Courses

How can we learn about the past? How do we tell stories about the past? How do we judge the truth of falsity of evidence? Writing History seminars introduce students to many different ways of interpreting and writing about the past, and to the wide range of sources that historians use: from diaries to tax rolls, from scraps of textile to films and advertisements. Topics and readings vary by section.

Full details for HIST 1200 - FWS: Writing History

When Mary Toft gave birth to rabbits in 1726, only some (but not all) doctors thought she was faking. Why was her story plausible, and how were the rabbits explained? Who controlled childbirth, and who had the power to decide whether a pregnancy was real? How did Mary Toft experience the event? Monstrous births, dishonest midwives, infanticide, and the powers of pregnant women were topics of fascination and debate in early modern Europe and America.  In this course we use writings by midwives, medical treatises, letters, autobiographies, news reports, and trial records to examine practices and beliefs surrounding childbirth, and at how these in turn reflected concerns about property, sexuality, health and religion.

Full details for HIST 1230 - FWS: Monstrous Births, Scheming Midwives: Childbirth in Europe 1500-1800

This course looks at Islam as a global phenomenon, both historically and in the contemporary world.  We spend time on the genesis of Islam in the Middle East, but then move across the Muslim would in various weeks (to Africa;Turkey; Iran; Eurasia; Southeast Asia; East Asia) and to the West to see how Islam looks across global boundaries.  The course tries to flesh out the diversity of Islam within the central message of this world religion.

Full details for HIST 1402 - FWS: Global Islam

How do we make sense of the Brexit vote in Great-Britain, the rise of political Islam and the "veil" debates in France, the anti-globalization movements in Spain and Greece, the growth of demagogic anti-immigrant parties from the Netherlands to Italy, or the fact that Swedes get more than thirty paid days off per year?  This course seeks to answer these questions by exploring the history of modern Europe.  Among other themes, we will discuss the Protestant Reformation, the rise of absolutism, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialism, colonialism, the Russian Revolution, the two world wars, decolonization and immigration, May '68, and the construction of the European Union.  In conjunction, we will examine how modern ideologies (liberalism, Marxism, imperialism, conservatism, fascism, totalitarianism) were developed and challenged.  Through a wide array of historical documents (fiction, letters, philosophy, treatises, manifestoes, films, and art), we will consider why "old Europe" is still relevant for us today.

Full details for HIST 1511 - The Making of Modern Europe, from 1500 to the Present

America is finishing up two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. They have been the longest wars in American history and have ended amid much ambivalence about the US engagement in each place and the results. They are part of a series of wars that America has fought as a global power, with a global reach, sending its forces thousands of miles from home. That global reach is not new, and goes back all the way to 1898 and the Spanish-American War. This course will look at the American military experience from our first tentative steps onto the global stage in 1898, to the earth-spanning conflicts of World War I and II, to the nuclear tension of Cold War conflicts, and finish with the current Long War against terrorism, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Full details for HIST 1571 - American Defense Policy and Military History from the Two World Wars to the Global War on Terror

This course seeks a fuller recounting of U.S. history by remapping what we understand as "America." We will examine traditional themes in the teaching of U.S. history—territorial expansion and empire, migration and nation building, industrialization and labor, war and revolution, and citizenship and transnationalism—but we will examine this "American experience" in a broader hemispheric context and include as actors americanos of Spanish, Mexican, Caribbean, and Central/South American ancestries.

Full details for HIST 1802 - Introduction to Latinos in U.S. History

This course provides an overview of disastrous attempts at colonization in the Americas from ca. 1500 through ca. 1760. Over thirteen weeks, we will engage with the question of why some attempts at colonization failed and why some succeeded. We will also explore other early modern failures, from bankrupt monopoly trade companies to ill-fated buccaneer communities and entire cities destroyed by earthquakes and hurricanes. Exploring failures, rather than successes, will help students understand the contingent process of colonial expansion as well as the roles of Indigenous dispossession, African slavery, and inter-imperial trade networks to the success or failure of early modern colonies. Over the course of the semester, my lectures will cover broad themes in failed enterprises, while students will read several monographs and primary-source collections on specific disasters. Some central questions include: Why did some colonies fail and other thrived? What role did social factors like gender, race, and class play in colonial failures? What can we learn about colonialism and imperialism through a focus on when those processes ended in disasters?

Full details for HIST 1986 - Disasters! A History of Colonial Failures in the Atlantic World, 1450-1750

Independent Study based supervised reading with history faculty.  Student must complete Independent Study Form with faculty supervisor for determining requirements and for permission to enroll through the online system (https://data.arts/cornell.edu/as-stus/indep_study_intro.cfm).  Student then work with their faculty supervisor throughout the semester for successful completion and grading of the agreed upon requirements.

Full details for HIST 2001 - Supervised Reading - Undergraduate

Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University "the first American university," referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where "any person can find instruction in any study." The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university.

Full details for HIST 2005 - The First American University

This course centers Black women who have often described their reproductive health experiences as "fighting for our lives." While grounded in an exploration of Black women 's experiences in the US, this course also looks across the diaspora to issues of access, rights, and equity in reproductive health. Deeply inspired by the field of Black Feminist Health Science Studies, a field that advocates for the centrality of activism in healthcare and its importance for Black women's overall health and well-being, this course examines how issues of gender, race, class, ability, and power intersect to inform how reproductive health is conceptualized, practiced, and experienced. Ultimately, this course will yield a deeper understanding of how Black women have transformed existential and literal threats on their lives into a robust terrain of community-based activism and a movement for reproductive justice. We will read across a range of texts and genres from the historical and theoretical, to memoir and documentary. With what we learn together, we will craft contributions to public debates around healthcare issues impacting Black women.

Full details for HIST 2023 - Fighting for Our Lives: Black Women's Reproductive Health and Activism in Historical Perspective

The Middle Ages are usually imagined as a time of manly men and feminine women: no room for gender ambiguity in Conan the Barbarian! Yet gender, then as now, was in fact unstable, multiple, and above all, constructed. This course explores the different ways masculinity was understood, manufactured, and manipulated in northern Europe – primarily early Ireland, England, and Scandinavia – using a variety of literary, legal, historical, archaeological, and artistic sources. Students will gain new perspectives on both gender and sex, on the one hand, and the history of medieval Europe, on the other.

Full details for HIST 2082 - Of Ice and Men: Masculinities in the Medieval North

What is the American empire? Is empire even the right word to describe U.S. power in the world today or in the past? If so, is the American empire formal or informal, and is the United States a reluctant superpower or a belligerent hegemon? When did the empire begin? And is it in decline today? In addressing these questions, this seminar will offer an in-depth look at key moments in the history of the United States and its foreign relations, ranging from the American revolutionary war and historians' debates about the founders' thinking in relation to empire; the "imperial moment" of 1898, when the United States acquired overseas colonies for the first time; the beginnings of the national security state in 1917 with the entry of the United States into the First World War; the "American Century", or the post-World War II years when the United States was the most powerful nation in the world; and the era of unipolarity after the end of the Cold War and which culminated in the Wars on Terror. Throughout, we will draw upon primary and secondary sources to examine the ideas and practices which have shaped U.S. foreign relations, including continental expansion, the frontier, imperial anticolonialism, the open door, covert operations, extraordinary rendition, police action, and more. Taking both a chronological and thematic approach, this class offers an examination of the past in order to understand some of the key issues facing the United States, and the world, today.

Full details for HIST 2212 - The U.S. Empire

Maoism and Chinese Communism are not history after Mao's death in 1976. In China, Maoism holds the key to the enduring success of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one of the most remarkable organizations of the 20th and 21st centuries that has survived the collapse of communism in Europe and the USSR. With the beneficial transformation brought by capitalism and globalization in China, the end of the Cold War and the narrative of the "end of history" cannot explain the resurgence of Maoism.

Full details for HIST 2435 - Global Maoism: History and Present

In this course we will read some of the most influential micro-history writers and explore examples of different subgenres of microhistory, such as individual biographies, family histories, social histories of towns, city, and village histories, histories of singular events and the impact they have on a family or a community, a history of an object, and fictional narratives of individual experiences of global events. The course aims to explore how seemingly a limited-scale of analysis can illuminate the experience of much larger events. The course will draw on examples that focus on a wide range of experiences from around the world, with special attention paid to the the Middle East and Africa. The final research project will build on the student's own family's history, or the history of one individual, or an object (such as an inherited jewelry, a document, a painting, or a photograph etc) and research to situate that person/object/family's history in the context of an event of global important (such as a war, colonialism, mass violence, environmental history, empire, etc).

Full details for HIST 2462 - Personal Histories of Global Events: Microhistorical Approaches to the Writing of Global History

This course examines the development of the Caribbean since the Haitian Revolution.  It  will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and our readings pay particular attention to the ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity shape the histories of the peoples of the region.  The course uses a pan-Caribbean approach by focusing largely on three islands - Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba - that belonged to competing empires.  Although the imperial powers that held these nations shaped their histories in distinctive ways these nations share certain common features. Therefore, we examine the differences and similarities of their histories as they evolved from plantation based colonies to independent nations.

Full details for HIST 2541 - Modern Caribbean History

The vast Congo Basin region has shaped the world in ways that are often ignored. Its mineral resources travel the globe – the uranium used to bomb Japan in 1945 came from the Congo, and if you have a cellphone, you probably have a bit of the Congo in your pocket. But the region has been a key site for global trade for centuries. More than 400 years ago, diplomats from the mighty Kongo kingdom were stationed in Brazil and Europe, intervening in global affairs. Later, more than seven million enslaved people were forcibly taken from the region, a trade that brought terrible suffering, but also ensured that Congo region culture and politics would shape the Atlantic world. The Congo's first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, inspired generations of freedom fighters around the world, and his assassination at the hands of Belgian forces and their Congolese allies (with aid from Canadian soldiers and the CIA) has inspired outrage ever since – and transformed African geopolitics. The Congo was arguably the site of the first struggle for a "second decolonization" on the African continent, and activists have been fighting to democratize the state since the 1960s. It is famed for its novelists, philosophers, musicians, and artists. This course will explore the Congo region's global influence, and consider how diverse globalizations shaped the region.

Full details for HIST 2556 - The Global Congo: Diplomacy, Extraction, and Resistance

This course focuses on the human condition of Chinese women after 1949. In the name of the Women's liberation movement since the early 1900s, do Chinese women eventually hold up the half sky? From the cradle to the grave, what was most challenging in women's life? How did political, economic, and cultural forces frame women's professional careers and private life? No judgments nor imaginations. Using multi-media, such as Chinese independent documentary films, music, and photographs, students will discover the hidden stories behind the mainstream narratives. Workshops with film directors, pop music singers, and photographers offer students an unusual way of accessing all backstage field experiences.

Full details for HIST 2575 - Tyranny and Dignity: Chinese Women from the Cultural Revolution to the White Paper Revolution

This lecture course serves as an introduction to the historical study of humanity's interrelationship with the natural world. Environmental history is a quickly evolving field, taking on increasing importance as the environment itself becomes increasingly important in world affairs. During this semester, we'll examine the sometimes unexpected ways in which "natural" forces have shaped human history (the role of germs, for instance, in the colonization of North America); the ways in which human beings have shaped the natural world (through agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization, as well as the formation of things like wildlife preserves); and the ways in which cultural, scientific, political, and philosophical attitudes toward the environment have changed over time. This is designed as an intensely interdisciplinary course: we'll view history through the lenses of ecology, literature, art, film, law, anthropology, and geography. Our focus will be on the United States, but, just as environmental pollutants cross borders, so too will this class, especially toward the end, when we attempt to put U.S. environmental history into a geopolitical context. This course is meant to be open to all, including non-majors and first-year students.

Full details for HIST 2581 - Environmental History

This course surveys modern U.S. history, from Reconstruction to the contemporary period. It will examine how race has been the terrain on which competing ideas of the American nation have been contested. From struggles over citizenship rights to broader meanings of national belonging, we will explore how practices, ideas, and representations have shaped political, cultural, and social power. A key concern for this course is examining how groups and individuals have pursued racial justice from the late-nineteenth century to the present.

Full details for HIST 2641 - Race and Modern US History

One thing many Americans think they know is their Indians: Pocahontas, the First Thanksgiving, fighting cowboys, reservation poverty, and casino riches. Under our very noses, however, Native American history has evolved into one of the most exciting, dynamic, and contentious fields of inquiry into America's past. It is now safer to assume, as Comanche historian Paul Chaat Smith has pointed out, that everything you know about Indians is in fact wrong. Most people have much to "unlearn" about Native American history before true learning can take place. This course aims to achieve that end by (re)introducing students to key themes and trends in the history of North America's indigenous nations. Employing an issues-oriented approach, the course stresses the ongoing complexity of Native American societies' engagements with varieties of settler colonialism since 1492 and dedicates itself to a concerted program of myth-busting. As such, the course will provide numerous opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking and reading skills.

Full details for HIST 2660 - Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong: Unlearning Native American History

This lecture class will explore the socio-cultural history of modern Egypt from the late 18th century to the 21st century "Arab Spring." We will explore Egyptian history under the Ottomans and the Mamluks, the unsuccessful French attempts to colonize Egypt, and the successful British occupation of the country. We will then examine the development of Egyptian nationalism from the end of the 19th century through Nasser's pan-Arabism to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. We will accomplish this with the aid of a variety of texts and media, including novels and films.

Full details for HIST 2672 - The History and Politics of Modern Egypt

This course offers an introduction to the history of the Roman empire, from the prehistoric settlements on the site of Rome to the fall of the Western empire in the fifth century and its revival in the East with Byzantium. Lectures will provide a narrative and interpretations of major issues, including: empire building, cultural unity and diversity, religious transformations, changing relations between state and society. Discussion section will be the opportunity to engage with important texts, ancient and modern, about Rome.

Full details for HIST 2689 - Roman History

The Great Qing (1644-1911), a multi-ethnic empire that conquered China proper from the northeastern borderlands, expanded into central Asia, Mongolia, and Tibet, and consolidated the China-based empire's control over its southwestern frontiers. An heir to both Chinese and Inner Asian traditions, the Qing empire laid the foundation for the modern Chinese nation-state. In this course, students will focus on the political, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of China's long eighteenth century. Students will also locate the early modern Chinese empire in a regional and global context, examining its power influence in Korea and Southeast Asia, and its encounters and interactions with Western and Japanese imperialist powers. These encounters and interactions contributed to the domestic turmoil and foreign invasions that eventually led to the demise of China's imperial tradition. But they also gave rise to new forces that would shape the fate of modern China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Spring 2021 onward, this course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for History Major

Full details for HIST 2931 - Making of an Empire in China

Independent Study based supervised research with a history faculty member.  Student must complete an on-line Independent Study form with a faculty supervisor to determine requirements and for permission.  Students then work with their faculty supervisor throughout the semester for successful completion and grading of the agreed upon requirements.

Full details for HIST 3002 - Supervised Research - Undergraduate

This course uses the history of the Spanish Inquisition, and the richness of its archival records, to explore the variety of ways in which the pursuit of heresy was intertwined with transforming how knowledge was constructed, scrutinized, repressed, and deployed in the early modern world. Topics covered will include the struggle over religious authenticity in the age of Reformation, the formation of the bureaucratic state, the rise of empiricism and the scientific revolution, the birth of modern psychiatry, and the intellectual revolutions typically associated with the Enlightenment.

Full details for HIST 3175 - Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Inquisitors, Heretics, and Truth in the Early Modern World

This course aims to familiarize students with the history of Scandinavia, ca. 800-1100 ad. Although well known as a dramatic chapter in medieval history, this period remains enigmatic and often misunderstood. Our goal will be to set Norse history within its European context, observing similarities with processes elsewhere in the medieval world, the better to perceive what makes the Norse unique. We will examine the social, economic and political activities of the Norsemen in continental Scandinavia, in Western and Eastern Europe, and in the North Atlantic. 

Full details for HIST 3200 - The Viking Age

In the conditions of strict censorship and numerous limitations on various forms of political organization and activism, literature and cinema, especially Iran's internationally acclaimed art cinematography, have been the major outlets through which the social and political concerns of the Iranian society have been voiced throughout the modern period. The course explores major themes and periods in Iran's transition from the secular state of the Pahlavi dynasty to the religious state of the Islamic Republic in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will focus on social as well as political themes including the Anglo-Russo-American Occupation of Iran, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, U.S.-Iranian relations, Iraq-Iran War, the Green Movement and the crisis of Islamic government, Images of the West in Iran, Modern Youth Culture, Gender segregation, and the struggle between modernity and traditionalism in contemporary Iran. We will watch selected Iranian documentary and feature films and draw on modern Persian literature but will approach them not as art forms but as reflections of major socio-economic, political, and religious phenomena in Iran's modern history. We will read and watch what the Iranians wrote and produced, read and watched, in order to view and explain Iran and its relations with the West through the Iranian eyes. We will examine how the Iranians perceived themselves and the others, how they viewed their own governments and the West, what issues inspired and shaped their outlook outside the official censorship during the period in question. All readings are in English translation and the films are with English subtitles. The course includes lectures deconstructing political, religious, and social evolution of modern Iran as well as regular class discussions where we will address the issues in question from a variety of perspectives.

Full details for HIST 3519 - History of State and Society in Modern Iran: Through Literature and Film

This course will take the students through the age of reforms in the Ottoman Empire, the rising of nationalism, and the encroachment of colonialism in the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, and the collapse of the empire. Emphasis will be placed on analyzing various historical narratives of ethno-religious nationalism using Turkey, Greece/Cyprus, and Lebanon, as case studies. 

Full details for HIST 3542 - The Ottoman Empire 1800-1922

This seminar examines the history of the United States' involvement with Middle East beginning with evangelical efforts in the 19th century and President Wilson's engagement with the colonial powers in the early 20th century during and after WWI. The discovery of vast Middle Eastern oil reserves and the retreat of the colonial powers from the region following WWII drew successive US administrations ever deeper into Middle Eastern politics. In due course the US became entrenched in the post-colonial political imagination as heir to the British and the French especially as it challenged the Soviet Union for influence in the region during the Cold War. And that only takes the story to the mid-1950s and the Eisenhower administration. Our discussions will be based on secondary readings and primary sources as we interrogate the tension between realist and idealist policies toward the Middle East and trace how these tensions play out in subsequent developments including the origins and trajectory of the US strategic alliances with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey and conflict with Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the two Gulf Wars.

Full details for HIST 3687 - The US and the Middle East

This course invites students to consider how Black women interacted with material objects and how these artifacts informed the contexts of their daily lives. the history of Black women as creators, consumers, and collectors of artifacts tells a story about American society, culture, and the contributions of Black women's labors and ideas to the production and meaning of material culture across time. From the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, Black women experienced layered relationships to artifacts, some of which they were forced to create under the system of chattel slavery and others they encountered through the prisms of desire and liberation. these varied contexts that inform Black women's connections to material and visual objects shape how they assign meaning to these artifacts and their cultural significance. Students will engage with course themes through research-based curatorial projects that introduce them to public history and digital history methods. The course will conclude with the development of a digital archive focused on curating the history of Black women's experiences with material culture.

Full details for HIST 3750 - Black Women and Material Culture

It may seem obvious that World War II was a global event, but the history of the war has often been told within national frames: the story of Britain "standing alone" in the Blitz, the "surprise" Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbour, the Soviet Union's "Great Patriotic War" or China's "War of Resistance" against Japan. This class explores those interpretations and their limitations, seeking to understand what allowed these various wars to be unified, in military terms but also in popular memory, as a singular "world war." In so doing, the class searches for the war's beginnings outside of Europe and traces its ends to the shatter-zones of the Soviet frontier, anticolonial rebellions in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, civil wars raging across the world, from Greece to China, and the rise of American global power. Looking at the war from multiple angles – encompassing the interrelated histories of race, gender, capitalism, imperialism, the environment and, of course, the military -- the course starts with an overview of the world in 1919 and concludes with the partition of the Korean peninsula in 1953. In between, students will traverse the globe as they are asked to examine the war between the great powers, popular uprisings against both the Allied and Axis powers, the Holocaust and resistance to it, the experiences of women, the importance of key battles, the lives of soldiers, and the physical devastation of the war itself, fought across land, sea, and air. At the end, the class will discuss what made the Second World War truly global, and ask whether it really ended in 1945.

Full details for HIST 3825 - World War II: A Global History

Across twentieth-century history, race and war have been dynamic forces in shaping economic organization and everyday livelihoods. This course will approach labor and working-class history, through a focus on global war as well as 'wars at home.' Racial and warfare events often intersect—in the histories of presidents and activists, business leaders and industrial workers, CIA agents and police, soldiers and prisoners, American laborers abroad and non-Americans migrating stateside. In this course, we'll consider how race and war have been linked—from the rise of Jim Crow and U.S. empire in the 1890s, to the WWII 'Greatest Generation' and its diverse workplaces, to Vietnam and the civil rights movement, to the Iraq wars and immigrant workers, to debates about what has been called a 'military-industrial complex' and a 'prison-industrial complex'.

Full details for HIST 3884 - Race and War in History: Workers, Soldiers, Prisoners, Activists

Surveys the modern history of Southeast Asia with special attention to colonialism, the Chinese diaspora, and socio-cultural institutions.  Considers global transformations that brought "the West" into people's lives in Southeast Asia.  Focuses on the development of the modern nation-state, but also questions the narrative by incorporating groups that are typically excluded.  Assigns primary texts in translation. 

Full details for HIST 3960 - Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century

This seminar is an introduction to the theory, practice, and art of historical research and writing. One key purpose of this course is to prepare students to work on longer research projects—especially an Honors Thesis. We will analyze the relationship between evidence and argument in historical writing; assess the methods and possible biases in various examples of historical writing; identify debates and sources relevant to research problems; think about how to use sources creatively; and discuss the various methodological issues associated with historical inquiry, analysis, and presentation.  This course is required for all students wishing to write an Honors Thesis in their senior year.  It should be taken in either semester of the junior year, or in spring of the sophomore year if you are planning to be abroad in your junior year.  NOTE: you do NOT need to be enrolled in the Honors Program in order to sign up for this course.

Full details for HIST 4000 - Introduction to Historical Research

This course is designed to facilitate student's successful completion of their History Department Honors theses through regular deadlines and small group writing workshops.

Full details for HIST 4002 - Honors Research

What does it mean to be Black and Indigenous? For much of United States history, at least, to be Black and Indigenous was a legal if not social impossibility. Even as societies around the world have embraced the pluralism of multiraciality Black-Indigenous peoples have found themselves largely absent from both historical and contemporary conversations surrounding blackness and indigeneity. This course does the important work of excavating the histories of Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. We will do so by examining case studies alongside the writing and artwork of Black-Indigenous figures in order to understand more about the relationships, politics, and meanings of Black-Indigenous identity.

Full details for HIST 4023 - Black and Indigenous Histories

This course will offer students an opportunity to view the process of shaping national debates from the perspective of the United States Senate. The modern Senate will serve as the point of reference for an inquiry into the development of the institution's powers under the Constitution during the past 200 years. Class readings, lectures and discussions will focus on the themes of continuity and change, the role of individual senators, and the institutional evolution of the Senate. In addition to general class reading and written examinations, each student will write a short paper and participate in an oral presentation.

Full details for HIST 4030 - History of the United States Senate

This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of American history: racialized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both.

Full details for HIST 4109 - The Practice and Theory of Public History: Slavery and Self-Emancipation in US History

This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other "undesirable" areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to "Black" heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.

Full details for HIST 4112 - The Historical Geography of Black America

Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution. This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia. The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea. Interaction with the West is a major theme. Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics. The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in "traditional" Asian cultures. The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism.

Full details for HIST 4127 - The Body Politic in Asia

One of the most troubling realizations of the 20th century has been the extent to which human activities have transformed the environment on a global scale. The rapid growth of human population and the acceleration of the global economy have meant that the 20th century, in environmental terms, has been unlike any other in world history. This course takes a comparative approach, examining crucial themes in the environmental history of the 20th-century world in different times, places, and ecologies.

Full details for HIST 4131 - Comparative Environmental History

Tolstoy is impossible. An aristocrat who renounced the privileges of wealth and rank. A man of titanic appetites who repudiated meat, alcohol and sex. A Christian who did not believe in God and tried to rewrite the Gospels. An anarchist who ruled his estate like an ancient patriarch. A writer of genius who thought literature was evil and a waste of time and referred to his greatest novel as "garbage." A pacifist who described the frontline experience of soldiers in the most careful, loving detail. In Tolstoy's imaginative universe, we may find the origin of contemporary conflicts and anxieties about money, about love and about power. But Tolstoy's modern consciousness was not made in Paris or New York - Tolstoy was made in late imperial Russia, notoriously the least modern country in nineteenth century Europe. How, then, did Tolstoy happen? How can we account historically for the contradictions that informed his epic project of self-fashioning? In this seminar, we will see Tolstoy at work in his single-handed creation of a counter-culture at war with the social and political currents of his time - and of ours.

Full details for HIST 4172 - Tolstoy: History and Counter-Culture

This course explores the intricacies of identity-making and processes of racialization in the Atlantic World from ca. 1500 onward. The range of topics covered include the encounters between Europeans and Indigenous people in the Americas and the invention of the "Indians," the spread of blood purity discourses across the Ibero-Atlantic, the intertwining of African Slavery and racializing ideologies in the British Atlantic, the development of medical frameworks for defining social differences, and the myriad ways in which subaltern groups and individuals resisted, adopted, and subverted the identities that were ascribed to them.

Full details for HIST 4474 - Race and Identity in the Atlantic World

The dispossession of Indigenous nations by Europeans represents the foundation of the past five centuries of North American history. Yet the truth of that history remains cloaked behind various Western legal-religious justifications for the dispossession of lndigenous American populations by Europeans (i.e., terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, the right of conquest, and Manifest Destiny). Through analysis of primary texts and up-to-date historical and legal scholarship, students in this course will unpack these still-thriving tropes of settler-colonial justification for dispossession, assess the true impact of the taking of Indigenous lands, and explore prospects for meaningful reconciliation in the present.

Full details for HIST 4674 - Dispossession, Truth, and Reconciliation

Frontiers and borders are at the heart of our international system. From the Great Wall of China to Donald Trump's plans to build wall along the US-Mexico border, frontiers have always been invested with strategic and symbolic importance. Even today, when boundaries of all kinds are transcended by global networks, borders remain powerful. Borders, walls, and fences have also had a tremendous symbolic significance throughout time. We will survey a variety of historiographical texts, spanning regions across the globe to find out how historians have been making sense of borders – how they have explored what borders mean to people and states, how borders define places, and what frontiers can reveal about larger processes of migration, state- formation, and governance.

Full details for HIST 4690 - Borders, Frontiers, and Walls in Global History

What does it mean to travel across political and cultural boundaries? How are people's thought, behavior, and identity shaped by such experiences and vice versa? How do historians explore and represent transnational and transcultural figures and their stories? Is it possible for historians to help the audience not only understand but also "experience" transnationality through narrative? The relationship between analytical history and history as narrative is complex and everchanging. We build on this relationship not by theorizing it but by examining history works and practicing writing history, in the context of lives and stories of transnational figures, that integrates analysis and narrative. Students read analytical works and narratives about people who operated, willingly or not, in multiple geographical, political, cultural, and religious worlds. While reflecting on the pros and cons of approaching history writing in different ways, students also develop skills in working on primary sources and develop projects on transnational figures of their own choice from any areas or historical times, from proposal to full-fledged papers.

Full details for HIST 4773 - Twice A Stranger: Transnational Figures and Their Stories

This seminar is devoted entirely to the writing of a substantive research paper, the dissertation prospectus, or fellowship proposal. Students will share research proposals, annotated bibliographies, outlines and portions of rough drafts. Class meetings will be devoted to discussing what students have produced, and general issues associated with constructing the dissertation prospectus and research papers.

Full details for HIST 6000 - Graduate Research Seminar

This workshop-style course provides a weekly opportunity for graduate students across all the fields of History and related disciplines to learn about different skills and competencies to succeed in graduate school. Some weeks, we will focus on how to do research in archives, taking notes and organizing sources, grant-writing, preparing an article for a journal, applying for jobs, writing a cover letter, compiling a CV and writing an annual report. Students will also have opportunities to practice giving conference presentations, job talks, and participating in video interviews.  The aim is to create a secure space where graduate students learn how to succeed in graduate school.

Full details for HIST 6002 - Professional Development Seminar

This course is a forum, organized jointly by students and the Director of Graduate Studies,  for the reading and discussion of precirculated papers, written mainly by graduate students in the History program. Students registering are expected to attend regularly.

Full details for HIST 6006 - History Colloquium Series

A research colloquium designed for European history graduate students. The colloquium will offer a forum for students to present papers and to discuss the work of Europeanists at Cornell as well as visiting scholars.

Full details for HIST 6010 - European History Colloquium

This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of American history: racialized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both.

Full details for HIST 6109 - The Practice and Theory of Public History: Slavery and Self-Emancipation in US History

This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other "undesirable" areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to "Black" heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.

Full details for HIST 6112 - The Historical Geography of Black America

Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution. This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia. The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea. Interaction with the West is a major theme. Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics. The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in "traditional" Asian cultures. The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism.

Full details for HIST 6127 - The Body Politic in Asia

The eighteenth century witnessed a number of important political, economic, scientific, and artistic transformations that shook the foundations of the Atlantic world. This seminar will focus on the intersections of art and liberation in the 18th century Americas. We will explore the role of visual culture, including maps, illustrations, paintings, talismanic objects, and ephemera in the mobilization of political dissent and revolution. The course will consist of a series of case studies that include the Tupac Amaru and Katari Rebellions (Peru/Bolivia), the Haitian Revolution, the Aponte Rebellion (Cuba), and various slave revolts across the Caribbean and Brazil, with a focus on the use of visuals in the spread of information and the creation of insurgent imaginaries in the years leading up to Independence in the 1820s.  This course would bring in students from a variety of disciplines, including History, Art History, Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies, given its interdisciplinary focus and the relevance of these transformative political and social movements to the present day.

Full details for HIST 6133 - Visual Culture during the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic World

Full details for HIST 6162 - Graduate History Proseminar: Archives, Writing, and Research in Southeast Asian History

The aim of this course is to investigate the relationship between history and images, by considering, the work of an outstanding representative of twentieth-century critical theory.  Siegfried Kracauer left a rich body of works spanning from the sociology of mass culture to film criticism and the philosophy of history.  This seminar will analuze his theory of images by following his intellectual trajectory from Europe to the United States.  We will read his early essays on photography an reification, as well as his well-known works on film theory and history (From Caligari to Hitler, Theory of Film; and History: The Last Things Before the Last).  Thus, we will inscribe Kracauer into his historical and intellectual context, shaped by other thinkersof images such as Th. W. Adorno, W. Benjamin, E. Panofsky, and M. Schapiro.

Full details for HIST 6235 - Images and History: Siegfried Kracauer

This course explores the intricacies of identity-making and processes of racialization in the Atlantic World from ca. 1500 onward. The range of topics covered include the encounters between Europeans and Indigenous people in the Americas and the invention of the "Indians," the spread of blood purity discourses across the Ibero-Atlantic, the intertwining of African Slavery and racializing ideologies in the British Atlantic, the development of medical frameworks for defining social differences, and the myriad ways in which subaltern groups and individuals resisted, adopted, and subverted the identities that were ascribed to them.

Full details for HIST 6474 - Race and Identity in the Atlantic World

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to some of the key issues and central themes in post-Reconstruction US history and historiography.  The readings and discussions will examine new and innovative scholarship as well as some durable classics.  The goal of this course is to familiarize students with some long-standing debates in the field as well as new perspectives and approaches to the past, but it will also seek to prepare you for preliminary exams and sharpen your analytical skills and tools.  The readings will be wide-ranging with particular focus on the history of capitalism, political history (the relationship between reform and reaction, and equality and difference), and intellectual and cultural history.

Full details for HIST 6532 - The United States in the 'Long Twentieth Century,' 1870-2020

America is finishing up two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. They have been the longest wars in American history and have ended amid much ambivalence about the US engagement in each place and the results. They are part of a series of wars that America has fought as a global power, with a global reach, sending its forces thousands of miles from home. That global reach is not new, and goes back all the way to 1898 and the Spanish-American War. This course will look at the American military experience from our first tentative steps onto the global stage in 1898, to the earth-spanning conflicts of World War I and II, to the nuclear tension of Cold War conflicts, and finish with the current Long War against terrorism, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Full details for HIST 6571 - American Defense Policy and Military History from the Two World Wars to the Global War on Terror

This course will explore how western society has thought about and treated animals. Although we will begin with a brief look at animals in classical and Judeo-Christian thought, the bulk of this class will focus on philosophical and scientific thinking about animals during the age of humanism, from the fifteenth century to the present day. We will read texts which explore the relationship between animals and human beings, the practice of vivisection, and the history of animal slaughter and meat-eating. The first part of the class will be devoted to pre-modern texts about animals (Aristotle, Descartes, Montaigne, Boyle) and the second part of the class will focus on more modern philosophical and scholarly works on animals and the animal-human divide (Agamben, Singer, Derrida, etc.)

Full details for HIST 6623 - Thinking About Animals

The dispossession of Indigenous nations by Europeans represents the foundation of the past five centuries of North American history. Yet the truth of that history remains cloaked behind various Western legal-religious justifications for the dispossession of lndigenous American populations by Europeans (i.e., terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, the right of conquest, and Manifest Destiny). Through analysis of primary texts and up-to-date historical and legal scholarship, students in this course will unpack these still-thriving tropes of settler-colonial justification for dispossession, assess the true impact of the taking of Indigenous lands, and explore prospects for meaningful reconciliation in the present.

Full details for HIST 6674 - Dispossession, Truth, and Reconciliation

Frontiers and borders are at the heart of our international system. From the Great Wall of China to Donald Trump's plans to build wall along the US-Mexico border, frontiers have always been invested with strategic and symbolic importance. Even today, when boundaries of all kinds are transcended by global networks, borders remain powerful. Borders, walls, and fences have also had a tremendous symbolic significance throughout time. We will survey a variety of historiographical texts, spanning regions across the globe to find out how historians have been making sense of borders – how they have explored what borders mean to people and states, how borders define places, and what frontiers can reveal about larger processes of migration, state- formation, and governance.

Full details for HIST 6690 - Borders, Frontiers, and Walls in Global History

What does it mean to travel across political and cultural boundaries? How are people's thought, behavior, and identity shaped by such experiences and vice versa? How do historians explore and represent transnational and transcultural figures and their stories? Is it possible for historians to help the audience not only understand but also "experience" transnationality through narrative? The relationship between analytical history and history as narrative is complex and everchanging. We build on this relationship not by theorizing it but by examining history works and practicing writing history, in the context of lives and stories of transnational figures, that integrates analysis and narrative. Students read analytical works and narratives about people who operated, willingly or not, in multiple geographical, political, cultural, and religious worlds. While reflecting on the pros and cons of approaching history writing in different ways, students also develop skills in working on primary sources and develop projects on transnational figures of their own choice from any areas or historical times, from proposal to full-fledged papers.

Full details for HIST 6773 - Twice A Stranger: Transnational Figures and Their Stories

Surveys the modern history of Southeast Asia with special attentions to colonialism, the Chinese diaspora, and socio-cultural institutions. Considers global transformations that brought "the West" into people's lives in Southeast Asia. Focuses on the development of the modern nation-state, but also questions the narrative by incorporating groups that are typically excluded. Assigns primary texts in translation.

Full details for HIST 6960 - Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century

The Proseminar in Peace Studies offers a multidisciplinary review of issues related to peace and conflict at the graduate level. The course is led by the director of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and is based on the Institute's weekly seminar series, featuring outside visitors and Cornell faculty. 

Full details for HIST 7937 - Proseminar in Peace Studies

Independent Study based supervised reading with a history faculty/field member.

Full details for HIST 8004 - Supervised Reading

Independent Study based supervised reading with a history faculty/field member.

Full details for HIST 8010 - Independent Study-PIRIP