Upcoming Courses
Below is a list of upcoming courses for the Spring 2026 semester.
HIST 10402/30401
Nazi Germany, Nazi Europe
This is a lecture course that will offer students an opportunity to delve into the dark history of Germany and Europe between the First World War and the Cold War. At the center of this course is the National Socialist movement, which dominated Germany from 1933 to 1945 and left its imprint on the world thereafter. The hope is that students become familiar with the movement’s intellectual and cultural origins, the political contingencies that made it successful, and the policies that made it popular and feared in Germany and beyond. Topics will include Social Darwinism and racial pseduo-science, the Treaty of Versailles and Weimar Germany, the rise of National Socialism to power, and Nazi society and culture. In addition, we will look at how Nazi politics were received and imitated in central and Eastern Europe and how Adolf Hitler’s international politics could appeal to peoples beyond Germany’s borders. Students will also learn about the systematic and organized killing of peoples and groups in Europe under occupation, including six million Jews and the Holocaust. The course will conclude with the postwar occupation regimes in Germany and Europe, the erasure of complicity with Nazism in the subsequent histories of Europe, and the failed attempts at deNazification and justice for the regime’s victims.Friday sections will consist of smaller discussion groups that will discuss the content of the lectures in part. Most importantly, students will read primary source material, including laws, witness statements, memoirs, and important scholarly debates. The Friday sessions will thus give students the opportunity to directly analyze accounts and sources. These skills will then be assessed in a document analysis paper and on our midterms and final exams.
HIST 20350
Global Catholicism
This course traces the history of Catholicism in the modern era. It is self-consciously global in its approach, examining how Catholic people, ideas, devotional practices and architectural drawings circulate around the world. Topics investigated include: Catholicism during the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religion and nationalism, the “social” question and Catholic ideas about the family and the economy, the crisis of fascism in the 1930s, decolonization and the cold war, liberation theology and the global South, the first (1869-70) and second (1962-65) Vatican councils and the current sexual abuse crisis. Students will read and interpret a variety of sources, including memoirs, short stories, papal encyclicals, art works and accounts by contemporary historians. Assignments will include short essays and quizzes. The final assignment will be a report, using materials from the course and working as an historian, written for Pope Francis.
HIST 20451
Global Asia
Scholars have long speculated about the rise of Asia, but Asia has already risen. Asian economies are driving global growth; Asian governments are some of the largest purveyors of foreign aid and investment; and Asian superpowers like China are shaping and shifting geopolitics. This course, taught by a political scientist and a historian, offers students the opportunity to unpack the complexity and diversity of Asia across time and space. We will explore Asia through political and historical concepts against the background of China’s evolving role within the region. At the same time, we will focus on elevating diverse Asian voices to understand how historical concepts and political and economic trajectories have shifted over time and what it means for domestic and global audiences in the 21st century.
As an integration course, our focus is analytical and interdisciplinary: we examine the political, economic, and social trajectory of Asia to shed light on the most dynamic region of the world. We also devote considerable time to understanding how historical legacies and patterns such as colonialism or economic imperialism impact Asia today. Lectures, assigned readings covering a wide range of primary and secondary sources in political science and history, and a discussion-oriented format introduces students to issues ranging from populism, party-state capitalism, and poverty alleviation to soft and sharp power, demographic crises, surveillance, and social unrest. All majors and backgrounds are welcome. No prior knowledge of Asian languages or topics is required.
HIST 30092
Memory, History, and Violence in the Middle East
This course examines the interplay between history, memory and violence in the modern Middle East. We will discuss specific case studies of violence and war and their social, political and cultural dynamics of commemoration, forgetfulness and silence. The course will start with an overview of theories and concepts emanated from the field of Memory Studies and then continue with our case studies. These will include the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the 1948 war that led to the establishment of Israel and Palestinian displacement, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the violent regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Armenian genocide during World War I and the Algerian war of independence (1955-1962).
HIST 30094
Modern India and Pakistan
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh account for more than a fifth of humanity: nearly two billion people in one of the most densely populated parts of the planet. South Asians speak more than a hundred languages, and represent most of the Hindus, Muslims, Sikh, Jains, and Zoroastrians in the world. The region’s major economy, India, is by itself among the ten largest economies and one of the fastest growing. Yet, there is much about South Asia that can be perplexing. Caste based violence remains widespread in a society that is fast modernizing; billionaires mushroom alongside widespread malnourishment; space missions are launched to Mars amidst vast numbers of illiterate and uneducated citizens; Bollywood thrives while freedom of expression is often under threat; religious fundamentalism exists alongside extraordinary religious pluralism; gay rights expand alongside the murders of atheist bloggers; a democratic government lives in fear of military overthrow; a society that has that has chosen women as heads of state also sees increasing reports of sexual crimes. This course will unravel these knots and explain the processes that gave rise to them. Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, this course will progress chronologically and bring us to the present day via themes on politics, economy, society, and popular culture. It offers an understanding of contemporary India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and their place on the global stage.
HIST 30267
The Middle Ages on Film
This course will explore modern popular imaginings of the Middle Ages through film. We will view several feature-length films and numerous clips, interspersed with readings from and about the Middle Ages. Together we will discuss and analyze both the texts and films. The films will range from early silent films to Monty Python spoofs to recent blockbusters. I have divided the course into six segments: (1) the Crusades; (2) Eleanor of Aquitaine: wife and mother of kings; (3) Robin Hood; (4) King Arthur; (5) the Black Death; and (6) Joan of ArcStudents will write short daily assignments, two short essays, and a final paper or take-home exam. There are two required textbooks and a course packet. The textbooks are Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (2002); and Daniel Hobbins (trans.), The Trial of Joan of Arc.
HIST 30341
From the Crusades to the Ottoman Empire: The Eastern Mediterranean 1000-1500
This course explores the major developments in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean from the time of the crusades and the eastward expansion of the Italian naval powers until the rise of the Ottoman Empire to a new universal power unifying the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor under the rule of a Muslim sultanate. The encounter between Latin and Greek Orthodox Christians in the wake of the crusade led to political rivalries and religious discord, culminating in the Latin conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade of 1204. While the eastward expansion of Italian naval powers had already begun in the late eleventh century, it was mainly as a result of 1204 that Venice and, later on, Genoa became predominant political and economic factors in the Eastern Mediterranean, controlling much of the long-distance seaborne trade between Italy and the Syrian coast. The Anatolian Seljuk Turks initiated the gradual Turkification and Islamization of Asia Minor. In the thirteenth century, the Eastern Mediterranean endured increasing pressure from the Mongols and the Mamluk sultanate. One of the results of this development was the rise of the Ottoman principality to a leading political power incorporating large parts of the Balkan Peninsula and, in 1453, the city of Constantinople. We will discuss both socio-economic and political aspects of these developments.
HIST 30351
The Making of Modern Ireland
This course offers a chronological survey of Ireland and the Irish from the Act of Union with Great Britain to the present day. It will consider the social, political, religious, gendered, cultural and economic aspects of that history, and will place the island of Ireland within its wider contexts, as part of the United Kingdom, as part of Europe, as part of the British Empire, and as the source of the global Irish Diaspora. The course will focus on a number of central issues, including: how enduring sectarian divisions have influenced the development of Irish history; the Famine, mass emigration, and the rise of the Diaspora; the development and course of both Ulster and Southern unionism, and of Irish nationalism; the relationship of Ireland and the Irish to the British Empire and the wider Anglo-world; the Irish revolution, counter-revolution, and partition; the development of the Irish Free State, and Republic of Ireland; the history of Northern Ireland, the Troubles, and the peace process; the collapse of the “Celtic Tiger”.
HIST 30375
The Crusades
The Crusades were a unique period in both human history and in Catholic history and theology. The period began when, in AD 1095, the Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Alexius Comnenus sent emissaries to Pope Urban II, asking for succor from Latin Christendom in order to repel the Muslim invaders who were overrunning his empire. Pope Urban II did not merely comply with this request, but transformed it into a much broader call to restore to Christendom the lands of Christianity’s origin in Syria, including the city of Jerusalem, which had been conquered by the Muslims more than four hundred years previously. In issuing his call, Pope Urban also inspired and unleashed an outpouring of religious fervor– and bloodshed– unique in the annals of Christian history, which lasted for centuries. During this time Christians, ranging from great saints, popes– including three beatified ones– and even a Doctor of the Church and a Confessor, to lords, knights, and peasants, considered the military Crusade in the Holy Land to be their best path to salvation and highest religious goal on earth. The Crusades also produced the first sustained, large-scale contact between Latin Christendom and the Islamic World in the Middle East, permanently changing the political landscape of the Mediterranean. This course will examine the historical and religious unfolding of this extraordinary movement, from the initial call to Crusade and the overwhelming response it aroused among Christians across Europe through the fall of Acre in 1291, including the Muslim reaction to and views of the Crusaders. Issues that will be explored include the preaching of popes, priests, saints and legates on behalf of the Crusade, and what these writings reveal about the place of the Crusades in Christian doctrine in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the rise of military monastic orders (The Templars, the Knights of St. John, the Teutonic Knights); relations between Church and secular authorities in both the Crusading armies and the Crusader kingdoms; the conflict between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors, and how this affected the various Crusades; how Muslims and Franks viewed one another; and how Frankish society was organized overseas.
Normative issues that will be considered include: How is that for 200 years, Catholicism, including one of only 36 Doctors of the Church, viewed the best and even the noblest path to salvation and the remission of sin as lying in fighting and killing non-Catholics? How is it that St. Bernard could tell the Teutonic knights to fight the Wends until “either their religion or their nation has disappeared”? What was the meaning of St. Bernard’s espousal, with a new interpretation, of Pope Gelasius’s “Two Swords” theory in “De Consideratione”, and what in fact is the proper relationship between the spiritual and the temporal powers? What effect did the Investiture Contest have on the Crusades and on the papacy, how was this conflict reflected in papal involvement in the Crusades and in politics, and what lessons does one learn about what papal political involvement should or should not be? Primary source reading sections will include not only medieval chronicles in translation, but also the writings, preaching, and letters of some of the main figures of the Crusade– and of the Church, including Pope Urban II, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and Popes Paschal II, Alexander III, Innocent III and Innocent IV.
HIST 30412
17th Century England: Divine Kings, Puritan Consciences, and Violent Actions
England’s seventeenth century provides one of the most compelling epochs of human history, full of a cast of remarkable characters. Once Elizabeth I died in 1603, a new dynasty, the Scottish royal house, the Stuarts, came to the throne in the person of James VI & I. A new political dynamic ensued. Insoluble tensions arose between perceived licentiousness in high politics on one hand and puritan moral rigour on the other, between royal control of religion and a hankering after policies based on literal Biblical interpretation and also between a gaping royal treasury and public reluctance to contribute financially to the realm. These, and other factors, resulted in the unthinkable: the dissolution of the ties that had held English politics and society together. The Civil War (or “Great Rebellion”, or “Puritan Revolution” depending on the interpretation favoured) that resulted gave rise to a welter of new constitutional ideas, religious experiments and virulent anti-Catholicism. These were all set loose as King and Parliament fought for domination of the country. We will pay particular attention to the figure of Oliver Cromwell, who came to command English politics both before and after the hitherto unimaginable public execution of the king (who many believed was God’s anointed). We will also ask why the English after allowing their king to be executed and their toleration a substantial Interregnum subsequently restored Charles II, their erstwhile king’s son, as monarch. Remarkable figures that we will encounter and evaluate include the Leveller John Lilburne, the poet John Milton, Praise-God Barebones (yes, that is a name) and the libidinous Samuel Pepys.
HIST 30445
Irish Language & Culture 1600-1900: Anglicization or Modernization
From the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century to today the hegemony, and later the survival, of native Irish culture in the Irish language has been challenged by English language culture. This course seeks, by analyzing primary sources in Irish (available to students in translation) in their historical context, to chart this process over time. The course also seeks to ask questions about the extent to which the Irish Catholic population resisted or collaborated in the process of anglicization that took place. Was the ‘Sacsa nua darbh ainm Éire’ /(New England going by the name of Ireland) culturally alien to the Irish population that resided in it?
HIST 30456
From Humors to Hysteria: Human and Political Bodies in European History, 1517-1918
Between the early rumblings of the Reformations and the last cannon shot of World War I, Europeans profoundly changed how they conceptualized bodies as experience and metaphors. During these four centuries, Europeans grounded the ways in which they interacted with each other and the world in bodily imaginings. On an individual level, the living, human body provided a means of accessing and understanding the material or spiritual world. On a collective scale, the physical body, its adornments, and its gestures provided markers that Europeans used to fracture society along axes of gender, sexuality, class, race, mental aptitude, and even sacrality. Drawing in part from their myriad imaginings of the human body, Europeans constructed metaphorical political bodies. The body politic assumed diverse forms spanning from divine right monarchs to revolutionary republics to modern nation states. Our course will lay bare the human body as culturally constructed, while fleshing out how Europeans’ evolving visions affected political imaginings.
HIST 30524
Modern European Thought from Rousseau to Foucault
Since the eighteenth century, Europeans have grappled with a number of transformative events and developments, from the French Revolution and the birth of an industrial economy, to catastrophic wars and the rise and fall of European empires. In the process of making sense of these events, they produced works of philosophy, political theory, art, and literature that continue to shape the way we understand our place in the world today. This course introduces students to the history of European thought from the Enlightenment to the present, a period that birthed the many great “isms” that have defined the modern world: liberalism, socialism, nationalism, feminism, existentialism, totalitarianism, and colonialism. Course readings will be drawn from a range of primary sources, including novels, works of philosophy, political treatises, films, and works of art, as well as secondary sources by historians. By reading these two kinds of sources together, we will explore not only how ideas and works of art were shaped by the historical context in which they were produced, but also how they themselves shaped the course of European history.
HIST 30602
The American Revolution
When speaking of the American Revolution, many writers reach for a comment made by John Adams in 1818 that, “[T]he Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people. . .” Whether this assertion is true historically or not, it still does not adequately describe what that revolution was. The American Revolution obviously had its political elements, primarily the formation of the United States. To reach its political goals, military means were necessary. Without a successful War for Independence, there would have been no revolution. To leave matters there, however, would be insufficient. A fuller understanding of the revolution would need to address how it affected the whole spectrum of American life. It would consider the revolution as a social movement that challenged the political and social hierarchies of the day. It would also ask how the revolution affected those who were not white males, especially women, slaves, and Native Americans. Without considering the possible negative implications of the revolution, any telling would be incomplete. This class will take up these challenges and attempt to make a full-orbed presentation of the events surrounding the American Revolution. It will introduce students both to elites and to those whom the popular narrative glosses over. It will attempt to count the losses, as well as the gains, which flowed from the move to independence from Britain. Finally, it will attempt to describe the many changes through this period, which resulted, not only in a new political nation, but in a new society and culture—changes that in varying degrees are still with us today and of which contemporary Americans are the inheritors.
HIST 30604
US Civil War and Reconstruction, 1848-77
This course surveys the years 1848 to 1877 and centers on the constitutional crisis of the mid-19th Century that exploded in the U.S. Civil War. We begin with the political controversies over slavery, consider the eruption of violence between abolitionists and slaveholders, the breakdown of the political system that climaxed in the election of 1860, the southern rebellion to Lincoln’s election, the experience of the war itself, the process of emancipation, and the political struggles during Reconstruction over federal power and the place of African-Americans in the Republic. This course emphasizes constitutional, political, social, and cultural events, the decisions made by public officials and voters, by men and women, by whites and blacks. In order to understand this tumultuous era, we will read political and legal documents as well as poetry, fiction, and private letters. Lastly, we will consider the ways in which historians evaluate the period and the ways the public remembers it. The course will be a mix of lecture and discussion.
HIST 30632
U.S. Environmental History
This class considers the environment’s role in shaping history. We will discover how our stories of the past change when we include microbes, pigs, and the climate, alongside more typical subjects like presidents, wars, and ideas. We will ask what nature has meant in the past to a range of people, from the Comanche on the Great Plains, to settler-farmers in New England, to coal miners in Colorado. Throughout the course we will also ask the question: What is nature? And how have ideas about nature changed over time? A premise of this course is that nature is not something “out there,” but in fact is everywhere. Thus, we will explore a robust set of thematic topics that will illumine the the varied meanings of “nature”: the ways it is constructed, how ideas about it have changed over time, how it surrounds us, nourishes us, has been used to justify violence and racism, how it impedes on our lives.
HIST 30636
Gender @ Work in US History
Gender has been fundamental to the organization of nearly all human societies, but what gender has meant in terms of identity, opportunity, and economic activity has varied widely across time and space. This course will explore gender at work in US history, taking a chronological approach to show gender’s evolution and ongoing intersections with class, race, age, religion, region, and sexuality from 1776 to the near present. The term “gender at work” expresses a double meaning here — first, it connotes that this is a labor history course, with an emphasis on the ways gender has operated at the workplace; second, it suggests the ubiquity of gender in shaping Americans’ lives, experiences, and imaginations not only at the workplace, but also in formal politics, informal communities, and every space in between. By exploring the ways gender has been both omnipresent and contingent throughout US history, students should better understand — and perhaps act upon — seemingly intractable contemporary conundrums involving questions of equal opportunity and pay, household division of labor, work-life balance, and the proper relationships among employers, workers, households, and government.
HIST 30640
Law and Religion in US History
Americans have long supported religious liberty under law, yet many also believed that only a religious people could guarantee the success of the Republic. Americans argued over how to define religious liberty, and over which particular religion best suited a republican government. Some said God had made certain people too inferior for citizenship, while others shot back that He had made all people equally capable. One man’s piety was another man’s oppression, one woman’s equality another woman’s blasphemy. We begin with the colonial era the concerns of the Revolutionary generation, look at the 19th Century’s reform movements and new state institutions, then consider the Civil Rights movement of the 20th Century, and the place of religion in public schools. This discussion class will examine legal documents, like judges’ rulings, and popular beliefs in political speeches and best-selling novels.
HIST 30644
Consuming America
This course traces the development of consumer society in the United States from the colonial era through the late twentieth century. It asks how Americans came to define the “good life” as one marked by material abundance and how transformations in buying and selling have shaped American culture, politics, and national identity. One of our aims will be to develop a usable historical definition of consumer society and to evaluate when such a society emerged in the United States. We will examine the role that consumption has played in defining and policing ideals of gender, race, sexuality, and class. We will also consider how Americans have used consumer practices and spaces to advance political claims and notions of citizenship. The course is organized around key turning points in American consumer capitalism: the consumer boom of the eighteenth century; the market revolution and feminization of consumption; the birth of the department store; the rise of mass consumption and commercial leisure; the development of modern advertising and sales; the spread of chain stores and shopping malls; and the globalization of American consumer culture. In addition to recent scholarship and text-based primary sources, we will analyze artifacts of consumer culture, such as advertisements, catalogs, product labels, broadsides, film, and television.
HIST 30655
Frames of History: Latinx History through Graphic Novels
The legacy of comics is ever present in society today. Many graphic novels are present in culture today, from various streaming services to box office sensations and flops to superheroes. For decades, graphic novels have provided critiques of environmental pollution, racism, the urban crisis, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. From rewriting the history of Texas to advocating for labor rights for Latina domestic workers, Latina/o creators have turned to graphic novels as a medium for documenting and disseminating their history. This course offers a broad overview of and introduction to the production of Latina/o History through Graphic Novels. The course will balance a thematic approach of central themes throughout Latina/o History, such as migration, labor, and social movements, and the methodology and terminology of reading comics. Once the center point of culture wars, graphic narratives are increasingly accepted today as forms that cultivate sophisticated types of verbal-visual literacy that actively critique forms of knowledge and contemporary policies and offer alternative forms of history. This class will explore how Latina/o graphic narratives have long been an essential source of cultural expression and central to the Latina/o communities documenting their history on their terms. From revisionist accounts to biographies of leaders to instilling superpowers to child migrants and domestic workers, graphic novels offer a compelling perspective into complementary historical narratives.
HIST 30668
The History of Energy in Modern American Life
This course will offer students a rigorous and lively encounter with multiple energy sources and their manifold effects on American society, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.Recent political developments in the US offer plenty of reasons for a course of this sort, one that can contextualize contemporary debates over energy-related matters such as global warming,national security, federal regulation, and sustainability in broad sweeps of change over time. Yet The primary goal of this course will be to provide a history of energy on its own terms. One Cannot grasp the complexities and entanglements of modern life in its entirety without first coming to terms with the ways humans demand, consume, and interact with energy – and in turn,the ways it shapes and reshapes our social structures, realigns our lived and material infrastructures, and even dictates cultural values and trends.We will interrogate these values and structural outcomes with the help of path-breaking scholarship – books and articles about coal, petroleum, electricity, and nuclear energy that not only chart their development over time, but also reveal the ways in which, at key junctures in the nation’s past, they forged new patterns of labor and race relations, corporate and community growth, state governance and land-use policy, gender and religion, regional growth andAmerica’s global reach. Moving from the Civil War to the present, from the oil patches of western Pennsylvania and West Texas to American petroleum sites in the Middle East – from the electrification of east-coast cities in the late nineteenth century to the damming of western rivers for hydropower in the early-twentieth, this course will give students the opportunity to ponder past and present energy systems within prisms of vast societal impact.
HIST 30672
Social History of American Medicine
This seminar explores the dynamic and complex history of medicine in the United States, from colonial times to the present, with a focus on how race, gender, class, and geography have shaped medical practices, healthcare institutions, and public health policies. Medicine in America has never operated in a vacuum; it has both shaped and been shaped by broader social structures. The course critically examines how medical authority was established and legitimized, often at the expense of marginalized communities, and how those communities have responded and resisted.
HIST 30805
U.S. Foreign Policy in the Cold War
This course covers the main developments in American foreign policy from World War II through the end of the Cold War. The principal topics of investigation will be wartime diplomacy and the origins of the Cold War; the Cold War and containment in Europe and Asia; Eisenhower/Dulles diplomacy; Kennedy-Johnson and Vietnam; Nixon-Kissinger and détente; Carter and the diplomacy of Human Rights; Reagan and the revival of containment; Bush and the end of the Cold War.
HIST 30912
Modern Mexican History: Art and Revolution
This course is designed to introduce students to Mexico’s modern history and its people. We will pay particular attention to political and artistic movements during the Porfiriato (1876-1910), the Revolution (1910-1938), and the post-revolutionary period (1938-1970s). We will include a detailed discussion of the recent disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, in the State of Guerrero.Students will examine what it meant to be a “militant” in the political world of artistic production and social movements and the different ways in which the Mexican state responded to this militancy. We will explore how and why a broad range of representative leaders of Mexico’s most important political and cultural revolutions used paintings, murals, graphic art, cartoons, literature, music, film, and graffiti to (A) lead a social, cultural, and political restructuring of their respective communities; (B) export their unique notions of “Revolution” to the nation and the world; and © question the contradictions that some artists (at times) faced within their own revolutionary movements.
HIST 30980
Race and Racism in Science, Medicine, and Technology
This course explores how ideas about race and racism have been intertwined with scientific, medical, and technological developments, shaping society since the 18th century. While recognizing that race is fundamentally a social construct, the course delves into scientific efforts to quantify, measure, and categorize individuals by race from early anthropometry to contemporary developments like the Human Genome Project and artificial intelligence. By critically analyzing scientific theories that produced and built upon ideas of racial hierarchy, students will develop a deep understanding of how race, racism, and racial inequality have been embedded into scientific knowledge, and thus, societal understanding. Students will also examine the historical context of racial disparities in healthcare, including the development of racialized medical theories, and will explore the role of technology in reinforcing or challenging racial biases, from the early days of photography to modern AI and surveillance technologies. This course is tailored for students with interests in the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge, as well as those curious about the origins of scientific racism and racial inequality.
HIST 33270
The Reformation
Welcome to The Reformation. In this class, we will focus on the history of Christianity in the late medieval and early modern periods, focusing especially on the divisive movements that have come to be known as “The Reformation.” We will begin by investigating the origins of reforming impulses in the late medieval church, leading up to the watershed moment in 1517, when Martin Luther famously challenged the Church’s authority by posting the Ninety-Five Theses. We will then trace the fallout of Luther’s proclamation across Europe and, indeed, the globe.
HIST 35049
Economy and Business in History
How do we explain the important role of the state in China’s economy past and present? Why did China not experience an industrial revolution in the 19th century? Why did capitalism never take off? These are just a few examples of important questions we will address in this course. The relationship between visible and invisible hands, i.e. state and market, provides the framework for our in-depth discussion of China’s economic and business history that geographically includes Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese overseas communities across Asia. At the beginning of the 21st century, China has reached a stunning level of growth and entrepreneurship embedded in a complex, constantly changing framework of economic, social, and political structures. A historically informed approach to China’s business and economic development allows us to uncover the institutional and organizational origins of firms, different forms of entrepreneurship and the relationship between government and business in a long-term perspective. This course also offers a comparative approach to the issue of China’s industrialization and economic modernization across time in a global setting.
HIST 35453
The French Revolution and Napoleon
The French Revolution created a turning point in history by paving the way for modern politics and society. Napoleon’s empire, on the other hand, toppled some of the oldest European monarchies and shook up the international status quo. During two and a half turbulent decades, the French destroyed feudalism, created a constitutional monarchy, founded a republic, and built an empire that stretched across the continent. Our course will focus on how the French reinvented the social, cultural, and political dimensions of their world from the 1780s to 1815. We will ask major questions such as: What were the origins of the French Revolution? How did the revolutionaries recreate political culture and social structures? Why did the Revolution radicalize at first but eventually slide into an empire? Was Napoleon the “son of the Revolution” or did he betray its major goals? Of special note, our course includes a 4-week “Reacting to the Past” game that allows you to engage in history from a completely new perspective. During this historical role-playing unit, you will become a specific member of the National Assembly or the Parisian crowd. To win, you must pass a constitution favorable to your position while wrestling “with the threat of foreign invasion, political and religious struggles, and questions of liberty and citizenship.” Although we may change the course of history within the unit, you will root your arguments in resources available to your historical persona: primary documents, political treatises, inspiring speeches, secret collaborations, and “current” events.
HIST 35636
Wild Kingdom: Animals in North American History
Animals are everywhere in North American history. From the living room to the back alley, animals created history on their own and with humans help. Steeds bore generals into battle while rats bore fleas with diseases that flattened armies. This course will introduce students to animal studies and offer them a sampling of the manifold ways non-human creatures drove economies, shouldered burdens, entered families, and entertained audiences. The topics covered in the class will include co-evolution, the fur trade, people eating animals and animals eating people, pet keeping, animal symbolism, and endangered species. The course invites students to see North American history anew through the eyes of a race horse, a sled dog, a passenger pigeon, a grizzly bear, or a field mouse.
HIST 35850
History of the Space Race
This course is an upper-level history seminar aimed at exploring the history of space flight from political, military, diplomatic, technological, and cultural perspectives. It begins with works of imagination – like Jules Vernes? From the Earth to the Moon – that inspired the early generation of rocket scientists, like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard. It then traces how the military utility of modern rockets, first mass produced for use as a weapons system in the First World War, turned the new science into a key strategic competition between Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1930s. From Germany?s V-2 rocket program to the missile race of the 1950s, the course then explores the strategic impetus behind the highly militarized space competition of the early Cold War. Following the success of Apollo, the strategic aims and goals shifted, and resources drained away from the American and Soviet space programs; readings will then explore the role of spaceflight in intelligence gathering and science diplomacy. Following the Cold War, competition in space seemed to be at an end, but the privatization revolution and growing strategic competition with China and Russia have given birth to a new space race, with targets including the Moon and Mars. In sum, students will address the key question: why space? How has the human imagination, technological change, and strategic necessity driven humanity into orbit, to the moon, and beyond?