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

Is the United States a nation of freedom-loving individualists or club-joining conformists? Both, obviously. How, then, have Americans reconciled their enthusiasm for personal independence and individual conscience with their need for mutual aid and collective harmony? From the early days of the republic to our own digitally-mediated age, clergy, activists, psychologists, feminists, and social scientists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, bell hooks, Betty Friedan have grappled with this question. In this First-Year Writing Seminar, we will study their essays, sermons, and manifestos in both content and form, responding with our own reflective, comparative, and persuasive essays.

Full details for HIST 1412 - FWS: Alone in the Crowd: Self and Society in American Thought

For centuries, people have revered the places known as Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks. Artists, intellectuals, and nature lovers have devoted books, brochures, and picture essays to the natural splendor, biodiversity, and history of these places. In this course, we will read a variety of essays, books, and stories about Yosemite and Yellowstone to become familiar with different writing traditions about place and nature. We will learn about the Indigenous history, settler colonialism, and conservationist efforts in Yosemite and Yellowstone by reading historical monographs, fiction, long-form journalism, and primary sources. To improve your writing and reading skills, you will make several attempts at different genres of writing about nature and the environment.

Full details for HIST 1470 - FWS: Writing About National Parks

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

This course will introduce students to the study of the Ottoman Empire from its inception in the late 13th century until the early part of 19th century. The classes will follow the main timeline of the geographical expansion of the empire with a special emphasis on the historical significance of the conquest of Istanbul, the consolidation of the borders of the empire, the establishment of the state apparatus in the classical period, a period of turbulence leading to a substantial transformation of the state in the early 19th century. Special focus will be placed on the Ottoman Empire's diverse religious communities-using the history of the Jewish community as the main case study-the evolution of the imperial and provincial governments' relationships with the various socio-cultural groups, legal and economic practices in the urban centers, the culture of the court in the early modern period, and the evolution of the inter-communal relations in the empire's urban centers. This course is intended to provide the student with a solid foundation from which they can pursue further specialized study in the history of the Ottoman Empire, the Modern Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

Full details for HIST 1561 - Introduction to the Ottoman Empire

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

Full details for HIST 1595 - African American History from 1865

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. (SC)

Full details for HIST 1622 - From Samurai to Superpower: Japan in World History II

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? (GE)

Full details for HIST 1740 - Imperial China

This course surveys modern Chinese history from 1600 to present. Time will be devoted to each of the three major periods into which modern Chinese history is conventionally divided: the Imperial Era (1600-1911), the Republican Era (1911-1949), and the People's Republic of China (1949-present). It guides students through pivotal events in modern Chinese history, and uncovers the origins of China's painful transition from a powerful early modern empire to a country torn by civil unrest and imperialist invasion, and then from a vanguard of world revolution to a post-communist party-state whose global power is on the rise. (GE)

Full details for HIST 1920 - Modern China

Independent Study based supervised reading with history faculty. Student must complete Independent Study Form with faculty supervisor for determining requirements and for permission to enroll through the online system. Student then work with their faculty supervisor throughout the semester for successful completion and grading of the agreed upon requirements.

Full details for HIST 2001 - Supervised Reading - Undergraduate

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

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for HIST 2050 - Introduction to Humanities

Religion is a term with a rich history but without a precise definition. Everyone can describe a religious idea or a religious experience even though there is no agreement about what it is that makes an idea or an experience religious. How did this state of things come about? What is it that makes religion both one thing and many things? Why do we apply this concept to Christianity, Islam and Judaism and to the deep feelings we associate with secular forms of devotion and enthusiasm - for food, for love, for family, for art, for sport? In this seminar, we will discover that religion is a distinctly modern concept, developed to address the psychological and social needs of Europeans increasingly adrift from the traditional communal practices and moral commitments of their parents and grandparents. Tracing the history of religion - rather than the history of religions - from the age of Immanuel Kant to the age of Emmanuel Levinas, we will examine paradoxical connection between the rise of religion and the decline of faith.

Full details for HIST 2155 - The Invention of Religion

What is democracy? What does it need to thrive? When does it die? How do anti-liberal, authoritarian regimes emerge? What makes them tick? In 1921, a British liberal announced that democracy had already been accepted as the normal and natural form of government. World War I had delivered Europe's old monarchies and autocracies a fatal blow. Three massive continental empires had fallen apart, making way to parliamentary democracies everywhere from Germany to Poland and the Balkans. Yet by the 1930s, few of these democracies were still standing. In the east, a new political experiment had culminated in the rise of a Soviet Empire. In Germany, the democratic elections of 1933 enabled Hitler's rise to power and the growth of a regime unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. In Italy, Mussolini stamped parliamentary democracy under his foot, proclaiming the victory of totalitarianism. A variety of authoritarian regimes arose in between these extremes. They formed alliances and battled each other: at first in the Spanish Civil War and then in World War II. In this seminar, we will closely examine the rise and fall of democracies and anti-democratic regimes in Europe between the two world wars, in order to understand how democracy and authoritarianism are related and what kinds of challenges democracies have faced - both in the past and at present.

Full details for HIST 2165 - The Death of Democracy: Europe Between the World Wars

East Asian medicinal and martial arts, whether practiced in East Asia or in other parts of the world, have been important points of contact for people within and between often marginalized communities. In this course we will study the twentieth century development of East Asian combat and healing traditions, and the transport of those disciplines to the U.S. We will examine the personal, community, national, and global stakes of East Asian arts for those who invest in suppressing, teaching, and practicing them. We will consider how East Asian martial and medical practices relate, for example, to global and local histories of orientalism, colonialism, migration, and racism, and to historical post-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements. Over the course of the semester, we will research martial and medical arts as they have been practiced in Ithaca, and place these local histories into their broader historical contexts. (SC)

Full details for HIST 2207 - East Asian Medical and Martial Arts

What was the Second World War? How do people in different countries remember it today? In this class, we will explore the military, political, economic and cultural history of the Second World War—and the wars within wars—from the perspective of its diverse participants, including the national governments of the major belligerents, partisans, colonial soldiers, women snipers and soldiers, indentured laborers and combatants everywhere. Through an examination of secondary literature, novels, films and primary source, the class begins with the worldwide crisis of capitalism and imperialism in 1931 and concludes with the suppression of anti-colonial revolts across the so-called “revolutionary crescent” in the 1940s, culminating in the partition of the Korean peninsula in 1953.

Full details for HIST 2213 - World War II: History and Culture

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

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

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

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

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 course explores the changing meaning of American freedom and citizenship in the context of the long struggle for black liberation. Relying on social and political history, it confronts the promise, possibilities, and limitations of civil rights and human rights in the twentieth century. We examine various “rights” discourses and their role in reconfiguring our legal landscape and cultural mores, molding national and group identity, bestowing social and moral legitimacy, shaping and containing political dissent, reinvigorating and redefining the egalitarian creed, and challenging as well as justifying the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S. We examine the attempts of subjugated groups to transcend narrow social definitions of freedom, and we confront the question of formal political rights versus broader notions of economic justice in a national and international context.

Full details for HIST 2353 - Civil Rights vs. Human Rights in the Black Freedom Struggle

For millennia, Buddhist monks, merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, and adventurers have moved around the Indian Ocean arena circulating Buddhist teachings and powerful objects. In doing so they helped create Buddhist communities in the places we now refer to as southern China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. The course explores these circulatory histories by focusing on case studies in each of four historical periods: premodern (esp. early second millennium A.D.); the era of 19th-century colonial projects; mid-20th-century nation-state formation in South and Southeast Asia; and contemporary (early 21st century) times. Drawing together materials from Indian Ocean studies, Buddhist studies, and critical studies of colonialism, modernity, and nation-state formation, this course attends to the ways in which changing trans-regional conditions shape local Buddhisms, how Buddhist collectives around the Indian Ocean arena shape one another, and how trade, religion, and politics interact. (GE)

Full details for HIST 2548 - Buddhists in Indian Ocean World: Past and Present

The vast Congo Basin region has shaped the world in ways that are often ignored. Its mineral resources travel the globe - the uranium used to bomb Japan in 1945 came from the Congo, and if you have a cellphone, you probably have a bit of the Congo in your pocket. But the region has been a key site for global trade for centuries. More than 400 years ago, diplomats from the mighty Kongo kingdom were stationed in Brazil and Europe, intervening in global affairs. Later, more than seven million enslaved people were forcibly taken from the region, a trade that brought terrible suffering, but also ensured that Congo region culture and politics would shape the Atlantic world. The Congo's first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, inspired generations of freedom fighters around the world, and his assassination at the hands of Belgian forces and their Congolese allies (with aid from Canadian soldiers and the CIA) has inspired outrage ever since - and transformed African geopolitics. The Congo was arguably the site of the first struggle for a second decolonization on the African continent, and activists have been fighting to democratize the state since the 1960s. It is famed for its novelists, philosophers, musicians, and artists. This course will explore the Congo region's global influence, and consider how diverse globalizations shaped the region.

Full details for HIST 2556 - The Global Congo: Diplomacy, Extraction, and Resistance

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

An introductory history of Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, and Koreans in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1990s. Major themes include racism and resistance, labor migration, community formation, imperialism, and struggles for equality.

Full details for HIST 2640 - Introduction to Asian American History

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

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

This 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 lecture course examines approaches to the study of terrorism, especially in the global north. It will cover 1) the history of terrorism as it developed over the course of the modern era (in the process distinguishing terrorism from other forms of modern political violence, e.g. partisan warfare, state terror, etc.) and 2) the ways terrorism has been perceived, presented, and remembered by contemporaries and subsequent generations. Questions, therefore, will include the following: How has terrorism been approached by political theory, history, literature, etc.? How have these approaches constructed terrorism as an object of scientific investigation? How were terrorists perceived and represented by their contemporaries (in the press, literature, the arts)? How did terrorists represent themselves (in political pamphlets, autobiographies, fiction)? Readings will include archival materials, manifestos, memoirs, and novels, as well as classic pieces of political writing (e.g. Lenin, Schmitt, Arendt).

Full details for HIST 2690 - History of Terrorism

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. (SC)

Full details for HIST 2750 - History of Modern India

This course considers how a small northern European kingdom acquired and then governed a vast global empire. Beginning with the navigators, pirates and settlers of the Elizabethan era, and ending with the process of decolonization after World War Two, we will explore the diverse character and effects of British imperialism in the Americas, in Asia, in Africa, and the Pacific, and consider the legacies of the British empire in the contemporary world.

Full details for HIST 2760 - The British Empire

In this course, we will learn about the history of the West. We will deconstruct popular myths about the West, as we engage with the major themes and significant debates that define the historical scholarship. This course will begin with Native origin stories and end with the 20th century. As a class, we will study the west from a multitude of perspectives, such as race, gender, and ethnicity, the environment, labor, politics and culture. This course is designed to increase our knowledge of the social, political and intellectual developments that have shaped our understanding of the West.

Full details for HIST 2765 - The North American West

Science needs images. Natural history books contain drawings of plants and animals, physics books diagrams of atoms, and medical books depictions of the human body. But what makes these images “scientific”? Why aren’t they just a work of art? In this course students will examine the history of scientific images from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. We will investigate: When did science begin to value the use of images? What purpose were scientific images meant to serve? How have technologies of production changed over time? Students will uncover who the creators of scientific images are and examine how image-making has redirected the course of knowledge. The class is addressed to anyone interested in history, art, culture, and the sciences.

Full details for HIST 2812 - History of Scientific Images

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

The French Revolution was one of the most dramatic upheavals in history, sweeping away centuries of tradition and ushering in the political and cultural modernity we arguably still live in today. Although often remembered for mass executions by guillotine and the rise of Napoleon, it was much more. Between 1789 and 1815, the French people experimented with virtually every form of government known to the modern world: absolutist monarchy, constitutional monarchy, representative democracy, radical left-wing republicanism, oligarchy, and right-wing autocracy. This course explores the rapidly changing political and social landscape of this extraordinary period, the evolution of political culture (the arts, theater, songs, fashion, the cult of the guillotine), and shifting attitudes towards gender, race, and slavery.

Full details for HIST 2860 - The French Revolution

What is war? How has it changed over time? How and why do states engage in war and what social, economic and political factors determine when and what kind of war breaks out? Who fights wars and why? This class answers these questions by tracing the evolution of modern warfare from the beginnings of nationalism and state-formation in 16th century Europe to the present day. Focusing on questions of total war, revolution, insurgency and counterinsurgency, colonial war and wars of resistance, grand strategy and political economy, students will learn about conventional and irregular war across a span of almost four hundred years, from Europe and the Americas to China and Japan, the Middle East, and North and Central Africa.

Full details for HIST 2905 - Global History of War

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

This course offers a broad understanding of the crucial roles East Asian women played in culture, the economy, and society from antiquity to the early twentieth century. By rethinking the pervasive stereotype of the passive and victimized East Asian women under by staunch Confucian patriarchy, it aims to examine women’s struggles, negotiations, and challenges of the normative discourse of femininity, with a focus on patrilineal family, the female body and reproduction, domesticity and women’s economic labor, women’s work, literacy and knowledge, and the modernization of women. We will examine how Confucian notions of gender and family were, far from being fixed, constantly redefined by the historical and temporal needs of East Asian contexts. This examination is undertaken through a combination of reading original texts and secondary scholarship in various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, history, literature, and material culture. No knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean necessary. (SC)

Full details for HIST 2981 - Gender, Family, and Confucianism in East Asia

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

Full details for HIST 3002 - Supervised Research - Undergraduate

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

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

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

How does the state draw political power from nature? What is the relationship between the environment and national and/or imperial identity? How does the environment resist political control, or support human resistance? This course will explore these questions from the perspective of Russian and Soviet culture. Analyzing literature, art, and film in historical context, we will consider the environment as worker and victim, refuge and rebel, commodity and national(ist) emblem, exploring the degrees of agency it is granted in different artistic depictions. With special attention to the history of Russian imperialism and Soviet “internal colonization” and to non-Russian writers and artists of the Russian Empire and USSR, including Indigenous writers. All readings will be in English.

Full details for HIST 3415 - Art, Nature, and Empire in Russian and Soviet Culture

Sufism, popularly understood as Islamic mysticism, is a loose name given to a broad and diverse collection of beliefs, practices and groups that range and vary across time and space. Going from a small and largely secretive group of mystical practitioners to a mainstream form of piety in the late medieval period, Sufism has a fascinating history, filled with intrigue, controversy, conflict and interesting characters. In this course, students will delve deep into the history of Sufism and read widely from across the Sufi and anti-Sufi traditions. Concentration will be given to practical questions of how Sufis saw themselves and their relationship to God and the world, how they built mystic community, spurned or embraced family life, interacted with mainstream society, and engaged in controversial erotic practices. Across the course, we will read Sufi histories and biographies, poetry, introductory treatises, as well as anti-Sufi polemics and stories.

Full details for HIST 3448 - Islamic Mysticism

America has fought two wars in the 21st century, in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were the longest wars in American history and ended badly, amid much ambivalence about the defense policies that created them. Those wars and policies are part of the long history of the war that America has fought as a global power and the policies that shaped those wars and shaped that global power. This course will look at US defense policies and military experience over the long 20th century, from the earth-spanning conflicts of World War I and II, to the nuclear tension of Cold War conflicts, to the global war on terror, and finally to current conflicts like Ukraine and the Middle East. Though this course is primarily about the United States, it draws in the critical global events and actors as well so as to understand the entire history — as much as possible.

Full details for HIST 3571 - American Defense Policy & Military History from the World Wars to the Global War on Terror

This course examines the history of culture in North America from the pre-contact era to present. We will examine how Native, African, European, Asian, and Latino/a influences, along with colonization, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and consumerization, reshaped the development of American culture, including its architecture, literature, music, visual art, and practices of religion, leisure, and consumption. We will also gain a basic familiarity with the theory and methods of cultural history. Intended for upper-division undergraduate students, the course provides practice in the analysis of historical sources, historiography, and written and oral expression.

Full details for HIST 3602 - From Witchcraft to K-Pop Crossover: A Cultural History of North America

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

This course will explore Holocaust survivor testimonies, from the multilayered history of their recording across the globe and their increasing institutionalization after the 1980s to their current uses and future promises, including digital methods. How can we approach, use, and make sense of what amounts to 20 years of uninterrupted listening? This seminar will offer a hands-on, interdisciplinary approach to these largely untapped archives around the world, probing them through the lens of history, film and media studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, and memory studies. Throughout the semester, students will each pick one video testimony to work on individually. Collectively, the course will develop tools to make these video testimonies not only a lasting memorial, but a proper object of study at the global level. Taken together, we will offer a tentative answer to an urgent question: what is the future of Holocaust and atrocity testimony, now that the last generation of survivors is passing away?

Full details for HIST 3835 - The Past and Future of Holocaust Survivor Testimonies

This course explores the Cold War as a global conflict that reshaped the twentieth century and is many ways shaped the world we live in today. Beginning with its origins in the aftermath of World War II, we examine competing ideologies, economic systems, and visions of world order. Topics include the division of Europe, decolonization, proxy wars in Asia and Latin America, the nuclear arms race, surveillance cultures, and human rights activism. Through a mix of primary sources, scholarship, and film, we will analyze the Cold War not just as a superpower standoff but as a truly international phenomenon that affected people, politics, and societies worldwide. The course concludes by assessing the Cold War’s end and its enduring global legacies—from 1989 to contemporary geopolitical crises.

Full details for HIST 3953 - Cold War Europe

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. (SC)

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

How did the U.S. and China reach this precarious moment? Are they on the brink of a hot war, or can diplomacy still prevent the worst? Is a cold peace even possible? This course critically examines the history of U.S.-China relations from 1949 to 2025, exploring the key diplomatic, economic, military, social, and ideological developments that have shaped bilateral ties. Beginning with early Cold War hostility (1949–1972), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the prolonged diplomatic estrangement (1953–1972), the course traces pivotal moments such as Nixon’s historic rapprochement (1972-1979), the cautious engagement of normalization (1979–1989), China’s economic rise and global integration (1990s–2008), and the evolving tensions of interdependence often described as ‘One Bed, Two Dreams’ (2008–present), shifting security dilemmas, and ongoing trade and technological competition. Special attention will be given to the contemporary landscape of strategic containment, rivalry, and the price of competition and cooperation. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students will analyze primary sources, academic literature, government reports, and firsthand accounts to assess how U.S.-China relations have evolved within a broader global context. Discussions will engage with pressing issues, including military tensions in the Indo-Pacific, economic decoupling, and the future trajectory of the bilateral relationship in an era of geopolitical uncertainty.

Full details for HIST 4076 - History of US-China Relations, 1949-2025

Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution. This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia. The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea. Interaction with the West is a major theme. Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics. The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in traditional Asian cultures. The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism. (SC)

Full details for HIST 4127 - The Body Politic in Asia

This class moves beyond the traditional disciplinary confines of academic history to examine museums, archival collections, parks, monuments, podcasts, op-eds, maps, and more as sites of historical inquiry, memory, and knowledge production. We will think critically about what it means to craft place-based and environmental history narratives for a “public” audience. Throughout the semester, we will also consider the following questions: Who counts as a historian? To whom are historians responsible when they conduct archival research and craft narratives? What makes history in/accessible? Who are the actors in environmental history (humans, or also non-human animals and plants)? This course will also reconsider what it means to write place-based histories by incorporating site visits (including a park, an archive, and a museum) into our coursework.

Full details for HIST 4243 - Public History in Place: Interpreting the Environment

This seminar explores how ancient empires developed and were administered as well as how the experience of empire in the modern world and the writing of its history in the ancient world are intertwined. Which ancient empires receive scholarly attention? How are those empires’ histories told—and do those histories change when we reflect on lessons from modern colonialism? In this course, we look at the Achaemenids and the Seleucids in Western and Central Asia as well as Carthage in Northern Africa and Western Europe to situate Classical Athens and the Roman empire within the history of ancient empires in the latter half of the first millennium BCE. Major themes will include ethnicity and identity among imperial elites, citizenship as power, and economic institutions as means of territorial control.

Full details for HIST 4345 - Ancient Empires: From Persia to Rome, 550 BCE to 14 CE

This course explores the method of oral history in theory and practice, across different topics, contexts, and geographic/national terrains. It will consider questions like: what sorts of insights do oral histories enable? How can oral history as a method supplement, destabilize, and enrich existing historical accounts? What are the challenges and risks of oral histories, and how can historians mitigate those risks? What theoretical assumptions underlie oral historical work? Are certain topics more appropriate than others to oral historical investigations, and if so, why? We will explore these questions through reading a wide range of texts, hearing from oral historians about their work, and workshopping methods in class, as well as through independent research.

Full details for HIST 4422 - Oral History: Theory, Practice, and Method

Sunset, polar night, Times Square, satellites in space—these are just four lightscapes. Light is essential to humanity in multifaceted ways. It both reflects and shapes human interactions with the environment. Yet light is also complex, multiple, and contested. This seminar explores diverse lightscapes in varied contexts. How do we know light? How does light define and shape landscapes and nightscapes? How have people managed, transformed, and valued different lightscapes over time? This course draws primarily from the history of science and technology, STS, and environmental history with forays into anthropology, environmental humanities, geography, media studies, and more. We will examine texts and images, and engage with lightscapes at Cornell and in Ithaca. The seminar culminates in a class project centered on student-selected lightscapes.

Full details for HIST 4466 - Lightscapes

This senior/graduate seminar will tackle some of the main debates in the historiography of the Middle Eastern, by focusing on the history of Middle East during the period of Ottoman rule. The Middle East is a loosely defined geographic area, which for the purpose of this course will include parts of North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent, and the Arabian Peninsula. Concentrating on the Middle East in the 19th century will provide the context in which to discuss ideas such as imperialism, colonialism, orientalism, center-periphery relations, centralization vs. decentralization and ethnic nationalism against the background of fast-moving developments of the Late Ottoman Empire. Students will be expected to have basic background knowledge in Middle Eastern/Islamic History.

Full details for HIST 4542 - The Modern Middle East During the Long Nineteenth Century

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

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

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

The dispossession of Indigenous nations by Europeans represents the foundation of the past five centuries of North American history. Yet the truth of that history remains cloaked behind various Western legal-religious justifications for the dispossession of lndigenous American populations by Europeans (i.e., terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, the right of conquest, and Manifest Destiny). Through analysis of primary texts and up-to-date historical and legal scholarship, students in this course will unpack these still-thriving tropes of settler-colonial justification for dispossession, assess the true impact of the taking of Indigenous lands, and explore prospects for meaningful reconciliation in the present.

Full details for HIST 4674 - Dispossession, Truth, and Reconciliation

This seminar will introduce students to some of the classic and more recent works that have allowed historians to re-think geographical and temporal scales, paying particular attention to the definitions, possibilities, and limitations of microhistory, world history, global history, and big history and the multiple geographical scopes of regional histories. We will start by analyzing how historians have thought about scale as a useful tool to recast grand historical narratives, before moving to readings that offer critical takes on how microhistory, world history, and global history have been defined and used. We will then read a variety of case studies that have productively played with scale to uncover worlds that tended to be eclipsed by approaches that favored national or conventional area studies frameworks.

Full details for HIST 4711 - Matters of Scale: Microhistory, Big History, and the Space Between Them

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

Full details for HIST 4950 - Witches, Whores and Wives: Patriarchy and Resistance in Renaissance England

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

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

Full details for HIST 6002 - Professional Development Seminar

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

Full details for HIST 6006 - History Colloquium Series

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

Full details for HIST 6010 - European History Colloquium

How did the U.S. and China reach this precarious moment? Are they on the brink of a hot war, or can diplomacy still prevent the worst? Is a cold peace even possible? This course critically examines the history of U.S.-China relations from 1949 to 2025, exploring the key diplomatic, economic, military, social, and ideological developments that have shaped bilateral ties. Beginning with early Cold War hostility (1949–1972), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the prolonged diplomatic estrangement (1953–1972), the course traces pivotal moments such as Nixon’s historic rapprochement (1972-1979), the cautious engagement of normalization (1979–1989), China’s economic rise and global integration (1990s–2008), and the evolving tensions of interdependence often described as ‘One Bed, Two Dreams’ (2008–present), shifting security dilemmas, and ongoing trade and technological competition. Special attention will be given to the contemporary landscape of strategic containment, rivalry, and the price of competition and cooperation. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students will analyze primary sources, academic literature, government reports, and firsthand accounts to assess how U.S.-China relations have evolved within a broader global context. Discussions will engage with pressing issues, including military tensions in the Indo-Pacific, economic decoupling, and the future trajectory of the bilateral relationship in an era of geopolitical uncertainty.

Full details for HIST 6076 - History of US-China Relations, 1949-2025

What is the history of knowledge? Over the last decades, historians of science have examined a range of figures from artisans and scholars to itinerant healers and household experimenters. This body of scholarship has inquired into the nature of knowledge, asking whether this is a more appropriate historical rubric than “science”. In this graduate seminar, we will investigate this development in historiography by studying books published over the last thirty years in the history of science (ca. 1500 to 1900). Drawing on various approaches – global, social, food, visual, and gender history – students will explore the newest approaches in the field. The seminar addresses graduate students from different fields who seek a grounding in recent methods and concepts in the history of science.

Full details for HIST 6115 - What is the History of Knowledge?

Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution. This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia. The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea. Interaction with the West is a major theme. Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics. The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in traditional Asian cultures. The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism. (SC)

Full details for HIST 6127 - The Body Politic in Asia

This class moves beyond the traditional disciplinary confines of academic history to examine museums, archival collections, parks, monuments, podcasts, op-eds, maps, and more as sites of historical inquiry, memory, and knowledge production. We will think critically about what it means to craft place-based and environmental history narratives for a “public” audience. Throughout the semester, we will also consider the following questions: Who counts as a historian? To whom are historians responsible when they conduct archival research and craft narratives? What makes history in/accessible? Who are the actors in environmental history (humans, or also non-human animals and plants)? This course will also reconsider what it means to write place-based histories by incorporating site visits (including a park, an archive, and a museum) into our coursework.

Full details for HIST 6243 - Public History in Place: Interpreting the Environment

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 course will introduce graduate students to transnational histories of the African continent. We will be reading at least a monograph per week. We will meet weekly to have robust conversations about the form and content of the monographs, paying particular attention to the types of sources the scholar uses and how they found them. This class will give students a window into what studying history outside of the traditional archive can imply. Indeed, African historians cannot rely solely on well classified archival documents in national or regional archives. Scholars of African history have found all sorts of ingenious ways of identifying sources, and we will follow them on their journeys.

Full details for HIST 6304 - Introduction to Global Africa: Major Texts and Methods

This course explores the method of oral history in theory and practice, across different topics, contexts, and geographic/national terrains. It will consider questions like: what sorts of insights do oral histories enable? How can oral history as a method supplement, destabilize, and enrich existing historical accounts? What are the challenges and risks of oral histories, and how can historians mitigate those risks? What theoretical assumptions underlie oral historical work? Are certain topics more appropriate than others to oral historical investigations, and if so, why? We will explore these questions through reading a wide range of texts, hearing from oral historians about their work, and workshopping methods in class, as well as through independent research.

Full details for HIST 6422 - Oral History: Theory, Practice, and Method

This senior/graduate seminar will tackle some of the main debates in the historiography of the Middle Eastern, by focusing on the history of Middle East during the period of Ottoman rule. The Middle East is a loosely defined geographic area, which for the purpose of this course will include parts of North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent, and the Arabian Peninsula. Concentrating on the Middle East in the 19th century will provide the context in which to discuss ideas such as imperialism, colonialism, orientalism, center-periphery relations, centralization vs. decentralization and ethnic nationalism against the background of fast-moving developments of the Late Ottoman Empire. Students will be expected to have basic background knowledge in Middle Eastern/Islamic History.

Full details for HIST 6442 - The Modern Middle East During the Long Nineteenth Century

Sufism, popularly understood as Islamic mysticism, is a loose name given to a broad and diverse collection of beliefs, practices and groups that range and vary across time and space. Going from a small and largely secretive group of mystical practitioners to a mainstream form of piety in the late medieval period, Sufism has a fascinating history, filled with intrigue, controversy, conflict and interesting characters. In this course, students will delve deep into the history of Sufism and read widely from across the Sufi and anti-Sufi traditions. Concentration will be given to practical questions of how Sufis saw themselves and their relationship to God and the world, how they built mystic community, spurned or embraced family life, interacted with mainstream society, and engaged in controversial erotic practices. Across the course, we will read Sufi histories and biographies, poetry, introductory treatises, as well as anti-Sufi polemics and stories.

Full details for HIST 6448 - Islamic Mysticism

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

Full details for HIST 6482 - History Geography Theory

The French Revolution has fascinated, enraged, and perplexed some of the greatest writers of the last two centuries. In this seminar, we will be reading the whole range of these texts: from theorists like Burke, Tocqueville, and Marx, to literary figures like Carlyle and Dickens, to more recent historians writing from the perspectives of social history, cultural studies, post-structuralism, and colonial studies.

Full details for HIST 6626 - Narratives of the French Revolution

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 6634 - Curating the British Empire

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

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

This seminar will introduce students to some of the classic and more recent works that have allowed historians to re-think geographical and temporal scales, paying particular attention to the definitions, possibilities, and limitations of microhistory, world history, global history, and big history and the multiple geographical scopes of regional histories. We will start by analyzing how historians have thought about scale as a useful tool to recast grand historical narratives, before moving to readings that offer critical takes on how microhistory, world history, and global history have been defined and used. We will then read a variety of case studies that have productively played with scale to uncover worlds that tended to be eclipsed by approaches that favored national or conventional area studies frameworks.

Full details for HIST 6711 - Matters of Scale: Microhistory, Big History, and the Space Between Them

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. (SC)

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