Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for Fall 2023

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
HIST1200 FWS: Writing History
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

Fall, Spring.
HIST1217 FWS: Meritocracy in America: From Slavery to Student Debt
How did you get to Cornell? Is the college admissions process racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise based on prejudice? What about the education system writ large? What does a letter of admission mean? Can a GPA, a test score, an application essay capture, and convey, who you are? Are you an impostor or the real thing? Can anyone earn, deserve, merit the kind of opportunities on offer in the Ivy League? Or the careers that can follow? Through history, memoir, fiction, and film—"The Big Test" and "My Bondage and My Freedom," "The Dispossessed" and "Legally Blonde"—this course will guide students to critically reflect on the meaning of merit in their own lives and our larger society.

Full details for HIST 1217 - FWS: Meritocracy in America: From Slavery to Student Debt

Fall.
HIST1301 FWS: History of the Essay
HIST1321 FWS: Post-World War II America: Crisis and Continuity
Why are the years following World War II considered so remarkable in the landscape of American history? Several critical events and debates that rocked the nation from the 1940s onward reverberate today, such as involvement in wars, civil rights, women's rights, concerns about teenagers, and crises in American cities. Enriched by a variety of primary sources, including films and TV shows, this course analyzes the central events, people, and forces that transformed American society and culture from the years after World War II to the present. The course aims to help students learn how to write persuasively about scholarship and primary sources, while gaining a deeper appreciation for the lasting influence of the major events, crises, and interpretations of post-World War II American history.

Full details for HIST 1321 - FWS: Post-World War II America: Crisis and Continuity

Fall.
HIST1481 FWS: Black Caribbean Thought
How did black radical Caribbean intellectuals grapple with the global crises of racial capitalism in the 20th century? This first-year writing seminar will examine the writings of C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Andaiye, and other Afro-Caribbean activist-intellectuals. We will discuss and analyze the work of these influential figures in five brief essays.

Full details for HIST 1481 - FWS: Black Caribbean Thought

Fall.
HIST1561 Introduction to the Ottoman Empire
This course will introduce students to the study of the Ottoman Empire from its inception in the late 13th century until the early part of 19th century. The classes will follow the main timeline of the geographical expansion of the empire with a special emphasis on the historical significance of the conquest of Istanbul, the consolidation of the borders of the empire, the establishment of the state apparatus in the classical period, a period of turbulence leading to a substantial transformation of the state in the early 19th century. Special focus will be placed on the Ottoman Empire's diverse religious communities—using the history of the Jewish community as the main case study—the evolution of the imperial and provincial governments' relationships with the various socio-cultural groups, legal and economic practices in the urban centers, the culture of the court in the early modern period, and the evolution of the inter-communal relations in the empire's urban centers.  This course is intended to provide the student with a solid foundation from which they can pursue further specialized study in the history of the Ottoman Empire, the Modern Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

Full details for HIST 1561 - Introduction to the Ottoman Empire

Fall.
HIST1576 War in U.S. History: From the Frontier to the Wars on Terror
Is war a "way of life" for Americans, as some historians have suggested? In recent years, many Americans have come to think about war as something that happens "over there", away from our own shores, but war – the act of fighting itself, as well as the political, economic and social demands of mobilisation, and the foreign and domestic consequences of military violence – has shaped the United States in countless ways. This course explores both the shadow of war – the seen and unseen effects it has on people and societies – and the substance – the wars themselves – to explore America's relationships with the rest of the world, from the revolutionary period to the present day. At the same time, we we'll also examine non-military and quasi-military encounters between Americans and peoples abroad, including tourism, romantic entanglements, business relationships, and religious proselytising, asking "what is war?", and even whether the United States has ever been at peace. Through this multi-layered focus we will discover some of the many ways in which Americans have thought about, engaged with, impacted, and been impacted by, the world beyond the country's borders, and the extent to which war and violence have played a prominent role in those interactions.

Full details for HIST 1576 - War in U.S. History: From the Frontier to the Wars on Terror

Fall.
HIST1595 African American History From 1865
Focusing on political and social history, this course surveys African-American history from Emancipation to the present. The class examines the post-Reconstruction "Nadir" of black life; the mass black insurgency against structural racism before and after World War II; and the Post-Reform Age that arose in the wake of the dismantling of legal segregation. The course will familiarize students with the basic themes of African-American life and experience and equip them to grasp concepts of political economy; class formation; and the intersection of race, class and gender.

Full details for HIST 1595 - African American History From 1865

Fall.
HIST1660 The Vikings and their World
Globalization may seem like a recent hot topic, but it was already very much in vogue 1000 years ago when Norse explorers burst out of Scandinavia to journey as far as North America, Azerbaijan, the Mediterranean and the White Sea. This course will introduce students to the Norsemen and women of the Viking Age and the centuries following it, weaving together literary, chronicle, archaeological and other sources to tell the remarkable stories of these medieval entrepreneurs and of the many people and places they encountered. Along the way, students will also pick up crucial historical thinking skills: assessing change and continuity over time, learning the basics of source criticism, and gaining an appreciation for interdisciplinary research. This course qualifies for credit towards the undergraduate minor in Viking Studies. 

Full details for HIST 1660 - The Vikings and their World

Fall.
HIST1710 The Jewish Atlantic: 1492-Present
Who were the Jews that first settled in the Americas and around the Atlantic? How did their experiences intersect with processes of colonization, empire-building, racialization, and the formation of an interconnected Atlantic World? Why do half the world's Jews live currently in countries on the Atlantic littoral? How do they maintain trans-national bonds with other Jews around the world? This course will reconstruct the rise of the Sephardi Diaspora following the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, their settlement patterns across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, their global economic activities, and the uneasy ways they mapped onto religious, political, and racial schema of the period. We will also explore the mass-migrations of European, Middle Eastern, and North African Jews in the 19-20th centuries that rejuvenated the Jewish Atlantic and will investigate how the formation of the State of Israel has impacted the bonds of solidarity within this multi-ethnic Jewish Diaspora.

Full details for HIST 1710 - The Jewish Atlantic: 1492-Present

Fall.
HIST1920 Modern China
This course surveys modern Chinese history from 1600 to present. Time will be devoted to each of the three major periods into which modern Chinese history is conventionally divided: the Imperial Era (1600-1911), the Republican Era (1911-1949), and the People's Republic of China (1949-present). It guides students through pivotal events in modern Chinese history, and uncovers the origins of China's painful transition from a powerful early modern empire to a country torn by civil unrest and imperialist invasion, and then from a vanguard of world revolution to a post-communist party-state whose global power is on the rise.

Full details for HIST 1920 - Modern China

Fall.
HIST1951 Foreign Policy as Subversion
To what extent does the ideal of the US as a vanguard for democracy and freedom in the world match up with other aspects—military, economic, and humanitarian—of US foreign policy? This same question about the degree to which discourses and practices correspond might be asked of other countries, like the Soviet Union, China, and Britain, but this course examines the ways in which US foreign policy has been deployed over the course of the twentieth century and the ways those policies have been perceived and received by people living in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Particular case studies will be addressed stemming from the faculty's specializations (for example, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, and Chile) and the emphasis is on the role of the United States in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Prominent themes will include forms of subversion, from military muscle to economic coercion, and how and why they have changed over time; meanings of liberty, democracy, freedom, and sovereignty in different places and times; popular responses to policies and actions of foreign administrations; the relationships between sovereign states and transnational corporations; the uses and abuses of History in the formulation and justification of policy initiatives and in local responses to them; and the complexities involved in discerning internal and external forces in an increasingly transnational world.

Full details for HIST 1951 - Foreign Policy as Subversion

Fall.
HIST1970 Pirates, Slaves, and Revolutionaries: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to Louverture
What is the Caribbean? How did its native inhabitants fared in the aftermath of the arrival of Europeans? How did the region shift from a Spanish Lake to a heavily contested geopolitical site where all European powers vied for political and commercial superiority? What were the main production systems of the region and how did they result in dramatic environmental change? How did the eighteenth-century revolutions transform the Caribbean? In this introductory survey to Caribbean history we will answer these and many other questions through the study of the political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental transformations of the Caribbean from the arrival of Columbus to the era of the Haitian Revolution. We will follow indigenous people, Spanish conquistadors, English, Dutch, and French pirates and privateers, planters, and merchants, imperial officers, slaves, sailors, and revolutionaries as they adapted to the multiple transformations that shaped this region. Through lectures, discussions, and readings of primary and secondary sources we will navigate the Caribbean in a quest to understand the historical processes that gave shape to this tropical paradise.

Full details for HIST 1970 - Pirates, Slaves, and Revolutionaries: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to Louverture

Fall.
HIST2001 Supervised Reading - Undergraduate
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

Fall, Spring.
HIST2010 Atlantic Travelers
The objective of this seminar is to introduce students to the subjects of mobility and empires in the early modern Atlantic World. Through close reading of primary and secondary sources and discussions, students will become familiar with the experiences of many types of travelers that between 1492 and the early nineteenth century traversed the Atlantic Ocean from the Old to the New World. The class will also draw students' attention to the multiplicity of perspectives from which history can be narrated. The cast of travelers will include conquistadors, puritan settlers, pirates, slaves, indentured servants, scientists, loyalist refugees, black sailors, creole patriots, military adventurers, and women. The discussions will emphasize the different ways in which these travelers crossed the Atlantic, adapted to life in the Americas, and, in the process, contributed to the creation of the Atlantic World. Although no prior knowledge of Atlantic history is required, this seminar is ideal for students who have previously taken courses on colonial Latin America, early modern Europe, colonial America, African history, and other related surveys and seminars.

Full details for HIST 2010 - Atlantic Travelers

Fall.
HIST2043 Asian American Oral History
This seminar will explore Asian American history through the methodology of oral history. Students will read Asian American historical scholarship that has relied on oral history methods, but they will also engage with theoretical and methodological work around the use of oral sources. Students will develop, research, and present oral history projects.  Themes include power and knowledge production, the role of oral history in documenting the Asian American past, and local and family histories as avenues through which to explore oral history methods.

Full details for HIST 2043 - Asian American Oral History

Fall.
HIST2052 Disassembling Silicon Valley: A People's History of High-Tech America across Race, Gender and Empire
"Silicon Valley" may sound like another name for the future, but it also a place with a past. In this course, we will delve into the economic, environmental, political, social, and technological history of both the wider high-tech industry and the specific locale in the San Francisco suburbs. From the Spanish imperial conquest to the Space Race, from steam and radio to microchips and AI, across dimensions of race, gender, class, and immigration status, this course will strip Silicon Valley down to parts. Students will then use what they've learned to put the place back together again in their own way—not as the top-down elite-driven story that we know but as a "people's history" that can speak to all.

Full details for HIST 2052 - Disassembling Silicon Valley: A People's History of High-Tech America across Race, Gender and Empire

Fall.
HIST2132 Law and Society in Early Modern and Modern China
China was and still is regarded in the Western world as a country without the rule of law. In this course, students examine recent scholarship that challenges this simplified understanding of the role of law in Chinese politics and society. It approaches law in early modern and modern China both as a state institution of governance and control, and as a platform that facilitates interactions and negotiations between state and society, between different social forces, and between different cultures. At the same time, this course guides students to develop projects of their own choice, either addressing legal issues or using legal sources, from tentative proposals to research papers based on their examination of original or translated primary sources.

Full details for HIST 2132 - Law and Society in Early Modern and Modern China

Fall.
HIST2155 The Invention of Religion
Religion is a term with a rich history but without a precise definition. Everyone can describe a religious idea or a religious experience even though there is no agreement about what it is that makes an idea or an experience religious. How did this state of things come about? What is it that makes religion both one thing and many things? Why do we apply this concept to Christianity, Islam and Judaism and to the deep feelings we associate with secular forms of devotion and enthusiasm — for food, for love, for family, for art, for sport? In this seminar, we will discover that religion is a distinctly modern concept, developed to address the psychological and social needs of Europeans increasingly adrift from the traditional communal practices and moral commitments of their parents and grandparents. Tracing the history of "religion" — rather than the history of religions — from the age of Immanuel Kant to the age of Emmanuel Levinas, we will examine paradoxical connection between the rise of religion and the decline of faith.

Full details for HIST 2155 - The Invention of Religion

Fall.
HIST2195 Biography, History, and Modernity
Drawing on a combination of primary and secondary sources, this course explores the multiple forms and evolution of biographical writing from the Renaissance onward. We will interrogate the relationship between biographical reasoning and several modern phenomena, including the construction of national identities, the rise of psychoanalysis, and even the historical profession itself. And we will consider whose voices, experiences, and subjectivities are historically valorized through the increasing prominence of biography, and who has been marginalized, silenced, or erased from history in the process.

Full details for HIST 2195 - Biography, History, and Modernity

Fall.
HIST2207 East Asian Medical and Martial Arts
East Asian medicinal and martial arts, whether practiced in East Asia or in other parts of the world, have been important points of contact for people within and between often marginalized communities. In this course we will study the twentieth century development of East Asian combat and healing traditions, and the transport of those disciplines to the U.S. We will examine the personal, community, national, and global stakes of East Asian arts for those who invest in suppressing, teaching, and practicing them. We will consider how East Asian martial and medical practices relate, for example, to global and local histories of orientalism, colonialism, migration, and racism, and to historical post-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements. Over the course of the semester, we will research martial and medical arts as they have been practiced in Ithaca, and place these local histories into their broader historical contexts.

Full details for HIST 2207 - East Asian Medical and Martial Arts

Fall.
HIST2220 From the New Deal to the Age of Reagan
This seminar will explore some of the major political and cultural trends in the United States,  from the era of the Democratic New Dealer, Franklin D. Roosevelt, through the era of the conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan? This seminar will explore through primary source research and secondary readings  the key economic, political, and cultural characteristics and transformations of the period from 1930 though the turn of the century.  The course will examine the rise, persistence, and breakdown of the so-called "New Deal Order" and the crucial political shifts that we call the "Reagan Revolution." A key theme in this course will be the transformations and critiques of American liberalism and conservatism.

Full details for HIST 2220 - From the New Deal to the Age of Reagan

Fall.
HIST2297 Public History Lab: The History of People Setting Themselves Free From Slavery in the US
In this course, we will study the history of Black resistance to slavery in the US. Then we will help to build an exhibit about that topic at one of the foremost museum sites that interprets the history of US slavery. Students will learn about the history of slavery and emancipation, and how the attempt to memory-hole the history of Black resistance to slavery has shaped public memory and politics. We will also study how institutions like the Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana are working to produce a more accurate understanding of the American past. In the second half of the course we will shift to working on the research, development, and production of the exhibit. The course will run parallel with a sibling course being taught in the University of New Orleans' MA program in Public History.

Full details for HIST 2297 - Public History Lab: The History of People Setting Themselves Free From Slavery in the US

Fall.
HIST2321 Introduction to Military History
An introduction to basic themes of military history, e.g., battle, strategy, tactics, war and society, as well as classic works, e.g. Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Clausewitz, Jomini.  Recent theories in scholarship will also be emphasized.

Full details for HIST 2321 - Introduction to Military History

Fall.
HIST2515 Freedom Struggles in Southern Africa
This course will examine southern African definitions of freedom and methods and tactics used in the fight for freedom. It will investigate how different thinkers defined political and personal freedom and how they pursued it, paying careful attention to changing definitions and practices over time, and to the specificity of the southern African region, long a site of global and regional exchange. The course will consider major figures like Nelson Mandela but will also explore lesser-known histories of women's freedom struggles and grassroots and community movements to define a free society. It will emphasize the plurality and diversity of southern African theorizations of freedom. The course will engage with historiographical debates in the field of 'liberation histories', and will use diverse primary source materials, including trial documents, memoirs, political speeches and tracts, and novels.

Full details for HIST 2515 - Freedom Struggles in Southern Africa

Fall.
HIST2530 Introduction to Islamic Civilization
At the beginning of the 7th century, a new religion, Islam, appeared in Arabia and by the end of the century, Muslims had defeated the Byzantines and Persians and created an empire that stretched from Spain to India. For the next millennium, Islam glittered. Its caliphs, courts, and capitals were grander, more powerful, and more sophisticated than those of any medieval king, duke or prince. In this course, we will trace the emergence and development of Islamic civilization from the birth of Muhammad ca. 570 to the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. We will read the Qur'an and listen to its recitation; examine the career of the Prophet Muhammad; follow the course of the Arab conquests; explore the nature of the conflict between Sunnis and Shi'is; learn about the five pillars of Islam, sharia law, theology, and Sufism; and assess the achievements of Muslim intellectuals in literature, art, architecture, science, and philosophy.

Full details for HIST 2530 - Introduction to Islamic Civilization

Fall.
HIST2543 In the Crossfire of Empires: Africa and World War II
World War II was one of the most transformative periods in the history of the 20th century. As a result, scholars, writers and filmmakers continue to re-examine the war from multiple angles. Nonetheless, most accounts of the war marginalize Africa's role and the consequences of the war for African communities.   This course considers the new historiography on World War II that aims to put the 'world' back into our analysis of WW II and considers the ways in which imperialism, race and gender shaped the prosecution and the consequences of the war.  It focuses specifically on Africa's social, economic and political engagement with the powers at the center of the conflict and introduces students to emerging debates in African historiography and the historiography of World War II. 

Full details for HIST 2543 - In the Crossfire of Empires: Africa and World War II

Fall.
HIST2562 Medicine and Healing in China
An exploration of processes of change in health care practices in China. Focuses on key transitions, such as the emergence of canonical medicine, of Daoist approaches to healing and longevity, of "scholar physicians," and of "traditional Chinese medicine" in modern China. Inquries into the development of healing practices in relation to both popular and specialist views of the body and disease; health care as organized by individuals, families, communities, and states; the transmission of medical knowledge; and healer-patient relations. Course readings include primary texts in translation as well as secondary materials.

Full details for HIST 2562 - Medicine and Healing in China

Fall.
HIST2640 Introduction to Asian American History
An introductory history of Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, and Koreans in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1990s. Major themes include racism and resistance, labor migration, community formation, imperialism, and struggles for equality.

Full details for HIST 2640 - Introduction to Asian American History

Fall.
HIST2674 History of the Modern Middle East
This course examines major trends in the evolution of the Middle East in the modern era. Focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries and ending with the "Arab Spring," we will consider Middle East history with an emphasis on five themes: imperialism, nationalism, modernization, Islam, and revolution. Readings will be supplemented with translated primary sources, which will form the backbone of class discussions.

Full details for HIST 2674 - History of the Modern Middle East

Fall.
HIST2680 Sex, Drugs, and Experimenting with Democracy in 1960s and 1970s America
Roots of the United States' most vexing problems can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s. This class explores the struggles to explain these turbulent decades in both popular memory and historical scholarship and the consequences of our interpretations for understanding today. Students will use movies and oral history to investigate the role of perspective, framing, and agency in historical analysis. We will examine the era's struggles over issues such as racial hierarchy, gender roles, abortion, climate change, economic inequality, war, drugs, crime, and democracy.

Full details for HIST 2680 - Sex, Drugs, and Experimenting with Democracy in 1960s and 1970s America

Fall.
HIST2710 Introduction to the History of Medicine
This course offers an introductory survey of the history of medicine (principally in Europe and the United States) from classical antiquity to the early twentieth century. Using a combination of both primary and secondary sources, students will learn about the "Hippocratic Heritage" of contemporary western medicine; medicine in late antiquity; faith and healing in the medieval period; medicine and knowledge in the Islamic world; medicine during the Renaissance (particularly the rise of the mechanical philosophy); medicine in the age of Enlightenment; professionalization, women-doctors and midwives, and battles over 'quackery' in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the role of medicine in colonialism and empire; and the promises and perils of modern medicine (dramatic decreases in mortality on the one hand, the rise of Eugenics and the importance of Medicine to the National Socialist State on the other). As well as this temporal survey, we will consider a number of ongoing themes: race, bodily difference, and medicine; medicine and the environment; women, gender, and medicine; the history of the body; the history of sexuality; and the close connections between forms of social order and forms of medical knowledge. The course meets three times a week (for two lectures and a section) and is open to all.

Full details for HIST 2710 - Introduction to the History of Medicine

Fall.
HIST2860 The French Revolution
The French Revolution was one of the most dramatic upheavals in history, sweeping away centuries of tradition and ushering in the political and cultural modernity we arguably still live in today. Although often remembered for mass executions by guillotine and the rise of Napoleon, it was much more. Between 1789 and 1815, the French people experimented with virtually every form of government known to the modern world: absolutist monarchy, constitutional monarchy, representative democracy, radical left-wing republicanism, oligarchy, and right-wing autocracy. This course explores the rapidly changing political and social landscape of this extraordinary period, the evolution of political culture (the arts, theater, songs, fashion, the cult of the guillotine), and shifting attitudes towards gender, race, and slavery.

Full details for HIST 2860 - The French Revolution

Fall.
HIST2970 Imperial Russia
This course surveys the history of Imperial Russia, from its ninth-century Kievan beginnings to its rapid disintegration under the pressure of the First World War. Lectures will draw special attention to recurrent acts of revolutionary transformation that punctuate Russia's long tradition of "internal colonization." We will look at the creation of Russian culture, politics and society between the ninth century and the nineteenth as an exercise in empire-building — a project that originated with the enterprising princes of medieval Moscow, collapsed with the end of the Riurikid dynasty at the turn of the seventeenth century, spectacularly revived in eighteenth-century St. Petersburg, under the standard-bearer or the reforming Romanovs, Peter the Great, and eventually taken up by some of the most articulate representatives of a late-imperial intelligentsia whose dreams of Russian greatness were even more extravagant than those of the tsar. Topics for discussion include: the Russian translation of Greek Christianity, Russia's fraught relationship with Western Europe, the paradox of imperial modernization and the continual recourse, in Russian literary, musical, and visual cultures to an image of Russia as a frontier society without a state.

Full details for HIST 2970 - Imperial Russia

Fall.
HIST2981 Gender, Family, and Confucianism in East Asia
This course offers a broad understanding of the crucial roles East Asian women played in culture, the economy, and society from antiquity to the early twentieth century. By rethinking the pervasive stereotype of the passive and victimized East Asian women under by staunch Confucian patriarchy, it aims to examine women's struggles, negotiations, and challenges of the normative discourse of femininity, with a focus on patrilineal family, the female body and reproduction, domesticity and women's economic labor, women's work, literacy and knowledge, and the modernization of women. We will examine how Confucian notions of gender and family were, far from being fixed, constantly redefined by the historical and temporal needs of East Asian contexts. This examination is undertaken through a combination of reading original texts and secondary scholarship in various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, and material culture.

Full details for HIST 2981 - Gender, Family, and Confucianism in East Asia

Fall.
HIST3002 Supervised Research - Undergraduate
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

Fall, Spring.
HIST3012 Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film After the End of History
More than thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the distance needed to view the twentieth-century state socialist project from a historical perspective--even as Cold War tropes are revived amid another major confrontation with Russia. In this course, we will analyze memoirs, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period of history. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Albania, the UK, and the United States.

Full details for HIST 3012 - Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film After the End of History

Fall.
HIST3081 Stability and Crisis: Capitalism and Democracy, 1870 to the present
This course examines the intertwined histories of capitalism and democracy from the 1870s to the present day. We will explore how modern capitalism became a global force at the same time as democratic ideas and practices struggled to establish themselves. In doing so we will grapple with key questions of history, political economy, and ethics. Do economic crises tend to weaken democracy? Is stability or crisis the norm? Can mass politics ever control the international monetary and financial system? Are our political systems and societies fatally dependent on ever-increasing growth? Is there any reason to think they can handle challenges such as increasing inequality and drastic climate change? We will look for answers to these questions by studying key moments in the history of global capitalism and democracy.

Full details for HIST 3081 - Stability and Crisis: Capitalism and Democracy, 1870 to the present

Fall.
HIST3255 Revolution or Reform?
This course explores the relation between literary and utopian Enlightenment cultures in Western history.  For each moment of rapid change, from Plato to the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century and beyond, we will focus on two texts: one which promoted the enlightened and revolutionary utopian social blueprint; and one offering an alternative model of transformation or a dystopian account of the utopian model. You will come away from this course having a chronologically wide and intellectually deep immersion in 2500 years of European philosophical and literary history. Throughout, you are encouraged to think about what resources we use to imagine social transformation and to ask if revolution is in fact the best way to effect social transformation. This class may be used toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for HIST 3255 - Revolution or Reform?

Fall.
HIST3391 Seminar on American Relations with China
A historical review of the fragile and volatile U.S.-China relationship from the opening by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s until the present. Several individual sessions will be led by current or former executive branch or congressional officials, business people, journalists, representatives of nongovernmental organizations and others who have worked in China or have participated in the making of U.S. policy toward China.

Full details for HIST 3391 - Seminar on American Relations with China

Fall.
HIST3430 History of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction
A survey of the turning point of US. history: The Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath, Reconstruction (1865-1877). We will look at the causes, the coming, and the conduct, of the war, and the way in which it became a war for freedom. We will then follow the cause of freedom through the greatest slave rebellion in American history, and the attempts by formerly enslaved people to make freedom real in Reconstruction. And we will see how Reconstruction's tragic ending left questions open that are still not answered in U.S. society and politics.

Full details for HIST 3430 - History of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction

Fall.
HIST3950 Monsoon Kingdoms: Pre-Modern Southeast Asian History
This course examines Southeast Asia's history from earliest times up until the mid-eighteenth century. The genesis of traditional kingdoms, the role of monumental architecture (such as Angkor in Cambodia and Borobodur in Indonesia), and the forging of maritime trade links across the region are all covered. Religion - both indigenous to Southeast Asia and the great imports of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - are also surveyed in the various premodern polities that dotted Southeast Asia. This course questions the region's early connections with China, India, and Arabia, and asks what is indigenous about Southeast Asian history, and what has been borrowed over the centuries. Open to undergraduates, both majors and non-majors in History, and to graduate students, though with separate requirements.

Full details for HIST 3950 - Monsoon Kingdoms: Pre-Modern Southeast Asian History

Fall.
HIST4000 Introduction to Historical Research
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

Fall, Spring.
HIST4001 Honors Guidance
This course provides structure for the student's research and introduces them to research techniques. Enrollment limited to students admitted to the History Department's Honors Program.

Full details for HIST 4001 - Honors Guidance

Fall.
HIST4091 Contesting Identities in Modern Egypt
This seminar examines the dynamics of modern collective identities which dominated the Egyptian public sphere in the long twentieth century. We will explore the underpinnings and formation of territorial Egyptian nationalism, pan-Arabism and Islamism through close readings and class discussions of important theoretical, historiographical and primary texts.

Full details for HIST 4091 - Contesting Identities in Modern Egypt

Fall.
HIST4262 Environmental Justice: Past, Present, Future
"Environmental Justice" is a relatively recent term, coined in the United States in the 1980s.  It usually refers to a social movement fighting against the unfair concentration of toxic sites within impoverished communities of color.  As a broader set of ideas, though, "environmental justice" has a much longer history, going back at least to the 17th century in England, when poor farmers banded together to prevent common land from being enclosed for the exclusive use of the aristocracy.  This course explores that deep history, examining various overlaps between environmental thought and theories of social justice over the past 400 years in the western world.  It concludes with an examination of the current climate justice movement and a consideration of how environmental justice concerns are being played out in recent works of speculative fiction.  What do we owe to the climate refugees of our present day?  What do we owe to future generations?

Full details for HIST 4262 - Environmental Justice: Past, Present, Future

Fall.
HIST4265 Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World
This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems – such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors – enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people – requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.

Full details for HIST 4265 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World

Fall.
HIST4303 Nationalism and Decolonization in Africa
This course examines the rise of nationalism as well as the process and aims of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa. It draws on films and a variety of primary and secondary materials in order to illuminate the complex and contested arenas from which African nationalisms emerged. Throughout the course we will examine the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender, and class shaped the discourse of nationalism as well as nationalist strategies and agendas. We will also explore the ways in which the conflicts and tensions of the nationalist period continue to shape post-colonial state and society.

Full details for HIST 4303 - Nationalism and Decolonization in Africa

Fall.
HIST4338 Queer Histories of North Africa
In this course, we will explore the history of queer lives and activism in Northern Africa. Today in most North African counties same-sex sexual activities are illegal and many LGBTQ+ people choose to hide their sexual orientation from large parts of their communities for fear of social discrimination, family rejection, violence, or murder. Historically speaking, then, queer desire and relationships have been restricted to sexually-segregated spaces in the private sphere. But queer people have been part of every major protest movement since the 1960s, and have struggled, more recently, for legal rights, including the right to marry, to organize, and to press charges when they are discriminated against. To recover the rich history of queer people and struggles in this understudied region of the African continent, we will look at primary sources, as well as historical monographs, film, fiction, music, and graphic novels.

Full details for HIST 4338 - Queer Histories of North Africa

Fall.
HIST4346 Revolts Against the Roman Empire
This class will study an important example of resistance, that is, several armed revolts against Imperial Rome during the first two centuries of our era. Africa, Asia, and Europe all saw such rebellions. What caused them? Why did almost all of them fail? Were they popular movements or elite enterprises? What other forms of resistance to Rome existed besides armed revolts? To what extent were ethnicity, race, or religion factors in the revolts? The main case studies will be Arminius (Germany), Tacfarinas (North Africa), Boudicca (Britain), the Batavian Revolt (Netherlands), the Jewish Revolt (Judea), the Diaspora Revolt/Kitos War (Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, Judea, Mesopotamia), the Bar Kokhba Revolt (Judea). Readings in ancient literary sources as well as inscriptions, papyri, coins, and archaeological evidence.

Full details for HIST 4346 - Revolts Against the Roman Empire

Fall.
HIST4435 Art, Nature, and Empire: The Environment in Russian and Soviet Culture
How does the state draw political power from nature? What is the relationship between the environment and national and/or imperial identity? How does the environment resist political control, or support human resistance? This course will explore these questions from the perspective of Russian and Soviet culture. Analyzing literature, art, and film in historical context, we will consider the environment as worker and victim, refuge and rebel, commodity and national(ist) emblem, exploring the degrees of agency it is granted in different artistic depictions. With special attention to the history of Russian imperialism and Soviet "internal colonization" and to non-Russian writers and artists of the Russian Empire and USSR, including Indigenous writers.

Full details for HIST 4435 - Art, Nature, and Empire: The Environment in Russian and Soviet Culture

Fall.
HIST4761 Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman
The people who invaded the isle of Britain after the withdrawal of Roman government in the early fifth century, and who dominated it until the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, are responsible for some of the best-known and most enduring legacies of the Middle Ages: Beowulf and Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready. This course examines the Anglo-Saxons in their early-medieval context, focusing especially on the cooperation between history and its sister disciplines – archaeology, literary criticism, and others – that is so vital for shedding light on this distant, opaque era. 

Full details for HIST 4761 - Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman

Fall.
HIST4851 Refugees
Since World War II, over 4 million people have migrated to the United States as refugees. In this seminar we will examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a "haven for the oppressed." We will examine the crafting of refugee/asylum policy, the role of nongovernmental actors in influencing policy, and the ways policy reflected foreign-policy interests and security concerns. The last weeks of the course will pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum-seekers, and our changing definitions of who 'merits' protection in the United States.

Full details for HIST 4851 - Refugees

Fall.
HIST6002 Professional Development 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

Fall, Spring.
HIST6006 History Colloquium Series
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

Fall, Spring.
HIST6010 European History Colloquium
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

Fall, spring.
HIST6065 Science, Technology and Capitalism
This course examines the relationship between scientific development, technological innovation and maintenance, and the capitalistic forces that support and benefit from these activities.

Full details for HIST 6065 - Science, Technology and Capitalism

Fall.
HIST6202 Political Culture
This course will explore the relationship between popular belief, political action, and the institutional deployment of social power. The class will be roughly divided in three parts, opening with a discussion of how the material world influences the culture of a society. The middle section will connect culture to political ideology, including symbolism and the construction of group identity. The last part of the course will consider ways in which cultural symbols and ideology can be manipulated in order to legitimate government authority. We will then, coming full circle, trace how political regimes can influence the social practices from which culture originates.

Full details for HIST 6202 - Political Culture

Fall.
HIST6265 Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World
This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems – such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors – enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people – requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.

Full details for HIST 6265 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World

Fall.
HIST6303 Nationalism and Decolonization in Africa
This course examines the rise of nationalism as well as the process and aims of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa. It draws on films and a variety of primary and secondary materials in order to illuminate the complex and contested arenas from which African nationalisms emerged. Throughout the course we will examine the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender, and class shaped the discourse of nationalism as well as nationalist strategies and agendas. We will also explore the ways in which the conflicts and tensions of the nationalist period continue to shape post-colonial state and society.

Full details for HIST 6303 - Nationalism and Decolonization in Africa

Fall.
HIST6346 Revolts Against the Roman Empire
This class will study an important example of resistance, that is, several armed revolts against Imperial Rome during the first two centuries of our era. Africa, Asia, and Europe all saw such rebellions. What caused them? Why did almost all of them fail? Were they popular movements or elite enterprises? What other forms of resistance to Rome existed besides armed revolts? To what extent were ethnicity, race, or religion factors in the revolts? The main case studies will be Arminius (Germany), Tacfarinas (North Africa), Boudicca (Britain), the Batavian Revolt (Netherlands), the Jewish Revolt (Judea), the Diaspora Revolt/Kitos War (Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, Judea, Mesopotamia), the Bar Kokhba Revolt (Judea). Readings in ancient literary sources as well as inscriptions, papyri, coins, and archaeological evidence.

Full details for HIST 6346 - Revolts Against the Roman Empire

Fall.
HIST6482 History Geography Theory
This seminar is a readings course on works from the past two decades that have wrestled theoretically, empirically, and narratively with the boundary between geography and history. The course is purposefully promiscuous, temporally and spatially, and the readings traverse wide swaths of time and space. Topics to be covered may include mapping, surveying, and exploration; the production of space; histories of property and enclosure; non-state spaces and counter-territorialities; development and 'nature'; and spatial subjectivities.

Full details for HIST 6482 - History Geography Theory

Fall.
HIST6547 Ottoman Africa, African Ottomans
In this seminar we will explore the Ottoman Empire's presence in the continent, and the continent's influence on the rest of the Ottoman Empire.  In addition to the focus on the history of Ottoman North Africa, we will explore the role Istanbul played in the history of the Red Sea Basin (today's Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, South Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia) and vice versa. A special focus will be placed on the role sub-Saharan African slave trade played in Ottoman society, from the ruling elite households of Istanbul to the day-to-day formulation of ideas of difference making across the Turkish and Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire. Emphasis will be placed on reading new literature on race and slavery in the Ottoman world, borrowing theoretical and analytical formulations around this topic form better-developed historiographies of other parts of the world. This seminar targets a senior and graduate students interested in the history of empire, the Middle East and Africa trans-imperial histories, and south-south relations. 

Full details for HIST 6547 - Ottoman Africa, African Ottomans

Fall.
HIST6761 Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman
The people who invaded the isle of Britain after the withdrawal of Roman government in the early fifth century, and who dominated it until the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, are responsible for some of the best-known and most enduring legacies of the Middle Ages: Beowulf and Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready. This course examines the Anglo-Saxons in their early-medieval context, focusing especially on the cooperation between history and its sister disciplines – archaeology, literary criticism, and others – that is so vital for shedding light on this distant, opaque era.

Full details for HIST 6761 - Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman

Fall.
HIST6851 Refugees
Since World War II, over 4 million people have migrated to the United States as refugees. In this seminar we will examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a "haven for the oppressed." We will examine the crafting of refugee/asylum policy, the role of nongovernmental actors in influencing policy, and the ways policy reflected foreign-policy interests and security concerns. The last weeks of the course will pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum-seekers, and our changing definitions of who 'merits' protection in the United States.

Full details for HIST 6851 - Refugees

Fall.
HIST6885 Interwar Internationalisms, 1918-1939
Drawing on new scholarship and writings from the period itself, this course explores the considerable political, institutional, social, economic, and intellectual innovation that took place between 1918 and 1939. We will focus on the different forms of international collaboration and exchange that characterized this period, from the League of Nations to economic technocrats, from public health specialists to abolitionists, from religious thinkers to fascists, and from anti-colonial activists to humanitarian innovators; the interwar years saw the growth of the international civil society we take for granted today.  At the same time, we will examine internationalism critically and ask why it could ultimately not root deeply enough in national contexts to prevent another world war. As the birthplace of many tendencies and practices that in fact survived into the second half of the century, interwar internationalism was both promising and perilously perched in an era of instability and transition.

Full details for HIST 6885 - Interwar Internationalisms, 1918-1939

Fall.
HIST6950 Monsoon Kingdoms: Pre-Modern Southeast Asian History
This course examines Southeast Asia's history from earliest times up until the mid-eighteenth century. The genesis of traditional kingdoms, the role of monumental architecture (such as Angkor in Cambodia and Borobodur in Indonesia), and the forging of maritime trade links across the region are all covered. Religion - both indigenous to Southeast Asia and the great imports of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - are also surveyed in the various premodern polities that dotted Southeast Asia. This course questions the region's early connections with China, India, and Arabia, and asks what is indigenous about Southeast Asian history, and what has been borrowed over the centuries. Open to undergraduates, both majors and non-majors in History, and to graduate students, though with separate requirements.

Full details for HIST 6950 - Monsoon Kingdoms: Pre-Modern Southeast Asian History

Fall.
HIST7090 Introduction to the Graduate Study of History
This course is designed to introduce entering graduate students to crucial issues and problems in historical methodology that cut across various areas of specialization.

Full details for HIST 7090 - Introduction to the Graduate Study of History

Fall.
HIST7110 Introduction to Science and Technology Studies
Provides students with a foundation in the field of science and technology studies. Using classic works as well as contemporary exemplars, seminar participants chart the terrain of this new field. Topics for discussion include, but are not limited to, historiography of science and technology and their relation to social studies of science and technology, laboratory studies, intellectual property, science and the state, the role of instruments, fieldwork, politics and technical knowledge, philosophy of science, sociological studies of science and technology, and popularization.

Full details for HIST 7110 - Introduction to Science and Technology Studies

Fall.
HIST7937 Proseminar in Peace Studies
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

Spring.
HIST8004 Supervised Reading
Independent Study based supervised reading with a history faculty/field member.

Full details for HIST 8004 - Supervised Reading

Fall, Spring.
HIST8010 Independent Study-PIRIP
Independent Study based supervised reading with a history faculty/field member.

Full details for HIST 8010 - Independent Study-PIRIP

Fall, Spring.
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