History Undergraduate Courses and Descriptions-Fall 2023

HST 101:  American History to 1865

*This course includes the lecture and a weekly discussion section. By enrolling in discussion, you automatically enroll in the lecture.

This introductory course will survey American history from the pre-colonial era to the Civil War. We will approach this period of history through a discussion of three themes. The first covers the period from the founding down to the middle of the eighteenth century and focuses on how Europeans from a medieval culture became Americans. The second theme explores the political, social and economic impact the Revolution had upon American society. And finally, we will focus on the modernization of American society in the nineteenth century and how that modernization was a major factor in causing the sectional crisis.

In addition to the two lecture classes a week, you will attend a small discussion class taught by one of the teaching assistants once each week.

Concentration: U.S. / Period: Pre-Modern

HST 111: Early Modern Europe

*This course includes the lecture and a weekly discussion section. By enrolling in discussion, you automatically enroll in the lecture.

This course covers the history of Europe from the Black Death, which marked the end of the Middle Ages, to the French Revolution – the beginning of the modern world. While it will cover the major events of the period – the Renaissance, the Reformation, the English, French and scientific revolutions, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the growth of the modern state – the emphasis will be on changes in the lives of ordinary men and women. There will be a mid semester, a final, and two short (c. 5 page) papers.

Concentration: Europe / Period: Pre-modern

HST 121: Global History to 1750

*This course includes the lecture and a weekly discussion section. By enrolling in discussion, you automatically enroll in the lecture.

This course introduces students to global history from the thirteenth century through 1750 by focusing on social, economic, political, intellectual, and religious developments in major regions of the world: Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Beginning with the Mongol’s Eurasian empire, their transformation of the continent, and the spread of Islamic empires from Central Asia to the Atlantic, it traces the historical patterns of different world regions in the fifteenth century through the trans-Atlantic slave trade and European imperialism.  What types of exchanges were facilitated by maritime trade and trade diasporas? How were human interactions with their environment circumscribed by climate change and disease? The latter part of the course looks at global connections and local particularities facilitated by the spread of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Course themes include empire, disease, environment, slavery, religion, state-formation, and the rise of global trade. Topics will be covered thematically in general chronological order. Lectures will be supplemented by maps, visual materials, music, documentaries and films. All students are required to attend lectures and one discussion a week.

Concentration: Global / Period: Pre-modern

This course is an introductory survey of Middle East history from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to 1900. There are no pre-requisites, and no prior knowledge of the Middle East is expected. We will discuss the origins of Islam, and aspects of major Islamic empires such as the Umayyads (7^th-8^th centuries), the Abbasids (8^th-13^th centuries), the Fatimids (10^th-12^th centuries) with greater focus on the Ottomans (14^th-20^th centuries). In approaching this long history, which unfolded over a vast geography from the Iberian Peninsula and West Africa to Central and South Asia, we will not confine our study to high politics but will also explore intellectual, cultural and social issues such as gender relations, sectarianism, consumerism (coffee, tulips!), gossip and disease. We will also learn how to critically read documentary and material historical traces in order to understand how historical knowledge is constructed as well as the tensions between popular memory and written history.  

Concentration: Global / Period: Pre-modern

HST 210: The Ancient World 

*This course includes the lecture and a weekly discussion section. By enrolling in discussion, you automatically enroll in the lecture.

This course surveys the history of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, and explores the classical roots of modern civilization. We will begin with the first civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the roots of western religion in ancient Israel; then proceed through Bronze Age, archaic and classical Greece, the Persian wars, the trial of Socrates, the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic world, the rise of Rome, and end with the fall of the Roman Empire and the coming of Christianity. The course will treat political, social, cultural, religious and intellectual history. We will focus on issues that the ancients themselves considered important – good and bad government, the duties of citizens and the powers of kings and tyrants – but we will also examine those who were marginalized by the Greeks and Romans: women, slaves, so-called "barbarians." The course will emphasize reading and discussion of primary sources, in order to provide a window into the thought-worlds and value systems of past societies.

Concentration: Europe / Period: Pre-modern

This course is a survey of pre-modern African history, presenting an overview of the main themes and chronology of the development of African culture and society. It provides an exposition of the regional and continental diversity and unity in African political, economic, social and cultural histories with special emphasis on major African civilizations, processes of state formation, encounters with the Euro-Asia world, Africa’s role in the international Trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean and Atlantic trades, ecology, and urbanization.

Concentration: Global / Period: Pre-modern

In the last two and a half centuries, food has transformed dramatically. Global integration and new agrarian and industrial systems of production have displaced many earlier relationships with the land and its products. The people who grow, harvest, prepare, and serve food and how they do so have transformed due to accelerating social processes from urbanization to mass migration and the culture of domesticity. Eating, too, has become both deeply politicized and intensely refined—the stuff of regulation, identity formation, and emotional connection. The production, consumption, abundance, and scarcity of food create boundaries, political or otherwise, defining people and shaping bodies. This course anchors the study of these transformations in European history in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. 

Concentration: Europe / Period: Modern

Selected ideas/movements/episodes concentrated on American/European cultural history, ancient and modern, as seen in images. Close-reading of texts, images, cultural artifacts. Representations of the self, emotion, ideas, and art of living as reflected in a range of primary sources including philosophy, literature, art, architecture, and film. Discussion of extensive common readings, art works, documentary films, and other materials, as well as individual original research. Hands-on visual workshop component. Reading/viewing journal, short writing assignments, presentations, and semester research paper related to cultural history in images. Students use common readings as a springboard to in-depth examination of a particular image as the centerpiece of their semester project. Students at any level from any program welcome.

Concentration: U.S./Europe / Period: Pre-Modern/Modern

This course is part one of the Native North American Survey. Spanning from the pre-colonial era to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, this course will take a chronological approach to Native North America to understand how major historical events and themes connect the past to the present. This is mostly a discussion-based course with major topics including Native sovereignty and self-determination, cultural conflict, the Doctrine of Discovery, international/inter-imperial warfare, settler colonialism, Native survivance, and other forms of Native resistance and cultural perseverance.

Concentration: US / Period: Pre-Modern

HST 300, M005: Native America and the World

This course is a study of Native America in an international context. Organized thematically, this course will begin with a discussion of the 2007 United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the issues faced by Native Americans in the present day. We will then touch on critical points in the history of North America that place Native Americans in contact/conflict with other nations from across the world. This course is an even split of lectures and discussions with major topics ranging from colonialism to migration to the global whaling industry to the sport of Lacrosse to environmental activism and justice.

Concentration: US / Period: Modern

This course is about the history of development in Modern Africa from 1800 to the present. Development here is defined as the quest for progress/improvement in human economic and social conditions. Focus is on the origins, meaning, and implementation of development as an idea and practice in modern Africa. Readings challenge the students to develop a critical assessment of these processes. The readings examine roles of several agencies and institutions in Africa’s development history, particularly states, administrators, international institutions, knowledge regimes, as well as geography, natural resources, labor, policy frameworks of postcolonial states. What has motivated these institutions and agencies to engage in development in Africa? What has been the vision of ordinary Africans regarding developments? Assignments include critical writing reflections and tests. The course is relevant to students interested in the historical, political, and international contexts of Africa’s development question. Students of history, economics, development, political science, international relations will particularly find the course relevant to their fields.

Concentration: Global / Period: Modern

As A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) has exploded into contemporary consciousness and its uses in everyday life have expanded exponentially (ChatGPT, for example), it is vital to pause to reflect on its potential impact on nearly every realm, from education, jobs, popular culture, and entertainment to how we think of ourselves as human beings, form relationships, interact with others, and navigate other aspects of our public and private lives. In this course, we will explore AI as a cultural phenomenon through its history, imaginative portrayals in film and the arts, and current debates over its pros and cons, with special attention to the impact of the virtual world of computer technology, social media, the internet, and now AI, on the self. Comparison with earlier concepts of the self, emotion, and thought in intellectual history and cultural criticism of technology and media—with their visions of what the human person is and might strive to be—can help us assess what might be different in emerging concepts and practices. 

This course explores interstate systems of ancient Greece and Rome through international relations theory.  The theoretical framework is applied to two famous historical narratives: Thucydides' portrayal of the great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and Polybius' account of the Second Punic War between the Roman Republic and its arch nemesis Carthage, led by the commander Hannibal.

Concentration: Europe / Period: Pre-Modern

This course explores the history of revolutions and counterrevolutions in twentieth century Latin America, an epoch that witnessed unprecedented levels of social uprisings followed by political violence. We examine the ways in which class, gender, race, and ethnicity shape revolutionary actors and movements. As we consider the local, country-specific dimensions of the Cold War, we will also explore the impact of regional and global dynamics. We will examine diverse revolutionary experiences, from Mexico to Central America and the Southern Cone, as we analyze how the state and transnational actors responded to such momentous changes. Countries such as Chile and Argentina experienced significant upheavals during the 1960s and 1970s, but also disturbing levels of state violence and repression made more deadly by the use of new technologies. Some of the central questions that motivate this course include: how do we understand the complex dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution in Latin America? What has been the role of local, regional, and transnational actors in fomenting both? How has the Latin American left transformed throughout the century? What are the legacies of the Cold War in Latin America? To understand the lived experiences of the Cold War, we will work with declassified CIA documents, translated primary sources, murals, posters, music, and more!

Concentration: Global / Period: Modern 

What is History? How do scholars “do” history? This seminar introduces history majors to the methods and goals of historical study, and to the skills needed to conduct independent historical research. The first part of the course will be spent discussing what exactly history is and has been. We will then move on to discussing the kinds of history that have developed across the century in the American Historical profession. Finally, students will spend a large portion of the course familiarizing themselves with the analytical and practical skills needed to develop their own research projects. 

T/TH 11:00-12:20

What is History? How do scholars “do” history? This seminar introduces history majors to the methods and goals of historical study, and to the skills needed to conduct independent historical research. The first part of the course will be spent discussing what exactly history is and has been. We will then move on to discussing the kinds of history that have developed across the century in the American Historical profession. Finally, students will spend a large portion of the course familiarizing themselves with the analytical and practical skills needed to develop their own research projects. 

This course examines the period between 1787 and 1848 as a distinctive era in United States history.  From the adoption of the Federal constitution to the Mexican war and the Gold Rush, the early American republic offers a vivid case study in historical irony: how a revolutionary republic inched towards nationalism and imperialism; how declared principles of liberty and equality could coexist with (and occasionally create new modes of) racial, gendered, and economic oppression and inequality; how a people who praised the virtues of rural life became progressively urban and industrial.  Readings and lectures will juxtapose the traditional scholarly focus on statecraft, presidential politics, and diplomacy with more recent research in social, cultural, and economic history.

Concentration: US / Period: Modern 

This course explores European civilization from about 800 to about 1200. We will study kings, saints, and villains; faith and violence, love and hatred; ideas and beliefs. Our questions include: how did these people make sense of their world? How did they respond to crisis and opportunity? How did their civilization work? What was life like in medieval Europe? To answer these questions, we will mainly read primary sources that show us what medieval people themselves had to say about their world. Our goal will be to understand the past on its own terms. We will also emphasize the skills of close reading, strong argumentation, and clear expression of ideas.

Concentration: Europe / Period: Pre-modern

From revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, to mass protests in Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen, to the overthrow of the regime in Libya, this course offers an historical introduction to the revolutionary movements that began in 2010 and 2011. Was it a Facebook revolution? Who was Tweeting in Tahrir? What role did women play? And where exactly is Tunisia?

Beginning with in-depth case studies of Tunisia and Libya since the 1950s followed by shorter case studies of Bahrain, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen, this course explores the social, economic, and political histories of each country to understand the contexts and reasons for social justice movements and protests. Topics include postcolonial politics, anti-imperialism, socialism and socialist development, state feminism, neoliberalism and economic restructuring, and social media. Who participated in protests movements and sit-ins? How did music, videos, or street art contribute to these movements? 

Concentration: Global / Period: Modern

In this course we will survey Chinese history from earliest times to the end of the Ming dynasty in 1644.  This seemingly remote time witnessed the formation of a complex government and society whose influence extended to much of East Asia. Ranging over the centuries, the class will explore some of the main currents in Chinese political, cultural, social, and intellectual history. These include:  Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Legalism as competing and sometimes intersecting philosophies; the imperial system and major changes in its form over time; the changing roles of women in society; popular rebellion and heterodox religion; and the place of science and technology in the Chinese past.

We will read a variety of texts in addition to a concise textbook.

Concentration: Global / Period: Pre-modern

Latin America had the world’s longest experience with colonialism, which in some areas lasted from 1500 almost to 1900.  It was the first place where Native Americans met Europeans, and their often violent and exploitative but also creative contact helped shape distinct multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies. Latin America had both the earliest and most prolonged experience with African slavery. 

This course will examine the period from pre-Columbian times to 1825. We will concentrate on six main themes. First, we examine Europeans’ violent conquest of indigenous societies and subsequent efforts to impose Christianity and other cultural values on the conquered even as they exploited them economically. Second, the course highlights the continuing and partially successful efforts of Native Americans to resist or modify European cultural and economic impositions. Third, we explore the introduction and expansion of African labor, the experiences and resistance of African Americans, and the eventual end of African slavery in Latin America. Fourth, we trace Spanish and Portuguese colonial institutions. Fifth, we analyze gender in colonial Latin American societies, and finally, we will cover the efforts of diverse Latin Americans to build independent nations. This course requires no prior knowledge of Latin America. We will work with primary sources such as Spanish and Indigenous accounts of conquest, maps, court records, and more.

Concentration: Global / Period: Pre-Modern

This course examines and analyzes the changing social, economic, and political roles of American women from European settlement to the Civil War. Using primary documents, historical essays, and fiction, we will explore how women's roles and identities have been defined by American society over different historical periods. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which women of diverse races, classes and ethnic groups have either embodied or challenged dominant social norms.  

This is primarily a lecture course with discussion of reading and writing assignments based on primary source material.

In 1933, a radical and dictatorial regime came to power in Germany, remade the German state, and went on to orchestrate a vast program of mass murder in pursuit of a vision of biological purity and to launch a war of world conquest, ultimately killing millions. This course examines the history of German fascism, the Nazi state, and the Holocaust according to three primary lines of inquiry. In the first part of the course, we will address the question of how the Nazis came to power. What was Nazism, and why did it gain a popular following? Why did the Weimar Republic, the parliamentary democracy founded in 1918, fall (first to dictatorship and then to Nazism) in the early 1930s? In the second part of the course, we will examine the politics of Nazism in power. What was everyday life like for various Germans under the Nazi state, and why did many Germans come to support the regime? The course’s third section addresses war, genocide, and the legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust.  How did Nazi genocide policies develop, and how was it possible to implement them? What can the history of Nazi Germany teach us about other state-run mass murder programs?  How have Germans grappled with the aftermath of Nazi Germany?

Concentration: Europe / Period: Modern

The Russian Empire emerged relatively late in the modern era, but it quickly rose to dizzying heights of military power, cultural prestige, and influence on international politics. Powerful rulers like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, literary giants like Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky, radical socialists like Alexander Herzen and Vladimir  Lenin – these figures placed Russia at the center of trends that transformed European society for five hundred years. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire was in the midst of a period of precipitous decline, which led to the collapse of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty during the First World War. This course examines the history of Russia from the emergence of the Tsarist autocratic system in the 1400s to the revolutions of 1917, focusing on the Russian state, serfdom, the Russian intellectual tradition, Russia’s imperial policies, and nineteenth-century working-class activism. We will also examine the lived experiences of various social groups within the Empire, including peasants, urban women, ethnic minorities, factory workers, and the intelligentsia.

Concentration: Europe / Period: Modern

Is there, as some historians have claimed, a distinctive ‘American way of war’ traceable over the four centuries since the beginning of the European colonization of North America? If so, what are its characteristics, how has it changed over time, and what does it reveal about a peculiar American attitude to state violence and the relationship between military and civilian society? In this course, we will examine the ‘small’ and ‘big’ wars of the United States from the colonial period to the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Class meetings will be a mixture of lectures and discussion. Students will complete a number of primary and secondary source readings. Assessment will be based on class discussion and several reading and writing assignments.

Concentration: U.S. / Period: Modern

Religion has been an explosive issue in recent South Asian politics. Commencing with a look at contemporary events, such as the Rohingya refugee crisis, the consolidation of a Hindu nationalist state in India, and the recently concluded Civil War in Sri Lanka, this course will work its way back through the twentieth and nineteenth centuries to understand their historic roots. Key themes discussed will include the gendered nature of religious violence; majoritarian politics and religious identities; colonial rule and enumerated communities; everyday and extraordinary violence.

Concentration: Global / Period: Modern

This course explores the centrality of gender (ideas about what it means to be a man or woman, how masculinity and femininity are defined and expressed) and race (whether biological, cultural or otherwise) in France, England and their colonial empires. Looking in particular at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will examine the gender and racial hierarchies and presumptions that justified colonial occupation, domination, and exploitation, and the ways they infused not only politics, but science, literature, and the arts (though not without significant and sustained resistance). How did race and gender – or racism and gender biases – contribute to European expansion? What are the legacies or continues shaping race and inequality today?

Examples extend from the Caribbean to South Asia with attention towards the impact of colonialism on Europe and Europeans as well as US empire, and race and gender in the US today. This course is about the making of the modern world, and the centrality of inequalities (based on race and gender) to nation building over the past 200 years no matter how liberal, republican, or democratic. We alternate between the historical contexts of colonialism and their relevance today with readings from disciplines including anthropology, literature, feminist theory, and cultural studies.

Concentration: Europe / Period: Modern

This course addresses crime, deviance, and dissent in American history from the colonial period to the present, considering the ways in which the state has encouraged order and conformity among its constituents. We will examine how industrialization, immigration, urbanization, emancipation, and war transformed American society, causing the breakdown of older forms of social control such as church and community while producing significant discontented and dispossessed populations. This course also examines the expanding role of the state in controlling "deviant" behavior beginning in the late-nineteenth century and the reordering of legal priorities in the latter half of the twentieth century. Major topics include police, radicalism, alcohol, vice, sexuality, and organized crime.

Concentration: U.S. / Period: Modern

This course examines the legends that evolved around the Biblical figure of Mary Magdalene. It begins with the New Testament, then traces the development of her legends through the early Christian and medieval eras and into such modern day versions as The Da Vinci Code.  We will pursue the development of the legends by reading primary sources, from the Bible to Christian writers, saints' lives, plays, and miracle collections. We will also engage with scholarship surrounding Mary as saint, legend and historical puzzle. Emphasis will be on discussion analyzing readings. We will also give attention to developing skills of close reading, solid argumentation and clear writing.

Concentration: Europe / Period: Pre-Modern 

Through a thematic and chronological approach, this course examines the changing nature of Japanese society from early modern times (1600-1868) through the modern period (1868-1945) and postwar Japan (1945-today). We begin in 1600 when the battle of Sekigahara ushered in more than two centuries of “great peace” and “isolation” that only ended in 1868 with the fall of the Togukawa shogunate. We follow developments through the founding of the new Meiji government, when political leaders and ordinary citizens set out to create a modern nation-state, which resulted in great social, political and economic changes, while internationally Japan’s quest for an oversea empire brought the country into conflict with its neighbors and ultimately the U.S. In the final section of the course, we study Japan’s successful post-war economic “miracle,” and consider the Tokyo governor and nationalist Ishihara Shintarô’s publication of the best-selling book "The Japan That Can Say No," which argues that the West has much to learn from Japan. Class topics range from urbanization, mass culture and nationalism, popular protest, imperialism, colonialism and empire to gender, war and occupation, memory, apology politics, and globalization. The course will also pay particular attention to the contested nature of modernity. Primary sources, secondary scholarship, film clips and short story translations allow us to explore the changing nature of Japanese politics and society, as well as Japan’s interaction with East Asia and the world. Course requirements include weekly reading assignments, class discussion, a take-home midterm, an in-class final exam and a research paper.

Concentration: Global / Period: Modern

This course examines the history of Western attitudes towards China.  In particular, we will focus on experts: the relatively small group of individuals we have relied upon for our knowledge of China. Among their numbers have been journalists, historians, missionaries, fiction writers, poets, and philosophers. Some have been famous, such as Pearl Buck and Marco Polo; and some infamous, such as the forger Sir Edmund Backhouse. One famous expert even boasted he’d never been to China. Why, he asked, should he permit the real China to interfere with the more glorious China of his mind?  How experts have seen China has been determined in some sense by how they wanted to see it, and by how they wanted to convey it to the people back home.  Students choose a China expert to research in depth, and prepare a substantial research paper based on original sources. 

Concentration: Global / Period: Modern

This is a research seminar on the history of the United States Civil War.  Students will write 25-30 page papers, utilizing primary sources.  Subjects considered will include politics, military strategy and tactics, memory, slavery, reconstruction, race, and gender.

Concentration: US / Period: Modern 

What if history had turned out differently than we remember? What if Julius Caesar had not been assassinated, the Black Death had not ravaged Europe, Columbus had not reached the Americas, the South had won the Civil War, or the Soviets had landed someone on the Moon first? In this course we will be considering the theory and practice of counterfactual history, or the examination of moments in the past in which events might have diverged dramatically from those that actually happened. Thinking about counterfactuals requires us to examine fundamental questions about causality and contingency in history and to what extent events are driven by structural circumstances or the choices of individual people. As a capstone to the course, each student will develop an annotated counterfactual history of their own on a subject of their own choice, expressed through print nonfiction, fiction, visual media, or some other method of presentation.

Instructor Consent Required

Students doing the thesis will take 3 credits of HST 495 the first semester and 3 credits of HST 496 the second semester (2 semesters for a total of 6 credits), which may begin in their junior or senior year.  Students should register for HST 495 and 496 upon approval from the faculty advisor and Undergraduate Director.