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

The analytical essay seems to be the basic form of nonfiction writing—but why?  And how did it come to be seen this way?  Why don't you learn to write prose poems in college, or memos, or just elaborate lists?  Or are those also essays?  How has the essay varied across time and cultures?  How has its form been influenced by historical forces, and how did essayists become shapers of their historical moments?  The word "essay" just means an attempt, so this course will be experimental and exploratory, analyzing many different essays in their historical context, and pausing occasionally to dwell on key writers like Montaigne, Thoreau, Woolf, Sontag, and Baldwin.  And of course you will be expected to make several attempts at creative essay-writing. 

Full details for HIST 1301 - FWS: History of the Essay

Mao Zedong's famous portrait hangs over the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing, a fitting symbol of his dominating presence in the history of modern China. But who exactly was Mao and how has he been perceived by others? A courageous revolutionary seeking the liberation of the oppressed masses? A bloodthirsty tyrant bent on self-exaltation and personal power? A savvy politician promoting the modernization of an ancient land? In this course we will probe the figure of Mao through a variety of readings, some by Mao, but most by others, ranging from Mao's physician to former Red Guards to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. And we will add our own perceptions to them by writing about Mao, the man and the myth.

Full details for HIST 1431 - FWS: Mao, China, and the World

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 studies the history of American capitalism. It helps you to answer these questions: What is capitalism? Is the U.S. more capitalist than other countries? How has capitalism shaped the history of the United States? Has it been a force for freedom, or is it a system of exploitation? What is its future? Through lectures, readings, and discussions, we'll give you the tools to win all your future arguments about capitalism, pro and con. And we won't even charge you the full market price.

Full details for HIST 1540 - American Capitalism

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

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

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

In 1868, samurai revolutionaries and their allies seized the reins of power and established a new capital they called Tokyo. Against all odds, this fragile regime survived and made Tokyo a center of power that would transform both Japan and the world. This survey of Japanese history explores the rise and fall of Japan as a modern imperial power; its foreign relations; its economic and scientific development from "feudalism" to futuristic technologies; and Japan's many modern revolutions, from the rule of the samurai to Westernization and democracy, from democratic collapse to fascism and World War II, and from Japan's postwar rebirth to the present. We will examine not only big events but also everyday life, including gender and sexuality, family and schools, and art and popular culture.

Full details for HIST 1622 - The World of Modern Japan

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

Full details for HIST 1740 - Imperial China

The borders that separate the United States from Canada and Mexico are among the longest in the world. The southern border with Mexico receives a disproportionate amount of attention from policymakers, journalists, and artists, while our northern border is largely unfamiliar to most Americans. This course offers a necessary corrective: a comparative examination of these two North American borderlands, from their 16th-to-18th century colonial antecedents to contemporary challenges related to commerce, environmentalism, indigenous rights, immigration, border fence construction, drug smuggling, and pandemic-related travel restrictions. The course demonstrates that both the US-Mexico and US-Canada border zones have been, and remain, sites of conflict and cooperation, nationalism and globalization, sovereignty and subordination.

Full details for HIST 1820 - U.S. Borders, North and South

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

Full details for HIST 1951 - Foreign Policy as Subversion

Independent Study based supervised reading with history faculty.  Student must complete Independent Study Form with faculty supervisor for determining requirements and for permission to enroll through the online system (https://data.arts/cornell.edu/as-stus/indep_study_intro.cfm).  Student then work with their faculty supervisor throughout the semester for successful completion and grading of the agreed upon requirements.

Full details for HIST 2001 - Supervised Reading - Undergraduate

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

Apartheid was a brutal system of segregating every aspect of life for different racial groups in South Africa. This notorious system of racial oppression survived for four and a half decades before it officially came to an end with South Africa's first democratic election in 1994. However, the long-term effects of apartheid still shape the everyday life in the country. This course will explore the history and memory of apartheid in South Africa by using memoir as a genre of historical source. Simultaneously, we will read primary historical sources and historiographical debates to understand the politics of remembering and forgetting the history of apartheid. The course will begin with a broad overview of apartheid state and society and historians' attempts to find meaning of it. In the second part of the course, we will explore the afterlife of apartheid through a collection of memoirs written by key anti-apartheid activists. Alongside, we will examine the politics of representation in sites of public commemoration such as museums, memorials, and exhibitions.

Full details for HIST 2025 - Apartheid's Afterlife

The Middle Ages are usually imagined as a time of manly men and feminine women: no room for gender ambiguity in Conan the Barbarian! Yet gender, then as now, was in fact unstable, multiple, and above all, constructed. This course explores the different ways masculinity was understood, manufactured, and manipulated in northern Europe – primarily early Ireland, England, and Scandinavia – using a variety of literary, legal, historical, archaeological, and artistic sources. Students will gain new perspectives on both gender and sex, on the one hand, and the history of medieval Europe, on the other.

Full details for HIST 2082 - Of Ice and Men: Masculinities in the Medieval North

Until the 18th century, criminals and heretics were tortured and killed before large crowds of spectators, Jews and other outcasts were required to wear special badges and segregated from the rest of society, and Kings were thought to be the representatives of God's majesty on earth. In the middle of the 18th century, these and other long-standing traditions came under attack by a cultural and intellectual revolution known as "The Enlightenment." In reading circles, coffee houses, and salons from Paris and London to Philadelphia, a new system of thought developed and spread throughout Europe and the colonies. Through the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others, we will explore the radical ideas about politics, religion, law, race, and gender by which intellectuals claimed to be sweeping away the "barbarism" of the old world and ushering in the modern "Age of Reason." 

Full details for HIST 2085 - The Enlightenment: The Birth of Modern Thought

According to the 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report released by the U.S. State Department, 24.9 million people worldwide are currently the victims of human trafficking and modern-day slavery. This upper-division course explores the roots of this modern crisis, focusing on human trafficking and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world, a region that encompasses Western Europe, the Americas, and Western Africa. Slavery and human trafficking in this region involved the interactions of three cultural groups, European, African, and American Indian, but within those broad categories were hundreds of different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic groups. Through readings focused on the conditions and cultures of slavery in the western hemisphere from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the course will explore how slavery was defined, who was vulnerable to enslavement, what slavery meant socially and legally in different times and places across the Atlantic world, and why human trafficking and forced labor continued well past the legal abolition of transatlantic slavery. The course is divided into five parts: an introductory section on definitions of slavery and human trafficking, followed by sections on American Indian slavery, African slavery in West Africa and the Americas, servitude and captivity in the Atlantic world, and concluding with an analysis of the legacies of early modern slavery today.

Full details for HIST 2091 - A History of Human Trafficking in the Atlantic World, ca. 1400-1800

In this course we will learn about the rich varieties of religious life in imperial China, focusing on major historical transformations between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. We will investigate the organization of pantheons and human relations with the divine, and consider how they might illuminate social relations. We will examine the ways in which religious rites and festivals helped to constitute social groupings such as families, communities, sects, and states. We will consider the roles of texts, theatrical performances, and clergy in transmitting and transforming understandings of the human, natural, and divine worlds. Finally, we will explore the spatial organization of the sacred in bodies, things, sites, and landscapes.

Full details for HIST 2208 - The History of Religious Life in Imperial China

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.

Full details for HIST 2307 - Histories of the African Diaspora

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

Full details for HIST 2354 - African American Visions of Africa

This course 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.

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

This seminar utilizes recent research on the concept of "minorities" in West Asia and North Africa during the late Ottoman period, through the age of European colonialism, and the rise of nationalism.  Relying on new research on the topic, we will focus on the social and political histories of the notion of a Millets, or "nations" in the Ottoman Empire, and the late development of the idea of "minority" vs. "majority" population in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Case studies will focus on ethnic and religious groups and how their relationship to an imperial state and emerging ideas of "race" and nationalism produced new challenges and concepts of identification in the case of the Armenian population of Anatolia, Jews in Turkey and Iraq, Maronites in Lebanon, Palestinians in Israel, and non-Sunni Muslims like the Alevis of Turkey and Alawites of Syria, and Sub-Saharan Africans in the Maghreb.  Authors and subject matter specialists will be invited, whenever possible, to lead the seminar discussion via Zoom or in person (if health conditions allow).

Full details for HIST 2461 - History of Minorities in Ottoman West Asia and North Africa

This course focuses on African American women in the 20th century. The experiences of black women will be examined from a social, practical, communal, and gendered perspective. Topics include the Club Woman's movement, suffrage, work, family, black and white women and feminism, black women and radicalism, and the feminization of poverty.

Full details for HIST 2512 - Black Women in the 20th Century

This course examines the development of the Caribbean since the Haitian Revolution.  It  will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and our readings pay particular attention to the ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity shape the histories of the peoples of the region.  The course uses a pan-Caribbean approach by focusing largely on three islands - Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba - that belonged to competing empires.  Although the imperial powers that held these nations shaped their histories in distinctive ways these nations share certain common features. Therefore, we examine the differences and similarities of their histories as they evolved from plantation based colonies to independent nations.

Full details for HIST 2541 - Modern Caribbean History

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

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

This course offers an introduction to the history of the Roman empire, from the prehistoric settlements on the site of Rome to the fall of the Western empire in the fifth century and its revival in the East with Byzantium. Lectures will provide a narrative and interpretations of major issues, including: empire building, cultural unity and diversity, religious transformations, changing relations between state and society. Discussion section will be the opportunity to engage with important texts, ancient and modern, about Rome.

Full details for HIST 2689 - Roman 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.

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

This course examines the history of mental illness—its conception and treatment—in the United States, from the early 1800s to the present, focusing on four major questions: (1) How have understandings of mental illness been developed and deployed by psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and social workers, and how have those understandings varied across time and place? (2) How have understandings and treatments of mental illness shaped, and been shaped by, conceptions of race, class, gender, and sexuality? (3) In what ways have treatment of mental illness and "social deviance" operated as a form of social control? (4) How do conceptions of mental illness come to circulate in popular culture and everyday life? Pairing historical scholarship with autobiographical writing and case studies from the 1800s to the present, the course moves chronologically in order to track, and draw connections between, a wide range of movements within American psychological and social welfare history, including the creation and closing of mental hospitals, the pathologization of racial, gender, and sexual difference, psychopharmacology, anti-psychiatry, and the politics of diagnosis.

Full details for HIST 2721 - History of Mental Health and Mental Illness in the United States

This introductory course is a broad survey of the history of the Indian subcontinent from remnants of the Mughal empire through the end of the British empire into the postcolonial present. Prominent themes include the emergence of nonviolent protest, religious and regional identities, ethnic rivalries, social reform and the "woman question," deindustrialization, nationalism and the place of democracy and militarism in a region that includes two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. 

Full details for HIST 2750 - History of Modern India

This course looks at theories and practices of incarceration in the West, from the Middle Ages to the present, emphasizing changing purposes and rationales.  It was only in the nineteenth century that prisons came to be a primary way of punishing people for crimes: the course will consider the reasons for this transition, as well as earlier practices of using prisons in the context of hostage-taking, sanctuary and surveillance. We explore the attitudes of state authorities and reformers and the experiences of many kinds of prisoners (Prisoners of War, debtors, religious dissidents and political prisoners as well as convicts).

Full details for HIST 2815 - Imprisonment in Europe and America from the Middle Ages to the Present

Before Jewish politics, Jewish identity and Jewish philosophy, there was Jewish law. No other institution is more important to the history of Judaism and to the Jewish way of life. In this lecture course, we will explore the ways in which legal thought and legal discourse shaped Jewish experience and expression between the biblical age and the computer age. We will discover how the cultural meaning of law changed over time, how legal concepts shaped Jewish belief and Jewish behavior, and how the study of Jewish legal sources contributed to the emergence of modern constitutional thought in the Atlantic world.

Full details for HIST 2853 - The Law in Jewish History

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.

Full details for HIST 2932 - Engendering 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

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

This course aims to familiarize students with the history of Scandinavia, ca. 800-1100 ad. Although well known as a dramatic chapter in medieval history, this period remains enigmatic and often misunderstood. Our goal will be to set Norse history within its European context, observing similarities with processes elsewhere in the medieval world, the better to perceive what makes the Norse unique. We will examine the social, economic and political activities of the Norsemen in continental Scandinavia, in Western and Eastern Europe, and in the North Atlantic. 

Full details for HIST 3200 - The Viking Age

This course will introduce students to recent scholarship about the historical, cultural, and linguistic relationship between the Chinese and the Vietnamese peoples. Nationalist thought has given rise to widely accepted myths and cliches that are not supported by evidence. Students will learn how the terms "Chinese" and "Vietnamese" are used anachronistically; why, despite historical evidence, the idea of unrelenting Sino-Vietnamese hostility has become fashionable in modern times; how the extensive Sino-Vietnamese overlap affects contemporary regional security issues; and what makes the shared Sino-Vietnamese realm of ideology, politics, government, religion, and social organization such a stable element in Asia despite apparent problems.

Full details for HIST 3363 - Sino-Vietnamese Studies

In the early 1590s, a mysterious cartographer drew a map of the Americas for eager and curious European audiences. The orientation of the map was from the perspective of a ship crossing the Atlantic and arriving in the Caribbean, with Newfoundland marking the northern boundary and the islands of the Caribbean marking its southern boundary. The mapmaker knew what he was doing, an entire literary genre in sixteenth-century Europe was devoted to the islands of the Americas. Sixteenth-century Europeans' obsession with all things maritime and insular point to an important historical fact often overlooked in more land-based histories of colonies and empires: West and West Central Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans encountered one another initially from the bows of canoes, the decks of ships, or sandy beaches. And maritime cultures and technologies continued to influence the development of colonial societies—and resistance to colonization—throughout the colonial period. This course explores the history of Early America from the deck of a ship. Through lectures and readings, we will analyze how the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean created opportunities for some and cataclysmic misfortune for others. Self-liberated African and Afro-descended mariners, women running port towns in the absence of men, Kalinago pilots, and impressed European sailors will serve as some of our guides through a maritime history of early America.

Full details for HIST 3405 - A Maritime History of Early America, ca. 1450-1850

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

This course will take the students through the age of reforms in the Ottoman Empire, the rising of nationalism, and the encroachment of colonialism in the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, and the collapse of the empire. Emphasis will be placed on analyzing various historical narratives of ethno-religious nationalism using Turkey, Greece/Cyprus, and Lebanon, as case studies. 

Full details for HIST 3542 - The Ottoman Empire 1800-1922

In 1989, following the anti-Communist revolutions in the Eastern Bloc countries, Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed "the end of history" and predicted the final global victory of economic and political liberalism. Marxism had been definitely defeated and the era of revolutions was over. Yet, in the last two decades, revolutions have been spreading across the globe with remarkable speed: from the color revolutions in the former Soviet Union and Balkan states, to the Arab Spring and the widespread anti-globalization and anti-austerity protests around the world. This course will offer a comparative study of the history and theory of modern revolutions—from the American and French revolutions of the 18th century to the anti-colonial independence struggles of the postwar world—with the goal of attaining a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the revolutions of our time. We will explore the causes and motivations of diverse revolutionary movements, placing particular emphasis on the political ideas that inspired them. We will read works by Paine, Rousseau, Robespierre, Sieyes, L'Ouverture, Marx, Tocqueville, Lenin, Luxembourg, Mao, Fanon, and others. The course is designed as an introductory class and no previous knowledge of the history or political theory we will be covering is required.

Full details for HIST 3626 - Revolution

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

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

Surveys the modern history of Southeast Asia with special attention to colonialism, the Chinese diaspora, and socio-cultural institutions.  Considers global transformations that brought "the West" into people's lives in Southeast Asia.  Focuses on the development of the modern nation-state, but also questions the narrative by incorporating groups that are typically excluded.  Assigns primary texts in translation. 

Full details for HIST 3960 - Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century

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

In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law that made African slavery inheritable through matrilineal descent. Partus sequiter ventrem codified the economic and legal value associated with the reproductive labor of enslaved women and shaped the social and power dynamics of slavery in distinctive ways. The gendered contexts of enslaved women's lives began to take shape throughout the Atlantic world and well into the mid-nineteenth century in the antebellum South. The lives of enslaved women, however, can be understood in a variety of contexts that we have yet to fully understand. In this graduate seminar, we will read and think deeply about the historiography of slavery and gender. This body of work boasts a unique genealogy and invites questions about the methodologies of our guild as we seek to understand these transformations with a limited archive. This seminar will examine the experiences of enslaved women but will also consider how gender configures in the lives of enslaved men, and white women and men.

Full details for HIST 4155 - Slavery and Gender in the Atlantic World

This course explores the development of the concept of "race" as applied by and to Asian populations and societies. We also examine the idea of "Asia" and its others in global discourse, including through lenses such as Orientalism, Occidentalism, Pan-Asianism, and Afro-Asianism. Our focus is on the history of East Asia and trans-Pacific entanglements with Western empires from the early modern era to the present. A major theme is race science, or the scientific investigation and construction of "race," as it was practiced on and by East Asian peoples. We also explore intersections of "race" with nationalism, imperialism, warfare, law and citizenship, and sex and the family.

Full details for HIST 4168 - Race and Asia in World History

This seminar explores the politics of identity-making by analyzing the role that identity played in the social and cultural developments that shaped the Ibero-Atlantic. Our primary focus will be on the interplay between pre-formed identities circulating in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the construction of a politics of empire that engendered new forms of identity and socio-cultural patterns across Spanish and Portuguese realms from the fifteenth century onward. Weekly readings and discussions will draw on recent scholarly debates on the interplay of race, ethnicity, slavery, class, gender, sexuality, religion, law and cultural performance, to trace how a variety of individuals and political institutions confronted an increasingly multi-plex social landscape. And we will reflect on how the identity politics that such historical actors developed and deployed in the process ultimately gave shape to the social dynamics of the early modern Atlantic World and produced long-lasting reverberations into the era of the modern nation state.

Full details for HIST 4195 - Identity Politics in the Ibero-Atlantic

Why are some technologies such as cars and computers associated with men and masculinity? How did vacuums and sewing machines become gendered female? How do technological artifacts and systems constitute, mediate, and reproduce gender identities and gender relations? How do technologies uphold gender hierarchies and thus social inequalities? This class explores the relationship between gender and technology in comparative cultural, social, and historical perspective. Specific themes include meanings, camouflage, and display; socializations; industrialization, labor, and work; technologies of war; the postwar workplace; sex and sexuality; and reproductive technologies. Most course materials focus on Western Europe and the United States since the late 18th century, but the issues raised in this class will prepare students to think about the relationship between gender and technology in other contexts including our own.

Full details for HIST 4231 - Gender and Technology in Historical Perspectives

Unconventional warfare, especially special operations, is often thought of as strictly a modern phenomenon, while hybrid warfare is a term of very recent origin. Yet both loom large in the record of ancient Greece & Rome. We look at case studies from the Trojan War to the Roman Empire, including, but not limited to, the Trojan War, the Peloponnesian War, the Punic Wars, and the wars of Antony and Cleopatra against Octavian. Readings in ancient sources and modern theorists.

Full details for HIST 4361 - Unconventional and Hybrid Warfare in Ancient Greece and Rome

This course will be a Eurasian comparative study of the collapse of Rome and Han-Dynasty China and what happened from the 5th to 8th centuries on selected frontiers of these empires: northwestern Europe and ancient Vietnam. The Merovingian kings in what became northern France and western Germany presided over the beginnings of European feudalism. In China, after the collapse of the Han empire and its successor dynasties in southern China, the empire was eventually revived by the Tang Dynasty; local and regional rulers appeared on the southern imperial frontier during this time of change but did not initiate a new historical trajectory—rather, the Annamese cultivated a strong sense of membership in the imperial world. Why was the fate of the Roman and the Chinese imperial traditions different? And why were the experiences of the Merovingians and the Annamese different?

Full details for HIST 4485 - Annamese and Merovingians: Two Imperial Frontiers - Rome and Han-Tang China, 5th-8th Centuries

What is a university, what does it do, and how does it do it? Moving out from these more general questions, this seminar will focus on a more specific set of questions concerning the place of race within the university. What kinds of knowledge are produced in the 20th- century U.S. university? Why is it, and how is it, that certain knowledge formations and disciplines come to be naturalized or privileged within the academy? How has the emergence of fields of inquiry such as Ethnic Studies (with an epistemological platform built on the articulations of race, class and gender) brought to the fore (if not brought to crisis) some of the more vexing questions that strike at the core of the idea of the university as the pre-eminent site of disinterested knowledge? This seminar will give students the opportunity to examine American higher education's (particularly its major research institutions) historical instantiation of the relations amongst knowledge, power, equality and democracy.

Full details for HIST 4551 - Race and the University

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

Full details for HIST 4634 - Curating the British Empire

Historical biographies are one of the most popular forms of historical writing. In this course we will examine the challenges and opportunities of writing biographies set in the pre-1800 world by focusing on people in the black Atlantic (individuals of African descent who traveled between and lived in West Africa, Europe and the Americas).  What makes for a good historical (as opposed to a literary or simply glorifying) biography? How can one add depth and context to the often limited nuggets of information about an individual life in ways that can reveal so much more? These are questions at the heart of this course.

Full details for HIST 4653 - Biography and the Black Atlantic, 1400-1800

This course examines the history of policing in Black communities from its origins in slavery, through the Civil Rights/Black Power eras and the War on Drugs, to the present day. Specifically, it reveals how Black people's desire for freedom from slavery led fearful local, state, and federal authorities to establish a complex web of laws, policies and social practices that monitored and governed Black people's lives in sickening detail. This system ultimately laid a durable foundation for systems of racial and social control that continue to exist in modified forms in contemporary society. Using an array of sources—including film, legal codes, government documents, oral histories, newspaper reports, and personal letters—this course explores the legacy of slavery in modern-day policing and mass incarceration. For longer description and instructor bio, visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for HIST 4669 - From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: A History of Policing in Black Communities

Martyrdom is one of the most troubling legacies of monotheistic belief. The idea and the practice of martyrdom remain with us, despite the inroads of secularization into every other aspect of Judaism and Christianity. Thanks to the global reach of mass media, martyrs continually intrude upon our consciousness. The willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice inspires, enrages and terrifies us. Where did this controversial ideal originate and why has it gained such enormous cultural power? This course examines the beginnings of martyrdom in the ancient Mediterranean, the cradle of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Looking closely at the historical context - the intellectual, social and political developments — that gave rise to the iconic figure of the martyr in the world of late antiquity, we will explore how men and women came to embrace the opportunity of "dying for God," and why the cult of martyrdom became a public institution. Ancient people viewed the spectacle of martyrdom with an equal measure of admiration and alarm; looking closely at evidence of their ambivalence, we will gain some perspective on our own mixed feelings about this deeply disconcerting phenomenon.

Full details for HIST 4742 - Dying for God: Judaism, Christianity and the Meaning of Martyrdom

What does it mean to travel across political and cultural boundaries? How are people's thought, behavior, and identity shaped by such experiences and vice versa? How do historians explore and represent transnational and transcultural figures and their stories? Is it possible for historians to help the audience not only understand but also "experience" transnationality through narrative? The relationship between analytical history and history as narrative is complex and everchanging. We build on this relationship not by theorizing it but by examining history works and practicing writing history, in the context of lives and stories of transnational figures, that integrates analysis and narrative. Students read analytical works and narratives about people who operated, willingly or not, in multiple geographical, political, cultural, and religious worlds. While reflecting on the pros and cons of approaching history writing in different ways, students also develop skills in working on primary sources and develop projects on transnational figures of their own choice from any areas or historical times, from proposal to full-fledged papers.

Full details for HIST 4773 - Twice A Stranger: Transnational Figures and Their Stories

Since World War II, over 4 million people have migrated to the United States as refugees. In this seminar we will examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a "haven for the oppressed." We will examine the crafting of refugee/asylum policy, the role of nongovernmental actors in influencing policy, and the ways policy reflected foreign-policy interests and security concerns. The last weeks of the course will pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum-seekers, and our changing definitions of who 'merits' protection in the United States.

Full details for HIST 4851 - Refugees

In medieval and renaissance Europe, criminals were fined, branded, or executed; after the 18th century, more of them went to jail. For some observers, the birth of the prison was a triumph of humanitarian compassion. For others, they marked an ominous new form of social control.  In this course look at why and how prisons emerged during the 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe and America.  What were prisons like, how did newfangled  "Enlightenment" ideas about punishment and poverty affect penal reformers, how did the new prisons compare to other institutions of confinement (plague hospitals, mental asylums, bridewells), and how did prisoners exercise agency?

Full details for HIST 4945 - The Birth of the Prison in Eighteenth Century Europe and America

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

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

As Monty Python put it, European history is a long story of people finding ever more creative ways to slaughter each other. Europe's present, however, is marked by the remarkable feat of European integration, which since World War II has made peace rather than war the norm. This recent integration of the continent not only demands historical explanation. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on the deeper forces of integration and disintegration that have shaped the continent in the last few centuries. This course places European integration in a much wider perspective, including that of the opposite tendency, towards periodic disintegration. Readings focus on important classic texts as well as the best recent works of European history that deal with unifying and fragmenting tendencies in the development of the continent's institutions, politics, culture, social life, regions, and economic and class structure.

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

In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law that made African slavery inheritable through matrilineal descent. Partus sequiter ventrem codified the economic and legal value associated with the reproductive labor of enslaved women and shaped the social and power dynamics of slavery in distinctive ways. The gendered contexts of enslaved women's lives began to take shape throughout the Atlantic world and well into the mid-nineteenth century in the antebellum South. The lives of enslaved women, however, can be understood in a variety of contexts that we have yet to fully understand. In this graduate seminar, we will read and think deeply about the historiography of slavery and gender. This body of work boasts a unique genealogy and invites questions about the methodologies of our guild as we seek to understand these transformations with a limited archive. This seminar will examine the experiences of enslaved women but will also consider how gender configures in the lives of enslaved men, and white women and men.

Full details for HIST 6155 - Slavery and Gender in the Atlantic World

This course explores the development of the concept of "race" as applied by and to Asian populations and societies. We also examine the idea of "Asia" and its others in global discourse, including through lenses such as Orientalism, Occidentalism, Pan-Asianism, and Afro-Asianism. Our focus is on the history of East Asia and trans-Pacific entanglements with Western empires from the early modern era to the present. A major theme is race science, or the scientific investigation and construction of "race," as it was practiced on and by East Asian peoples. We also explore intersections of "race" with nationalism, imperialism, warfare, law and citizenship, and sex and the family.

Full details for HIST 6168 - Race and Asia in World History

This seminar explores the politics of identity-making by analyzing the social, cultural, and political developments that shaped the Ibero-Atlantic. Our primary focus will be on the interplay between pre-formed identities circulating in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the construction of a politics of empire that engendered new forms of identity across Spanish and Portuguese realms from the fifteenth century onward. Weekly readings and discussions will draw on recent scholarly debates on the interplay of race, ethnicity, slavery, class, gender, sexuality, religion, law and cultural performance, to trace how political institutions and individuals confronted these layers of a complex and multi-faceted social landscape. And we will reflect on how the identity politics developed by these historical actors gave shape to the early modern Atlantic World and have had long-lasting reverberations into the era of the modern nations state.

Full details for HIST 6195 - Identity Politics in the Ibero-Atlantic

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

Full details for HIST 6202 - Political Culture

Topic: Late Antiquity.

Full details for HIST 6300 - Topics in Ancient History

This proseminar will introduce graduate students to major histories, theories, and methods in public humanities, to explore how history, art, and culture circulate in public life, how power and governance shape collective memory and cultural production, and how scholars can engage their wider communities. Students will critically analyze a range of modes of public humanities practice, including monuments and memorials, museums and archives, historic preservation, oral history, public art, film and performance, and digital humanities, to consider the histories of those forms and their political, social, and affective meanings. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and workshop public humanities projects based on their scholarship, independently or in potential collaboration with the Johnson Museum of Art, Rare and Manuscript Collections, the Kheel Center, The History Center, and other university departments and community organizations.

Full details for HIST 6338 - Public Humanities

Unconventional warfare, especially special operations, is often thought of as strictly a modern phenomenon, while hybrid warfare is a term of very recent origin. Yet both loom large in the record of ancient Greece & Rome. We look at case studies from the Trojan War to the Roman Empire, including, but not limited to, the Trojan War, the Peloponnesian War, the Punic Wars, and the wars of Antony and Cleopatra against Octavian. Readings in ancient sources and modern theorists.

Full details for HIST 6361 - Unconventional and Hybrid Warfare in Ancient Greece and Rome

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

Full details for HIST 6525 - Historicizing Communism

Full details for HIST 6555 - Gender and the Law

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

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

For description, see STS 4634. 

Full details for HIST 6634 - Curating the British Empire

Historical biographies are one of the most popular forms of historical writing. In this course we will examine the challenges and opportunities of writing biographies set in the pre-1800 world by focusing on people in the black Atlantic (individuals of African descent who traveled between and lived in West Africa, Europe and the Americas).  What makes for a good historical (as opposed to a literary or simply glorifying) biography? How can one add depth and context to the often limited nuggets of information about an individual life in ways that can reveal so much more? These are questions at the heart of this course.

Full details for HIST 6653 - Biography and the Black Atlantic, 1400-1800

This course will introduce students to recent scholarship about the historical, cultural, and linguistic relationship between the Chinese and the Vietnamese peoples. Nationalist thought has given rise to widely accepted myths and cliches that are not supported by evidence. Students will learn how the terms "Chinese" and "Vietnamese" are used anachronistically; why, despite historical evidence, the idea of unrelenting Sino-Vietnamese hostility has become fashionable in modern times; how the extensive Sino-Vietnamese overlap affects contemporary regional security issues; and what makes the shared Sino-Vietnamese realm of ideology, politics, government, religion, and social organization such a stable element in Asia despite apparent problems.

Full details for HIST 6663 - Sino-Vietnamese Studies

This course examines the history of policing in Black communities from its origins in slavery, through the Civil Rights/Black Power eras and the War on Drugs, to the present day. Specifically, it reveals how Black people's desire for freedom from slavery led fearful local, state, and federal authorities to establish a complex web of laws, policies and social practices that monitored and governed Black people's lives in sickening detail. This system ultimately laid a durable foundation for systems of racial and social control that continue to exist in modified forms in contemporary society. Using an array of sources—including film, legal codes, government documents, oral histories, newspaper reports, and personal letters—this course explores the legacy of slavery in modern-day policing and mass incarceration. For longer description and instructor bio, visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for HIST 6669 - From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: A History of Policing in Black Communities

This course will be a Eurasian comparative study of the collapse of Rome and Han-Dynasty China and what happened from the 5th to 8th centuries on selected frontiers of these empires: northwestern Europe and ancient Vietnam. The Merovingian kings in what became northern France and western Germany presided over the beginnings of European feudalism. In China, after the collapse of the Han empire and its successor dynasties in southern China, the empire was eventually revived by the Tang Dynasty; local and regional rulers appeared on the southern imperial frontier during this time of change but did not initiate a new historical trajectory—rather, the Annamese cultivated a strong sense of membership in the imperial world. Why was the fate of the Roman and the Chinese imperial traditions different? And why were the experiences of the Merovingians and the Annamese different?

Full details for HIST 6685 - Annamese and Merovingians: Two Imperial Frontiers - Rome and Han-Tang China, 5th-8th Centuries

Martyrdom is one of the most troubling legacies of monotheistic belief. The idea and the practice of martyrdom remain with us, despite the inroads of secularization into every other aspect of Judaism and Christianity. Thanks to the global reach of mass media, martyrs continually intrude upon our consciousness. The willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice inspires, enrages and terrifies us. Where did this controversial ideal originate and why has it gained such enormous cultural power? This course examines the beginnings of martyrdom in the ancient Mediterranean, the cradle of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Looking closely at the historical context - the intellectual, social and political developments — that gave rise to the iconic figure of the martyr in the world of late antiquity, we will explore how men and women came to embrace the opportunity of "dying for God," and why the cult of martyrdom became a public institution. Ancient people viewed the spectacle of martyrdom with an equal measure of admiration and alarm; looking closely at evidence of their ambivalence, we will gain some perspective on our own mixed feelings about this deeply disconcerting phenomenon.

Full details for HIST 6742 - Dying for God: Judaism, Christianity and the Meaning of Martyrdom

What does it mean to travel across political and cultural boundaries? How are people's thought, behavior, and identity shaped by such experiences and vice versa? How do historians explore and represent transnational and transcultural figures and their stories? Is it possible for historians to help the audience not only understand but also "experience" transnationality through narrative? The relationship between analytical history and history as narrative is complex and everchanging. We build on this relationship not by theorizing it but by examining history works and practicing writing history, in the context of lives and stories of transnational figures, that integrates analysis and narrative. Students read analytical works and narratives about people who operated, willingly or not, in multiple geographical, political, cultural, and religious worlds. While reflecting on the pros and cons of approaching history writing in different ways, students also develop skills in working on primary sources and develop projects on transnational figures of their own choice from any areas or historical times, from proposal to full-fledged papers.

Full details for HIST 6773 - Twice A Stranger: Transnational Figures and Their Stories

Since World War II, over 4 million people have migrated to the United States as refugees. In this seminar we will examine some of these refugee migrations and the ways these migrations challenged our understanding of the United States as a "haven for the oppressed." We will examine the crafting of refugee/asylum policy, the role of nongovernmental actors in influencing policy, and the ways policy reflected foreign-policy interests and security concerns. The last weeks of the course will pay particular attention to climate refugees and asylum-seekers, and our changing definitions of who 'merits' protection in the United States.

Full details for HIST 6851 - Refugees

In medieval and renaissance Europe, criminals were fined, branded, or executed; after the 18th century, more of them went to jail. For some observers, the birth of the prison was a triumph of humanitarian compassion. For others, they marked an ominous new form of social control.  In this course look at why and how prisons emerged during the 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe and America.  What were prisons like, how did newfangled  "Enlightenment" ideas about punishment and poverty affect penal reformers, how did the new prisons compare to other institutions of confinement (plague hospitals, mental asylums, bridewells), and how did prisoners exercise agency?

Full details for HIST 6945 - The Birth of the Prison in Eighteenth Century Europe and America

Surveys the modern history of Southeast Asia with special attentions to colonialism, the Chinese diaspora, and socio-cultural institutions. Considers global transformations that brought "the West" into people's lives in Southeast Asia. Focuses on the development of the modern nation-state, but also questions the narrative by incorporating groups that are typically excluded. Assigns primary texts in translation.

Full details for HIST 6960 - Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century

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