Courses

Five centuries before Columbus'​s fateful journey, Europeans in flimsy wooden ships were trekking westward across the Atlantic.​ This course examines the Norse discovery of America ca. 1000 AD, focusing on the so-called 'Vínland sagas.' We will study these sagas as medieval historians' attempts to write about their own past, contrasting their works with modern historians' takes on the same issues. We will also engage with Native American perspectives, with the contact zone between texts and material evidence, and with the afterlife of the Norse journeys in popular imagination. Students will write short essays reviewing and reassessing existing historiography, with the aim of refining our sense of the relationship between events and their textualisation, both now and in the past.

Full details for HIST 1180 - FWS: Viking America

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

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

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), most famous today as the author of children's stories, including The Jungle Book, was one of the most popular and acclaimed writers of his day. He was also a noted chronicler of the world of the British empire. In this class, we will read the short stories, poems and novels that Kipling wrote about India – including his most famous novel, Kim. Students will explore the intersections between Kipling's stories and the history of British rule in India, and also consider the broader question of how fictional works can be used to explore the history of past cultures.

Full details for HIST 1400 - FWS: Rudyard Kipling's India: Literature, History, and Empire

Full details for HIST 1445 - FWS: Twentieth-Century Brazil

The history of France is inseparable from that of its empire. In this seminar, we will look at various places within the French Empire (Indochina and Algeria, the Caribbean and West Africa) insofar as they came to bear on "French" history. While particular attention will be placed on the specificities of the French Republic and its civilizing mission, students will write about broader themes including race, cultural difference, migration, economic development, and political representation. In addition to engaging with how historians and theorists have addressed the complicated and mutually influential relationships between metropole and colony, students will also work with extensively with primary sources, including writings by anticolonial activists Aimé Césaire, Ho Chi Minh, and more recently Christiane Taubira.

Full details for HIST 1446 - FWS: France and its 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

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

Despite the presence of women and lunatics on the throne, monarchy was for centuries considered the best form of government. Even today we are fascinated by Diana, Will and Kate. Why? Using drama, visual arts, political treaties and court ritual we will examine how monarchy was legitimated, where power really lay, how gender and sexuality affected politics and how monarchy in modern times has intersected with popular culture and with modern ideologies like nationalism.

Full details for HIST 1650 - Myths of Monarchy in Europe, Medieval Times to the Present

From ancient seafarers to the Mars rovers, from Christopher Columbus to the Apollo astronauts, humans have for centuries explored the far reaches of our planet and are now venturing into the solar system and beyond. This course examines the history of such human activity. Among the topics covered are motives for exploration, technological advances that assist exploration, obstacles that must be overcome, the roles of leaders, the spread of information about exploration, and positive and negative consequences of exploration. It is led by Steven Squyres of Astronomy and Mary Beth Norton of History, with the assistance of guest lecturers.

Full details for HIST 1700 - History of Exploration: Land, Sea, and Space

This course explores the history of imperial China between the 3rd century b.c.e. and the 16th century c.e. with a focus on the following questions:  How did imperial Chinese states go about politically unifying diverse peoples over vast spaces?  How did imperial Chinese approaches to governance and to relations with the outer world compare with strategies employed by other historical empires?  How did those approaches change over time?  How did major socio-cultural formations — including literary canons; religious and familial lineages; marketing networks; and popular book and theatrical cultures — grow and take root, and what were the broader ramifications of those developments?  How did such basic configurations of human difference as Chinese (civilized)-barbarian identity, high-low status, and male-female gender operate and change over time?

Full details for HIST 1740 - Imperial China

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 introduces students to the growing field of academic Food Studies, providing historical perspective into the development of American culinary culture. Discussions of American cuisine will lead directly into larger concepts of American identity: is there a uniquely American menu? How have restaurants shaped American patterns of sociability and civil rights? What are the 19th century origins of tipping? Students will actively engage with 19th and early 20th century primary source material, including recipes, advertisements, cookbooks, and nutrition manuals.

Full details for HIST 1886 - Introduction to Food Studies: History and Culture

This introductory course follows the history of Asia-Pacific from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the relations of China, India, Japan, South, and Southeast Asia.  This course is intended for students wanting a broad historical overview of what makes Asia distinctive and important in the global economy and in world politics.

Full details for HIST 1910 - Introduction to Modern Asian History

By posing seemingly simple questions such as what is love and who has the right to love, this introductory-level lecture course surveys how love has been experienced and expressed from the pre-modern period to the present. Through case studies of familial and conjugal love in Africa, Asia, the US, Europe, and South and Latin America, the course will examine the debates about and enactment's of what constitutes the appropriate way to show love and affection in different cultures and historical contexts. Among the themes we will explore are questions of sexuality, marriage, kinship, and gender rights. A final unit will examine these themes through modern technologies such as the Internet, scientific advances in medicine, and a growing awareness that who and how we love is anything but simple or universal.

Full details for HIST 1930 - A Global History of Love

How did the approaches to knowledge of nature that developed in medieval and early-modern Europe create an enterprise that associated the practical manipulation of nature with scientific truth? This course surveys intellectual approaches to the natural world from the theologically-shaped institutions of the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Ancient Greek authors such as Aristotle and Archimedes were used in diverse ways that came to usher in an era of European global expansion. By the late 17th century, a new kind of practically applicable science attempted to demonstrate Francis Bacon's famous claim that "knowledge is power." 

Full details for HIST 1941 - The History of Science in Europe: From the Ancient Legacy to Isaac Newton

When did the 'Americas' come in to being?  Who created 'them' and how? What other geographic units of analysis might we consider in thinking about what Iberian explorers and intellectuals initially called the 'fourth part' of the world?  Given the scope and extent of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, could 'the Americas' extend from the Caribbean to the Philippines?  This course takes up such questions as a means to explore the history of what would become-only in the nineteenth century-'Latin America.' We move from the initial "encounters" of peoples from Africa and Iberia with the "New World," the creation of long-distance trade with, and settlement in, Asia, and the establishment of colonial societies, through to the movements for independence in most of mainland Spanish America in the early 19th century and to the collapse of Spanish rule in the Pacific and Caribbean later that century. Through lectures, discussions and the reading of primary sources and secondary texts, the course examines the economic and social organization of the colonies, intellectual currents and colonial science, native accommodation and resistance to colonial rule, trade networks and imperial expansion, labor regimes and forms of economic production, and migration and movement.

Full details for HIST 1950 - The Invention of the Americas

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 sucessful completion and grading of the agreed upon requirements.

Full details for HIST 2001 - Supervised Reading - Undergraduate

This seminar examines America during the overlapping eras of segregation & immigration exclusion.  Beginning with contests over the weaning of freedom during reconstruction and running through the institution of Jim Crow legislation and immigration exclusion, the course ends with an evaluation of mid-20th century movements for civil rights and equality.  Themes include the links between racial and economic oppression, legal and defacto restriction, everyday resistance, and struggles for equality.

Full details for HIST 2042 - Jim Crow and Exclusion Era in America

What are intellectuals and why should we care about them? And how are they, like everyone else, inscribed in racial and social hierarchies that condition both their position in a broader social world and the very content of their interventions? In exploring these questions, this course will take a capacious approach that includes women, colonial subjects, and less formally-trained "organic" intellectuals, in addition to understanding the specific French origins of the term. Together we will work with thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and lesser known Brazilian authors. We will discuss psychoanalysis, Marxism, anticolonial politics, and racial inclusion, constantly drawing texts and social contexts into dialogue. Ultimately students' final research papers will address a given intellectual, work, movement, or concept.

Full details for HIST 2096 - Intellectual History in Black and White

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

A general history of the United Nations from its origins to the present. The course will deal with changes  in the missions and operations of all the major departments of the UN and its associated organizations such as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, but the emphasis will be on the crisis activities of the Security Council and peacekeeping activities in the field. 

Full details for HIST 2163 - History of the United Nations

In this course we will examine the modes of philosophical and spiritual inquiry, varieties of spiritual/bodily cultivation and practice, and religious organizations and movements in China that we know as Daoist (or "Taoist"). We will examine the ways in which Daoism was used variously to contest or legitimate imperial political power, and how the procedures and ideologies of the imperial state in turn informed Daoist theory and practice.  Throughout, we will examine the ways in which standard modern western dichotomies, such as sacred/secular, spiritual/physical, and mind/body, break down when we try to apply them to the study of Daoism.  Course will focus on the period from the fourth century B.C.E. to the thirteenth century C.E. 

Full details for HIST 2209 - Daoist Traditions

Americans are conflicted about immigration. We honor and celebrate (and commercialize) our immigrant heritage in museums, folklife festivals, parades, pageants, and historical monuments. We also build fences and detention centers, and pass more and more laws to bar access to the United States. Polls tell us that Americans are concerned about the capacity of the United States to absorb so many immigrants from around the world. How often have we heard the laments "Today's immigrants are too different. They don't want to assimilate" or "My grandparents learned English quickly, why can't they?" The assumption is that older generations 'Americanized' quickly but that today's immigrants do not want to assimilate. Did 19th century immigrants really migrate to the United States to "become Americans"? Did they really assimilate quickly? Are today's immigrants really all that different from the immigrants who arrived earlier? Why do these particular narratives have such power and currency? This seminar will explore these issues and help students discern fact from fiction. 

Full details for HIST 2251 - U.S. Immigration Narratives

This seminar examines some of the political and cultural visions of Africa and Africans held by African-American intellectuals and activists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emphasis is placed on the philosophies of black nationalism, Pan Africanism and anticolonialism and the themes of emigration, expatriation, repatriation and exile. Awareness of Africa and attitudes toward the continent and its peoples have profoundly shaped African-American identity, culture and political consciousness. Notions of a linked fate between Africans and black Americans have long influenced black life and liberation struggles within the U.S. The motives, purposes and outlooks of African-American theorists who have claimed political, cultural, or spiritual connection to Africa and Africans have varied widely, though they have always powerfully reflected black experiences in America and in the West. The complexity and dynamism of those views belie simplistic assumptions about essential or "natural" relationships, and invite critical contemplation of the myriad roles that Africa has played in the African-American mind."

Full details for HIST 2354 - African American Visions of Africa

This course explores the social, cultural and communal lives of black women in North America, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade, and ending in 1900. Topics include Northern and Southern enslavement, first freedoms in the North, Southern emancipation, color consciousness, gener-cross racially and issues of class.

Full details for HIST 2511 - Black Women to 1900

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

Brexit, immigration, and the election of Donald Trump have all been recently heralded as signs of an imminent apocalypse. Films and fiction are saturated with images of zombies, environmental catastrophe, or nuclear disaster. Why are we so fascinated with the end of the world, and what is the genealogy of this imagery? What can visions of Armageddon tell us about past societal hopes and anxieties? How were they used to make claims about human nature and about who did and did not deserve salvation? This course traces apocalyptic thought from the Protestant reformation onwards, with a particular emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe. Case studies range from radical millenarian sects to Chernobyl, and readings include all from Dostoevsky to Czech New Wave cinema. 

Full details for HIST 2630 - Histories of the Apocalypse: From Nostradamus to Nuclear Winter

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

An introduction to ancient Greek history from the era of the Trojan War to the conquests of Alexander the Great. Topics include the rise and fall of the Greek city-state, the invention of politics, democracy, warfare, women and the family. Course readings are in classical texts and modern scholarship.

Full details for HIST 2650 - Ancient Greece from Helen to Alexander

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the origins, character, and results of the American Revolution, as well as engaging the enduring significance of its memory in contemporary American life - why do we choose to remember the American Revolution in ways that occlude its divisive and bloody events? This course explores many of the key themes of this critical period of American history: the rise of colonial opposition to Great Britain, the nature of the Revolutionary Wars, and the domestic "republican experiment" that followed the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The course emphasizes student interpretations with an eye toward analyzing the comparative experiences of women and men, "everyday people" and famous leaders, Native Americans, African-Americans, and those who opposed the Revolution.

Full details for HIST 2665 - The American Revolutionary Era

This lecture course explores the dramatic cultural, economic, and social upheavals in U.S. society during the 1960s and 1970s. It will primarily focus on the dynamic interactions between formal politics, the state, the economy, and the era's mass movements on the right and the left. Among other things, we will explore the history and legacy of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the Vietnam War, deindustrialization, "white flight," the War on Poverty, the War on Crime, Watergate, the "rise of the right," and women's changing roles.

Full details for HIST 2680 - The United States in the 1960s and 1970s

Starting with the appearance of European trading companies and the establishment of the Mughal empire around 1500 and ending with the establishment of British dominance by 1800, the readings focus on recent debates over India's place in a global economy in the early modern period. The three major themes emphasize 1) state-formation on the Indian subcontinent; 2) encounters with peoples from beyond the subcontinent through commercial, diplomatic, military and maritime activities; and 3) exchanges of consumer goods and aesthetic practices. 

Full details for HIST 2749 - Mughal India and the Early Modern World, c. 1500-1800

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 last empire. 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 would eventually led to the decline and demise of the Chinese empire, but they also gave rise to new forces that would shape the fate of modern China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Full details for HIST 2931 - China's Early Modern Empire

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 sucessful completion and grading of the agreed upon requirements.

Full details for HIST 3002 - Supervised Research - Undergraduate

If you have ever wondered what the Vietnam War was all about, how did it begin, how was it fought, why was it so controversial, why did the American people turn against it, why was it important, why were generations of American students taught the North Vietnamese version of the war, why the South Vietnamese allies of the United States were abandoned, and what happened to the Vietnamese and the Americans as a result of the war—then this class is for you! With fresh eyes and surprising insights, it will take you beyond the fashionable fictions and clichés to look at the twenty-five years during which the United States, through six presidential administrations, was involved in Vietnamese affairs (1950-1975). For decades, Americans have been meditating on "the lessons of the Vietnam War," but it turns out that neither was any lesson ever learned nor were the so-called "lessons" even plausibly related to actual events. Today, Americans continue to be taught myths about the Vietnam War. This course shows why these myths obstruct a realistic understanding of American history during the past half-century.

Full details for HIST 3312 - What was the Vietnam War?

What impact did Africa's involvement in the slave trade and its colonization by Europe have on its long-term economic health? What role have post-independence political decisions made within Africa and by multinational economic actors (the World Bank and the IMF, for example) had on altering the trajectory of Africa's economic history? Does China's recent heavy investment in Africa portend a movement away from or a continuation of Africa's economic underdevelopment? These questions and others will be addressed in this course. 

Full details for HIST 3652 - African Economic Development Histories

The Second World War remains the single most important set of events shaping the contemporary world. The course deals with both the events of World War II as they shaped European and world history and the way those events were remembered and commemorated in postwar years. Lectures, screenings, and readings will examine: the role of wartime political leaders and military commanders; the experience of war and occupation for soldiers and civilians, including Resistance movements and collaborators; Nazi genocide; intellectual and cultural changes during the war, including the impact on literature and philosophy; strategic questions about the origins and conduct of the war; the concluding phases involving the Nuremberg Trials, the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and the launching of the Cold War; and the representation of the war in subsequent films, literature, and political culture.

Full details for HIST 3710 - World War II in Europe

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.

Full details for HIST 4000 - Introduction to Historical Research

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

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

Modern science is often seen as having been originally developed in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Copernicus, who set the Earth in motion around the sun in the early 16th century, and Newton, who made the universe an infinite expanse filled with gravitational attractive forces, at the end of the 17th, frame this crucial period of European expansion. The new universe was invented at the same time as the discovery and exploitation of the New World and the establishment of new trading relationships with the East. This course, a weekly 400-level seminar, examines the new ideas and approaches to nature promoted by European philosophers and mathematicians as part of this outward-looking enterprise aimed at the practical command of the world. We will read works by such people as Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others, as well as important secondary literature, in order to understand how European thought attempted to integrate nature, God, and the state into new ways of making usable knowledge of the world.

Full details for HIST 4120 - Scientific Revolution in Early - Modern Europe

This advanced seminar traces transformations in citizenship and the franchise throughout U.S. history. Through readings, frequent short writings, discussion, and a final paper, the class examines the struggles over who can claim full citizenship and legitimate voice in the political community. It examines the divergent, often clashing, visions of legitimate democratic rule, focusing particularly on the debates over who should vote and on what terms.  We examine the dynamics that have shaped the boundaries of citizenship and hierarchies within it, paying attention to changes in the civic status of Native Americans, property-less white men, paupers, women, African Americans, various immigrant groups, residents of U.S. colonies, felons, and people with intellectual disabilities. A significant portion of the class focuses on debates about U.S. democracy in the decades after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Full details for HIST 4203 - Contesting Votes: Democracy and Citizenship Throughout U.S. History

This course focuses on the American South in the nineteenth century as it made the transition from Reconstruction to new forms of social organization and patterns of race relations. Reconstruction will be considered from a sociopolitical perspective, concentrating on the experiences of the freed people. The New South emphasis will include topics on labor relations, economic and political changes, new cultural alliances, the rise of agrarianism, and legalization of Jim Crow.

Full details for HIST 4390 - Reconstruction and the New South

This course will provide both a historical introduction to and critical analysis of the constitution of Japanese Studies as a "field" of postwar academic inquiry. While reading texts particularly influential in the early and contemporary formation of the field, we will consider such questions as the domestic and international contexts in which Japanese studies has been institutionalized and maintained, and the relationship between "Japan" as an object of area studies discourse and "Japan" as represented in American journalism, popular culture, and politics. The course will examine the historical origins of area studies and various critiques conducted about area studies as a model of academic discipline. Possibilities for cross-disciplinary research (along lines recently undertaken in fields such as feminist criticism and cultural studies) will also be explored.

Full details for HIST 4428 - The Formation of the Field: Japan as Area

Communism merged multiple theories, events and experiences.  It's complexity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancies that separate the communist idea from its historical embodiments; it lies in the diversity of its expressions.  Sketching its "anatomy," this seminar will distinguish at least four broad forms of communism, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to one another, but different enugh to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution, communism as regime, communism as anti-colonialism and communism as a varient of social democracy.  The October Revolution was their common matrix, but their trajectories have been different.  Exploring communism as a global experience, we will shape the profile of one of the central actors of the twentieth century.

Full details for HIST 4525 - Historicizing Communism

Authority and authorship: the similarity of the words alone suggests a close connection. But what happens to the authority of a text when its author is unknown? The proposed seminar combines methods derived from the history of the book, literary studies, and cultural and social history in exploring this question. As one might expect, there is no singular answer. Cases will be examined in which authorial evasiveness or reticence undermine the authority of a text while other cases will illustrate how authority has been enhanced by anonymity or anonymous contributions (one thinks, for example, of blind peer review in an academic context). Furthermore, the course will also go beyond the domain of the text by examining authority and anonymity in non-textual contexts.

Full details for HIST 4628 - Authority and Anonymity: Historical Reflections on a Historically Variable Relationship

As China, with its "China Dream," rises in power on the global stage, what "China" means to its inhabitants and outsiders has become an issue increasingly relevant to business, international relations, and cultural exchange, and a topic that draws intensive attention from historians and social scientists. This course brings together undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in shifting meanings embedded in the concept of "China," either as part of their research agenda, or as a useful lens for comparative analysis. Focus will be on how China as an Empire/ a Nation was conceptualized by different people in different periods and in different contexts, and on the reality and representation of China as political, cultural, racial, and geographical entities.

Full details for HIST 4772 - China Imagined: The Historical and Global Origins of the Chinese Nation

Full details for HIST 6006 - History Colloquium Series

This graduate seminar seeks to familiarize students with some of the most recent takes on transnational history that have emphasized the experiences of individuals and groups whose lives were affected by mobility across political boundaries. An explicit aim of the seminar is to use these border-crossing lives as a way to develop a critique of conventional areas studies frameworks and to explore the possibilities of imagining (geographically and otherwise) a different world (or multiple different ways of organizing global space). Since most of the readings will concentrate on the pre-nineteenth century world, the seminar will also offer students tools to rethink conventional narratives of the rise of a globalized world that tend to emphasize the second half of the nineteenth century as the birth of the global world. Globalization, this course will demonstrate, was happening long before most accepted narratives assert.

Full details for HIST 6132 - Mobility, Circulation, Migration, Diaspora: Global Connections

This course focuses on the American South in the nineteenth century as it made the transition from Reconstruction to new forms of social organization and patterns of race relations. Reconstruction will be considered from a sociopolitical perspective, concentrating on the experiences of the freed people. The New South emphasis will include topics on labor relations, economic and political changes, new cultural alliances, the rise of agrarianism, and legalization of Jim Crow.

Full details for HIST 6391 - Reconstruction and the New South

Communism merged multiple theories, events and experiences.  It's complexity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancies that separate the communist idea from its historical embodiments; it lies in the diversity of its expressions.  Sketching its "anatomy," this seminar will distinguish at least four broad forms of communism, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to one another, but different enugh to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution, communism as regime, communism as anti-colonialism and communism as a varient of social democracy.  The October Revolution was their common matrix, but their trajectories have been different.  Exploring communism as a global experience, we will shape the profile of one of the central actors of the twentieth century.

Full details for HIST 6525 - Historicizing Communism

This course takes a theoretical (what are some of the key understandings of capitalism?), methodological (how should we study it?), and case study approach to the history of capitalism in the United States and beyond. The History of Capitalism has become a major research field in the last decade and in this course we will examine the new historiography, as well as the older scholarship (Polanyi, Braudel, and other works) on which it is built.  While the main focus will be on the history of the United States, we will examine this development comparatively and in the context of the rich literature in other parts of the world. We will examine the strengths and weaknesses of the history of capitalism approach to analyzing and understanding American history. Along the way we will examine how it relates to other topics such as the history of slavery and work, consumerism and identity, neoliberalism and political economy, and intellectual and cultural history.  Students in other departments and history graduate students who are not specialists in US history are encouraged to take this course.

Full details for HIST 6531 - The History of Capitalism: The US Case in Perspective

This seminar is intended for Graduate students who are interested in exploring notions of space and place within the context of the late Ottoman Empire. Going beyond the examination of the "Islamic city" this seminar will bring theoretical readings about place making, in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, to bear on the late Ottoman case. From the urban frontiers of the empire to the capital, Istanbul, this seminar will tackle the latest in historical research on the late Ottoman Empire's parks, public monuments, city planning, public/private space, Ottoman official buildings, the "Turkish house," the "Arab house," city soundscapes, amongst others. We will critically examine how recent studies are re-shaping historians' knowledge of urban spaces and mental map of this vast empire.

Full details for HIST 6548 - City-Scapes of the Late Ottoman Empire

This course offers graduate students an opportunity to consider ways for analyzing texts from Asia, both modern and pre-modern, both literary and historiographical. The emphasis will be on how narratives are constructed, how the form and content of narratives are related, and how narratives express unstated or hidden authorial intentions. Students will read books and essays on theories of narrative, translation, and ideological analysis. Students will discuss these readings and write essays about them. And students will write a research term paper based on study of a selected Asian text in its original Asian language.

Full details for HIST 6617 - Seminar in Asian Literature and History

Authority and authorship: the similarity of the words alone suggests a close connection. But what happens to the authority of a text when its author is unknown? The proposed seminar combines methods derived from the history of the book, literary studies, and cultural and social history in exploring this question. As one might expect, there is no singular answer. Cases will be examined in which authorial evasiveness or reticence undermine the authority of a text while other cases will illustrate how authority has been enhanced by anonymity or anonymous contributions (one thinks, for example, of blind peer review in an academic context). Furthermore, the course will also go beyond the domain of the text by examining authority and anonymity in non-textual contexts.

Full details for HIST 6628 - Authority and Anonymity: Historical Reflections on a Historically Variable Relationship

As China, with its "China Dream," rises in power on the global stage, what "China" means to its inhabitants and outsiders has become an issue increasingly relevant to business, international relations, and cultural exchange, and a topic that draws intensive attention from historians and social scientists. This course brings together undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in shifting meanings embedded in the concept of "China," either as part of their research agenda, or as a useful lens for comparative analysis. Focus will be on how China as an Empire/ a Nation was conceptualized by different people in different periods and in different contexts, and on the reality and representation of China as political, cultural, racial, and geographical entities.

Full details for HIST 6772 - China Imagined: The Historical and Global Origins of the Chinese Nation

The special topic for this semester's seminar is The History of Digitalization.  We will read mostly secondary sources on the transition from analog to digital forms of electronic media, focusing on the United States.   We begin with the (digital) telegraph system of the 19th century as a reminder that the historical arc we are studying ran from digital to analog to digital (not simply analog to digital).  We then consider the analog telephone system and analog computing of the early to mid-20th century, before spending the remainder of the course on the digitization of communications, computation, and the media from World War II to the present.  We consider the social, cultural, political, and economic, aspects of the construction and use of these technologies.

Full details for HIST 7000 - Special Topic 3: Issues in the Cultural History of Technology

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

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

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

Full details for HIST 8004 - Supervised Reading

Full details for HIST 8010 - Independent Study-PIRIP