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

This course explores how social, political, and economic movements for equality challenge entrenched power. The class will examine the long Civil Rights Movement, the Populist movement, the labor movement, women's suffrage, third wave feminism, and gay and lesbian liberation. In addition to reading articles, book chapters, and excerpts from academic history, we will analyze primary sources (such as "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Power by Ture and Hamilton); view documentaries (such as biographies Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria; and read memoirs (such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Outlaw Woman). Students will engage in a range of academic and history-based writing, including review essays, comparative analyses, and a research-oriented project based on some primary source analysis.

Full details for HIST 1315 - FWS: American Insurgencies

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

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

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

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

This course will explore the relationship between sports and politics over the course of American history since the 19th century.  Sports and politics have come together surprisingly frequently in the last two centuries and this course will take a "case study" method to examine particular episodes of politicized sports.  In the course of our investigations, we will the following questions: How do we define politics?  How have sports acted as a place for subversion and resistance? Conversely, how have sports reflected the power structure? No background knowledge is necessary.   Course materials will include memoirs, articles, and a variety of visual sources, including film and photography.   Course requirements will include a research paper.

Full details for HIST 1585 - Sports and Politics in American History

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

This course examines immigration to the United States since the early national period. The course will consider the root causes of migration; its role in settler colonialism, nation-building, and empire; and the social, cultural and economic adaptation of various populations. We will also examine popular and political responses to immigration, as reflected in legislation and policy, and film and the print media.

Full details for HIST 1800 - Immigration in U.S. History

On August 9-10, 1969, ex-convict, aspiring rock star, and charismatic leader Charles Manson ordered his so-called Family to brutally murder a few of LA's rich, white, "beautiful people" and leave clues implicating black radicals. The idea was to trigger an apocalyptic race war he called "Helter Skelter" (after a song by The Beatles). Today, these murders stand as the most infamous in twentieth-century U.S. criminal history and as synecdoche for the "end of the Sixties." They have also spawned a veritable Manson Industry in the popular realm: there are now Manson books, movies, TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, websites, music, comics, t-shirts, and even a tourist attraction (the Hollywood "Helter Skelter" tour). This course analyzes the history of the Manson murders as well as their incredible resonance in American culture over the past half century. Who was Charles Manson and who were the members of the Family? What was the Family's relation to the counterculture, to Hollywood, Vietnam, the Black Panther Party, and environmentalism? How might we fit the Manson murders into the long history of apocalyptic violence and terror? And what does it mean that the Manson murders have occupied our collective imagination for fifty years? To answer these and other questions, we will analyze a variety of sources including television and newspaper reports, trial transcripts, true crime writing, memoirs, interviews, novels, films and documentaries, podcasts and pop songs.

Full details for HIST 1850 - Thinking about History with the Manson Murders

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

This course is the first in a two-course sequence that studies the role of migration in the historical configuration of the Caribbean. This first part focuses on migrations to the Caribbean from the fifteenth century to the present. The course uses the arrival of numerous populations to the Caribbean as analytical lens to explore the role of new populations in shaping the social, political, racial, cultural, and economic landscape of the Caribbean. Through an analysis of the interactions among the many groups that peopled the Caribbean, the course offers students analytical tools to understand and develop their own interpretations of the historical development of the Caribbean, emphasizing processes of dispossession, racialization, colonialism, and resistance.

Full details for HIST 1975 - Caribbean Migrations I: Caribbean Arrivals

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

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for HIST 2050 - Introduction to Humanities

In this sophomore seminar, we will explore cultural, political, and social debates in China's transition from an early modern empire to a republic, and then from a vanguard of world revolution to a post-communist party-state. Through examining primary sources in various forms (treatise, speech, and film), we will focus on issues such as Confucianism, Western-inspired cultural and legal concepts, nationalism, communism, feminism, liberalism, as well as indigenous understandings and appropriations of imported -isms. The course is organized around four debates: those between constitutional reformers and revolutionaries at turn of the 20th century; between New Culture radicals and statist reformers in the 1920s and 1930s; between politicians who resorted to social and political revolutions to "save China" and writers who believed in the transformative power of "culture;" and between liberals and "leftist" intellectuals in post-1989 China; with an interlude addressing the 1960s and the 1970s, when dissenting voices were encouraged in some ways and brutally suppressed in others. Students will participate in four debates organized at the end of each 3-week section. Each student will submit four short response papers on the four social debates the course covers. In consultation with the instructor, each student will choose a social debate from modern China that is NOT addressed in the classroom, developing a historiographical paper as his/her final essay. There is no prerequisite, but pre-acquired knowledge in Chinese history and civilization is helpful.

Full details for HIST 2133 - Social Debates in China

What is democracy? What does it need to thrive? When does it die? How do anti-liberal, authoritarian regimes emerge? What makes them tick?  In 1921, a British liberal announced that democracy had already been accepted as the normal and natural form of government. World War I had delivered Europe's old monarchies and autocracies a fatal blow. Three massive continental empires had fallen apart, making way to parliamentary democracies everywhere from Germany to Poland and the Balkans. Yet by the 1930s, few of these democracies were still standing. In the east, a new political experiment had culminated in the rise of a Soviet Empire. In Germany, the democratic elections of 1933 enabled Hitler's rise to power and the growth of a regime unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. In Italy, Mussolini stamped parliamentary democracy under his foot, proclaiming the victory of totalitarianism. A variety of authoritarian regimes arose in between these extremes. They formed alliances and battled each other: at first in the Spanish Civil War and then in World War II. In this seminar, we will closely examine the rise and fall of democracies and anti-democratic regimes in Europe between the two world wars, in order to understand how democracy and authoritarianism are related and what kinds of challenges democracies have faced - both in the past and at present.

Full details for HIST 2165 - The Death of Democracy: Europe Between the World Wars

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

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

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

Most people learn about Africa through the media.  However, media critics note that coverage is disproportionately skewed toward negative stories - poverty, war and corruption. While these factors are a reality for too many people on the continent, media observers note that too often the coverage lacks context and breadth.  Furthermore, media outlets do not report positive developments even where they exist.  This course will provide some of the depth and context necessary to understand events in contemporary Africa.  The first two-thirds of the course will examine African social and economic history since the nineteenth century - Africa's integration in the international economy, the rise of new social classes, the creation of the colonial state and the post-colonial state.  Our primary examples will be drawn from  East, West and Southern Africa to highlight both the similarities and differences of their historical development.  The final third of the course will examine several contemporary issues in which scholars and journalists have attempted to address the weaknesses in general press coverage. 

Full details for HIST 2542 - The Making of Contemporary Africa

For millennia, Buddhist monks, merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, and adventurers have moved around the Indian Ocean arena circulating Buddhist teachings and powerful objects.  In doing so they helped create Buddhist communities in the places we now refer to as southern China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia.  The course explores these circulatory histories by focusing on case studies in each of four historical periods: premodern (esp. early second millennium A.D.); the era of 19th-century colonial projects; mid-20th-century nation-state formation in South and Southeast Asia; and contemporary (early 21st century) times.  Drawing together materials from Indian Ocean studies, Buddhist studies, and critical studies of colonialism, modernity, and nation-state formation, this course attends to the ways in which changing trans-regional conditions shape local Buddhisms, how Buddhist collectives around the Indian Ocean arena shape one another, and how trade, religion, and politics interact.

Full details for HIST 2548 - Buddhists in the Indian Ocean Arena: Past and Present

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

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

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

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

The largest of the three great Islamic empires of the early modern era, the Mughal empire at its height ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent, and more than 100 million subjects. This course offers a survey of the Mughal empire between c. 1500 and 1800, exploring how Mughal imperial culture reflected the cultural and religious diversity of India. We will consider how the rise and fall of the Mughals was connected to broader global transformations in early modern world, and how the rise of British power in India was shaped by the legacies of Mughal rule. Primary sources include court chronicles, biographies of emperors, as well as Mughal painting and architecture.

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

"Why no socialism in America?" Scholars and activists have long pondered the relative dearth (compared to other industrialized societies) of sustained, popular, anticapitalist activity in the United States. Sure, leftist movements in the U.S. have often looked and operated differently than those in other parts of the world. But many Americans have forged creative and vibrant traditions of anticapitalism under very difficult circumstances. This class examines socialist thought and practice in the U.S. from the 19th century to the present. We trace intersections of race, class, and gender while exploring the freedom dreams of those who have opposed capitalism in the very heart of global power.

Full details for HIST 2955 - Socialism in America

This course surveys the history of the world's first socialist society from its unlikely beginnings in 1917 to its unexpected demise in 1991. Traditional topics such as the origins of the revolutions of 1917, Stalin's Terror, WW II, Khrushchev's Thaw, etc., will be covered, but lectures will emphasize the interaction between the political, socio-economic, and especially the cultural spheres. A good deal of the materials we will study in this course will be drawn from the realm of literature, cinema, and art.

Full details for HIST 2969 - The Rise and Fall of the Soviet 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 successful 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?

The Korean War (1950-1953) followed the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) when the People's Republic of China promoted communist revolutions in Korea and Vietnam that were resisted by the United States. Often called "the forgotten war," the Korean War was a time of great suffering for the Korean people, involved the armies of several countries, and had a large influence not only on the subsequent history of Korea but also on the direction of the Cold War and on American politics, society, and military organization. This course will examine the war and why it became important for Americans to forget it. American memories of the war were swamped by the experience of the Vietnam War, but deeper than that was the troubling adjustment to the Cold War after the sense of accomplishment produced by the end of the Second World War. It was the beginning of the American perception of limitations on what the United States could and should do to promote its interests in global affairs.

Full details for HIST 3358 - Why Forget the Korean War?

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

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

How to define and interpret the human condition in China under Mao's ruling (1949-1976)? What was human resilience in the face of power? How did Chinese people constantly find ways to re-organize their lives in a pragmatic way? How to evaluate the human cost of institutional arrangements?  In this undergraduate course, we will use first-hand resources and case studies to closely analyze life and death in the Mao Era. Reading the lived experiences of five social classes, such as industrial capitalists, workers, peasants, cadres, and intellectuals, in those successively political movements after 1949, students will gain an understanding of how the Chinese navigated their lives in difficult times. They might be a senior partner for Shell in Shanghai, a hearted Christian and wife, an outspoken intellectual who was persecuted over years, and a former hard laborer who is today one of Asia's best-known financiers or women from China's countryside and so forth. The course will shed light on the interrelations between institutional frames, individual identity, gender and revolutionary politics in the Mao Era and will highlight the many different experiences of life and death in Mao's China, in terms of class, gender, generation.

Full details for HIST 3525 - Life and Death in China Under Mao

An examination of Islamic history from 600-750, with special attention to historiography and interpretive issues. Topics to be discussed will include: Arabia and the Near East before Islam; the collection of the Qur'an, the biography of Muhammad, the Arab conquests, the Umayyad caliphs, and the Abbasid takeover.

Full details for HIST 3618 - Islamic History: The Beginnings of Islam: 600-750

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

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

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

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

Full details for HIST 4000 - Introduction to Historical Research

This course 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

Since Columbus's arrival to the Americas, a number of commodities have bound together Europe, Africa, and the Americas, drastically changing the lives of many people on both sides of the Atlantic. Covering nearly five hundred years of history, this seminar invites students to explore the history of the Atlantic World through the "lives" of commodities such as gold, silver, sugar, cacao, tobacco, cotton, cochineal, indigo, bananas, and more. Tracing commodities from their production site to the moment of consumption, students will be able to understand the possibilities that the commodity-chain approach offers to historical research. As part of this seminar students will write a research paper (using primary sources) that will explain the commodity chain of a specific commodity.

Full details for HIST 4041 - Atlantic Commodities

Through readings and discussions, this seminar will take multiple approaches to explore history, politics and society in 20th century China from the perspective of fashion. How to define politics from the dimension of fashion? What's a politicized fashion? How did fashion reflect the power structure? How did fashion become a way of obedience and resistance?

Full details for HIST 4075 - Fashion and Politics in Twentieth-Century China

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 will examine the relationship between the imperial, provincial, and local state apparatuses and the various sections of society as the Ottoman Empire underwent a steady transition from the so-called Ancient Régime through the constructs of the so-called modern state. This course will look at specific case studies from across the empire, examining the similarities and difference, across provinces, and wherever possible, across imperial domains. From a theoretical point of view, the discussion will not simply focus on how the relationship between state and society changed, but will also investigate the construct of the separation of state and society conceptually, over the period of 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Full details for HIST 4543 - State and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire

During Europe's colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the "supply chain" for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.

Full details for HIST 4634 - Curating the British Empire

This reading seminar will explore the expansion and influence of mass media in the Middle East from the late nineteenth to the turn of the twenty-first century. We will examine how the intersection of popular music, theater, poetry, film, and satellite television shaped culture, ideology, and identities in the modern Middle East. Topics we will consider include contested media representations of "modernity," gender, and evolving cultural, religious, national, and transnational identities.  Although this seminar focuses upon the Middle East, it aims to locate the region within a larger global context.

Full details for HIST 4666 - Mass Media and Identities in the Modern Middle East

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

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

It is a truism that early modern society was a 'patriarchal' one in which men had authority -- but how did that authority operate and what were its limits? How did the exercise of power between men and women intersect with religious, literary, legal and political institutions? We will approach these questions chronologically, examining the impact of the Reformation, the English Revolution, the Enlightenment, the rise of middle class and polite culture. We will also explore them methodologically and generically, with an eye to how different kinds of evidence and sources can produce different kinds of conclusions. Historians' hypotheses will be tested by analysis of primary sources.

Full details for HIST 4950 - Gender, Power, and Authority in England, 1600 to 1800

Full details for HIST 6002 - Professional Development Seminar

Full details for HIST 6006 - History Colloquium Series

Full details for HIST 6010 - European History Colloquium

Full details for HIST 6021 - Introduction to Military History

Since Columbus's arrival to the Americas, a number of commodities have bound together Europe, Africa, and the Americas, drastically changing the lives of many people on both sides of the Atlantic. Covering nearly five hundred years of history, this seminar invites students to explore the history of the Atlantic World through the "lives" of commodities such as gold, silver, sugar, cacao, tobacco, cotton, cochineal, indigo, bananas, and more. Tracing commodities from their production site to the moment of consumption, students will be able to understand the possibilities that the commodity-chain approach offers to historical research. As part of this seminar students will write a research paper (using primary sources) that will explain the commodity chain of a specific commodity.

Full details for HIST 6041 - Atlantic Commodities

Through readings and discussions, this seminar will take multiple approaches to explore history, politics and society in 20th century China from the perspective of fashion. How to define politics from the dimension of fashion? What's a politicized fashion? How did fashion reflect the power structure? How did fashion become a way of obedience and resistance?

Full details for HIST 6075 - Fashion and Politics in Twentieth-Century China

This graduate seminar will explore major currents in historical writing about African-American life and culture in the twentieth century. Focusing on social, intellectual, and labor history, we will identify key themes in recent studies of the formation of modern black communities and politics before and after World War Two. The course will place special emphasis on class, gender, social movements, and migration.

Full details for HIST 6322 - Readings in 20th Century African-American History

The class will study the period of US history from emancipation in the Civil War to the beginning of World War I, keeping the long process of Reconstruction, "Redemption," Indigenous dispossession, immigration, industrialization, and incorporation in a reborn settler-colonial republic in the center of the frame.

Full details for HIST 6334 - Emancipations, Reconstructions, and Settler-Colonial Expansions: 1861-1914

Graduate seminar on the literature of the "temporal turn." Topics may include periodization, modernity and modernism, time and technology, rhythmanalysis, acceleration, boredom, eschatology, time in war and revolution, etc. Readings will include classic texts as well as recent scholarship and will cover the period from the ancient to the late/post-modern. The seminar will concentrate on Europe (including Russia), but may include segments on transnational and/or non-Western areas.

Full details for HIST 6382 - History of Time, Time of History

This seminar will examine the relationship between the imperial, provincial, and local state apparatuses and the various sections of society as the Ottoman Empire underwent a steady transition from the so-called Ancient Régime through the constructs of the so-called modern state. This course will look at specific case studies from across the empire, examining the similarities and difference, across provinces, and wherever possible, across imperial domains. From a theoretical point of view, the discussion will not simply focus on how the relationship between state and society changed, but will also investigate the construct of the separation of state and society conceptually, over the period of 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Full details for HIST 6543 - State and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire

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

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

For description, see STS 4634. 

Full details for HIST 6634 - Curating the British Empire

For more than two centuries, revolutions have marked the rhythm of modernity. In 1780, the original meaning of revolution - an astronomical rotation - was transformed in order to apprehend a social and political overthrow. This course will investigate the multiple uses of this crucial concept of political theory, from the revolutionary canon (Blanqui, Marx, Fanon...) to the classics of conservatism (Maistre, Cortés, Schmitt...), which depict contemporary history as a conflict between revolutions and counter-revolutions, socialist and fascist revolutions. We will explore the connections between history and theory, and stress the global dimension of revolutions, forged by a permanent transfer of ideas and people from one continent to another.

Full details for HIST 6655 - Revolution: An Intellectual History

This reading seminar will explore the expansion and influence of mass media in the Middle East from the late nineteenth to the turn of the twenty-first century. We will examine how the intersection of popular music, theater, poetry, film, and satellite television shaped culture, ideology, and identities in the modern Middle East. Topics we will consider include contested media representations of "modernity," gender, and evolving cultural, religious, national, and transnational identities. Although this seminar focuses upon the Middle East, it aims to locate the region within a larger global context.

Full details for HIST 6666 - Mass Media and Identities in the Modern Middle East

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

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

It is a truism that early modern society was a 'patriarchal' one in which men had authority -- but how did that authority operate and what were its limits?  How did the exercise of power between men and women intersect with religious, literary, legal and political institutions?  We will approach these questions chronologically, examining the impact of the Reformation, the English Revolution, the Enlightenment, the rise of middle class and polite culture.  We will also explore them methodologically and generically, with an eye to how different kinds of evidence and sources can produce different kinds of conclusions.  Historians' hypotheses will be tested by analysis of primary sources.

Full details for HIST 6905 - Gender, Power, and Authority in England, 1600 to 1800

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

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

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

Full details for HIST 7937 - Proseminar in Peace Studies

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

Full details for HIST 8004 - Supervised Reading

Full details for HIST 8010 - Independent Study-PIRIP