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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

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

How did Japan evolve from samurai to superpower?   We investigate this transformation in Japanese and world history over a two-semester sequence.  Students are free to enroll in either semester independently.  (All are welcome, but none required, to enroll in both semesters.)  We begin in early Japan: the birthplace of the sun goddess Amaterasu, the imperial court devoted to her, and the samurai who rose to rule under her sway.  Early Japan was also home to con-men and courtesans, mischievous gods and warring Buddhists, the world's first (and female!) novelist, and a surprisingly cosmopolitan culture of artists and scientists, comedians and entrepreneurs, human traffickers and international travelers.  Our first semester exploring this eclectic culture culminates in the early modern era (1600–1868), when under samurai rule, Japan developed many "modern" elements that laid the groundwork for the revolutionary changes and superpower status examined in the second semester.  We chart Japan's development not only through big events but also everyday life, delving into gender and sexuality, family and labor, arts and entertainment, and more.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1621 - From Samurai to Superpower: Japan in World History I

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

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1660 - The Vikings and their World

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries declared "post-truth" as the international word of the year. Since then, especially with the rise of generative AI, concerns about the meaning of truth have emerged as central in media, politics, and daily life. But does truth/post-truth have a longer history? And what can we learn from how philosophers, political theorists, artists, and people in the past engaged with concepts like truth and falsity? This history of Deep Fakes offers students a historical understanding of how and why humans have constructed and enacted categories of the real/fake, original/copy, and fact/fiction from the ancient world to the present day. Specific topics covered may include myth and history, conspiracy, imposters, forgeries, propaganda, realism, replicants, and hyperreality.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 1690 - Deep Fake: A History

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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1951 - Foreign Policy as Subversion

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2043 - Asian American Oral History

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

Ever thought about starting your own country? You're not alone. The past is filled with examples of new worlds, both imagined and attempted: from More's Utopia to Gregor MacGregor's Poyais to the Bates family's Sealand. Our present too is replete with various schemes to create kinds of state-like communities: from autonomous territories in resistance to libertarian seasteads and cloud-based Network states designed around blockchain and cryptocurrencies. This class covers some 500 years of history and literature to examine the political and social foundations out of which such efforts arose; their philosophical underpinnings; their life-spans in terms of both real life existence and long-term influence; and changing technological and social possibilities for new countries now.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 2064 - Starting Your Own Country: From Utopia to the Network State

This course engages the rich cartographic record of colonial North America via an in-depth analysis of two dozen iconic maps. Integrating visual and textual analysis, students will assess human representations of space across cultural boundaries, explore change over time in the mapmaking practices of indigenous peoples and various European intruders, and study the evolving relationship between cartography and power, attending particularly to the process by which mapping promoted a revolutionary new understanding of American geography as composed of the bounded territories of nation-states.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2391 - From Terra Incognita to Territories of Nation-States: Early American History in Two Dozen Maps

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

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

Where have humans found truth? Will the truths we uphold today remain true tomorrow? Leaning on discussion and close reading of texts, this seminar asks students to think about how truth becomes history and how historically-situated concepts, values and norms become true. Examining the ways in which thinkers and writers from a variety of different perspectives have conceived what truth is (and isn't), the class will focus on notions of truth and falsehood in religion, science, philosophy, and literature. Specific themes for consideration and discussion will include: the role of divinity in underwriting truth claims; the place of truth-standards in the study of nature and the development of new technology; the moralization of truth and lies; the disillusionment with absolutes and the increasing "relativization" of truth in the modern age.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 2441 - Truths: A History from Antiquity to the Modern

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2562 - Medicine and Healing in China

This course explores the history of the Holocaust during which the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Topics covered in this class include the history of antisemitism in Europe and twentieth-century Germany, the origins and rule of the Nazis, the politics of World War II, the Final Solution and extermination camps, Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust, among other topics.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2567 - Holocaust in History and Memory

This course is an introduction to the study of Islam and Islamic history. Organised historically, the lecture series will begin with the career of the Prophet Muhammad, before charting the course of the Islamic Conquests, the establishment, zenith and collapse of various Islamic Empires, ending with European colonialism. Along the way, this geopolitical and historical overview will provide a backdrop to our exploration of changes and developments in Islamic thought and practice. In particular, we will focus on the emergence of the Sunni-Shi'i conflict, the rise of Sufism and Salafism, as well as how scholars across time and space thought and wrote about questions of ideal Islamic governance, the religious authority of the caliph, women's role in society and public space, slavery, the ethics of living under non-Muslim rule and the place of non-Muslims in Islamic society.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2627 - Introduction to Islam

We often define history as change over time, while overlooking that our ways of measuring, thinking about, and using time are themselves an important part of history. This lecture course examines that history on a global scale. Why have societies around the world spent so much effort over the centuries in studying, philosophizing, and inventing stories about time? How have clocks, calendars, and other timekeepers evolved? How have those devices helped re-organize society, industry, and science? Drawing on case studies from every continent, this course will familiarize students with the technological, political, social, and cultural histories of time, while developing their skills in analyzing primary sources such as art works, films, and literary texts.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2631 - The Global History of Time

This course offers a survey of American political thought from the colonial period to the present. We will read Puritan sermons, revolutionary pamphlets, philosophical treatises, presidential orations, slave narratives, prison writings, and other classic texts, in order to understand the ideas and debates that have shaped American politics. Topics to be discussed will include the meaning of freedom, the relationship between natural rights and constitutional authority, the idea of popular sovereignty, theories of representation and state power, race and national identity, problems of inequality, and the place of religion in public life. Lectures will be organized around both historical context and close reading of primary texts.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2655 - American Political Thought

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2665 - The American Revolutionary Era

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

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

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

This course investigates the history of science in early modern Europe (ca. 1500 to 1800), a period in which new understandings of the natural world emerged while traditional forms of knowledge fell into crisis. Students will examine texts and images, objects and instruments from the history of science as a lens onto the intellectual, religious, and political transformations of the period. Why did our knowledge of nature witness profound changes? How was science carried out and by whom? Where did scientific authority serve the interests of colonial empires? Key themes include the study of the earth, climate, and environment; the circulation and censorship of scientific knowledge; and the relationship of ancient thought to modern experiment and observation.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 2811 - Science, Nature, and Knowledge: 1500-1800

Full details for HIST 2881 - Ten Technologies That Shook the World?

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.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2970 - Imperial Russia

This course reexamines Korea's place in East Asia by studying transnational cultural and intellectual interactions that Korea has had with China and Japan. The course is divided into three parts. First, it examines Korea's centuries-long participation in the China-centered East Asian world order and its exit from that world order around the turn of the twentieth century. Second, it turns to Japan's emergence as an expansionist power in East Asia, replacing China's long-term hegemony in the region, and the diverse ways Koreans and other East Asians, including the Japanese, coped with the Japan-centered new formation of the East Asian world order in the first half of the twentieth century. Third, the course moves to contemporary Korea and investigates the impact of the so-called Korean Wave (the global popularity of Korean popular culture) on Japanese society and Korea-Japan relations, giving students a chance to think deeply about the effects of Japanese colonialism on contemporary Korea-Japan relations and the possible role of culture in smoothing over ongoing political and diplomatic tensions between the two neighboring countries.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2996 - Korea and East Asia

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

Full details for HIST 3002 - Supervised Research - Undergraduate

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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS) (HA-AG, SBA-AG)

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

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

This course provides a critical historical interrogation of what Black Marxism author Cedric Robinson called "the Black Radical Tradition." It will introduce students to some of the major currents in the history of black radical thought, action, and organizing, with an emphasis on the United States after World War I. It relies on social, political, and intellectual history to examine the efforts of black people who have sought not merely social reform, but a fundamental restructuring of political, economic, and social relations. We will define and evaluate radicalism in the shifting contexts of liberation struggles. We will explore dissenting visions of social organization and alternative definitions of citizenship, progress, and freedom. We will confront the meaning of the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality in social movements.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 3590 - The Black Radical Tradition in the U.S.

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'.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

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

While the purpose of Hollywood films is to entertain, when those films are set in the past, they offer a critical lens onto how and why we remember and memorialize certain historical events. This course analyzes a series of films set in colonial North America and the Atlantic world in order to ask bigger questions about the meaning of our colonial past to the ways in which we think about the present. During the course, we will read and discuss articles and books in order to learn about the time periods and contexts presented in several different films, and we will use that knowledge to understand what each filmmaker chose to include or exclude and why, paying specific attention to representations of race, gender, and class. Over the course of the semester, we will also meet virtually with various historians who have worked in the film industry to discuss their experiences making academic history relevant for Hollywood. This course will provide students with a clear understanding of specific times and places in early American history, while also encouraging them to think about when, why, and how that past remains relevant (or irrelevant) today.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 4204 - Early American History through Film, ca. 1500-1800

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

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

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

Idea(l)s of modernity across the Global South have been largely rooted in Euro-American projections of "civilization", and "civilizational" projects. The colonial worldview in which only Western(ized) experiences could be modern is foundational to the multifarious ways in which scholarship and nation-builders have engaged with progress, whether aspiring to it, rejecting it, or appropriating it. In this seminar we explore how imperial authorities, nationalists, and scholars/intellectuals have interfaced with idea(l)s of progress and modernity in Asia, reading works ("one book a week") grounded in multiple disciplines and cultural settings. Core themes will include: health and hygiene, consumption, technology, gender, piety and devotion, imperialism and race, and nationalism.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

Full details for HIST 4408 - Projects of Modernity in Asia

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 4655 - Revolution: An Intellectual History

In this seminar, we will examine the war's major turning points on the European theater in order to understand not only the nature of this conflict, but also the forces that made it possible. We will look closely at the two superpowers that clashed on the continent, turning Europe into a veritable inferno for the people caught in between. What kinds of societies were Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia? How did the war affect them and their regimes? We will also survey the spaces in between to discover why these two vast empires competed so ruthlessly over them. We will find out how the populations caught between these two giants made ends meet, both by cooperating and by resisting the great powers. Although some knowledge of what was going on at the front will be helpful, this class is not a course in military history. As a result, it focuses primarily on the social and cultural dimensions of war - which it explores through a variety of sources, including fiction, memoirs, and films. Topics include the occupation and destruction of Poland; the fall of France; Hitler's Europe and the Holocaust; resistance and collaboration with Nazi occupation forces across Europe; the Soviet experience of war; as well as the effect of war on family life, politics, and societies in Europe.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 4672 - Europe in Flames: World War II and its Aftermath

Chinese discourses have long linked the circulation of cosmic energies, political power, and bodily vitalities. In these models political order, spiritual cultivation, and health are achieved and enhanced through harmonizing these flows across the levels of Heaven-and-Earth, state, and humankind. It is when these movements are blocked or out of synchrony that we find disordered climates, societies, and illness. In this course, we will examine the historical emergence and development of these models of politically resonant persons and bodily centered polities, reading across primary texts in translation from these otherwise often separated fields. For alternate frameworks of analysis as well as for comparative perspectives, we will also examine theories of power and embodiment from other cultures, including recent scholarship in anthropology and critical theory.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for HIST 4931 - Vitality and Power in China

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

Full details for HIST 6002 - Professional Development Seminar

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

Full details for HIST 6006 - History Colloquium Series

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

Full details for HIST 6010 - European History Colloquium

This course examines the relationship between scientific development, technological innovation and maintenance, and the capitalistic forces that support and benefit from these activities.

Full details for HIST 6065 - Science, Technology and Capitalism

Full details for HIST 6091 - Histories of European Integration and Disintegration

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

Full details for HIST 6202 - Political Culture

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

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

Topics for this course vary.

Full details for HIST 6300 - Topics in Ancient History

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

Idea(l)s of modernity across the Global South have been largely rooted in Euro-American projections of "civilization", and "civilizational" projects. The colonial worldview in which only Western(ized) experiences could be modern is foundational to the multifarious ways in which scholarship and nation-builders have engaged with progress, whether aspiring to it, rejecting it, or appropriating it. In this seminar we explore how imperial authorities, nationalists, and scholars/intellectuals have interfaced with idea(l)s of progress and modernity in Asia, reading works ("one book a week") grounded in multiple disciplines and cultural settings. Core themes will include: health and hygiene, consumption, technology, gender, piety and devotion, imperialism and race, and nationalism.

Full details for HIST 6408 - Projects of Modernity in Asia

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

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

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

Chinese discourses have long linked the circulation of cosmic energies, political power, and bodily vitalities. In these models political order, spiritual cultivation, and health are achieved and enhanced through harmonizing these flows across the levels of Heaven-and-Earth, state, and humankind. It is when these movements are blocked or out of synchrony that we find disordered climates, societies, and illness. In this course, we will examine the historical emergence and development of these models of politically resonant persons and bodily centered polities, reading across primary texts in translation from these otherwise often separated fields. For alternate frameworks of analysis as well as for comparative perspectives, we will also examine theories of power and embodiment from other cultures, including recent scholarship in anthropology and critical theory.

Full details for HIST 6931 - Vitality and Power in China

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

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

Full details for HIST 8010 - Independent Study-PIRIP