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