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

This course looks at Islam as a global phenomenon, both historically and in the contemporary world.  We spend time on the genesis of Islam in the Middle East, but then move across the Muslim would in various weeks (to Africa;Turkey; Iran; Eurasia; Southeast Asia; East Asia) and to the West to see how Islam looks across global boundaries.  The course tries to flesh out the diversity of Islam within the central message of this world religion.

Full details for HIST 1402 - FWS: Global Islam

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  Through a wide array of historical documents (fiction, letters, philosophy, treatises, manifestoes, films, and art), we will consider why "old Europe" is still relevant for us today.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

Who were the Jews that first settled in the Americas and around the Atlantic? How did their experiences intersect with processes of colonization, empire-building, racialization, and the formation of an interconnected Atlantic World? Why do half the world's Jews live currently in countries on the Atlantic littoral? How do they maintain trans-national bonds with other Jews around the world? This course will reconstruct the rise of the Sephardi Diaspora following the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, their settlement patterns across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, their global economic activities, and the uneasy ways they mapped onto religious, political, and racial schema of the period. We will also explore the mass-migrations of European, Middle Eastern, and North African Jews in the 19-20th centuries that rejuvenated the Jewish Atlantic and will investigate how the formation of the State of Israel has impacted the bonds of solidarity within this multi-ethnic Jewish Diaspora.

Full details for HIST 1710 - The Jewish Atlantic: 1492-Present

This course seeks a fuller recounting of U.S. history by remapping what we understand as "America." We will examine traditional themes in the teaching of U.S. history—territorial expansion and empire, migration and nation building, industrialization and labor, war and revolution, and citizenship and transnationalism—but we will examine this "American experience" in a broader hemispheric context and include as actors americanos of Spanish, Mexican, Caribbean, and Central/South American ancestries.

Full details for HIST 1802 - Introduction to Latinos in U.S. History

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

When did the 'Americas' come in to being?  Who created 'them' and how? What other geographic units of analysis might we consider in thinking about what Iberian explorers and intellectuals initially called the 'fourth part' of the world?  Given the scope and extent of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, could 'the Americas' extend from the Caribbean to the Philippines?  This course takes up such questions as a means to explore the history of what would become-only in the nineteenth century-'Latin America.' We move from the initial "encounters" of peoples from Africa and Iberia with the "New World," the creation of long-distance trade with, and settlement in, Asia, and the establishment of colonial societies, through to the movements for independence in most of mainland Spanish America in the early 19th century and to the collapse of Spanish rule in the Pacific and Caribbean later that century. Through lectures, discussions and the reading of primary sources and secondary texts, the course examines the economic and social organization of the colonies, intellectual currents and colonial science, native accommodation and resistance to colonial rule, trade networks and imperial expansion, labor regimes and forms of economic production, and migration and movement.

Full details for HIST 1950 - The Invention of the Americas

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 course is a seminar focused on a service-learning approach to understanding the history of neoliberal transformations of the global economy through the lens of an island (Jamaica) and a community (Petersfield). Building on the success of previous year's global service-learning course and trip to Petersfield, and now bringing the course under the auspices of both the Engaged Cornell and Cornell Abroad administrative and funding capabilities. Students will attend class each week and will also take a one-week service trip over spring break to work with the local community partner (AOC) in Petersfield. We will also work with Amizade, a non-profit based in Pittsburgh, who is the well-established partner of the AOC and which works with numerous universities on global service learning projects. They have a close relationship with CU Engaged Learning and Research.

Full details for HIST 2006 - Understanding Global Capitalism Through Service Learning

Drawing on a combination of primary and secondary sources, this course explores the multiple forms and evolution of biographical writing from the Renaissance onward. We will interrogate the relationship between biographical reasoning and several modern phenomena, including the construction of national identities, the rise of psychoanalysis, and even the historical profession itself. And we will consider whose voices, experiences, and subjectivities are historically valorized through the increasing prominence of biography, and who has been marginalized, silenced, or erased from history in the process.

Full details for HIST 2195 - Biography, History, and Modernity

This seminar examines the Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican diasporas in the United States. We will examine US relations with these three countries; the root causes of this Caribbean migration; their history in particular urban areas of the United States; and the political, social, and cultural issues that have attracted attention.

Full details for HIST 2253 - Diasporas from the Spanish Caribbean

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

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

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

At the end of the Great War, Europe has became the realm of a new relationship between violence, culture, and politics. From 1914 to 1945, the continent became the realm of an extraordinary entanglement of wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions, civil wars, and genocides, which could be summarized by the concept of "European Civil War". This course will analyze some features of this cataclysmic time by engaging political theory, cultural and intellectual history, and by scrutinizing novels, films, and intellectual productions.

Full details for HIST 2333 - The Culture of Violence: Europe 1914-1945

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

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 2415 - Biography and the Black Atlantic, 1400-1800

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

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

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 focuses on the human condition of Chinese women after 1949. In the name of the Women's liberation movement since the early 1900s, do Chinese women eventually hold up the half sky? From the cradle to the grave, what was most challenging in women's life? How did political, economic, and cultural forces frame women's professional careers and private life? No judgments nor imaginations. Using multi-media, such as Chinese independent documentary films, music, and photographs, students will discover the hidden stories behind the mainstream narratives. Workshops with film directors, pop music singers, and photographers offer students an unusual way of accessing all backstage field experiences.

Full details for HIST 2575 - Tyranny and Dignity: Chinese Women from the Cultural Revolution to the White Paper Revolution

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 examines the history of Chile from the 1700s to the present, always with an appreciation for its place in a broader world but always also with attention to its regional and national specificities and its links to the Pacific. Lectures will be paired with readings from various genres: fiction, poetry, journalism, manifestos, speeches, historical monographs, and short stories.

Full details for HIST 2715 - A Global South: Chile, the Pacific and the World

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.

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

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

Provides an introduction to the role computing and information technologies played in political public life, from tabulating machines used to calculate the census to Big Tech's impact on democratic procedures, the future of labor, and the environment. Though organized around four thematic units (Recognizing and Representing, Knowing, Working, and Belonging), the course pays attention to the chronological trajectory of technologies and political practices and students will develop the skills necessary for historical analysis. While focusing on the US experience the course also highlights the international flow of labor, materials, and ideas. By studying the development of computing historically, we will grapple with the effects of computing and data sciences on society today, paying special attention to critiques of economic, racial, and gender injustice. The course will meet twice a week, and each meeting will include a lecture followed by a discussion.

Full details for HIST 2920 - Inventing an Information Society

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

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

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

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

Julius Caesar is one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in world history. His ruinous overreach forever changed the course of Roman history, and his reform of the calendar is still with us. In this course, students will chart Caesar's rise, fall, and contemporary artistic and philosophical responses to it. Authors include Julius Caesar himself, Cicero, Plutarch, Sallust, Nepos, Lucan, and Shakespeare. All readings are in English.

Full details for HIST 3616 - The Rise and Fall of Julius Caesar, and the Death of the Roman Republic

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

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

This course will offer students an opportunity to view the process of shaping national debates from the perspective of the United States Senate. The modern Senate will serve as the point of reference for an inquiry into the development of the institution's powers under the Constitution during the past 200 years. Class readings, lectures and discussions will focus on the themes of continuity and change, the role of individual senators, and the institutional evolution of the Senate. In addition to general class reading and written examinations, each student will write a short paper and participate in an oral presentation.

Full details for HIST 4030 - History of the United States Senate

This seminar invites students to consider major debates and historiographical problems that emerge in the history of race in nineteenth-century America. Through in-depth reading, engaging discussion, and scholarly writing we will examine slavery, northern reform movements, gender and power, the American Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow through the prism of race. We will explore tensions that emerge in the craft of history including public debates about the past, analytical vs. narrative history, the problem of archival sources, and what constitutes "good history."

Full details for HIST 4157 - Readings in Race and Nineteenth-Century American History

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

Full details for HIST 4408 - Projects of Modernity in Asia

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other "minority" experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.

Full details for HIST 4520 - Jewish Cities

As the English East India Company conquered vast Indian territories in the late 1700s, it was besieged with allegations of corruption against its leading officials. This course will examine the origins of modern imperialism through the lens of corruption, considering how corruption scandals generated new ideas of imperial sovereignty and law. Using parliamentary records and other primary sources, students will conduct research into one of the most famous corruption trials in eighteenth century Britain, the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1787-1795), former Governor of Bengal, for 'high crimes and misdemeanors'. Exploring how Hastings and his accusers debated the legal basis of imperialism, we will assess the impact of Hastings's trial and eventual acquittal on the forging of the modern British Empire.

Full details for HIST 4723 - Scandal, Corruption, and the Making of the British Empire in India

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

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 6002 - Professional Development Seminar

Full details for HIST 6006 - History Colloquium Series

Full details for HIST 6010 - European History Colloquium

Full details for HIST 6095 - Empires and Nations: Europe and the World

This seminar invites students to consider major debates and historiographical problems that emerge in the history of race in nineteenth-century America. Through in-depth reading, engaging discussion, and scholarly writing we will examine slavery, northern reform movements, gender and power, the American Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow through the prism of race. We will explore tensions that emerge in the craft of history including public debates about the past, analytical vs. narrative history, the problem of archival sources, and what constitutes "good history."

Full details for HIST 6157 - Readings in Race and Nineteenth-Century American History

Long hair, colorful clothes, psychedelic music, free love, and stormy demonstrations: this is the image that the 1970s engraved in our collective imagination. Framed by two waves of strikes - victorious in 1969 and defeated in 1980 - the Italian seventies were a rebellious time. At the end of the economic boom, this decade experienced the outbreak of multiple contradictions that had accumulated in the postwar period, when a poor and rural country had rapidly turned into a modern industrial society.  In these years, Italy appeared dramatically torn between tradition and modernity. This seminar will explore these transformations, focusing on the relationship between culture and help us to depict a diverse landscape beyond the dominant cliche of the "years of lead."  We will scrutinize multiple sources - novels, films, songs and political essays - as well as memorial and historical productions.

Full details for HIST 6278 - We Want Everything: The Italian 1970s

This graduate seminar approaches the writing of history as a problem rather than a given, as a craft or even an art rather than a standard method of presenting research. We'll consider as many kinds of history writing as possible, including some that are more traditional and some that are more experimental. To get at the complexity of the problem, we'll approach it from at least three distinct angles, examining the actual history of the writing of history (going back to Herodotus, "The Father of Lies"); the theory and philosophy of the writing of history; and current writing practices. Readings will range widely through time and space and will be assessed not just for the quality of their arguments or their place in a given historiography but also for their success as pieces of writing. We'll discuss such topics as narrative structure, the role of the first person, tone, character development, and the basic use of language. Students will also be expected to do a fair amount of writing for this class and to share their papers in a workshop setting-though no new research will be required during the semester. Obviously, the course is geared toward students in the History department, but anyone doing historical writing in any discipline whatsoever-English, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, etc.-is warmly invited to sign up.

Full details for HIST 6350 - The Writing of History

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

Full details for HIST 6408 - Projects of Modernity in Asia

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other "minority" experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.  

Full details for HIST 6520 - Jewish Cities

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

Full details for HIST 6652 - African Economic Development Histories

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

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

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