Courses

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

How do we make sense of the Brexit vote in Great-Britain, the rise of political Islam and the "veil" debates in France, the anti-globalization movements in Spain and Greece, the growth of demagogic anti-immigrant parties from the Netherlands to Italy, or the fact that Swedes get more than thirty paid days off per year?  This course seeks to answer these questions by exploring the history of modern Europe.  Among other themes, we will discuss the Protestant Reformation, the rise of absolutism, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialism, colonialism, the Russian Revolution, the two world wars, decolonization and immigration, May '68, and the construction of the European Union.  In conjunction, we will examine how modern ideologies (liberalism, Marxism, imperialism, conservatism, fascism, totalitarianism) were developed and challenged.  Through a wide array of historical documents (fiction, letters, philosophy, treatises, manifestoes, films, and art), we will consider why "old Europe" is still relevant for us today.

Full details for HIST 1511 - The Making of Modern Europe, from 1500 to the Present

This course uses a multidisciplinary approach to explore the complex relationship between history and popular culture in Africa. The course considers two main questions - how can you write history using popular culture? And, how do artists use history to create popular culture? It uses examples from around the continent to explore old and new forms of popular culture; forms of cultural expression used by historians; as well as the ways in which artists use moments of great historical significance or key historical actors in their works. We consider, for example, the work of Leroy Vail who used songs by Mozambican peasants to write a social history of colonialism as well as films about colonialism by African film-makers such as the late Ousman Sembene.

Full details for HIST 1590 - History and Popular Culture in Africa

From Frankenstein to The Matrix, science fiction and film have depicted contemporary science, technology, and medicine for almost two centuries. This course introduces students to historical and social studies of science and technology using science-fiction films and novels, as well as key readings in science and technology studies. What social questions can fictional accounts raise that factual ones can only anticipate? How have "intelligent machines" from Babbage's Analytical Engine to Hal raised questions about what it means to be human? What can Marvel Comics teach us about changes in science and technology? When can robots be women and, in general, what roles did gender play in scientific, technological, and medical stories? How was the discovery that one could look inside the human body received? How do dreams and nightmares of the future emerge from the everyday work of scientific and technological research?

Full details for HIST 1620 - Histories of the Future

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

Full details for HIST 1930 - A Global History of Love

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.

Full details for HIST 1960 - Modern Latin America

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

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

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.

Full details for HIST 1985 - From Subjects to Citizens: The Making and Unmaking of Early America

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

Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University "the first American university," referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where "any person can find instruction in any study." The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university.

Full details for HIST 2005 - The First American University

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

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

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

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

This course uses history and political theory to understand the fascist experience in the twentieth century. In the first part of the course, we will examine fascist ideology; its relation to democracy and dictatorship; whether fascism is best understood as another form of authoritarianism or as totalitarianism; the role of nationalism, race, religion, culture, gender, the family, and intellectuals in fascist regimes; and the institutional and economic foundations of fascist politics. The second half of the course covers the origins, development and defeat of fascist states in the mid-twentieth century. We will devote the most time to understanding what happened in Mussolini's Italy (1922-1945) and in Hitler's Germany (1933-1945), but will also examine fascist movements and regimes in Austria, Hungary, Romania, Spain and Portugal. We will finish the course by looking at the persistence of fascist movements and ideas beyond WWII and into the present, and ask how these are similar to historical fascism and in what ways they differ from that experience.

Full details for HIST 2285 - Fascism in the Twentieth Century: History and Theory

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

Full details for HIST 2321 - Introduction to Military History

The international boundary between Canada and the United is the longest, straightest border in the world. Although frequently cast as "boring" in juxtaposition to its southern counterpart, this viewpoint overlooks the U.S.-Canada border's longstanding history as a site and engine of trans-national tensions and controversies. This course addresses the complex histories of the 3,500 mile boundary separating the United States from Canada from its eighteenth century colonial antecedents to contemporary challenges related to drug smuggling, border fence construction, pandemic-related travel restrictions, immigration, commerce, environmental issues, Indigenous peoples' rights, and national identity construction. The instructor, a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, brings not only life experience of border-crossing, but also a recent background in legal testimony on border-related issues.

Full details for HIST 2392 - Where Fire Meets Ice: Histories of the U.S.-Canada Border Across Four Centuries

This course uses a multi-disciplinary approach to examine the importance of textiles in African social and economic history. It combines art history, anthropology, social and economic history to explore the role of textiles in marking status, gender, political authority and ethnicity. In addition, we examine the production and distribution of indigenous cloth and the consequences of colonial rule on African textile industries. Our analysis also considers the principles of African dress and clothing that shaped the African diaspora in the Americas as well as the more recent popularity and use of African fabrics and dress in the United States.

Full details for HIST 2452 - Dress Cloth and Identity

Why did a relatively poor, marginal island garner a reputation for rebelliousness and embark on radical (though often failed) experiments in toleration and democracy over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? This course explores the social, religious and political upheavals that rocked the British Isles, from the Henrician reformation to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Topics include: the relationship of puritanism to political radicalism; the trial and execution of King Charles I, anti-Catholicism as an ideology; the twinned threats of theocracy and Cromwellian military rule; the role of the press and public opinion in early modern politics, the struggle for and limits of religious toleration, and the relationship of revolutions in England to violence in Scotland and Ireland. Finally, we will look at how the memory of earlier revolutions shaped British responses to the American and French Revolutions.

Full details for HIST 2521 - England's Age of Revolutions, 1500-1815

In ancient Greece and Rome, government did little besides wage war and raise taxes, culture focused on war, warriors gloried in battle, and civilians tried to get out of the way. This course surveys the impact of war and the rarity of peace in the ancient world. Topics include: "why war?"; the face of battle; leadership; strategy, operations, and tactics; women and war; intelligence and information-gathering; diplomacy and peacemaking; militarism; war and slavery; the archaeology of warfare. Readings in translation include selections from Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, Josephus, and Ammianus Marcellinus. (pre-1800/non-US)

Full details for HIST 2560 - War and Peace in Greece and Rome

This lecture course serves as an introduction to the historical study of humanity's interrelationship with the natural world. Environmental history is a quickly evolving field, taking on increasing importance as the environment itself becomes increasingly important in world affairs. During this semester, we'll examine the sometimes unexpected ways in which "natural" forces have shaped human history (the role of germs, for instance, in the colonization of North America); the ways in which human beings have shaped the natural world (through agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization, as well as the formation of things like wildlife preserves); and the ways in which cultural, scientific, political, and philosophical attitudes toward the environment have changed over time. This is designed as an intensely interdisciplinary course: we'll view history through the lenses of ecology, literature, art, film, law, anthropology, and geography. Our focus will be on the United States, but, just as environmental pollutants cross borders, so too will this class, especially toward the end, when we attempt to put U.S. environmental history into a geopolitical context. This course is meant to be open to all, including non-majors and first-year students.

Full details for HIST 2581 - Environmental History

This course focuses on the ideas and practices of Crusading, from its birth ca. 1100 to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1292. We explore the roots of Crusading in Christian Europe and in the Islamic Near East; the conquest, settlement, and loss of the Latin Levant; and the impacts and afterlives of Crusading. Central themes include the institutional, intellectual, and political histories of Christianity (Latin, Byzantine, and other) and Islam; military, social, and economic narratives of the period; and social, cultural, and environmental analysis, using both material and textual sources.

Full details for HIST 2590 - The Crusades

One thing many Americans think they know is their Indians: Pocahontas, the First Thanksgiving, fighting cowboys, reservation poverty, and casino riches. Under our very noses, however, Native American history has evolved into one of the most exciting, dynamic, and contentious fields of inquiry into America's past. It is now safer to assume, as Comanche historian Paul Chaat Smith has pointed out, that everything you know about Indians is in fact wrong. Most people have much to "unlearn" about Native American history before true learning can take place. This course aims to achieve that end by (re)introducing students to key themes and trends in the history of North America's indigenous nations. Employing an issues-oriented approach, the course stresses the ongoing complexity of Native American societies' engagements with varieties of settler colonialism since 1492 and dedicates itself to a concerted program of myth-busting. As such, the course will provide numerous opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking and reading skills.

Full details for HIST 2660 - Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong: Unlearning Native American History

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

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

Following the conquests of Alexander, the ancient civilization of Egypt came under Greek rule. This period is best known for its famous queen Cleopatra, the last independent ruler of ancient Egypt. But even before Cleopatra's life and death, the Egypt that she governed was a fascinating place – and a rich case study in cultural interactions under ancient imperialism. This course explores life in Egypt under Greek rule, during the three centuries known as the Ptolemaic period (named after Cleopatra's family, the Ptolemaic dynasty). We will examine the history and culture of Ptolemaic Egypt, an empire at the crossroads of Africa, the Near East, and the Mediterranean. We will explore the experiences of both Egyptians and Greeks living in this multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-linguistic society. Finally, we will investigate the ways that Ptolemaic Egypt can shed light on modern experiences of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization.

Full details for HIST 2688 - Cleopatra's Egypt: Tradition and Transformation

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

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

Ancient economies were very different to our modern economy: there were no banks, transport and communication were difficult, and the discipline of economics did not yet exist. Yet there are also striking similarities between the ancient and modern economic worlds: many people liked luxuries, production was increasingly standardized, and buyers and sellers came together on market days. This course introduces the key characteristics of ancient economies, with a focus on ancient Rome but also looking at classical Athens and further afield. It is structured around themes such as trade and exchange, craft, consumption, and money. Its aim is to probe the nature of the ancient economy, both for students interested in the ancient world and for students keen to put the modern economy in historical perspective.

Full details for HIST 2712 - The Ancient Economy

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. For their final project, students will conduct original research in a digital or material archive, chosen in consultation with the instructor, to produce a draft of an exhibit, providing popularly accessible historical context and interpretation.

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

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 ten 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, envirotech, users, and maintenance and repair. Technologies addressed will vary, but may include the slave ship, factory, climate control, atomic bomb, and plastic.  

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

This course will examine consumerism in the United States, first focusing on the rise of advertising, mass-market goods, shop windows, and department stores at the turn of the 20th century. We will examine the built environment, the experience of shopping, and the consequent disease of "kleptomania", looking at inequality and activism as a potential political outlet for consumerism. We will also study consumerism as a system of cultural meaning. How do our objects shape and symbolize our identities? What does our constellation of material goods say about our values, our beliefs, and our lives? What stands outside consumer culture? What does it mean to commodify love or bottle nature? Can art or beauty be beyond value?

Full details for HIST 2885 - Consumer Culture

The Great Qing (1644-1911), a multi-ethnic empire that conquered China proper from the northeastern borderlands, expanded into central Asia, Mongolia, and Tibet, and consolidated the China-based empire's control over its southwestern frontiers. An heir to both Chinese and Inner Asian traditions, the Qing empire laid the foundation for the modern Chinese nation-state. In this course, students will focus on the political, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of China's long eighteenth century. Students will also locate the early modern Chinese empire in a regional and global context, examining its power influence in Korea and Southeast Asia, and its encounters and interactions with Western and Japanese imperialist powers. These encounters and interactions contributed to the domestic turmoil and foreign invasions that eventually led to the demise of China's imperial tradition. But they also gave rise to new forces that would shape the fate of modern China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Spring 2021 onward, this course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for History Major

Full details for HIST 2931 - Making of an Empire in China

In the course we will study the history of the lands, peoples, and states of Eastern Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries as an integral part of modern Europlean and global history. We will ask what the East European experience can teach us about larger questions of cause and effect, agency in history, continuties and ruptures, the interplay between institutions, states and individuals, and the relationship between culture and politics. The course will define the region broadly, to include the lands stretching from today's Ukraine to Poland and the Balkans. But given the constant flux in borders, demographics, and sovereignities of this region, we will have to continually reconsider what and where Eastern Europe was. We will survey key periods in the region's history, looking closely at cases from across Eastern Europe. We will learn about institutions, large-scale processes, personalities, events, cultural artifacts, and ideas using a combination of narrative history and literary essays, primary documents, works of fiction, and films.

Full details for HIST 2958 - Empires and Vampires: History of Eastern Europe

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

Full details for HIST 2970 - Imperial Russia

The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented change in China as the country's ancient imperial system collapsed and a new modern order began to emerge. This course will explore the myriad transformations that occurred during this remarkable century of revolution and renewal. Among the major changes that we will focus on are the fall of the Qing dynasty, the intellectual awakening of May Fourth, the rise of the Nationalist party-state, and key events of the Communist era, such as the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong and the capitalist reforms of Deng Xiaoping. The class will encourage historical reflection on China's engagement with the modern world in order to better understand the complex reality of China today.

Full details for HIST 2985 - Transformations in Twentieth Century China

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 explores the history, sociology, and ethics of risk. In particular, we will focus on the complex and often ambiguous relationship between science, technology, and risk. A historical perspective shows how science and technology have generated risks while they have also played key roles in managing and solving those very risks. By examining several case studies, including 19th-century mining, the 1911 Triangle fire, nuclear science, the space shuttle disasters, asbestos litigation, Hurricane Katrina, and the contemporary financial crisis, we will consider how risk and ideas about risk have changed over time. By exploring different historical and cultural responses to risk, we will examine the sociopolitical dimensions of the definitions, perceptions, and management of risk both in the past and the present.

Full details for HIST 3181 - Living in an Uncertain World: Science, Technology, and Risk

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

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

This class investigates race and class in the American labor market from Colonial America to the present day. We investigate the circumstances and labor institutions that brought labor to the U.S. and how laborers of various classes were received. A primary goal of the class is to understand the degree to which social mobility was historically possible in different time periods in American history. Social mobility is intimately tied to labor market institutions and the ability for workers to get ahead within those institutions. Some of the institutions we study are Indentured Servitude, Slavery, tenant farming, the Great Migration and labor organization in the industrial north. Ultimately we hope to build an understanding of the historical roots of the role of race and class today.

Full details for HIST 3480 - Race and the American Labor Market in Historical Perspective

In the conditions of strict censorship and numerous limitations on various forms of political organization and activism, literature and cinema, especially Iran's internationally acclaimed art cinematography, have been the major outlets through which the social and political concerns of the Iranian society have been voiced throughout the modern period. The course explores major themes and periods in Iran's transition from the secular state of the Pahlavi dynasty to the religious state of the Islamic Republic in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will focus on social as well as political themes including the Anglo-Russo-American Occupation of Iran, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, U.S.-Iranian relations, Iraq-Iran War, the Green Movement and the crisis of Islamic government, Images of the West in Iran, Modern Youth Culture, Gender segregation, and the struggle between modernity and traditionalism in contemporary Iran. We will watch selected Iranian documentary and feature films and draw on modern Persian literature but will approach them not as art forms but as reflections of major socio-economic, political, and religious phenomena in Iran's modern history. We will read and watch what the Iranians wrote and produced, read and watched, in order to view and explain Iran and its relations with the West through the Iranian eyes. We will examine how the Iranians perceived themselves and the others, how they viewed their own governments and the West, what issues inspired and shaped their outlook outside the official censorship during the period in question. All readings are in English translation and the films are with English subtitles. The course includes lectures deconstructing political, religious, and social evolution of modern Iran as well as regular class discussions where we will address the issues in question from a variety of perspectives.

Full details for HIST 3519 - History of State and Society in Modern Iran: Through Literature and Film

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

Full details for HIST 3652 - African Economic Development Histories

During more than four decades following the end of World War II international politics was dominated by a phenomenon known as the Cold War. This class examines the origins, course, and ultimate demise of this conflict that pitted the United States and NATO against the Soviet Union and its allies. It seeks to evaluate the competing explanations that political scientists and historians have put forward to explain the Cold War by drawing on the new evidence that has become available. The course considers political, economic, and strategic aspects of the Cold War, including the nuclear arms race, with particular focus on the link between domestic and foreign policy. The course emphasizes writing, and includes a final research paper for which students will use original archival materials. Please contact the instructor if you are interested in an optional extra-credit Russian-language section.

Full details for HIST 3837 - WIM: The Cold War

Whether buying at a general store, shopping at a department store, or loitering at a mall, consumption has always formed an important part of the American experience. More than just commodities bought and sold, consumption is also about the institutions, social practices, cultural meanings, and economic functions that have surrounded the merchandise. This course will look at the changing meanings consumption has had for life, politics, and economy in the US over the past 300 years.

Full details for HIST 3870 - The History of Consumption: From Wedgwood to Wal-Mart

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 is designed to facilitate student's successful completion of their History Department Honors theses through regular deadlines and small group writing workshops.

Full details for HIST 4002 - Honors Research

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

Full details for HIST 4041 - Atlantic Commodities

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

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

In the last decades, "Holocaust Studies" witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics.  This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing.  It will analyze the classical debates between "intentionalism" and "functionalism," the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism.  Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory.  This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Full details for HIST 4237 - The Holocaust and History Writing

This seminar will examine U.S. culture and politics in the 1980s as a pivotal decade in shaping our contemporary cultural, social, and political landscape. We will consider how U.S. culture and politics shifted with the "Reagan Revolution" and the end of the Cold War, and their connections to and ramifications for social activism, social welfare, media, foreign policy, and everyday life. At the same time, we will consider the methodological opportunities and challenges in researching, writing, reading, and presenting recent history. Students will complete a research paper, and work together to design and launch a digital exhibition on the 1980s. We will also explore how 1980s culture and politics was shaped by nostalgia for the 1950s, and how the 1980s and remembered and misremembered today. Topics include the rise of neoliberalism, privatization of civil and social services, the emergence of digital technologies, activism in response to HIV/AIDS, transnational feminisms, the consolidation of the Christian right, and the "Culture Wars." Readings will include historical scholarship, as well as creative non-fiction, films, TV, and music from the 1980s.

Full details for HIST 4337 - The 1980s: Politics, Culture, and Memory in the United States

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

Full details for HIST 4390 - Reconstruction and the New South

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 4408 - Projects of Modernity in Asia

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

Full details for HIST 4614 - Seminar in Islamic History: The Beginnings of Islam: 600-750

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

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

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.

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

European empires used the law to justify colonialism and project sovereign authority over distant territories. But the legal regimes imposed by imperial centers on colonial peripheries were jurisdictionally complex, overlapping, and contested by colonial actors on the ground. This course explores the role of law in the context of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas, ca. 1490 to 1800. We will consider the transmission and transformation of legal thought and practice throughout the Atlantic world, with a specific focus on the role of law in shaping racial identities, gender norms, imperial competition, and the ultimate unraveling of empires in the Americas. The course will examine the different legal regimes, from Roman civil law to English common law, that shaped societies in the Americas. And we will pay particular attention to actors in colonial spaces—from self-liberated Africans to European smugglers—who manipulated the complexity of imperial legal regimes to suit their own needs, shaping the trajectory of American history from the bottom-up in the process.

Full details for HIST 4716 - Law and Empire in Early America

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

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

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

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

This seminar is devoted entirely to the writing of a substantive research paper, the dissertation prospectus, or fellowship proposal. Students will share research proposals, annotated bibliographies, outlines and portions of rough drafts. Class meetings will be devoted to discussing what students have produced, and general issues associated with constructing the dissertation prospectus and research papers.

Full details for HIST 6000 - Graduate Research Seminar

Full details for HIST 6006 - History Colloquium Series

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

Full details for HIST 6041 - Atlantic Commodities

A seminar on the global historiography of technology. Typical topics include industrialization; military science and technology; science and engineering in corporate settings; engineering as a profession; technology, colonialism, and development; race, gender, class, and technology; labor and technologies' users; urbanization, "modernization," and technology in rural life; consumers of technology; technology and the nation-state; and environmental technologies.

Full details for HIST 6190 - Seminar in the History of Technology

In the last decades, "Holocaust Studies" witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics.  This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing.  It will analyze the classical debates between "intentionalism" and "functionalism," the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism.  Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory.  This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Full details for HIST 6237 - The Holocaust and History Writing

Policing and Resistance in US History: this course will study concepts, questions, analyses, and historiographies of policing in US History from 1607 to the present. It will also consider struggles against policing power as a process of politics, social organization, culture, and ethnogenesis. We will discuss the ways that settler colonialism, slavery, processes of racialization, of gender, capitalism, sexuality, labor struggle, mass incarceration, immigration and other concepts and problematics shape histories of containment and resistance.

Full details for HIST 6333 - Racialized Policing in United States History

This seminar will examine U.S. culture and politics in the 1980s as a pivotal decade in shaping our contemporary cultural, social, and political landscape. We will consider how U.S. culture and politics shifted with the "Reagan Revolution" and the end of the Cold War, and their connections to and ramifications for social activism, social welfare, media, foreign policy, and everyday life. At the same time, we will consider the methodological opportunities and challenges in researching, writing, reading, and presenting recent history. Students will complete a research paper, and work together to design and launch a digital exhibition on the 1980s. We will also explore how 1980s culture and politics was shaped by nostalgia for the 1950s, and how the 1980s and remembered and misremembered today. Topics include the rise of neoliberalism, privatization of civil and social services, the emergence of digital technologies, activism in response to HIV/AIDS, transnational feminisms, the consolidation of the Christian right, and the "Culture Wars." Readings will include historical scholarship, as well as creative non-fiction, films, TV, and music from the 1980s.

Full details for HIST 6337 - The 1980s: Politics, Culture, and Memory in the United States

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

Full details for HIST 6391 - Reconstruction and the New South

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

Full details for HIST 6482 - History Geography Theory

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

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

Full details for HIST 6672 - Europe in Flames: World War II and its Aftermath

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

Full details for HIST 6710 - Seminar in Islamic History: 600-750

European empires used the law to justify colonialism and project sovereign authority over distant territories. But the legal regimes imposed by imperial centers on colonial peripheries were jurisdictionally complex, overlapping, and contested by colonial actors on the ground. This course explores the role of law in the context of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas, ca. 1490 to 1800. We will consider the transmission and transformation of legal thought and practice throughout the Atlantic world, with a specific focus on the role of law in shaping racial identities, gender norms, imperial competition, and the ultimate unraveling of empires in the Americas. The course will examine the different legal regimes, from Roman civil law to English common law, that shaped societies in the Americas. And we will pay particular attention to actors in colonial spaces—from self-liberated Africans to European smugglers—who manipulated the complexity of imperial legal regimes to suit their own needs, shaping the trajectory of American history from the bottom-up in the process.

Full details for HIST 6716 - Law and Empire in Early America

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

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

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

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

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

Full details for HIST 7937 - Proseminar in Peace Studies

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

Full details for HIST 8004 - Supervised Reading

Full details for HIST 8010 - Independent Study-PIRIP