Students in the Public History Initiative class

Connecting students with the excitement of historical discovery

Academics

The Department of History is committed to pursuing excellence in historical scholarship and teaching across many different time periods and research interests. Its outstanding faculty specializes in a wide array of historical issues and themes that transcend particular regions and periods. Courses connect undergraduate and graduate students with the excitement of historic discovery and provide a rigorous training in researching and analyzing the human past.

Popular Destinations

Undergraduate Program Educational Goals Courses Graduate Program Professional Development History Graduate Field Handbook

Attention Undergraduates:

Are you interested in becoming a history major? You can apply online, after securing your own major advisor. For more information: history-major-application-information. Paper Applications are available at 120 Mary Ann Wood Drive.

Important notices:

Codes for pre-1800 and World Areas courses are currently available soon on the Course List ( https://courses.cornell.edu/courses/hist/), and in archival Catalogs.

Pre-1800 is coded as HPE
World Areas are coded as HAN, HNA, HEU, HGS, HTR
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Spring Event:

Announcing History’s 2nd Open House/Trivia Night at 120 Mary Ann Wood Drive

Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Time: 4:30-6:00

Location: 120 Mary Ann Wood Drive, Room 125

Details: Join us for a night of fun trivia, a chance to hear history’s faculty talk about their course offerings, and to find out what CHS is. Handouts (including course flyers) will be available, faculty will be on hand to answer questions, this will be a great time to meet other majors and minors, snacks, and earn prizes for trivia questions. Highlights about our first trivia event: https://history.cornell.edu/news/history-department-hosts-lively-open-house-and-trivia-night.

*Please share the details about this event with friends who are interested in History!

History News

HIST 2154 Sex and Power in Jewish History

3/19/2026

HIST 2154 Sex and Power in Jewish History (also JWST 2851, RELST 2154) (HST-AS) (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Monday and Wednesday: 2:30-4:15

Professor Olga Litvak

Jewish men and women in early modern Europe lived their lives within a gendered social order inherited from the Talmudic period. The relationship between sex and power remained fundamental to Jewish communal discipline until the eighteenth century. The explosion of vernacular publishing, increasing economic and geographic mobility and the coming of emancipation challenged existing gender norms and liberated Jewish desire - well, almost. As we will see, modernity has an ambiguous effect on Jewish sexual expression and Jewish sexual politics. It is not clear that the emancipation of Jewish men had the same emancipatory effect on Jewish women. Jewish patriarchy proved unexpectedly resilient. In this course, we will explore why - despite Judaism's reputation for liberal attitudes to sex - neither most Jewish men nor many Jewish women embraced the possibilities of personal liberation from a reproductive regime of rigid self-control and near compulsory heterosexual monogamy.

Escalation playbook: Why limited strikes rarely stay limited

3/20/2026

With the the Pentagon seeking $200 billion for the escalating Iran conflict, David Silbey, historian in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, sees a typical escalatory pattern. He analyzes Strait of Hormuz closures, risks, and deployment options shaping U.S. defense policy.

HIST 1965 Introduction to African History

3/19/2026

HIST 1965 Introduction to African History (HST-AS) (HIST-HGS)

Monday and Wednesday: 10:10-11:25 plus discussion

Professor Rachel Sandwell

This course will offer a broad overview of African history from the development of early human societies to the modern era, and a critical introduction to how historians approach the writing of African history. We will think about the origins of the discipline and field of African history, the politics of history writing, and the many sites of historical thinking outside the academy. We will consider major events in the continent’s history, including the emergence of early societies and states; religious transformations; innovations in agriculture; the development of regional and global trade systems; slavery; colonization and decolonization; and African intellectual and artistic productions. The course will familiarize students with methods, concepts, and debates that are central to the field of African history.

HIST 1631 Sex, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

3/19/2026

HIST 1631 Sex, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (HST-AS) (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 9:05-9:55

Professor Rachel Weil

Why did wives who killed their husbands in early modern Europe get charged not with murder but with petty treason? Did rape victims ever get justice? Why did the witch craze happen when it did? Were female thieves treated with more leniency than male ones? This course considers sexualized crimes, crimes against women, and crimes that women were thought to frequently perpetrate—rape, witchcraft, infanticide, prostitution, crimes against masters and husbands—to see how law interacts with gendered relations of power and the policing of sexuality. We will discuss the reasons why some crimes were associated with women, and learn to analyze primary sources like trial records, news and ballads, and criminal autobiography that reveal cultural assumptions and significance.