happened when they did, why they often did not happen, and how revolution mattered to the meaning of Latin America in the twentieth century. Class size: 12

11817

HIST/JS 315 The Culture of Yiddish

Cecile Kuznitz

. . . Th .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 306

HIST

Cross-listed: Jewish Studies For nearly one thousand years Yiddish was the primary language of European Jewry and its emigrant communities. This class will explore the role of Yiddish in Jewish life and the rich culture produced in the language. Topics will include the sociolinguistic basis of Jewish vernacular languages; medieval popular literature for a primarily female audience; the role of Yiddish in the spread of Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment); attempts to formulate a secular Jewish identity around the Yiddish language; the flourishing of modern Yiddish press, literature, and theater and their intersection with European modernism; contemporary Hasidic (ultra-Orthodox) culture; and the ongoing debate over the alleged death of Yiddish. All readings will be in English translation. Familiarity with the Hebrew alphabet and/or Jewish history helpful but not required. Class size: 15

11883

HIST 3238 Enlightenment in France

Tabetha Ewing

. . . Th .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 301

HIST

Cross-listed: French Studies The Enlightenment in 18th-century France represented a great burst of intellectual confidence in man's capacity to change the human condition. It built on processes already underway including: the radical expansion of formal education, literacy among men, and print culture; and an international community of scientific inquiry. Yet, the intellectual work of the philosophes --its myriad forms, its circulation, and its auto-critique centered in Paris-- is the heart of this movement. That the revolutionary hope of Enlightenment flourished amid global war, territorial expropriation, and slavery requires exhuming the great prejudices buried beneath the famed Enlightenment hatred of superstition, religious intolerance, and despotism. This course will survey characteristic literary forms from the novel to the Encyclopedia, and such key Enlightenment themes as: gender, race, and human nature; the natural world and the city/civilization; the colonies; politics and economy; and epistemology and the progress of human reason. We read familiar titles of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau but also contemporary best-sellers: La Mettrie's Man-Machine, Buffon's Natural History, Graffigny's Letters of a Peruvian Woman, Quesnay's Encyclopedie articles on agriculture and economy, and Moreau de Saint-Méry's Description of the French colonies. Students will complete a portfolio of inter-locking short analytical writings. Class size: 15

11775

HIST 329 Culture & History of Food

Rene Marion

. T . . .

10:10am - 12:30 pm

OLIN 302

HIST

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies Recent movements—from the latest diet to the sustainable food movement—beg us to consider what relationships exist between who we are and what we eat. In this course, we will take a historical and cultural look at these issues by asking: What can we understand about a culture by looking at its food? How do people construct relations to their bodies, other people, their histories, animals, and their environment through food? In the process, we will consider themes that include food's role in organizing gender relations, religious practice, debates over taste and pleasure, cultural and national identity, and environmental impact and sustainability. Readings will explore varied approaches to the study of food and will help to illustrate how foodways can evoke and shape the priorities, values, and practices of a culture. Class size: 15

11814

HIST 350 20^th Century Russia: A Country in Turmoil

Gennady Shkliarevsky

M . . . .

4:40pm-7:00 pm

OLIN 310

HIST

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.

Class size: 15