Person reading a book in grass at the top of a hill

Your July 2025 reads

This month’s featured titles include a look at the world’s first advice column, self-help for parents, and a scholarly book on Venezuela.

Book cover: The Greater Second World War

Global perspectives reframe timeline and scope of WWII

This summer marks the 80th anniversary of the “official” end of World War II, but a new book co-edited by Ruth Lawlor, assistant professor of history, extends the war’s timeline back to 1931 and into the mid-1950s.

Temple Olympian Zeus
https://brewminate.com/the-rise-of-the-athenian-empire-and-democracy-in-athens/

HIST 2325 The Athenian Empire: Athenian History, 600 to 300 BCE

HIST 2325 The Athenian Empire: Athenian History, 600 to 300 BCE (HST-AS) Monday and Wednesday: 8:40-9:55 Professor Talia Prussin This course focuses on the rise and fall of the Athenian empire, beginning with its roots in the late Archaic period, continuing through its height in the mid-fifth century BCE, and ending with the city’s transformation into an oligarchy under Alexander the Great’s Successors. Topics include the development of Athenian democracy, the institutions of the Athenian empire, and the experience of non-Athenians under Athenian rule. Attention will be paid to the particular strengths and weaknesses of the ancient evidence for Athenian history, introducing students to the use of Greek inscriptions, coins, and material culture in the writing of ancient history.

Mount Rushmore
https://home.nps.gov/moru/learn/photosmultimedia/index.htm

HIST 2369 Race, The Nation, & American Outdoor Recreation

HIST 2369 Race, the Nation, & American Outdoor Recreation (also SHUM 2369) (HST-A., SCD-AS) (HNA) Tuesday and Thursday: 1:25-2:40 Dr. Amanda Martin This class will explore how access to the outdoors has been impacted by social inequalities related to race, class, and gender throughout U.S. history. The idea of “the outdoors” and its synonyms (whether “wilderness” or “nature”) has sustained lasting cultural resonance in the United States. Since the nineteenth century’s development of American Romanticism, “nature”—or the idea of a landscape not manipulated by humans—has become a powerful cultural symbol and one of the nation’s most cherished attributes. However, this course will examine how this strong reverence for natural places in the United States has been overlaid by racist ideologies.

Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

Requirements Worksheet

THE HISTORY MAJOR REQUIREMENTS SHEET STUDENT’S NAME: ___________________________________________________ Student’s CUID: ____________________________________________________ 1) Students must complete (or be taking) two History courses before being admitted to the major. 2) Students must choose a History Advisor, meet and discuss a plan for successful completion of the major (fill out the chart below), and gain that advisor’s signature on both the Requirements Sheet and Application before submitting these to the main office. 3) 9* History Department courses must be completed with a C or better. Courses taken for entry can be counted towards the nine required. *Many history courses will fulfill more than one of the following requirements. However, you must still take a total of NINE COURSES to complete the history major. FWS do not count towards major requirements. 4 courses from 5 world areas (HAN, HNA, HEU, HGS, HTR) Course # _____ Title:_______________________________ Area:______ _____ Title:_______________________________ Area:______ _____ Title:_______________________________ Area:______ _____ Title:_______________________________ Area:______ 3 courses in history before 1800 Course # _____ Title:_____________________________________ _____ Title:_____________________________________ _____ Title:_____________________________________ At least 2 seminars, one of which MUST BE a 4000-level (taken on Cornell Campus) Course # _____ Title:______________________________________ _____ Title_______________________________________ Other history courses Course # _____ Title:______________________________________ _____ Title:______________________________________ _____ Title:______________________________________ _____ Title:______________________________________ _____ Title:______________________________________ _____ Title:______________________________________ ADVISOR’S SIGNATURE: ________________________________________________________________ Date of Student and Advisor Meeting: __________________________________________________________

Jingya Guo

Student spotlight: Jingya Guo

Jingya Guo, a doctoral candidate in history, studies how historical actors contested and reconfigured the demarcation between pathology and health for female bodies in China.

Hokusai Dragon
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hokusai_Dragon.jpg

HIST 4931 Vitality and Power in China

HIST 4931 Vitality and Power in China (also ASIAN 4429, BSOC 4911, CAPS 4931, RELST 4931, STS 4911) (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (HPE, HAN) Tuesday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research Professor TJ Hinrichs Chinese discourses have long linked the circulation of cosmic energies, political power, and bodily vitalities. In these models political order, spiritual cultivation, and health are achieved and enhanced through harmonizing these flows across the levels of Heaven-and-Earth, state, and humankind. It is when these movements are blocked or out of synchrony that we find disordered climates, societies, and illness. In this course, we will examine the historical emergence and development of these models of politically resonant persons and bodily centered polities, reading across primary texts in translation from these otherwise often separated fields. For alternate frameworks of analysis as well as for comparative perspectives, we will also examine theories of power and embodiment from other cultures, including recent scholarship in anthropology and critical theory.

tombstone with military helmets across top

HIST 4672 Europe in Flames: World War II and its Aftermath

HIST 4672 Europe in Flames: World War II and its Aftermath (also JWST 4672) (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (HEU) Tuesday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research Professor Cristina Florea One of the most spectacular conflagrations in global history, World War II surpassed all previous conflicts in violence, cruelty, and sheer contempt for human life. It definitely changed the shape of Europe, arguably marking the "end of the European era." Was the Second World War a conflict of ideologies or a war of empires? What was the relationship between the theaters of war (Western and Eastern) and the home fronts? In this seminar, we will examine the war's major turning points on the European theater in order to understand not only the nature of this conflict, but also the forces that made it possible. We will look closely at the two superpowers that clashed on the continent, turning Europe into a veritable inferno for the people caught in between. What kinds of societies were Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia? How did the war affect them and their regimes? We will also survey the spaces in between to discover why these two vast empires competed so ruthlessly over them. We will find out how the populations caught between these two giants made ends meet, both by cooperating and by resisting the great powers. Although some knowledge of what was going on at the front will be helpful, this class is not a course in military history. As a result, it focuses primarily on the social and cultural dimensions of war - which it explores through a variety of sources, including fiction, memoirs, and films. Topics include the occupation and destruction of Poland; the fall of France; Hitler's Europe and the Holocaust; resistance and collaboration with Nazi occupation forces across Europe; the Soviet experience of war; as well as the effect of war on family life, politics, and societies in Europe. Finally, the course will consider the aftermath of was: attempts to reconstruct and deal with legacies of war, which continued shaping European societies for decades to come.

News article depicting the Boston Massacre
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Massacre.jpg

HIST 4204 Early American History through Film, ca. 1500-1800

HIST 4204 Early American History through Film, ca. 1500-1800 (also AMST 4205) (HST-AS) (HPE, HNA) Thursday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research Professor Casey Schmitt While the purpose of Hollywood films is to entertain, when those films are set in the past, they offer a critical lens onto how and why we remember and memorialize certain historical events. This course analyzes a series of films set in colonial North America and the Atlantic world in order to ask bigger questions about the meaning of our colonial past to the ways in which we think about the present. During the course, we will read and discuss articles and books in order to learn about the time periods and contexts presented in several different films, and we will use that knowledge to understand what each filmmaker chose to include or exclude and why, paying specific attention to representations of race, gender, and class. Over the course of the semester, we will also meet virtually with various historians who have worked in the film industry to discuss their experiences making academic history relevant for Hollywood. This course will provide students with a clear understanding of specific times and places in early American history, while also encouraging them to think about when, why, and how that past remains relevant (or irrelevant) today.

Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

HIST 3740 America Becomes Modern: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

HIST 3740 America Becomes Modern: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era (also AMST 3744) (HST-AS) (HNA) Tuesday and Thursday: 2:55-4:10 Professor Lawrence Glickman “America Becomes Modern” offers an upper-level survey of major themes in American history between 1877 and 1917. The course will have a lecture/discussion format; student participation is highly valued and encouraged. The last two decades of the 19th century and the first two of the twentieth marked an abrupt shift in the life experiences of the American people. Daily life changed radically from 1877-1920, as the agrarian republic gave way to an urbanizing consumer society. Debates about “progress” characterized the period, as new technologies, new peoples, new forms of politics and culture, and new patterns of living transformed the United States. This course will explore the political, economic, diplomatic and cultural history of the Gilded age and Progressive eras, focusing on the ways American tried to make sense of, to order, to moralize and to shape rapid change.

Flammarion
Flammarion - public domain

HIST 2811 Science, Nature, and Knowledge: 1500-1800

HIST 2811 Science, Nature, and Knowledge: 1500-1800 (also STS 2810) (HST-AS)(HPE, HEU) Monday and Wednesday: 10:10-11:25 Professor Jeremy Schneider This course investigates the history of science in early modern Europe (ca. 1500 to 1800), a period in which new understandings of the natural world emerged while traditional forms of knowledge fell into crisis. Students will examine texts and images, objects and instruments from the history of science as a lens onto the intellectual, religious, and political transformations of the period. Why did our knowledge of nature witness profound changes? How was science carried out and by whom? Where did scientific authority serve the interests of colonial empires? Key themes include the study of the earth, climate, and environment; the circulation and censorship of scientific knowledge; and the relationship of ancient thought to modern experiment and observation.

Photo of My Wife and My Mother-in-law 1915
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Wife_and_My_Mother-in-Law#/media/File:My_Wife_and_My_Mother-in-Law.jpg

HIST 2441 Truths: A History from Antiquity to the Modern

HIST 2441 Truths: A History from Antiquity to the Modern ((ETM-AS, HST-AS) (HPE, HEU) Monday and Wednesday: 2:30-4:10 Professor Olga Litvak and Professor Jeremy Schneider Where have humans found truth? Will the truths we uphold today remain true tomorrow? Leaning on discussion and close reading of texts, this seminar asks students to think about how truth becomes history and how historically-situated concepts, values and norms become true. Examining the ways in which thinkers and writers from a variety of different perspectives have conceived what truth is (and isn’t), the class will focus on notions of truth and falsehood in religion, science, philosophy, and literature. Specific themes for consideration and discussion will include: the role of divinity in underwriting truth claims; the place of truth-standards in the study of nature and the development of new technology; the moralization of truth and lies; the disillusionment with absolutes and the increasing “relativization” of truth in the modern age.

mockup of pretend city
Creative Commons

HIST 2064 Starting Your Own Country: From Utopia to the Network State

HIST 2064 Starting Your Own Country: From Utopia to the Network State (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (HTR) Monday and Wednesday: 2:55-4:10 plus Independent Research Professor Raymond Craib Ever thought about starting your own country? You’re not alone. The past is filled with examples of new worlds, both imagined and attempted: from More’s Utopia to Gregor MacGregor’s Poyais to the Bates family’s Sealand. Our present too is replete with various schemes to create kinds of state-like communities: from autonomous territories in resistance to libertarian seasteads and cloud-based Network states designed around blockchain and cryptocurrencies. This class covers some 500 years of history and literature to examine the political and social foundations out of which such efforts arose; their philosophical underpinnings; their life-spans in terms of both real life existence and long-term influence; and changing technological and social possibilities for new countries now.

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