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

Full details for HIST 1200 - FWS: Writing History

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

Societies reveal much about themselves in how they define and distinguish truth and untruth. This course examines the history of facts, frauds, and gossip in the West, from the late medieval period to present. We will focus on five historical episodes in the making and unmaking of truth: the medieval inquisition; the first early modern scientific laboratories; the Feejee Mermaid and other playful frauds of P.T. Barnum's American Museum; early 20th-century newsrooms, advertising and propaganda agencies; and the 21st-century Internet. We will write, workshop, and revise reflective, comparative, and persuasive essays on these episodes, while gaining a better understanding of how such modern concepts as objectivity, reliability, and deception have developed.

Full details for HIST 1411 - FWS: Facts, Frauds, and Rumors: (Un)Truth in Western History

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. (HIST-HGS, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 1561 - Introduction to the Ottoman Empire

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

Full details for HIST 1595 - African American History from 1865

Through discussion of a variety of high-profile and lesser-known trials throughout history, this course will examine a range of issues in the history of law and criminality. We will study the relationship between ideology and law in different societies, the politics of trials, the theory and practice of punishment, and the relationship of trials to terror(ism) and social marginalization. Cases to be covered include: Socrates, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, the French Revolutionary Terror, the Russian revolutionary terrorists, the Dreyfus Affair, the Stalinist show trials, Charles Manson, OJ Simpson, and Pussy Riot. (HIST-HEU)

Full details for HIST 1600 - History of Law: Great Trials

Why did wives who killed their husbands in early modern Europe get charged not with murder but with petty treason? Did rape victims ever get justice? Why did the witch craze happen when it did? Were female thieves treated with more leniency than male ones? This course considers sexualized crimes, crimes against women, and crimes that women were thought to frequently perpetrate?rape, witchcraft, infanticide, prostitution, crimes against masters and husbands?to see how law interacts with gendered relations of power and the policing of sexuality. We will discuss the reasons why some crimes were associated with women, and learn to analyze primary sources like trial records, news and ballads, and criminal autobiography that reveal cultural assumptions and significance. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 1631 - Sex, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

This lecture course combines historical and literary approaches to explore the inner life of Americans over the last two hundred years. No prior knowledge of US history is assumed. We'll examine the ways in which historical context can shape literary works and the ways in which literature, in turn, can shape history. How have Americans imagined themselves and their nation? Has there ever been a stable American identity? The focus will be on literary works that pose questions about race, gender, individualism, and belonging, allowing us to see how writers have both reinforced and resisted cultural pressures. My hope is that tracing US history through works of the imagination will help in the collective (and perpetual) effort to reimagine American life. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for HIST 1770 - U.S. History through Literature

Do you wonder what the historical context is for migrations out of Central America? Or why many Brazilians are so fearful of the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro? Curious as to what the 'pink tide' is? Or why Silicon Valley investors are hanging out in Honduras and Panama? Who the Zapatistas are and why they call themselves by that name? When the very term 'Latin America' came into being? Why Chileans were the vanguard of the California Gold Rush? How Mexican cowboys ended up in Hawaii? If so, this course is for you. It surveys the social, political, cultural and economic history of Latin America from roughly 1800 to the present. The primary aim is to help you develop a mental map of the history of Latin America-of prominent themes issues; of historical eras and trajectories. Given the vastness of Latin America, and its somewhat arbitrary composition as an object of study, the approach of the course is thematic and chronological rather than regional. We will pay attention to a number of more specific and interconnected themes: the development of, and relationship between, capitalist economies and processes of state formation; the complex roles Britain and the U.S. have played in the region, but always with an appreciation for how Latin Americans have shaped their own histories and those of the U.S. and Britain; the ways in which non-elites-slaves, workers, peasants, among others-have shaped history; the politics of the production of history; and Latin America's 'situatedness' in a broader world. (HIST-HGS)

Full details for HIST 1960 - Modern Latin America

This course will offer a broad overview of African history from the development of early human societies to the modern era, and a critical introduction to how historians approach the writing of African history. We will think about the origins of the discipline and field of African history, the politics of history writing, and the many sites of historical thinking outside the academy. We will consider major events in the continent?s history, including the emergence of early societies and states; religious transformations; innovations in agriculture; the development of regional and global trade systems; slavery; colonization and decolonization; and African intellectual and artistic productions. The course will familiarize students with methods, concepts, and debates that are central to the field of African history. (HIST-HGS)

Full details for HIST 1965 - Introduction to African History

Waves of voluntary and forced migrants and their imposition on indigenous communities led to radically new societies in the Caribbean. Though popularized as tropical paradises, the Caribbean has one of the highest rates of emigration in the world. Revolutions, wars of independence and socio-economic and political marginalization has led to the formation of Caribbean diasporic communities in Central America, North America, Europe and Africa. These diasporic communities are also transnational spaces because emigrants retain important social, economic and political connections to their countries of origin. Drawing on specific case studies this course considers three interconnecting questions - What factors led to sustained emigration? Why did migrants' settle in specific countries? How have Caribbean diasporic communities reshaped their natal communities and their new homes? (HIST-HGS)

Full details for HIST 1976 - Recreating the Caribbean: Migration and Identity in Contemporary Caribbean History

On the eve of the American Revolution Britain administered 26 colonies-not just the 13 that would become the United States. British North America's dramatic struggle for independence has led many history textbooks to read the revolution back into colonial history, focusing on those 13 North American colonies that would become the United States, often at the expense of global connections that defined the colonial and revolutionary periods. As this class will explore, key elements of early American history can only be understood through a broader perspective, from the economic growth of New England as a result of the African slave trade and exchange in the Caribbean, to the use of citizenship as a category of exclusion in response to the myriad inhabitants-European, Indigenous, and African-who neighbored or lived within the original 13 colonies. In this course, we will explore the history of early America from the 1490s through the 1800s from a global perspective. Voices usually peripheral to the narrative of American development, from enslaved African mariners to Spanish American nuns, will become central to processes of cultural encounter, labor exploitation, revolutionary upheavals, and state formation that shaped the making and unmaking early America. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 1985 - American History from 1500 to 1800

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

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

This introductory course provides students with a critical understanding of diverse data practices across cultures and histories, incorporating critical multidisciplinary perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS), to Critical Data Studies, History, Media Studies, and Information Science. It focuses on how different societies have collected, processed, understood, and tooled information through various sensory, linguistic, and representational modes. Highlighting elements that embody resistance, refusal, and alternative epistemologies, this course aims to help students better understand the limits of data-centric ways of knowing, and hence become more culturally sensible about data ethics, social justice, and epistemic diversity.

Full details for HIST 2031 - Global History of Data

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. (ARKEO-COS)

Full details for HIST 2050 - Introduction to Humanities

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

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

Full details for HIST 2146 - Health and Fitness Culture

Jewish men and women in early modern Europe lived their lives within a gendered social order inherited from the Talmudic period. The relationship between sex and power remained fundamental to Jewish communal discipline until the eighteenth century. The explosion of vernacular publishing, increasing economic and geographic mobility and the coming of emancipation challenged existing gender norms and liberated Jewish desire - well, almost. As we will see, modernity has an ambiguous effect on Jewish sexual expression and Jewish sexual politics. It is not clear that the emancipation of Jewish men had the same emancipatory effect on Jewish women. Jewish patriarchy proved unexpectedly resilient. In this course, we will explore why - despite Judaism's reputation for liberal attitudes to sex - neither most Jewish men nor many Jewish women embraced the possibilities of personal liberation from a reproductive regime of rigid self-control and near compulsory heterosexual monogamy. (HIST-HEU)

Full details for HIST 2154 - Sex and Power in Jewish History

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

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

Americans are conflicted about immigration. We 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 the immigrant ancestors adapted 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. (HIST-HNA)

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

London grew fast in the 18th century. Along with more coffee-houses, newspapers, operas, abandoned children, fashion choices, immigrants, slaves, diseases, debtors' prisons and crime came a sense of utopian possibility and a fear of social dissolution. What was the experience of rapid social change like, what solutions were proposed to meet a perceived crisis, and what do our present-day ideas about the threats and possibilities of large, diverse cities owe to the 18th century? We will use fiction, diaries, criminal trials, and proposals for the betterment of society to explore how urban change was represented and experienced. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 2259 - Plague, Prisons and Print in 18th-century London

This seminar will introduce students to the expanding and dynamic historiography of the African diaspora. The most astute scholars of the African diaspora argue that diaspora is not to be conflated with migration for diaspora includes the cultural and intellectual work that constructs and reinforces linkages across time and space. Much of the early historiography of the African diaspora disproportionately focused on Anglophone theorists whose intellectual output engaged thinkers and communities in Anglophone West Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States. Recent interventions in the historiography of the African diaspora has significantly broadened its geographical conceptualization by including a larger segment of Western Europe, Latin America and Asia. In addition, scholars of Africa are increasingly exploring topics in the African diaspora. Using a range of archival and secondary sources, students will explore the material, cultural and intellectual factors that are remaking the historiography of the African diaspora. (HIST-HGS)

Full details for HIST 2307 - Histories of the African Diaspora

This class will explore how access to the outdoors has been impacted by social inequalities related to race, class, and gender throughout U.S. history. The idea of ?the outdoors? and its synonyms (whether ?wilderness? or ?nature?) has sustained lasting cultural resonance in the United States. Since the nineteenth century?s development of American Romanticism, ?nature??or the idea of a landscape not manipulated by humans?has become a powerful cultural symbol and one of the nation?s most cherished attributes. However, this course will examine how this strong reverence for natural places in the United States has been overlaid by racist ideologies. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for HIST 2369 - Race, the Nation, & American Outdoor Recreation

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. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

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

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. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 2562 - Medicine and Healing in China

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. (HIST-HGS)

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. (HIST-HPE, HIST-HTR)

Full details for HIST 2631 - The Global History of Time

An introduction to the history of the Greek world from Minoan prehistory to the end of the Hellenistic period. This course emphasizes connections between the Greek world and the Ancient Near East. Topics include the rise and fall of the Greek city-state, the invention of democracy, women and women?s economic rights, ancient multicultural societies, and the lives of enslaved people. Course readings include ancient texts as well as modern scholarship. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 2650 - Ancient Greek History

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. (GOVT-PT, HIST-HNA)

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. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 2665 - The American Revolutionary Era

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

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. (HIST-HNA)

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

This course offers a new way of understanding both the Holocaust and the broader history of modern Europe—from the ground up. Moving from Greece to France, and from Amsterdam to Moscow, we explore how Jewish communities experienced dictatorship, occupation, and genocide between 1918 and 1948. Students gain a full introduction to World War II and the Holocaust while working directly with diaries, letters, and survivor testimonies to see history through the eyes of its victims. Bridging the disciplines that meet in Jewish Studies, the course examines how violence, belonging, and moral choice shaped everyday life in one of the most turbulent eras of Jewish and European history. Along the way, students build critical interpretive skills, deepen their historical literacy, and learn how historians analyze personal narratives to understand large-scale events.

Full details for HIST 2701 - The Holocaust in Europe:A Victim-Centered History

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

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

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. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HPE, HIST-HTR)

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

In this course we will examine how we have come to narrate social, cultural, and political history in the United States, investigating the ways scholarly, curatorial, archival, and creative practices shape conceptions of the American past, in particular understandings of racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression and resistance. Students will build skills in historical interpretation and archival research and explore possibilities and challenges in preserving and presenting the past in a variety of public contexts-monuments, memorials, museums, historical sites, movies and television, and community-based history projects. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for HIST 2792 - Monuments, Museums, and Memory: An Introduction to Public History

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. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

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

Most people think of Christianity as the daughter religion of Judaism. In this course, we will see that what we now know as Judaism and Christianity both claimed ownership of the same textual tradition and emerged together from the same set of historical circumstances, shaped by political crisis, a radical transformation of the social order and the challenge of Graeco-Roman culture. Through close reading of the principal sources of Christian literature, such as Paul's letters to the first communities of gentile believers and the accounts of the life and death of the messiah, known collectively as the gospels, we will explore how and why the followers of Jesus first came to think of themselves as the New Israel and how a polemical engagement with their controversial interpretation of Hebrew prophecy shaped the development of the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 2852 - Judaism and the Origins of Christianity

In 1919, journalist John Reed published Ten Days That Shook the World about the 1917 Russian Revolution. Some events are so transformative, Reed argued, they change the course of history. This class examines then technologies that ?shook? the world over the past half millennium. Or did they? Can technology drive history? How should we think about the relationship between technology and culture, society, politics and the environment? This course challenges many popular understandings of technology and technological change, introducing students to major concepts in the history and social studies of technology, including technological determinism, systems, infrastructure, skill, technopolitics, envirotechs, users, and maintenance repair. Technologies addressed will vary, but may include the slave ship, factory, climate control, atmoic bomb, and plastic. (HIST-HTR)

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

In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations is highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China's long imperial tradition? This course explores the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present. It leads students to examine scholarship that challenges the popularly accepted myth of lineal progression of China toward gender equality, and to understand women's and men's life choices in various historical settings. At the same time, this course guides students to adopt gender as a useful analytical category, treating China as a case study through which students are trained to engender any society past and present. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)

Full details for HIST 2932 - Engendering China

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. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)

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

More than thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the distance needed to view the twentieth-century state socialist project from a historical perspective--even as Cold War tropes are revived amid another major confrontation with Russia. In this course, we will analyze memoirs, oral histories, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the Balkans, the UK, and the United States. All works will be in English. (HIST-HEU)

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

This course examines the long, complicated history of Korea?s relationship with China, focusing on the period from the fourteenth century to the present. Rather than having a nation-bound interpretation of history, the course explores how Korea?s national identity?from the Choson dynasty, through the colonial period, to the contemporary era of the two Koreas?has been shaped and negotiated in close relation to its interactions with China. By addressing various issues in Korean history that reflect Korea?s strong ties and conflicts with China, the course not only offers a comprehensive understanding of Korean history from a broader comparative perspective but also contributes to the transnational history of East Asia. No prior knowledge of Korean or Chinese is required. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN)

Full details for HIST 3021 - History of Korea-China Relations

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. (HIST-HEU)

Full details for HIST 3081 - Crises of Capitalism and Democracy since 1870

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. (HIST-HNA)

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

In this course, we will answer two major questions: What is Latino history? And how should we write Latino History? We will explore these questions without attempting to cover all of Latino history before 1800. We will focus on a variety of experiences to better understand how differences in race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and class have shaped Latino communities over time. We will read academic journal articles and books (secondary sources) and documents from the past, such as diaries, letters, court records, and maps (primary sources). Throughout the semester we will be working in groups toward creating a final project: a Latino history website. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 3770 - Latinos and the United States, 1492-1880

This course examines war and revolution as drivers of migration from Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean to the United States and Canada. From the War of 1898 to the wars in Central America, war and revolution have displaced millions of people, prompting internal and cross-border migration. This history underscores how migration is multicausal-that is, produced by a wide and complex range of intersecting drivers. War and revolution disrupt livelihoods, produce scarcity, and create the insecurity that makes it impossible to exercise a basic human right to stay home. The course also examines how Latinos have become actors in U.S. wars and interventions in their countries of ancestry. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for HIST 3801 - War and Revolution in 20th Century Latino History

One hundred and fifty years ago, most of the world’s Jews lived in Europe or the Ottoman Empire. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century the United States was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. Using the tools of social, cultural, and intellectual history, this course examines the lives of Jews in America from 1654 through the present, exploring how they adapted to life in the United States and how the United States adapted itself to the presence of Jews.

Full details for HIST 3806 - American Jewish History, 1654-Present

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'. (HIST-HNA)

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. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)

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

Max Weber (1864-1920) was the sharpest analyst of modernity: a condition marked by a global capitalist economic system, in which individuals are forced to specialize in a profession and calculate rationally without the comfort of religious belief but longing for objectivity in a world overtaken by relativism. But despite Weber?s influence he never produced a major programmatic book or school and left a fragmented body work across sociology, history, law, economics, religion, and philosophy. This reading- and discussion-intensive course examines Weber in the round, exploring both his empirical historical work and why any study of the modern human condition requires grappling with the issues that Weber identified: universalism and relativism, objectivity, rationality, specialization and vocation, transnational comparison, historical development, ideal-types, and motivation. (HIST-HEU)

Full details for HIST 4084 - How to be Modern: Thinking with Max Weber

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

Full details for HIST 4091 - Contesting Identities in Modern Egypt

This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to both remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of US history topics: the role of the police over time, and the way charges of ?police brutality? and violence have organized US history and shaped how we remember (or forget) it. Radicalized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both. And additional topics. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for HIST 4109 - Public History, Theory & Practice

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. (HIST-HNA)

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

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

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

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 Regime 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. (HIST-HGS)

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

This seminar analyzes the contours of early modern Europe's material landscape and the ways in which global exchanges and technological advancements impacted material production and consumption. Working within an interdisciplinary framework, we will explore the dynamic material, global, and social dimensions of objects, and the meanings that different materials could generate in art production. Each week we will investigate an early modern art material - from ivory, to amber, shells, and pearls - and its use and/or representation in a range of artworks. Students will learn to think materially; they will be introduced to multiple techniques of production, harvesting, and fashioning of materials, and will consider the broader social, economic, political, and environmental factors that shaped material culture. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Full details for HIST 4665 - Early Modern Materialities, 1400-1700

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

Max Weber (1864-1920) was the sharpest analyst of modernity: a condition marked by a global capitalist economic system, in which individuals are forced to specialize in a profession and calculate rationally without the comfort of religious belief but longing for objectivity in a world overtaken by relativism. But despite Weber’s influence he never produced a major programmatic book or school and left a fragmented body work across sociology, history, law, economics, religion, and philosophy. This reading- and discussion-intensive course examines Weber in the round, exploring both his empirical historical work and why any study of the modern human condition requires grappling with the issues that Weber identified: universalism and relativism, objectivity, rationality, specialization and vocation, transnational comparison, historical development, ideal-types, and motivation.

Full details for HIST 6084 - How to be Modern: Thinking with Max Weber

This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to both remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of US history topics: the role of the police over time, and the way charges of “police brutality” and violence have organized US history and shaped how we remember (or forget) it. Radicalized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both. And additional topics.

Full details for HIST 6109 - Public History, Theory & Practice

This seminar explores the international and transnational dimensions of the Black Power Movement, broadly defined. Beginning with an examination of transnationalism in the early 20th century, it examines the thought and political activities of African-American intellectuals and activists who crossed national boundaries, figuratively and literally, in the quest for black freedom. We will focus on the postwar era, particularly the 1950s through the 1980s, exploring transnationalism in the context of black feminism, Marxism, black nationalism, Pan Africanism, and other political traditions. We will examine the meeting and mingling of transnational discourses, ideologies, and activists in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Full details for HIST 6321 - Black Power Movement and Transnationalism

This graduate seminar focuses on some of the key texts to have set the contours of modern historical research. Readings will include works by Arendt, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Burckhardt, Foucault, Koselleck, and more. The course is intended especially for students focusing on European cultural-intellectual history, but open to all graduate students interested in historical thought and method.

Full details for HIST 6378 - Key Texts in European Cultural-Intellectual 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 Regime 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

This seminar analyzes the contours of early modern Europe's material landscape and the ways in which global exchanges and technological advancements impacted material production and consumption. Working within an interdisciplinary framework, we will explore the dynamic material, global, and social dimensions of objects, and the meanings that different materials could generate in art production. Each week we will investigate an early modern art material - from ivory, to amber, shells, and pearls - and its use and/or representation in a range of artworks. Students will learn to think materially; they will be introduced to multiple techniques of production, harvesting, and fashioning of materials, and will consider the broader social, economic, political, and environmental factors that shaped material culture.

Full details for HIST 6665 - Early Modern Materialities, 1400-1700

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. (ASIAN-SC)

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. (GOVT-IR)

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