Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

HIST 4761 Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman

HIST 4761 Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman (also MEDVL 4761) (HB)(ALC-AS, HST-AS)(HPE, HEU)

Thursday: 12:20-2:00 plus Independent Research

Professor Oren Falk

The people who invaded the isle of Britain after the withdrawal of Roman government in the early fifth century, and who dominated it until the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, are responsible for some of the best-known and most enduring legacies of the Middle Ages: Beowulf and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready. This course examines the Anglo-Saxons in their early-medieval context, focusing especially on the cooperation between history and its sister disciplines – archaeology, literary criticism, and others – that is so vital for shedding light on this distant, opaque era.

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Masada
Masada Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 4.0

HIST 4346 Revolts Against the Roman Empire

HIST 4346 Revolts Against the Roman Empire (also CLASS 4346, JWST 4346, NES 4346) (GHB)(GLC-AS, HST-AS)(HPE, HEU)

Tuesday and Thursday: 2:55-4:10 plus Independent Research

Professor Barry Strauss

This class will study an important example of resistance, that is, several armed revolts against Imperial Rome during the first two centuries of our era. Africa, Asia, and Europe all saw such rebellions. What caused them? Why did almost all of them fail? Were they popular movements or elite enterprises? What other forms of resistance to Rome existed besides armed revolts? To what extent were ethnicity, race, or religion factors in the revolts? The main case studies will be Arminius (Germany), Tacfarinas (North Africa), Boudicca (Britain), the Batavian Revolt (Netherlands), the Jewish Revolt (Judea), the Diaspora Revolt/Kitos War (Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, Judea, Mesopotamia), the Bar Kokhba Revolt (Judea). Readings in ancient literary sources as well as inscriptions, papyri, coins, and archaeological evidence.

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ACT-UP demonstration at FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, 1988.
ACT-UP demonstration at FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, 1988. Government Public Domain

HIST 4337 The 1980s: Politics, Culture, and Memory in the United States

HIST 4337 The 1980s: Politics, Culture, and Memory in the United States (also AMST 4337)(ALC-AS, HST-AS) (HNA)

Tuesday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research

Professor Stephen Vider

This seminar will examine U.S. culture and politics in the 1980s as a pivotal decade in shaping our contemporary cultural, social, and political landscape. We will consider how U.S. culture and politics shifted with the "Reagan Revolution" and the end of the Cold War, and their connections to and ramifications for social activism, social welfare, media, foreign policy, and everyday life. At the same time, we will consider the methodological opportunities and challenges in researching, writing, reading, and presenting recent history. Students will complete a research paper, and work together to design and launch a digital exhibition on the 1980s. We will also explore how 1980s culture and politics was shaped by nostalgia for the 1950s, and how the 1980s and remembered and misremembered today. Topics include the rise of neoliberalism, privatization of civil and social services, the emergence of digital technologies, activism in response to HIV/AIDS, transnational feminisms, the consolidation of the Christian right, and the “Culture Wars.” Readings will include historical scholarship, as well as creative non-fiction, films, TV, and music from the 1980s.

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Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

HIST 4303 Nationalism & Decoloniation in Africa

HIST 4303 Nationalism & Decolonization in Africa (also ASRC 4303) (GB)(HST-AS)(HGS)

Thursday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research

Professor Judith Byfield

This course examines the rise of nationalism as well as the process and aims of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa. It draws on films and a variety of primary and secondary materials in order to illuminate the complex and contested arenas from which African nationalisms emerged. Throughout the course we will examine the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender, and class shaped the discourse of nationalism as well as nationalist strategies and agendas. We will also explore the ways in which the conflicts and tensions of the nationalist period continue to shape post-colonial state and society.

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1918-Dancing Sailors
Dancing Sailors picryl.com/media/demuth-charles-1883-1935

HIST 4265 Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World

HIST 4265 Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World (also AMST 4264, ASRC 4265, FGSS 4265) (HST-AS) (HNA)

Thursday: 2:00-4:30 plus Independent Research

Professor Ruth Lawlor

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems – such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors – enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people – requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.

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Tsarevna-Lebed
Tsarevna-Lebed Wiki Media Commons by Mikhail Vrubel

HIST 2970 Imperial Russia

HIST 2970 Imperial Russia (HB) (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (HPE, HEU)

Monday and Wednesday: 10:10-11:25

Professor Olga Litvak

This course surveys the history of Imperial Russia, from its ninth-century Kievan beginnings to its rapid disintegration under the pressure of the First World War. Lectures will draw special attention to recurrent acts of revolutionary transformation that punctuate Russia’s long tradition of “internal colonization.” We will look at the creation of Russian culture, politics and society between the ninth century and the nineteenth as an exercise in empire-building — a project that originated with the enterprising princes of medieval Moscow, collapsed with the end of the Riurikid dynasty at the turn of the seventeenth century, spectacularly revived in eighteenth-century St. Petersburg, under the standard-bearer or the reforming Romanovs, Peter the Great, and eventually taken up by some of the most articulate representatives of a late-imperial intelligentsia whose dreams of Russian greatness were even more extravagant than those of the tsar. Topics for discussion include: the Russian translation of Greek Christianity, Russia’s fraught relationship with Western Europe, the paradox of imperial modernization and the continual recourse, in Russian literary, musical, and visual cultures to an image of Russia as a frontier society without a state.

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Read My Lips Photo
Read My Lips photo This postcard, produced for a nine-day nationwide protest in May 1988, was one of Gran Fury's earliest designs.

HIST 2722 LGBTQ History in the United States

HIST 2722 LGBTQ History in the United States (also AMST 2723, FGSS 2722, FGSS 2722) (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (HNA)

Tuesday and Thursday: 10:10-11:00 plus discussion

Professor Stephen Vider

This lecture traces the history of LGBTQ+ identities, relationships, and politics in the United States from the early 19th century to the present. We will consider, in particular, the shifting meanings of same-sex romantic and sexual relationships; the evolution of modern conceptions of sexual and gender identity as shaped by race and class; the emergence and policing of LGBTQ+ communities; and the history of LGBTQ+ activism and its intersections with broader movements for social and economic justice. Students will learn to read and analyze a range of historical scholarship, as well as primary texts in the history of gender and sexuality including memoirs and letters, periodicals, photographs, and political manifestos.

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Nixon and Elvis
Nixon and Elvis Wiki Public Domain: Ollie Atkins, chief White House photographer at the time

HIST 2680 Sex, Drugs, and Experimenting with Democracy in 1960s and 1970s America

HIST 2680 Sex, Drugs, and Experimenting with Democracy in 1960s and 1970s America (also AMST 2682) (HST-AS) (HNA)

Monday and Wednesday: 2:55-4:10 plus discussions devoted to the study of films

Professor Julilly Kohler-Hausmann

Roots of the United States’ most vexing problems can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s. This class explores the struggles to explain these turbulent decades in both popular memory and historical scholarship and the consequences of our interpretations for understanding today. Students will use movies and oral history to investigate the role of perspective, framing, and agency in historical analysis. We will examine the era’s struggles over issues such as racial hierarchy, gender roles, abortion, climate change, economic inequality, war, drugs, crime, and democracy.

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Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

HIST 2297 Public History Lab: The History of People Setting Themselves Free From US Slavery in the US

HIST 2297 Public History Lab: The History of People Setting Themselves Free From US Slavery in the US (also ASRC 2297, AMST 2297) (HST-AS)

Tuesday and Thursday: 1:25-2:15 plus Independent Research and Optional 1-credit Trip to Louisiana

Professor Edward Baptist

In this course, we will study the history of Black resistance to slavery in the US. Then we will help to build an exhibit about that topic at one of the foremost museum sites that interprets the history of US slavery. Students will learn about the history of slavery and emancipation, and how the attempt to memory-hole the history of Black resistance to slavery has shaped public memory and politics. We will also study how institutions like the Whitney Plantation Museum in Louisiana are working to produce a more accurate understanding of the American past. The course will run parallel with a sibling course being taught in the University of New Orleans’ MA program in Public History. In the second half of the course we will shift to working on the research, development, and production of the exhibit. The course will culminate (for those able) in a trip to Louisiana. There we will work on-site for a week with community partners, museum staff, and our colleagues in the UNO course. This will require students to make travel arrangements, and to pay a program fee that will cover lodging and local transportat

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Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

HIST 2220 From the New Deal to the Age of Reagan

HIST 2220 From the New Deal to the Age of Reagan (also AMST 2220, SHUM 2220) (HST-AS) (HNA)

Tuesday and Thursday: 2:55-4:10 plus Independent Research

Professor Lawrence Glickman

This seminar will explore some of the major political and cultural trends in the United States, from the era of the Democratic New Dealer, Franklin D. Roosevelt, through the era of the conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan? This seminar will explore through primary source research and secondary readings the key economic, political, and cultural characteristics and transformations of the period from 1930 though the turn of the century. The course will examine the rise, persistence, and breakdown of the so-called “New Deal Order” and the crucial political shifts that we call the “Reagan Revolution.” A key theme in this course will be the transformations and critiques of American liberalism and conservatism.

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Photo of acupuncture and map of Ithaca
Photos showing subjects covered and their intersection with Ithaca TJ Hinrichs

HIST 2207 Intersections: East Asia and Ithaca

HIST 2207 Intersections: East Asia and Ithaca (also ASIAN 2278) (HST-AS, SCD-AS)

Monday and Wednesday: 2:55-4:10 plus Independent Research

Professor TJ Hinrichs

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.

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Cross in the Mountains
Cross in the Mountains Wiki Caspar David Friedrich

HIST 2155 The Invention of Religion

HIST 2155 The Invention of Religion (also JWST 2155, RELST 2155) (GB) (ETM-AS, HST-AS) (HPE, HEU)

Monday and Wednesday: 2:30-4:10

Professor Olga Litvak

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.

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“Le Marron Inconnu,”
“Le Marron Inconnu,” de Albert Mangonès dans le centre de Port-au-Prince en Haïti, en avril 2018

HIST 2055 Race and Slavery in the Early Atlantic World

HIST 2055 Race and Slavery in the Early Atlantic World (also AMST 2755, ASRC 2755, LATA 2055) (HST-AS) (HPE, HNA)

Tuesday and Thursday: 11:40-12:55 plus Independent Research

Professor Casey Schmitt

The legacies of slavery remain all too obvious in the modern Atlantic World. From demographic imbalances to pervasive social and economic inequality, much of the recent past has involved addressing that destructive early modern heritage. This course traces the roots of slavery and race in the Atlantic World from 1400 to 1800. Through lectures, readings, and class discussion, we will examine how politics, culture, gender, and the law intersected to shape the institution of slavery and the development of conceptions of race. As an Atlantic World course, we will take a comparative perspective and ask how different imperial regimes (Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English) fostered different systems of race and slavery in the Americas. We will also ask how the law as a lived experience, gender norms, and imperial politics all worked to shape the production of racial hierarchies.

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Collossus: A Colossus Mark 2 computer being operated by Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker
Collossus: A Colossus Mark 2 computer Public domain This work created by the United Kingdom Government is in the public domain.

HIST 2052 Disassembling Silicon Valley: A People's History of High-Tech America across Race, Gender and Empire

HIST 2052 Disassembling Silicon Valley: A People's History of High-Tech America across Race, Gender and Empire (also AMST 2052, STS 2052) (HST-AS) (HNA)

Monday and Wednesday: 1:25-2:40 plus Independent Research

Dr. Charles Petersen

"Silicon Valley" may sound like another name for the future, but it also a place with a past. In this course, we will delve into the economic, environmental, political, social, and technological history of both the wider high-tech industry and the specific locale in the San Francisco suburbs. From the Spanish imperial conquest to the Space Race, from steam and radio to microchips and AI, across dimensions of race, gender, class, and immigration status, this course will strip Silicon Valley down to parts. Students will then use what they've learned to put the place back together again in their own way—not as the top-down elite-driven story that we know but as a "people's history" that can speak to all.

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Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

HIST 2043 Asian American Oral History

HIST 2043 Asian American Oral History (also AAS 2043) (HST-AS, SCD-AS)

Tuesday and Thursday: 10:10-11:25 plus Independent Research

Professor Derek Chang

This seminar will explore Asian American history through the methodology of oral history. Students will read Asian American historical scholarship that has relied on oral history methods, but they will also engage with theoretical and methodological work around the use of oral sources. Students will develop, research, and present oral history projects. Themes include power and knowledge production, the role of oral history in documenting the Asian American past, and local and family histories as avenues through which to explore oral history methods.

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Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

HIST 2010 Atlantic Travelers, 1492-1850

HIST 2010 Atlantic Travelers, 1492-1850 (HST-AS) (HPE, HGS)

Monday and Wednesday: 2:55-4:10 plus Independent Research

Professor Ernesto Bassi

The objective of this seminar is to introduce students to the subjects of mobility and empires in the early modern Atlantic World. Through close reading of primary and secondary sources and discussions, students will become familiar with the experiences of many types of travelers that between 1492 and the early nineteenth century traversed the Atlantic Ocean from the Old to the New World. The class will also draw students’ attention to the multiplicity of perspectives from which history can be narrated. The cast of travelers will include conquistadors, puritan settlers, pirates, slaves, indentured servants, scientists, loyalist refugees, black sailors, creole patriots, military adventurers, and women. The discussions will emphasize the different ways in which these travelers crossed the Atlantic, adapted to life in the Americas, and, in the process, contributed to the creation of the Atlantic World. Although no prior knowledge of Atlantic history is required, this seminar is ideal for students who have previously taken courses on colonial Latin America, early modern Europe, colonial America, African history, and other related surveys and seminars.

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Painting Louisburg-in-North-America
HIST-1985-Louisburg-in-North-America Pierre-Charles Canot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

HIST 1985 From Subjects to Citizens: The Making and Unmaking of Early America

HIST 1985 From Subjects to Citizens: The Making and Unmaking of Early America (also AMST 1985, ASRC 1985) (HB)(HST-AS) (HPE, HNA)

Tuesday and Thursday: 2:55-4:10 plus discussion

Professor Casey Schmitt

On the eve of the American Revolution Britain administered 26 colonies—not just the 13 that would become the United States. British North America’s dramatic struggle for independence has led many history textbooks to read the revolution back into colonial history, focusing on those 13 North American colonies that would become the United States, often at the expense of global connections that defined the colonial and revolutionary periods. As this class will explore, key elements of early American history can only be understood through a broader perspective, from the economic growth of New England as a result of the African slave trade and exchange in the Caribbean, to the use of citizenship as a category of exclusion in response to the myriad inhabitants—European, Indigenous, and African—who neighbored or lived within the original 13 colonies. In this course, we will explore the history of early America from the 1490s through the 1800s from a global perspective. Voices usually peripheral to the narrative of American development, from enslaved African mariners to Spanish American nuns, will become central to processes of cultural encounter, labor exploitation, revolutionary upheavals, and state formation that shaped the making and unmaking early America.

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Ezra Cornell statue on the quad

HIST 1970 Pirates, Slaves, and Revolutionaries: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to Louverture

HIST 1970 Pirates, Slaves, and Revolutionaries: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to Louverture (also ASRC 1790, LATS 1970) (HST-AS) (HPE, HGS)

Monday and Wednesday: 10:10-11:25 plus Independent Research

Professor Ernesto Bassi

What is the Caribbean? How did its native inhabitants fared in the aftermath of the arrival of Europeans? How did the region shift from a Spanish Lake to a heavily contested geopolitical site where all European powers vied for political and commercial superiority? What were the main production systems of the region and how did they result in dramatic environmental change? How did the eighteenth-century revolutions transform the Caribbean? In this introductory survey to Caribbean history we will answer these and many other questions through the study of the political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental transformations of the Caribbean from the arrival of Columbus to the era of the Haitian Revolution. We will follow indigenous people, Spanish conquistadors, English, Dutch, and French pirates and privateers, planters, and merchants, imperial officers, slaves, sailors, and revolutionaries as they adapted to the multiple transformations that shaped this region. Through lectures, discussions, and readings of primary and secondary sources we will navigate the Caribbean in a quest to understand the historical processes that gave shape to this tropical paradise.

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Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Boat upon the waters 1845
Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Boat upon the waters 1845 Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Boat upon the waters 1845

HIST 1621 From Samurai to Superpower: Japan in World History I

HIST 1621 From Samurai to Superpower: Japan in World History I (also ASIAN 2261, CAPS 1621) (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (HPE, HAN)

Tuesday and Thursday: 2:30-3:20 plus discussion

Professor Kristin Roebuck

Japan was once a disunited land of warriors, poets, peasants, and priestesses. By the twentieth century, Japan was a global center of finance, technology, geopolitics, and the arts. How did Japan evolve from samurai to superpower?

We investigate this transformation in Japanese and world history over a two-semester sequence. Students are free to enroll in either semester independently. (All are welcome, but none required, to enroll in both semesters.)

We begin in early Japan: the birthplace of the sun goddess Amaterasu, the imperial court devoted to her, and the samurai who rose to rule under her sway. Early Japan was also home to con-men and courtesans, mischievous gods and warring Buddhists, the world’s first (and female!) novelist, and a surprisingly cosmopolitan culture of artists and scientists, comedians and entrepreneurs, human traffickers and international travelers. Our first semester exploring this eclectic culture culminates in the early modern era (1600–1868), when under samurai rule, Japan developed many “modern” elements that laid the groundwork for the revolutionary changes and superpower status examined in the second semester.

We chart Japan’s development not only through big events but also everyday life, delving into gender and sexuality, family and labor, arts and entertainment, and more.

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The Big Stick
The Big Stick cartoon wikipedia.org/wiki/en:William_Allen_Rogers

HIST 1576 War in U.S. History: From the Frontier to the Wars on Terror

HIST 1576 War in U.S. History: From the Frontier to the Wars on Terror (also AMST 1576) (HST-AS) (HNA)

Tuesday and Thursday: 10:10-11:25 plus discussion

Professor Ruth Lawlor

Is war a “way of life” for Americans, as some historians have suggested? In recent years, many Americans have come to think about war as something that happens “over there”, away from our own shores, but war – the act of fighting itself, as well as the political, economic and social demands of mobilisation, and the foreign and domestic consequences of military violence – has shaped the United States in countless ways. This course explores both the shadow of war – the seen and unseen effects it has on people and societies – and the substance – the wars themselves – to explore America’s relationships with the rest of the world, from the revolutionary period to the present day. At the same time, we we’ll also examine non-military and quasi-military encounters between Americans and peoples abroad, including tourism, romantic entanglements, business relationships, and religious proselytising, asking “what is war?”, and even whether the United States has ever been at peace. Through this multi-layered focus we will discover some of the many ways in which Americans have thought about, engaged with, impacted, and been impacted by, the world beyond the country’s borders, and the extent to which war and violence have played a prominent role in those interactions.

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