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. It discusses major empires in Middle East covering topics such as culture and society, science and technology, and women and politics. We will approach the Middle East through the theme of exchange, considering the connections between Southwest Asia and North Africa and neighboring regions, as the crossroads of Asia and Europe. Other prominent themes include multiculturalism, reform, and modernization.

The course meets twice each week. There is no discussion section.

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

This is a research and writing seminar in which students will produce a 20 to 25 page paper on a particular aspect of early modern globalization. During the first several weeks of the course, we will discuss what historians mean by globalization, and analyze textual material to understand the various ways in which material, cultural, technological and biological exchanges across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia played a central role in the development and destruction of empires, states, and local communities. The seminar will allow students to appreciate the complex dynamics of early modern migration, slavery, religious globalization, conquest and colonialism, economic expansion, technological development, epidemics and disease. In the latter half of the course, students will focus on identifying and analyzing a set of archival and printed primary sources to develop and complete a research paper. Assignments will include outlines, bibliographies, short writing assignments, and rough drafts.

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

HST 300, M005: Native America and the World

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

Intellectual life—the life of the mind—has taken strikingly different forms throughout history, depending on where and when, yielding particular ideas we can situate in particular times and places. This course centers on a selection of key episodes, figures, and forms in European and American intellectual and cultural history, from ancient to modern, to immerse students some of the conceptions, practices, and quandaries of the life of the mind. Besides a set of episodes and ideas we will compare and contrast in depth, we will follow particular themes, starting with ideas circulating among ancient Greco-Roman philosophers on how to live (Stoicism, Platonism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and the like) and tracing their reemergence in subsequent currents such as early Christian thought, Renaissance humanism, transcendentalism, and existentialism. We will see ideas in formation as part of conversations taking place in specific venues, real and virtual, from the ancient Athenian agora to the existentialist discussion in Parisian café culture, dissenting communities around the 20th-century New York intellectuals and the “little magazines,” and new forms and expressions up to the present. Questions will include what forces and structures encourage or impede free and open intellectual inquiry, the debate over the decline of the public intellectual today, the impact of social media, and other current issues.

Concentration: US/Europe / Period: Pre-Modern/Modern

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

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

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 Arab Revolutions of 2011. Was it a Facebook revolution? Who was Tweeting in Tahrir? What role did women play? And where exactly is Tunisia?

Beginning with extensive case studies of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia since the 1950s followed by shorter case studies of Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, this course explores the social, economic, and political histories of each country to understand the contexts and reasons for the revolutions. Topics include postcolonial politics, anti-imperialism, socialism and socialist development, state feminism, neoliberalism and economic restructuring. Readings, lectures, and discussions consider the impact of broader transformations on rural communities, women, and the poor. Turning to the 2011 protests, we will discuss topics such as the demographic and social bases of these movements, their mobilization and communication through the internet, the dynamics of armed revolt, and the complexities of foreign intervention.

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

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

This course will explore the intersection of gender, race, and colonialism in colonial ideologies and imperial practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Beginning with a theoretical approach to the study of gender (as distinct from the study of either women or men), colonialism, and Orientalism, themes include the role of gender and race in discourses of modernity, civilization, and domesticity, the construction of national identity, imperial masculinity, race and science in colonial empires, the representation of women in consumer culture and imperial propaganda and contemporary issues relevant to the understanding of race, gender, and power. The readings concentrate on British and French colonialisms in the Middle East, India, and the Caribbean in comparison American and Japanese imperialism. These include the examination of how colonial expansion and racial ideologies influenced gender and social relations within Europe.  Though our focus is on the historical contexts of colonialism, our readings represent a variety of disciplines including anthropology, literature, feminist theory, and cultural studies, in addition to history.

Concentration: Europe / 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 

How diverse and inclusive were medieval societies? How did they deal with people of different believes, sick or disabled people, queer people or non-conformists? Was the medieval world a world of repression and structural violence against minorities or were there also spaces that fostered diversity and tolerance? Can observations on the Middle Ages help us understanding and resisting modern forms of othering and discrimination?

We will discuss these questions and develop individual research projects that are based on studying and contextualizing medieval primary sources and engaging with recent scholarship on medieval diversity.

Concentration: Europe / Period: Pre-Modern

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.