Iranian strike against Israel seemed more spectacle than attack, says prof.
Professor David Silbey comments on Iran's thwarted attack on Israel.
Professor David Silbey comments on Iran's thwarted attack on Israel.
Scholar David Silbey: “Large industrial wars like this one are as much about organization as they are about fighting, and this is a sign that Ukraine takes that lesson seriously.”
On April 13, the Navy Reserve Officers' Training Corps will celebrate the legacy of U.S. Marine Maj. Richard J. Gannon II '95, nearly 20 years after he was killed in Iraq.
The grants provide funding for students in unpaid or low-paying summer experiences to offset the cost of taking on those positions.
Theda Skocpol, Harvard scholar and A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, will present the public lecture “Rising Threats to U.S. Democracy – Roots and Responses” on April 9.
Mitter’s talk will re-examine the classic question, “Did the communists win or the nationalists lose the Chinese civil war?”
HIST 4673 Vienna and the Birth of the Modern (also JWST 4673) (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (HEU)
Tuesday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research
Professor Cristina Florea
This course takes Vienna’s history as a starting point for studying how the modern mind fought to liberate itself from a past deemed overly burdensome, while embracing radical innovation and change. Students will develop a sense of the city’s role as a laboratory of twentieth-century ideologies and ideas: liberalism and conservatism, Zionism and anti-Semitism, modernism and traditionalism. Most of the course’s key themes will converge on what contemporaries referred to as ‘the Jewish question,’ a problem which most characters we will examine engaged with to some extent. Assigned readings will include texts by Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
HIST 4196 From the Bible to the Museum: Jewish Memory and Public History (also NES 4196, RELST 4196, JWST 4196) (ALC-AS)(HST-AS) (HPE, HTR)
Wednesday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research
Professor Mayer Juni
How has the remembrance of the past shaped the evolution of Jewish religion, identity, and culture from Biblical times to the present? How have the creation, dissemination, and preservation of Jewish memory changed over time? How is Jewish history used in political discourse in contemporary society in the U.S. and around the Globe? How can the historical tools be utilized to generate a sophisticated and discerning public engagement with the complexities of the Jewish past? In this course, students will explore these questions through seminar discussions, attending, evaluating, and critiquing exhibits and cultural events and watching films that put Jewish history on display, and by deploying their own research, writing, and creative skills to produce public facing final projects or a traditional research p
HIST 3770 Latinos and the United States, 1492-1880 (also AMST 3775, LSP 3770) (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (HPE, HNA)
Tuesday and Thursday: 10:10-11:25 plus Independent Research
Professor Camille Suarez
In this course, we will answer two major questions: What is Latino history? And how should we write Latino History? We will explore these questions without attempting to cover all of Latino history before 1800. We will focus on a variety of experiences to better understand how differences in race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and class have shaped Latino communities over time. We will read academic journal articles and books (secondary sources) and documents from the past, such as diaries, letters, court records, and maps (primary sources). Throughout the semester we will be working in groups toward creating a final project: a Latino history website.
HIST 3653 International Development in African History (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (HGS)
Monday and Wednesday: 2:55-4:10 (3-credits)
Professor Rachel Sandwell
This lecture course examines the history of the idea and practice of development in twentieth century Africa. Since the 1990s, the US, with some input from other western nations, has had relative hegemony in defining “international development.” But this state of affairs was not inevitable – in the 1950s-1970s, decolonizing African nations hosted major debates on how to develop an independent, post-colonial system. Development theorists, academics, and freedom fighters traversed the continent and congregated in intellectual hubs, especially in Tanzania, but also in Nigeria, Mozambique, Senegal, Zambia, and elsewhere, to plan and implement a new world order. This course will combine intellectual and social history: we will explore theories of development, and situate them in their vibrant context.
HIST 3436 History of the Cops: Racialized Policing in the US (also AMST 3436) (HST-AS) (HNA)
Tuesday and Thursday: 10:10-11:25 plus Independent Research
Professor Edward Baptist
The course will study the history of policing and race in the US. Beginning with the origins of American policing in a settler-colonial society, it will study the way whiteness emerged as an identity that depended on the control of both Indigenous and Black people. We will discuss the role of policing in national identity, the defense of slavery, American empire, the rise of urban industrialization, the emergence of professionalized policing, the control of immigrants, and the undermining of Reconstruction. The emergence of twentieth-century America, the identification of crime as a key political and the further development of racialized policing as a core fiscal and ideological project of the American state will be the main focus of the second half of the course. The course will also cover organization against racialized policing in particular as a major political project, source of identity, and root of both solidarity and estrangement between Black and other working class Americans.
HIST 2852 Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (also JWST 2852, RELST 2852) (HST-AS) (HPE, HEU)
Monday and Wednesday: 10:10-11:25 (3-credits)
Professor Olga Litvak
Most people think of Christianity as the “daughter religion” of Judaism. In this course, we will see that what we now know as Judaism and Christianity both claimed ownership of the same textual tradition and emerged together from the same set of historical circumstances, shaped by political crisis, a radical transformation of the social order and the challenge of Graeco-Roman culture. Through close reading of the principal sources of Christian literature, such as Paul’s letters to the first communities of gentile “believers” and the accounts of the life and death of the messiah, known collectively as the gospels, we will explore how and why the followers of Jesus first came to think of themselves as the “New Israel” and how a polemical engagement with their controversial interpretation of Hebrew prophecy shaped the development of the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine.
HIST 2631 The Global History of Time (HST-AS)(HPE, HTR)
Tuesday and Thursday: 11:40-12:55 (3-credits)
Dr. Justin Clark
We often define history as change over time, while overlooking that our ways of measuring, thinking about, and using time are themselves an important part of history. This lecture course examines that history on a global scale. Why have societies around the world spent so much effort over the centuries in studying, philosophizing, and inventing stories about time? How have clocks, calendars, and other timekeepers evolved? How have those devices helped re-organize society, industry, and science? Drawing on case studies from every continent, this course will familiarize students with the technological, political, social, and cultural histories of time, while developing their skills in analyzing primary sources such as art works, films, and literary texts.
HIST 2452 Dress, Cloth and Identity in Africa and the Diaspora (also ASRC 2452, HIST 6452) (HST-AS) (HGS)
Tuesday and Thursday: 2:55-4:10 plus Independent Research
Professor Judith Byfield
This course uses a multi-disciplinary approach to examine the importance of textiles in African social and economic history and the long engagement between African consumers and textile producers from other world regions. It combines art history, anthropology as well as social and economic history to explore the role of textiles and dress in marking status, gender, political authority and ethnicity. In addition, we examine the production and distribution of indigenous and imported cloth as well as the consequences of colonial rule and contemporary globalization on African textile industries and consumers. Our analysis also considers the principles of African aesthetics and dress that continue to shape the African diaspora in the Americas.
HIST 2371 US Climate Catastrophes: Rethinking US History through the Climate (also AMST 2375) (HST-AS) (HNA)
Tuesday and Thursday: 2:55-4:10 plus Independent Research
Professor Camille Suarez
How does our understanding of the current climate emergency change when we examine the past with an environmental lens? In this course, we will think of US history through climate catastrophes, human-made and naturally occurring, to consider how humans and the environment have interacted with each other over time and to reconsider how that relationship has changed within a US context. Rather than focus on the traditional turning points of the US, such as wars or presidents, we will look at the California Gold Rush, the use of DDT, the building of the Oahe Dam, the Love Canal, and 21st-century hurricanes.
HIST 2315 The Occupation of Japan (GB)(GLC-AS, HST-AS) (HAN)
Tuesday and Thursday: 10:10-11:25 plus Independent Research
Professor Kristin Roebuck
In August 1945, Japan was a devastated country – its cities burned, its people starving, its military and government in surrender. World War II was over. The occupation had begun. What sort of society emerged from the cooperation and conflict between occupiers and occupied? Students will examine sources ranging from declassified government documents to excerpts from diaries and bawdy fiction, alongside major scholarly studies, to find out. The first half of the course focuses on key issues in Japanese history, like the fate of the emperor, constitutional revision, and the emancipation of women. The second half zooms out for a wider perspective, for the occupation of Japan was never merely a local event. It was the collapse of Japanese empire and the rise of American empire in Asia. It was decolonization in Korea and the start of the Cold War. Students will further explore these links through individual research on comparative occupation.
HIST 2151 War in Experience and Expression: Origins of Modern War-Writing, 1500-1900 (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (HPE, HEU)
Monday and Wednesday: 2:30-4:10
Professor Olga Litvak
This seminar treats the tension between the compelling moral, historical and psychological imperatives to represent armed conflict and the rhetorical difficulties attendant on doing so. Through critical and contextual analysis of texts situated within the modern European tradition of war-writing, students will examine the motives which make the accurate rendering of war both necessary and impossible: to impose order and meaning on the chaos of violence, to commemorate the victims without inducing guilt in the survivors, to celebrate individual acts of heroism while promoting collective peace, but above all to bring to bear the resources of linguistic expression on an experience of extremity which ultimately resists discursive mediation and, despite its ubiquity in human history, subverts our conception of the ordinary and challenges established analytic taxonomies.
HIST 2083 A Land to Call Our Own: De-Colonizing Medieval Europe (also MEDVL 2083) (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (HPE,HEU)
Tuesday and Thursday: 2:55-4:10 plus Independent Research
Professor Oren Falk
Colonial projects have a bad reputation; no one in their right mind would choose to identify as a colonizer, much less a colonialist. This was not always the case. In the 1800s, colonialism was the height of civilized accomplishment; everyone wanted in on it. In this course, we shift our gaze farther back in time to examine the thoughts and practices of people in medieval Europe. We delve into questions of function and type (is there a difference between colonization and colonialism?), of perspective and bias (does it matter how recent a colony is?), of social, cultural, regional, and temporal variation. By highlighting the non-self-evidence of truths we hold, the medieval past can help us appreciate why we cherish them nonetheless – or prompt us to re-evaluate them.
HIST 1770 U.S. History Through Literature (also AMST 1770) (HNA)
Monday and Wednesday: 10:10-11:25 plus discusion
Professor Aaron Sachs
This lecture course combines historical and literary approaches to explore the inner life of Americans over the last two hundred years. No prior knowledge of US history is assumed. We’ll examine the ways in which historical context can shape literary works and the ways in which literature, in turn, can shape history. How have Americans imagined themselves and their nation? Has there ever been a stable American identity?
The focus will be on literary works that pose questions about race, gender, individualism, and belonging, allowing us to see how writers have both reinforced and resisted cultural pressures. My hope is that tracing US history through works of the imagination will help in the collective (and perpetual) effort to reimagine American life.
HIST 1600 History of Law: Great Trials (HST-AS, ETM-AS) (HEU)
Tuesday and Thursday: 10:10-11:25 plus discussion
Professor Paul Friedland and Claudia Verhoeven
Through discussion of a variety of high-profile and lesser-known trials throughout history, this course will examine a range of issues in the history of law and criminality. We will study the relationship between ideology and law in different societies, the politics of trials, the theory and practice of punishment, and the relationship of trials to terror(ism) and social marginalization. Cases to be covered include: Socrates, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, the French Revolutionary Terror, the Russian revolutionary terrorists, the Dreyfus Affair, the Stalinist show trials, Charles Manson, OJ Simpson, and Pussy Riot.
HIST 1590 History and Popular Culture in Africa (also ASRC 1590) (GB) (HST-AS) (HGS)
Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 11:15-12:05
Professor Judith Byfield
This course uses a multidisciplinary approach to explore the complex relationship between history and popular culture in Africa. The course considers two main questions - How can you write history using popular culture? And how do artists use history to create popular culture? It uses examples from around the continent to explore old and new forms of popular culture; forms of cultural expression used by historians; as well as the ways in which artists use moments of great historical significance or key historical actors in their works. We consider, for example, the work of Leroy Vail who used songs by Mozambican peasants to write a social history of colonialism as well as films about colonialism by African film-makers such as the late Ousman Sembene.
Soaring rents and home prices have created a city of haves and have-nots, says Cornell history scholar Jacob Anbinder, who studies how America’s most progressive cities become unaffordable for a significant portion of the population.
History doctoral candidate Megan Jeffreys is using runaway slave ads as one of the foundations of her work.
Your gift allows the College to fulfill our mission — to prepare our students to do the greatest good in the world.
Daniel A. Baugh, professor emeritus of history, died Feb. 9 at his home in Williamsburg, Virginia. He was 92.
A series of four lectures — two in the spring and two in the fall of 2024 — will focus on “Unmasking the CCP: History, Politics, and Society in Post-1949 China."
Jacob Anbinder is finding political as well as economic reasons for the current housing crisis.
In Ukraine, fired general Zaluzhny appears to be taking the fall for recent failures and circumstances outside of President Zelensky’s control, says David Silbey.
This fifth cohort of Klarman Fellows is the largest since the program was launched in 2019.
"Mounting an attack with clearly identifiable Iranian forces is probably off the table," says David Silbey, associate professor of history, "but further proxy attacks are likely to continue.”
A watertight legal basis for confiscations is lacking because the US and its allies are not openly at war with Moscow, argues historian Nicholas Mulder in an op-ed.
Idyllic images of the Philippines taken by a Cornell alumnus in 1902 illuminate the tumultuous U.S. annexation of the archipelago in the aftermath of the Philippine-American War, according to a Ph.D. student in history.
An enduring friendship between alums — dating back to when they were mentor and student — has led both to cultivate their creativity.
Jon Parmenter helped the defense successfully assert an Aboriginal right to trade based on 18th century treaties.
Historian David Silbey gives perspective to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy scheduled meeting with President Biden ahead of a joint news conference.
Need a present for the Cornellian on your list? Here are titles on University history, traditions, songs, famous alums—even recipes!
The award was given for “Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire.”
“News is so important because it’s the foundation for critical thinking and critical debate,” said Texas Tribune editor-in-chief Sewell Chan.
Christopher S. Celenza will suggest some answers that arise from considering the history of the liberal arts, medieval and early modern universities, and the rise of the arts and sciences in the modern era.
The Cornell Historical Society (CHS) started the semester in abstraction. Away with ordinary ice breakers, we proposed a new manner of introduction. In the first floor seminar room of the still-standing McGraw Hall, we asked each other how to draw time. Pointer fingers lifted in the air, our interpretations varied: a zig-zag, a sine wave, a spiral, the hands of a clock. Now finding ourselves in November, CHS might draw time as an exponential graph. Already we’ve made it to the semester’s half! To hear what we’ve been up to, here’s a summary from our staff:
Shirley Lim's ’90 research into Hollywood icon Anna May Wong is receiving lots of attention as Wong is pictured on a new set of U.S. quarters.
From Oprah and the Obamas to lesser-known heroes, Joseph Holland ’78, MA ’79 finds words to live by.
A Nov. 16 talk sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the College of Arts and Sciences will shed light on the history of hate movements in the U.S.
Three A&S faculty members are recipients of 2023 Stephen H. Weiss Teaching Awards, which honor a sustained commitment to teaching and mentoring undergraduate students.
A specialist in the study of Latin manuscripts and the history of universities, John was a part of the Cornell community for more than 50 years, teaching medieval intellectual history, historiography and paleography – the study of historical writing systems and manuscripts.
The Society’s fall conference on Friday, Oct. 27, will feature talks by seven multidisciplinary fellows.
Beginning October 16, students can enroll in a wide range of online courses taught by Cornell faculty.
Military historian David Silbey comments on Ukrainian forces using American-supplied, long-range missiles on the battlefield for the first time.
Environmental historian Aaron Sachs will use a combination of gallows humor, history and silly videos to show how we can shift our attitude about climate change -- and how that shift might help us get to the next stage of climate activism.
HIST 4674 Dispossession, Truth, and Reconciliation (also AIIS 4674, AMST 4674) (HNA)
Tuesday and Thursday: 10:10-11:25
Professor Jon Parmenter
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.