11661

HIST 102   Europe since 1815

Gennady Shkliarevsky

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 301

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:  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: 20

 

11723

HIST / LAIS 120   Modern Latin America Since Independence

Miles Rodriguez

M . W . .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 310

HIST

Cross-listed:  Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights  This is an introductory survey of the history of Modern Latin America since Independence. The course traces the process of Independence of the Latin American nations from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in North and South America in the early nineteenth century, and the long-term, contested, and often violent processes of nation-formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Primary source and historical texts examine the region’s main challenges in this period, including persistent inequality, regional disintegration, endemic violence, elite political control, revolution, military rule, and civil reconciliation. Major historical issues and debates for study and discussion include the meaning and uses of the idea of “Latin America,” slavery and empire in nineteenth-century Brazil, and the roles of race, religion, women, and indigenous peoples in Latin American societies. Class size: 18

 

11885

HIST 134   The Ottomans and the

Last Islamic Empire

Omar Cheta

. T . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

HEG 102

HIST

Cross-listed:  Global & Int’l Studies; Middle Eastern Studies  In the aftermath of World War I, the Ottoman Empire disappeared from the world scene. In its place arose numerous states, which today make up the Middle East and significant parts of Eastern Europe. In all of these “post-Ottoman” states, the memory of the Ottoman Empire is well and alive. For example, it is in relation to the Ottoman legacy that modern Middle Eastern and East European national identities were constructed and claims to national borders settled (or not). This course is a general historical survey of Ottoman history from the founding of the empire around 1300 until its collapse in the aftermath of World War I. The course covers major topics in Ottoman history, including the empire’s origins, its Islamic and European identities, everyday life under the Ottomans, inter-communal relations, the challenge of separatist movements (Balkan, Greek, Arab) and the emergence of modern Turkish nationalism. Class size: 22

 

11902

HIST 137   Global Europe

Gregory Moynahan

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 201

HIST

Cross-listed:  Italian Studies, French Studies, German Studies, Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights, Spanish Studies, Irish and Celtic Studies  Where does Europe begin, and how do we establish its limits, conceptual and practical? Through a policy of aggressive expansion, the nation-states of Europe controlled over 85% of the habitable land in the world by 1900 and established common military, economic, political, scientific and diplomatic systems throughout much of this vast area. Yet this same expansion led to a hybridization, and contestation, of Europe polities through other cultures ranging from French North Africa, the British Commonwealth, and Latin America. How did Europe's expansion and the postcolonial reaction to it transform European culture and sensibility? How did a region defined by a millennium of continuous conflict that culminated in two world wars of unprecedented violence come to find not only relative peace but, in the European Union, a new political form and model for global human rights? Class size: 22

 

11722

HIST 140   Introduction to Russian

Civilization

Gennady Shkliarevsky

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 101

HIST

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.  Class size: 20

 

11884

HIST 158   Apartheid in South(ern) Africa

Drew Thompson

M . W . .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 205

HIST

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, Political Studies  Apartheid was a political beast that ravaged not only South Africa but also much of Southern Africa officially from the late eighteenth century until 1994 with the democratic election of South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela. However, more recent economic struggles and the perceived failings of the elected national party, the African National Congress, has brought into recent light apartheid’s legacies of inequality, South Africa’s longstanding regional dominance, and served as the public’s call for “redistribution” and “nationalization.” This course uses primary source documents to intimately explore apartheid’s philosophical, economic, and social origins within political institutions and daily life from the time of the Great Scramble in Africa. Students will also be encouraged to take a wider lens on apartheid’s development and implementation from the perspectives of more regional histories of activism and war that involved South Africa’s neighboring countries.  Class size: 22

 

11883

HIST 173   Historical Fiction through the “African” Novel

Drew Thompson

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

HEG 102

HIST

Cross-listed: Africana Studies The novel as a format and way of writing offers an important context to consider the relationship between history, memory, and fiction in colonial and independent Africa. Cultural critics across the United States and Europe have somewhat ironically announced the emergence of new “African voices.” This course places highly-celebrated contemporary novels and short stories of authors from across the continent, including Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, Noviolet Bulawayo, and Beatrice Lamwaka, in conversation with—the old “greats—those of Chinua Achebe, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Mariama Ba. Reading around themes of colonization, nationalism, civil war, and challenges of daily life from different generational and gender perspectives introduces students to the various historical representations of Africa and the methodological and theoretical politics associated within the interpretation of concepts of “fiction” and “voices” as related to the idea of African history. Class size: 22

 

11978

HIST 185   The Making of the Modern

Middle East

Omar Cheta

M . W . .

11:50 -1:10 pm

HEG 204

HIST

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies; Human Rights; Middle Eastern Studies  This course is a general historical survey of the Middle East since the late 18th century. It covers the major transformations that the region witnessed, especially, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, European imperialism, nationalism (including the Arab-Israeli conflict), political Islam and, most recently, the Arab Spring. The course emphasizes the interaction between society, culture and politics. Therefore, in addressing each of these broad themes, it pays particular attention to their social and cultural aspects such as, gender, labor, popular culture and forms of protest. The geographic focus of the course is largely the Eastern Mediterranean (including Egypt and Turkey), Iran and, to a lesser extent, the Gulf. While emphasizing the history of the modern Middle East, the course is meant to help students acquire critical tools necessary for the study of history more generally. For example, students will be required to examine primary texts and to reflect on the uses of history in contemporary contexts. Class size: 22

 

11879

HIST 2007   The World of James Bond

Richard Aldous

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 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

 

11604

HIST 201   Alexander the Great

James Romm

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 203

HIST

Cross-listed:  Classical Studies  Alexander the Great changed the world more completely than any other human being, but did he change it for the better? How should Alexander be understood -- as a tyrant of Hitlerian proportions, or as a philosopher-king seeking to save the Greek world from self-destruction, or as an utterly deluded madman?  Such questions remain very much unresolved among modern historians.  In this course we will attempt to find our own answers (or lack of them) after reading the ancient sources concerning Alexander and examining as much primary evidence as can be gathered.  Students will attain insight not only into a cataclysmic period of history but into the moral and ideological complexities that surround the assessment of historical personality, whether in antiquity or in the modern world.  No prerequisite, but students will be greatly helped by some familiarity with Greek history or civilization. Class size: 25

 

11887

HIST 2105   Hawkers & Madmen:

Advertising the American Dream

Mark Lytle

M . W . .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLINLC 206

HIST

Cross-listed:  American Studies Once upon a time advertising served a functional role. People with goods to sell described them in newspapers, leaflets, and signs. In the 20th Century advertising became big business, providing the vital link between producers and consumers.   Advertising agencies exploited the growing sophistication of mass media as it became more pervasive and persuasive. The California governor's race in 1934 produced a union of advertising and politics that has defined the electoral landscape ever since. One historian complained in the 1950s that advertising sold candidates the way it sold toothpaste. Since World War II, Americans receive more cultural information from advertising than any other medium. Psychologists and other social scientists introduced techniques such as subliminal suggestion that critics compared to brainwashing. Efforts to restrict and reform advertising, especially to children, abounded. Yet, many economists argued that without advertising, consumerism could not function. This course will explore the means advertisers have used to sell an idealized American consumer democracy. To what degree does advertising reflect the culture in which it is set and to what degree and in what ways does it shape that culture?  Class size: 22

 

11886

HIST 2109   Britain and the Great War

Richard Aldous

. T . Th .

11:50 -1:10 pm

RKC 102

HIST

Almost a hundred years after the outbreak of World War One, today’s view of the conflict is defined by the war poets’ evocation of a pointless waste of life-an “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” This course tests that notion by exploring the impact of the war on Great Britain and Ireland during and after the war through documents and seminal texts ranging from battlefield dispatches to Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Background reading: David Reynolds, “The Long Shadow” (2013). Class size: 22

 

11724

HIST 2122   The Arab-Israel Conflict

Joel Perlmann

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 301

HIST/DIFF

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.  Class size: 20

 

11889

HIST 2142   Harlem, Bronzeville, South Central

Myra Armstead

. T . Th .

3:10 -4:30 pm

OLIN 201

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed:  American Studies, Africana Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies. While pockets of African-American residential concentration have existed in American cities since the colonial period, the black ghetto – relatively large, dense, and racially monolithic--has been a feature of the American urban landscape only for the past century.  In this course, we will address the cultural, social, economic, and political factors that created and sustained these areas, and in the contemporary context work to unmake the so-called “ ‘hood.”  Although we will use New York City’s Harlem, Chicago’s Bronzeville, and Los Angeles’s South Central sections as case studies of common historical ghetto formation and evolution, we will also chart the

differences among these neighborhoods in the American imagination:  Harlem will be studied for its reputation as the center of African-American cultural and artistic achievement both during the Harlem Renaissance and in its gentrified form.  On the south side of “The City of Big Shoulders,” Bronzeville stands as an example of the working-class, industrial ghetto—offering opportunities for upward mobility.  Finally, through South Central, we will view the postindustrial nightmare of gangsta’ rap, drive-by shootings, and the intractable black underclass represented in popular culture through such films as “Boyz n the Hood,” “Colors,” and “Training Day.” Class size: 22

 

11878

HIST 217   The Progressive Era in US History

Myra Armstead

. T . Th .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 101

HIST

Cross-listed:  American Studies  This course surveys the years between 1890 and 1930 for the social and cultural politics of reform that it spawned. We will explore cross-Atlantic exchanges that informed an American Progressive consciousness, competing historical interpretations of Progressivism, and the legacy of Progressivism for later twentieth-century liberalism.  In addition to the recognized reform movements of the period, we will also challenge ourselves to view other contemporary developments--e.g., the rise of educative exhibits and exhibitionism, racial accommodationism,--as reflections of Progressive thought.  Class size: 20

 

11725

HIST 2191   Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World

Carolyn Dewald

M . W . .

1:30 -2:50 pm

OLIN 203

HIST/DIFF

Cross-listed:  Classical Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies   The course explores the gendered relations of men and women in the ancient Greco-Roman world.  We concentrate on literary and historical sources, in order to understand both the social history of ancient sexuality and the literary documents that show its most complex manifestations. Topics include: early Greek sources; women's lives in classical Athens; Greek homoerotic relationships; sexuality as part of Greek drama, religion and mythology; women in Roman myth, literature, and history; differences in Greek and Roman sexual/social bonds.  Class size: 22

 

12041

HIST 229   Confucianism: Humanity, Rites, and Rights

Robert Culp

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 205

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Asian Studies, Religion, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, Philosophy  Confucianism is one of the most venerable, diverse, and dynamic intellectual and cultural traditions in human history. This course explores the transformations of Confucian philosophy, social ethics, and political thought, from its ancient origins through the present, focusing on five key moments of change. Close readings in seminal Confucian texts provide a foundation in the earliest Confucian ideas of benevolence, rites, and righteousness. We then delve into the ideas of China’s middle-period Neo-Confucian thinkers Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, who pondered universal principle, the Great Ultimate, and innate human goodness. The third segment of the course analyzes the globalization of Confucian thought during the 16 th through the 19 th centuries, as Jesuit missionary translations of Confucian texts inspired the European Enlightenment and European imperialism sparked Chinese thinkers’ reformulation of “Confucianism” as a bounded, continuous tradition. The fourth segment of the course reconstructs how Confucian thought shaped Western ideas of rights as they entered East Asian politics and explores how Confucian concepts of humanity, relational ethics, and social responsibility may offer alternatives to Euro-American rights discourse. Finally, the course considers the contemporary Confucian revival as manifested in popular culture, tourism, neo-liberal economic discourse, and East Asian state authoritarianism. No prior study of Chinese language or history is required; first-year students are welcome. Class size: 22

 

11880

HIST 2551   Joyce’s Ulysses, Modernity,

and Nationalism

Gregory Moynahan

. T . Th .

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLINLC 210

HIST

Cross-listied:  Irish & Celtic Studies; Science, Technology & Society; Victorian Studies   Although it concerns only the day of June 16th, 1904, each chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses is written in a radically different historical and literary style.  In this course, we will complement Joyce’s stylistic innovation by using contemporary documents (newspaper accounts, advertising, folksongs, etc.) and historical texts  (epic, medieval chronicle, heroic, modern ironic) to unfold the historical context and resonance of each of Joyce’s chapters.  The course as a whole will then question how these various means of casting the reader in time and history illuminate the modernism and political reality of Dublin in 1904, and particularly the ethnic, religious, and social tensions that led Joyce to a life of exile from the Ireland of his text.  The goal will be both a survey of historical methodologies and an historical introduction to the problems of modernism and nationalism using this highly documented example.  Key issues addressed will be the function of historical and mythical time in everyday life, Joyce’s narrative as an anti-nationalist (yet, somehow, nationalist) epic, the role of popular scientific writing and technology in the creation of reality, the politics of gender and sexuality in the fin-de-siècle, the function of terrorism in politics, and the effect of politics and mass media on “personal” experience.  Class size: 20

 

11664

HIST 3135   Biography and U.S. History

Myra Armstead

M . . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

OLIN 305

HIST

Cross-listed:  American Studies  This course will allow students to assess the flexibility of biography as a genre of historical writing.  Students will survey the ways in which life stories can convey multiple and often opposing understandings of the past:  They can reinforce “Great Man” understandings of history, recover the role of ordinary people, confirm the idea of individual agency, highlight the inexorable power of context in framing individual decision-making, precisely locate and define extraordinary actions and actors, render history in human terms, and suggest rightly or wrongly a coherence to the past. By reading and constructing selected biographies in U.S. history, students will consider all these ways of reading biographies.  A long research paper in which students either evaluate a set of biographies of a single historical figure or produce a historically contextualized biography of a historical figure will be required.  This course is a research seminar and serves as a major conference for students concentrating in Historical Studies. 

Class size: 15

 

11891

HIST 3138   How to Write the History

of the Middle East

Omar Cheta

. T . . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

HEG 200

HIST

Cross-listed:  Middle Eastern Studies  In this seminar, we will study the most prominent approaches to writing the history of the Middle East. Our primary goal will be to think about historical narratives of the Middle East as constructed artifacts and as products of certain intellectual environments. For each meeting, we will read about an influential school of historical writing, such as the French Annales or Italian Microhistory. Alongside these readings, we will examine examples of the scholarship on Middle Eastern history that engage with these historiographical traditions. Our discussions will revolve around the possibilities and limits of writing history in light of the existent historical sources, academic and disciplinary norms, as well as present political considerations.  Class size: 15

 

11882

HIST 3141   Central European Cities:

Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest

Gregory Moynahan

. . W . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

RKC 200

HIST

Cross-listed: Environmental Studies, German Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Science, Technology, & Society   Focusing principally on four of the largest cities of central Europe, 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.  Students are expected to develop an original research paper of approximately thirty pages in length using primary sources. No previous knowledge of central European history is required, although it would obviously be beneficial.   Class size: 15

 

11892

HIST 3225   Global Latin American Conjunctures

Miles Rodriguez

. . W . .

1:30 -3:50 pm

HEG 200

HIST

Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, LAIS  In the twentieth century two moments stand out as global revolutionary conjunctures, the 1920s and 1960s. Both periods experienced original, wide-ranging, and open experimentation in many fields of human life including intense political protest, mass people’s movements, ideological ferment, and cultural effervescence. This seminar is on the ways in which Latin America experienced these two periods of globally-influenced revolutionary change. The goal of the seminar is to discover how the region was influenced by and integrated within two international postwar conjunctures but also developed autonomous responses to local and global changes. The seminar will read three major Latin American works in dialogue across both periods: the writings of the Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui on revolutionary struggle and indigenous rights from the 1920s, as well as Ché Guevara’s Bolivian Diary and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, both from 1967. It will also engage topics such as university reform in the 1920s, the 1968 student movements of Brazil and Mexico, military and religious rebellions, and other ideologically-influenced popular and revolutionary movements. Students will have the opportunity to produce original narratives based on Latin American historical sources and literatures from these past periods of global revolution.  Class size: 15

 

12037

HIST 3227   From the Dinosaurs to the Beastie Boys: A Public History Practicum on Bard College

Cynthia Koch

. T. .  .

11:50 – 2:10 pm

RKC 122

HIST

Cross-listed:  American Studies, Environmental & Urban Studies   Who lived and built here one hundred, two hundred, or even one thousand years ago? How do we educate one another about these other lives and their material cultures? In this practicum, students will use selections from the Preservation Master Plan for Bard College and the Bard College Archives to develop a public history project designed to illuminate the history of the people, lands, and buildings now occupied by the college.  Community-building tools of oral history and local history will be woven by students from archival and secondary research.  Projects might include a student-run academic conference, creation of digital walking tours of the campus and environs, a website, an historical exhibit, or other product. Students will study and interpret the history and historic context of Bard College, dating from prehistory and including early estates, local farms, and the industrial development of the river; the Romantic and Picturesque landscape and architectural movements; and culminating with St. Stephens College and the early history of Bard College.   Class size: 15

 

11663

HIST 365   Russian Intellectual History

Gennady Shkliarevsky

M . . . .

4:40 -7:00 pm

OLIN 301

HIST

Cross-listed:  Russian and Eurasian Studies   Russia’s modernization generated many dramatic conflicts in Russian society and culture. Few of them could rival those associated with the growing awareness of autonomy and agency. This awareness undermined the familiar notions of universal truth and challenged many traditional values. Russian 19th century secular thought became the scene of intense debates centered around this modern predicament, as well as tensions that it generated in the spheres of morality, social justice, aesthetics, to name just a few. Following a brief introduction dealing with the modernization of Russia, as well as the origins of Russian secular thought and intelligentsia ’the social group which was the carrier of the secular intellectual tradition’ the class will focus on major trends and personalities in 19th century Russian thought. Topics under consideration will include: continuity and change in Russian culture, debates between Westernizers and Slavophiles, the relationship between art and reality, revolutionary populism and socialism. Extensive readings will be the basis of weekly discussions and will include works by Chaadaev, Gogol, Herzen, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, as well as contemporary studies on Russian intellectual history. The requirements include a research paper, a presentation, and participation in weekly discussions. Class size: 15