Course Listings

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Culture and structure of preindustrial society in the late Middle Ages thorugh the mid-18th century.

This course will offer a whirlwind survey of European history from the French Revolution to the present. Moving at breakneck speed, the course considers the political, economic, social, and cultural transformation of the continent during this 250-year period of dramatic change. At the beginning of this period most Europeans were illiterate, impoverished farm laborers; by the end of the era most were well-educated, prosperous democratic citizens. As the course seeks to understand this transformation, the overarching theme will be revolutions--political, economic, and intellectual--and their attendant ideologies. This means that much of the focus is on coming to terms with the various "isms" that shaped Europe in this period, such as liberalism, nationalism, imperialism, communism, fascism, and feminism. The course is built around three tensions that can help make sense of the proliferation of revolutions and ideologies during this period and that provide the overall structure for the course and act as the "engine" that drives it forward: liberalism vs. illiberalism, universality vs. particularity, and modernity vs. tradition. The course concludes with reflection on the challenges that face Europe today and on what its future may hold.

This course provides an introduction to the major themes and eras of early United States history. Topics covered include European exploration and colonization, encounters with indigenous peoples, the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, the growth of American slavery, the Industrial Revolution, Westward expansion, and the Civil War.

This course provides an introduction to the history of the United States since 1865, emphasizing social and political changes in American life and America's role in an increasingly interdependent world. The course explores how new interpretations of American history enable us to rethink traditional historical narratives. Many historians now contend that developments central to the making of the nation - such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War- can be fully understood only in an international or global context. Students are expected to acquire a basic foundation in American history - key terms and events - as well as an understanding of how historians interpret and debate the past.

This course examines major themes and shifts in American culture over the period 1820-1890. The course will consider: popular theatre, including blackface minstrelsy; urban entertainments and cultural authority; backwoods brawling; sentimental fiction and antebellum women's culture; the emergence of cultural categories for "high" and "low" art; and the emergence of mass culture in the industrial age. Students are introduced not only to "more" history, but also to different methods of "doing" history.

The welfare state, democracy, and total war, 1900-present.

Since the advent of the Four Modernizations under the aegis of Deng Xiaoping in late 1978, Chinese society, culture, economy-indeed, almost every aspect of life-has been transformed. At the same time, however, the country's Maoist and more distant Republican and Imperial pasts have continued to inform and shape reform. This course examines the complexities of China's reformist period from the late 1970s until the early 21st century. The course highlights key currents, such as the transformation of rural-urban relations, domestic arguments about the unevenness and morality of socio-economic change, the 1989 Spring Democracy Movement, China's "Peaceful Rise," and its growing participation in global affairs, with an eye to understanding new social formations and highlighting the resonance of the past.

This course deals with the "deep structures" of the current Arab-Israel conflict, in other words, the fervently-held attitudes shaped by events going back hundreds, and, in certain cases, thousands of years, as well as by the more familiar developments of modern times. Primary but not exclusive emphasis is on Israel and the Palestinians. Themes discussed include: conflicts arising from the formation of nationhood and national identities in the Islamic Near East; Jewish self-identity in ancient, medieval, and modern times leading to the formation of Political Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state of Israel; Muslim attitudes toward the Jews and Judaism; Palestine and the Land of Israel as areas of contested sacred space; the linkage of all the above to contemporary politics in the Middle East.

Description forthcoming.

This course examines U.S. history through the lens of gender. Until the late 1980s, most historians who studied gender focused on the experiences of women. Influenced by second wave feminism, they sought to recover and document the history of women, which had largely been ignored by scholars. In recent years, however, historians of gender have expanded their scope. They now focus not only on women but men. Moreover, they question how gender is socially constructed, how meanings attributed to sexual difference develop, and how gender shapes human experiences in larger ways, such as our understandings of racism, imperialism, and war. In this course, we will examine what differentiates gender history from women's history and consider how gender shaped U.S. history, especially in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics may include the Jim Crow South, foreign policy, the New Deal, the Cold War, social movements, and popular culture.

This course examines the significance of revolution in the development of the modern world. It analyzes four pivotal European revolutionary periods, beginning with the French Revolution of 1789 and the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Then, the development of a nineteenth-century revolutionary tradition across Europe is explored; during this part of the course, students learn about the wave of national revolutions in 1848, the importance of figures such as Karl Marx, and the rise of radical ideologies such as socialism and radicalism. Next, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the varied international responses to the new communist state is examined. The course concludes with the student and worker uprisings that swept across Europe in 1968. Throughout the course students discuss important themes such as: the relationship between democratic ideals and revolutionary violence; the place of human rights in revolution; the role of culture during large-scale change; and the politics of reaction. Although it covers almost two hundred years of history, this course unites seemingly disconnected events by searching for evidence of a transnational revolutionary tradition.

1968: Was it an annus horribilis or an annus mirabilis? A year to forget, or a year which defines the height of existence? All across the world students and others rose up in confrontation against the policies of their governments; these were protests that, in some cases, resulted in death and in others a near collapse of the government. This seminar examines three particular Summer of 68 revolts-Chicago, Paris, and Prague-in order to determine whether there were common threads among them, and if so, whether these radical events portended a kind of global insurgency that never fully got off the ground. The course concentrates on primary sources in order to recreate the intellectual content of the moment, providing foundation to analyze the respective nations (United States, France, and Czechoslovakia) and where their vulnerabilities resided that made these events so scary. NOTE: This course is also listed as HISTORY 392 in CAESAR. Students who do not need to fulfill the research seminar requirement for the history major may choose to register for HISTORY 392, which is essentially the same course but does not require a major research paper.