The Department of History engages its students through a study of the past. We are committed to the idea that the most compelling stories are often the most revealing ones. In addition to teaching students the particular skills of historical inquiry, we provide them with tools that serve them beyond their majors and beyond the university.
The discipline of history poses challenging questions about the ways that human beings have made the worlds they live in. There are many approaches to history. Some historians study politics, whether that means political parties or the ways that people who never held public office nonetheless act to shape public life. Others study the lived experience of everyday Americans or the popular culture that reflects how people understand the world around them. Still others are especially interested in the kinds of stories about the past that we tell ourselves, for those stories reveal a great deal about our own society as well as that of a different time. Although it is not true that history repeats itself, it is true that without knowledge of the past we are unable to understand the present.
The Department of History at Washington University offers history majors and minors the opportunity to develop a coherent and challenging program of study. We also encourage all undergraduates to incorporate the discipline of historical thinking into their liberal arts education. In all courses, students are taught the kinds of skills that will help them succeed both in classes at Washington University and in their postgraduate careers. History students learn to read carefully, think critically, research honestly, and present information and ideas clearly and concisely, both verbally and in writing.
The Department of History offers a wide variety of courses, ranging from the ancient world to the present and spanning across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. There are many opportunities for small-group learning and discussion in first-year seminars, sophomore honors colloquia, writing-intensive seminars, and advanced seminars. The history major is structured to be flexible and to encourage students both to pursue established interests and to explore topics, time periods and locales that may be less familiar.
The Department of History prides itself on the individual attention that faculty mentors provide to students. Graduates express great satisfaction with their experience in the major, mentioning in particular the faculty's knowledge of the subject matter, dynamic teaching style, and respect for students.
Some history majors go on to pursue graduate work in the field and become professional historians, but most find that the knowledge and skills they build through history courses fit them for a wide range of careers. Our graduates have attended law or medical school and have pursued careers in government, education, research, business, communications, international agencies, publishing, museums and archives, public advocacy and many other fields.
Phone: | 314-935-5450 |
---|---|
Email: | history@wustl.edu |
Website: | http://history.wustl.edu |
Chair and Endowed Professor
Peter J. Kastor
Samuel K. Eddy Professor
PhD, University of Virginia
(The American Frontier and Early Republic)
Endowed Professors
Daniel Bornstein
Stella K. Darrow Professor of Catholic Studies
PhD, University of Chicago
(Medieval and Renaissance Europe)
Hillel J. Kieval
Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought
PhD, Harvard University
(Jewish History)
Kenneth Ludmerer
Mabel Dorn Reeder Distinguished Professor in the History of Medicine
PhD, MD, Johns Hopkins University
(Medical History)
Professors
Iver Bernstein
PhD, Yale University
(U.S. History and the Civil War)
Andrea S. Friedman
PhD, University of Wisconsin
(U.S. Women's History)
Steven B. Miles
PhD, University of Washington
(Chinese History)
Tim Parsons
PhD, Johns Hopkins University
(African Military History)
Mark Pegg
PhD, Princeton University
(Medieval European History)
Corinna Treitel
PhD, Harvard University
(Modern German History)
Associate Professors
Cassie Adcock
PhD, University of Chicago
(Modern South Asian History)
Monique Bedasse
PhD, University of Miami
(Caribbean History)
Elizabeth Borgwardt
PhD, Stanford University
(U.S. Foreign Relations)
Flora Cassen
PhD, New York University
(Jewish History)
Shefali Chandra
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
(Modern South Asian History)
Christine R. Johnson
PhD, Johns Hopkins University
(16th-Century German History)
Sowandé Mustakeem
PhD, Michigan State University
(Atlantic Slave Trade and the Middle Passage)
Nancy Y. Reynolds
PhD, Stanford University
(Middle Eastern History)
Anika Walke
PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz
(European History)
Lori Watt
PhD, Columbia University
(Japanese History)
Assistant Professors
Alexandre Dubé
PhD, McGill University
(Early Modern Atlantic World)
Douglas Flowe
PhD, University of Rochester
(American History)
Ulug Kuzuoglu
PhD, Columbia University
(Modern Chinese History)
Diana J. Montaño
PhD, University of Arizona
(Latin American History)
Christina Ramos
PhD, Harvard University
(Latin American History)
Teaching Professor
Krister Knapp
PhD, Boston University
(U.S. Intellectual History)
Affiliated Faculty
Jean Allman
J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities
PhD, Northwestern University
(History)
William Bubelis
Associate Professor of Classics
PhD, University of Chicago
(Classics)
Adrienne D. Davis
William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law
JD, Yale University School of Law
Mary Ann Dzuback
Associate Professor of Education
PhD, Columbia University
(Education)
Martin Jacobs
Professor of Rabbinic Studies
PhD and Habilitation, Free University of Berlin
(Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies)
Zhao Ma
Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History and Culture
PhD, Johns Hopkins University
(East Asian Languages and Cultures)
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp
Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor
PhD, Yale University
(Danforth Center on Religion and Politics)
Rebecca Messbarger
Professor of Italian and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
PhD, University of Chicago
(Romance Languages and Literatures)
Eric P. Mumford
Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture
PhD, Princeton University
(Architecture)
Leigh E. Schmidt
Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor
PhD, Princeton University
(Danforth Center on Religion and Politics)
Mark Valeri
Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics
PhD, Princeton University
(Danforth Center on Religion and Politics)
Hayrettin Yücesoy
Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies
PhD, University of Chicago
Steven Zwicker
Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities
PhD, Brown University
(English)
Professors Emeriti
Steven Hause
PhD, Washington University
Derek M. Hirst
William Eliot Smith Professor Emeritus of History
PhD, Cambridge University
Gerald N. Izenberg
PhD, Harvard University
David T. Konig
PhD, Harvard University
Linda J. Nicholson
Susan E. and William P. Stiritz Distinguished Professor Emerita of Women's Studies
PhD, Brandeis University
Max J. Okenfuss
PhD, Harvard University
Peter Riesenberg
PhD, Columbia University
Laurence Schneider
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Richard J. Walter
PhD, Stanford University
The Major in History
Total units required: 28
Requirements | Units |
---|---|
Introductory courses | 6 |
Upper-level courses | 18 |
Capstone experience | 4 |
- One introductory survey (100 level)
- One additional introductory course, chosen from any 100- or 200-level course listed in History and taught by history department faculty
* | "History department faculty” does not include affiliated faculty. |
** | This course can be an introductory survey, a lecture, or a seminar. |
*** | This course can be home-based or cross-listed in History. |
Note: Students may satisfy introductory course requirements using AP credit if they have earned a score of 5 on the AP European, U.S., or World History examinations.
* | Students will be awarded 3 units of credit per AP exam for a maximum of 6 credits toward the major or minor. |
** | A score of 4 on any of these exams may earn 3 units of elective credit but will not be counted toward the major or minor. |
Upper-Level Courses
At least 18 300- or 400-level units plus a capstone experience (for a minimum of 22 advanced units) must be completed. Requirements at this level include the following:
- At least one course designated "premodern" and one course designated "modern"
- At least one course from three of the following geographical areas: Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, or the United States or in transregional history (please refer to note 4 below)
- History 301 Historical Methods (a required methods course for all majors)
- The capstone experience: History majors must, prior to graduation, complete a capstone experience that consists of the following:
- Successful completion of the senior honors thesis; or
- An advanced seminar; or
- An independent research project with a significant writing component (History 500); or
- Directed fieldwork in the historical or archival profession, with a significant writing component (History 4001/History 4002)
Notes:
- Students should register under the L22 department code for any courses that will count toward the major or minor.
- International Baccalaureate: The department recognizes the superior preparation that many students have received in this program; however, no credit is awarded for the International Baccalaureate.
- The department recognizes that some students take their first history course or develop an interest in majoring in history only during their junior year and then face a dilemma in choosing between required introductory courses and upper-level course work more appropriate to their abilities. Such students, with the recommendation of their adviser in history, may petition the director of undergraduate studies to permit a designated upper-level course to substitute for one of the introductory courses. In all such cases, the minimum number of units remains 18 in the minor and 28 in the major.
- All upper-level units must be separate courses that are not double-counted toward a minor or second major. Courses in the major are excluded from the credit/no credit option.
- If a student chooses to count a transregional course toward the geographical requirement, at least one of the two other geographical areas that the student counts toward the major must cover a region that is not included in the transregional course. For example, a student who has completed courses in U.S. and Latin American history could not count a transregional course that examines the comparative history of the United States and Latin America. However, a student who has taken a transregional course on the United States and Latin America could take a course on either U.S. or Latin American history and would then need to take a course covering an area other than the United States or Latin America to satisfy the third area requirement.
- Courses taken pass/fail or credit/no credit do not count toward the major or minor.
Additional Information
Fieldwork: History majors are eligible for fieldwork at the Missouri Historical Society or at other museums. Opportunities are also sometimes available in the special collections at Olin Library, with local businesses, and at historical sites.
Study Abroad: The Department of History strongly encourages student participation in the various year and semester abroad programs approved by the College. A maximum of 3 history credits may be applied to the minor, and a maximum of 6 history credits earned may be applied to the major in history. Students must have their courses preapproved by the department's study abroad adviser prior to departure. It is possible to pursue a senior honors thesis after study abroad, but careful planning is required.
Senior Honors: Students who have a strong academic record may work toward Latin Honors. Students graduating with Latin Honors must meet grade-point average requirements and satisfactorily complete History 399 Senior Honors Thesis and Colloquium: Writing-Intensive Seminar while writing a thesis during the senior year.
Awards and Prizes: The Department of History annually awards the following prizes:
- The Helen and Isaac Izenberg Prize, for a superior paper written for an Advanced Seminar
- The Shirley McDonald Wallace Prize, for an outstanding first-year student enrolled in both semesters of Western Civilization
- The J. Walter Goldstein Prize, for an excellent, well-written senior honors thesis
- The Konig Prize in Law & History, for the best-written paper addressing the connection between law and history in any history course
Special Opportunities: Undergraduates interested in history are encouraged to join the Undergraduate History Association, which is the local chapter of Phi Alpha Theta (PAT). Led by the ongoing campus PAT members, the chapter usually holds an initial organizing meeting in the fall of each year. The activities of the chapter vary, but they typically include sponsorship of lectures, films, discussions and social events. Although national PAT membership requires 12 completed units of history courses, the local chapter welcomes the participation of all students interested in history. Each year, PAT publishes The Gateway History Journal, an anthology of the best student historical writing at Washington University.
The Minor in History
Total units required: 18
Requirements | Units |
---|---|
Introductory courses | 6 |
Upper-level courses | 12 |
Introductory Courses
- One introductory survey (100 level)
- One additional introductory course, chosen from any 100- or 200-level course listed in History and taught by history department faculty
* | "History department faculty” does not include affiliated faculty. |
** | This course can be an introductory survey, a lecture, or a seminar. |
*** | This course can be home-based or cross-listed in History. |
Note: Students may satisfy introductory course requirements using AP credit if they have earned a score of 5 on the AP European, U.S., or World History examinations.
* | Students will be awarded 3 units of credit per AP exam for a maximum of 6 credits toward the major or minor. |
** | A score of 4 on any of these exams may earn 3 units of elective credit but will not be counted toward the major or minor. |
Upper-Level Courses
12 additional units, 9 of which must be at the 300 or 400 level
Notes:
- All 18 units must be separate courses not double-counted toward the major or another minor. Courses in the minor may not be taken credit/no credit.
- The department recognizes that some students take their first history course or develop an interest in declaring a minor in history only during their junior year and then face a dilemma in choosing between required introductory courses and upper-level course work more appropriate to their abilities. Such students, with the recommendation of their adviser in history, may petition the director of undergraduate studies to permit a designated upper-level course to substitute for one of the introductory courses. In all such cases, the minimum number of units in the minor remains 18.
Visit online course listings to view semester offerings for L22 History.
L22 History 101C Western Civilization
This course is a history of Western civilization from 3500 BC to AD 1600. Western Civilization may be characterized as one long debate on the holy. In no other civilization did this debate about the limits of the sacred and the profane, this constant effort at trying to grasp the divine through word and deed, last continuously for over five thousand years. To argue over the holy is to argue over the very nature of how to live a life, from the most mundane daily activity to the most sublime act of the imagination. It is to argue over how politics, economics, art, philosophy, literature, and religion are realized in a society. Apart from many types of polytheism, we study the three great world monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We study the ancient cultures of north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, the empires of Alexander the Great and imperial Rome, the Christianization of the Roman empire and the rise of Islam, the early medieval world in the North Sea and the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople, the formation of Latin Christendom and the papal monarchy, the crusades and the reaction of the Islamic lands, concepts of individuality, the persecution of Jews and heretics, chivalry and peasant servitude, the Mongol Empire, the Black Death and the devastation of the 14th century, the renaissance in Italy and the Protestant reformation, the hunt for witches and the scientific revolution, the medieval origins of the African diaspora and the European conquest of the Americas. What defined being human, and so a man, a woman, or a child over five millennia? A fundamental question of this course is what is "Western Civilization" and when do the characteristics defined as "western" come together as coherent phenomenon? What, then, is historical truth? This course (through lectures, reading primary sources, discussion sections, and essay writing) gives the student a learned background in almost five thousand years of history. Introductory course to the major and minor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 102C Western Civilization
This course provides an introduction to the history of modern Europe. It begins by following Europeans from the upheavals of the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, and from the industrial revolution to the era of nation-state building; continues by exploring how Europeans became embroiled in the scramble for empire, the era of "totalitarianism," and two disastrous world wars; and ends by examining how Europeans coped with the divisions of the Cold War, the collapse of communism, and the challenges of unification and resurgent nationalism. Introductory course to the major and minor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 102D Barbarity and Civilization in Modern Europe
The history of modern Europe is one of both barbarity and civilization. Although Europeans staged revolutions to fight for democracy and argued for universal human rights, they also trafficked in slaves and practiced genocide. This course is a survey of modern European history, from Columbus' arrival in the New World through the 20th century. Although major historical events like the French and Russian Revolutions and the World Wars will certainly be covered in detail, we will also focus our attention on longer-term developments, like the rise of nationalism, the changing status of women, and the importance of race and religion in defining what it has meant to be European. This course will serve as an introduction to the practice of history, and it will familiarize students with a variety of different approaches: political, cultural, economic, global, comparative, social, and intellectual. As such, our readings will range from philosophical treatises and popular novels to academic articles and manifestos. This is an introductory course to both the major and the minor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 1053 First-Year Seminar in African History
Gender is a powerful lens through which to examine Africa's past. Defined as the behaviors, attitudes and roles that society assigns the sexes, gender is one of the principles that has shaped African societies from the earliest times to the present. This course provides a broad introduction to major themes and debates relating to gender in African history. We will examine how gender has been produced, reproduced and transformed in the lives of African women and men from the latter parts of the 19th century to the 20th century. We will highlight African agency and structures of power as we seek to examine gender as a social and historical construct in Africa. We will also analyze how gender intersects with race, sexuality and politics. Beginning with some of the methodological questions about gender in African history, our case studies -- drawn from a range of sources including articles, book chapters, novels and films -- will cover topics such as domesticity and the colonial encounter, "wicked women" and the reconfiguration of gender relations, nationalism and the women's question in African history, and sexuality and the state.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 1119 First-Year Seminar: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America: Myths, Realities and Identities
This course examines the history of racial thinking and the experience of race in Latin America. Topics covered include: concepts of "blood purity" in early modern Spain; the casta system in colonial Spanish America; indigenous and African identities; race, citizenship and nation-building; whitening projects; discourses of mestizaje or "race mixture"; and the intersection of race, gender and class. While the focus of the course will be on the complexities of race in Latin America, a place of enormous ethnic and cultural diversity, we'll also be looking to draw comparisons to the history of race in the U.S.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 1150 Frirst-Year Seminar: The Presidency 101: From Washington to Trump
Is this your first presidential election, or are you a policy wonk? Regardless of your political experience, this course provides an opportunity for students to learn about the American presidency as a contemporary political institution with deep roots in American history. This first-year seminar introduces undergraduates to the presidency by considering the institution in its political and cultural contexts. Using the 2020 election as a point of departure, this course will explore how the current president as well as the aspiring candidates reveal broader trends and new developments in American political history. In addition to introducing students to the study of the presidency, this course will also introduce students to diverse means of studying culture, with assignments that range from political speeches to policy documents to popular media.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: SSC BU: BA, HUM EN: S
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L22 History 1500 Silver, Slaves and the State: Globalization in the 18th Century
In this course, students will look at how silver, and also porcelain, tobacco and salt, shaped the early modern world. The course will look at how merchants and adventurers, as well as pilgrims, pirates, migrants and captives, encountered very different facets of that world, and tried to make sense of it. Students will also study how these attempts at exchange, how that process of "making sense," transformed how men and women of the 18th century, around the globe, saw their territories and their fellow humans. This is a world history class.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 154 First-Year Seminar: Saints and Society
The topic of this course is saints and society in medieval and early modern Europe. It explores the complex relationships between exceptional holy men and women, the historical settings in which they lived, and the religious and cultural traditions on which they drew. It considers saints as both embodiments of the highest ideals of their societies and radical challenges to ordinary patterns of social existence.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 1550 Temple & Palace in World History: Approaches to Religion and Politics in the Middle East
This course aims to examine the ways in which temple and palace cooperated with and competed against each other in the Middle East from ancient to the present times. As sites of spiritual and political power, temples and palaces have played a major role in human history. They have been a source of cooperation and conflict by inspiring and regulating the spiritual and social lives of people, including how they enacted laws, developed cultures, established institutions, and interacted with each other as individuals, families and societies. The course will trace how their interactions produced various models of authority, law and social association and how they collectively and separately rationalized social hierarchy and diversity in human societies. Introductory course to the major and minor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 163 Freedom, Citizenship and the Making of American Life
This course offers a broad survey of American history from the era before European settlement of North America to the late 20th century. The course explores the emergence and geographic expansion of the United States and addresses changes in what it meant to be an American during the nation's history. Tracing major changes in the nation's economic structures, politics, social order and culture, the course chronicles, among other issues, changes in the meanings of freedom, citizenship and American identity. Introductory course to the major and minor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Art: CPSC, HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 164 Introduction to World History: The Second World War in World History
This course introduction to World History uses World War II as a lens to examine the methodologies, approaches and sources historians employ to understand and analyze historical periods. The class will explore the global connections and interactions which characterize World History. The emphasis of this course will be on digging into topics traditionally neglected: the impact of the war on race, gender, family and children; daily life; and daily ethical decision making.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 1640 Health and Disease in World History
Health and disease are universal human experiences, yet vary profoundly across time and place. Extending from ancient times to the present, this course surveys that variety from a global perspective. We explore medical traditions from around the world, then examine how these responded to major epidemic diseases such as the Black Death. We study the globalization of disease and the emergence of scientific medicine after 1450, then turn to the interrelated histories of health and disease in the modern era. Throughout, we attend carefully to how the biological aspects of health and disease have shaped world history, while at the same time exploring the powerful mediating role of social, cultural, economic, and political factors — from religious beliefs and dietary practices to inequality, poverty, empire and war — in determining the myriad ways in which health and disease have been experienced and understood. Introductory course to the major and minor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 192 First-Year Seminar: African Experiences in the Second World War
Most conventional histories of the Second World War pay scant attention to Africa, thereby creating the misconception that the war had little impact on the peoples of the African continent. This introductory seminar restores the experiences of ordinary African women and men to the larger historical narratives of both Africa and World War II. Combining personal memoirs with official primary sources reveals not only how the global conflict influenced African history but also how Africans helped shape the final outcome and consequences of the war. This course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 200 Doctors and Terrorists: The Fictions of South Asian America
South Asians have always played an integral role in the culture, history and politics of the United States. However, for complex reasons, their presence has either been concealed, dismissed through dangerous stereotypes, or, just as inaccurately, celebrated for proving the generosity of American liberalism and multiculturalism. Racially misrecognized, this large and heterogeneous group has nonetheless shaped American categories of race, sexuality, and citizenship in intriguing and powerful ways. South Asian Americans have reached to fiction, music and popular culture to craft deeply intimate and original assessments of mainstream desires. In doing so, they have sought to resist the dictates of whiteness, to question U.S. imperialism, to garner acceptance and mobility, and to build solidarity with other U.S. minorities. In this course, we learn about the complex history and cultural productions of South Asians in America. How did "South Asia" become a category of identification, and who benefitted from that designation? What role have South Asians played in the economic, cultural and global ascendancy of the United States? How do South Asians connect with and control their countries of origin? What is the significance of storytelling in building the archive and questioning the fiction of South Asian America?
Same as L46 AAS 200
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2006 "Reading" Culture: Visualizing the American City
See Section Description. Topic changes semester to semester.
Same as L98 AMCS 206
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: CPSC, HUM, VC BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 201A Puzzles and Revolutions: Text and Tradition
One major force in human history has been inquiry into the natural world. Especially after 1550, natural science, by virtue of its role in the development of technology and the improvement of health, has brought about great changes on all scales of human existence, first in Western Europe and then globally. In this course, the changing character of inquiry into the natural world, from antiquity forward, will be the object of study. Does natural science enable us, for example, to study nature as it is in itself, or are culturally-determined perspectives or frameworks inescapable? How is it that natural science has, especially since 1800, proved so useful in the development of technology? How has it impinged on the arts? The requirements will include writing several short papers and brief responses to the readings.
Same as L93 IPH 201A
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 2061 Sophomore Seminar
This course is a sophomore seminar in history; topics vary per semester. Prerequisite: sophomore standing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2062 Sophomore Seminar
This course is a sophomore seminar in history; topics vary per semester. Prerequisite: sophomore standing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2070 Crossing Borders
This course provides an overview of the emergence of international governing institutions, the ideologies that shaped them, and concepts helpful for understanding them. Identifying the systems that have emerged to govern modern human societies at the national and international levels provides the means to consider how human beings are categorized within those systems, as citizens, subjects, asylum seekers, refugees, and the stateless. We engage a few classic works -- including "The Communist Manifesto," "Imagined Communities," and "Orientalism" -- and consider how they have transformed knowledge. The goal is for students to gain an empirical grasp of world institutions and a critical vocabulary that will provide the means for an informed engagement with international issues across different world regions and academic approaches.
Same as L97 IAS 207
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC, SC BU: IS EN: S
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L22 History 2081 Introduction to Jewish Civilization: History and Identity
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once famously invoked Max Weber in writing that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs." The main goal of this course — designed as an introduction to Jewish history, culture and society — will be to investigate the "webs of significance" produced by Jewish societies and individuals, in a select number of historical periods, both as responses to historical circumstances and as expressions of Jewish identity. Over the course of the semester we will focus on the following historical settings: seventh-century BCE Judah and the Babylonian exile; pre-Islamic Palestine and Babylonia (the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud); Europe in the period of the Crusades; Islamic and Christian Spain; Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries; North America in the 20th century; and the modern State of Israel. For each period we will investigate the social and political conditions of Jewish life; identify the major texts that Jews possessed, studied, and produced; determine the non-Jewish influences on their attitudes and aspirations; and the explore the efforts that Jews made to define what it meant to be part of a Jewish collective.
Same as L75 JIMES 208F
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2091 First-Year Seminar: The City in Early Modern Europe
From the city-states of Renaissance Italy to the 18th-century boomtowns of London and Paris, cities functioned as political, economic, and cultural centers, creating unique opportunities and challenges for their diverse inhabitants. Using a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, this course will examine how a variety of individuals — men and women, rich and poor, established citizens and marginal groups — tried to understand and manage life in the city. Their conflicting experiences and expectations created not only social and economic unrest but also a resilient social infrastructure, a tradition of popular participation in politics, and a rich legacy of cultural accomplishment. Topics studied include urban political and economic organization; the creation and use of public spaces; religion as a source of community and conflict; and urban crime and public punishment.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 2093 Sophomore Seminar: Mobilizing Shame: Violence, the Media, and International Intervention
Deciding when and when not to intervene in the affairs of a foreign and autonomous state has become a hot-button issue in light of the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the more recent lending of support to Syrian rebels. In this course, students will examine the emergence of the "international community," the development of human rights, the rise of the war correspondent as a mythical figure, the creation of supranational political and military institutions, the influence of the media on public sympathies, and the changing nature of global politics. Case studies may include: the Greek War of Independence, the Crimean War, the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, Apartheid in South Africa, the Rwandan genocide, the Somali Civil War, and the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2118 First-Year Seminar: Angels, Prostitutes and Chicas Modernas: Women in Latin American History
Women have been active players in the construction of Latin American nations. In the last two decades, leading scholars in the field have taken up the challenge of documenting women's participation. This research explosion has produced fruitful results to allow for the development of specialized courses. This course looks at the nation-building process through the lens of Latin American women. Students will examine the expectations, responsibilities and limitations women confronted in their varied roles from the Wars of Independence to the social revolutions and dictatorial regimes of the 20th century. Besides looking at their political and economic lives, students will explore the changing gender roles and relations within marriage and the family, as well as the changing sexual and maternal mores.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2119 First-Year Seminar: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America: Myths, Realities and Identities
What does it mean to identify as mestizo, moreno or mulato? How have Latin American nations dealt with their mixed racial populations and their rich African and indigenous heritages? What does it mean to be black in nations where the official discourse is one of racial hybridity or color blindness? This course examines the history of racial thinking and the experience of race in Latin America. While the focus of the course will be on the complexities of race in Latin America, a place of enormous ethnic and cultural diversity, we will also draw comparisons to the history of race in the U.S.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 214C Introduction to Islamic Civilization
A historical survey of Islamic civilization in global perspective. Chronological coverage of social, political, economic and cultural history will be balanced with focused attention to special topics, which will include: aspects of Islam as religion; science, medicine and technology in Islamic societies; art and architecture; philosophy and theology; interaction between Islamdom and Christendom; Islamic history in the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia as well as Africa; European colonialism; globalization of Islam and contemporary Islam.
Same as L75 JIMES 210C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: ETH, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2152 The Theory and Practice of Justice: The American Historical Experience
This introductory course uses historical case studies combined with readings in law, literature, and philosophy to illuminate key episodes where definitions of justice were contested in 19th- and 20th-century America. Some of the conflicts to be explored include Cherokee Removal; Civil War era debates over southern secession; whether reparation should be offered to freed people to redress the injustices of racial slavery; the denial of voting rights to women as a case of "taxation without representation"; 20th-century controversies over legal bans on racial intermarriage; free speech versus hate speech in the 1960s and 1970s; and recent debates over affirmative action and gay marriage. Attendance required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 2157 First-Year Seminar: The Meaning of Pakistan: History, Culture, Art
Pakistan is the second largest Muslim nation and the sixth most populous country in the world. First imagined as an anti-majoritarian and anti-imperial idea, the nation came to be split between East and West Pakistan, with a hostile Indian nation dividing the country. The subsequent emergence of Bangladesh, from within, exposed the complexities of U.S. imperial and Indian power, colonialism, identity, ethnicity, race, nationalism and repression. More recently, the War on Terror has once again exploited the ethnic and cultural conflicts produced by world histories of power and resistance. The events of the past two hundred years have undoubtedly and violently exacerbated the politicization of social and cultural identities. This course situates Pakistan in the context of pre-colonial social formations, British colonialism, internal colonialism, U.S. imperialism, the Cold War, Soviet interests, Indian regional hegemony and then turns to the powerful and diverse struggles launched by its own citizens against these external forces. How did successive empires construct and politicize social identities, and how did people contest and adapt these? How did caste, gender, race and religion shape empire and anti-imperial histories? Our sources will be historical, ethnographic, and literary. We will cover topics such as colonial fantasies, decolonization, the political uses of social categories of tribe, caste, language and gender, the political economy of militarism, terrorism, "development," activism, diasporic formations, poetry, music and art. The course will deepen our collective understanding of a critical series of developments in world history. Just as crucially, we will build a framework within which to address the stereotypes about Pakistan that dominate popular and media discourses today.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2170 How to Sit on an Iron Throne: Reading (Early Modern) Politics and Violence Through Game of Thrones
This class will attempt to enthusiastically pillage Game of Thrones and investigate what possible storylines were supplied by the history of 15th-17th century Europe. These storylines are heavily politicized in Game of Thrones and thus offer an exceptional opportunity to investigate how early modern men and women thought about power, fought with words and gift, built loyalties, betrayed one another, killed one another, married one another, and fielded armies of soldiers and cronies. Through the characters of Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister, students will study the historical stain of bastardy, and with the help of Cersei Lannister, Catelyn Tully and Arya Stark, the place of women in webs of power will also be examined.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2171 Who Died and Made Them Kings? People, Politics and Power in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
Who were the few, and who were the many, in the early-modern Atlantic World? The discovery of the Americas and the coalescing of an Atlantic World would do much to transform profoundly the common understanding of the body politics in the early-modern world. The Americas provided new models of kingship and empire; Aztecs and Incas ruled in ways which both seemed familiar and strange to Spaniards' eyes. In the Caribbean, the North, and the Amazon, nomadic and semi-nomadic nations presented even more puzzling situations, where no one seemed to rule. And yet other nations, such as the Iroquois, were experimenting with new political forms. This course is thus focused on tracking this multitude of experiences from a socio-political and anthropological perspective, rather than through intellectual history.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2255 First-Year Seminar: The Caribbean and the World
For many, the Caribbean evokes images of an exotic place with beautiful beaches, friendly, happy "natives" and unbridled hedonism. Yet, much more than a distant vacation destination for "first world" consumption, the Caribbean has long been closely intertwined with major events in World History. This course explores the ways in which the Caribbean has been a part of the making of World History, beginning in the 14th century and ending in the contemporary period. Themes covered will include: capitalism and slavery; the Haitian Revolution and its global reverberations; U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean; the impact of Caribbean migration on British culture; Caribbean sports; music and food in a global context; and the contributions of Caribbean thinkers to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist thought and action.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 2358 First-Year Seminar: Travel and Travelers in the Second British Empire
Empires were, most fundamentally, networks of communication, commerce, governance, and travel held together by force. They are difficult to understand and define because different sorts of people experienced imperial rule differently. This seminar offers a new perspective on the Second British Empire by examining it through the eyes of the people who traveled throughout it as politicians, administrators, soldiers, merchants, missionaries, journalists, artists, and settlers. The course work and assignments involve reading and writing conventional travel accounts, memoirs, and police reports.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 2400 Not Members of This Club: Women and Slaves in the Greco-Roman World
Both the Athenian Democracy and the Roman Senatorial Oligarchy were societies in which political power was the exclusive property of free, citizen males. With very few exceptions, the astounding accomplishments of those societies were also the creations of free, citizen males. This course examines the lives of two disparate but comparable groups of outsiders within Greek and Roman society. The status, rights and accomplishments of Athenian and Roman women are explored and placed in the context of other premodern societies. Likewise, the institution of slavery in Greece and Rome is explored and compared with other slave-holding societies, ancient and modern.
Same as L08 Classics 240
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC, SD Art: SSC BU: BA EN: S
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L22 History 2440 Introduction to European Studies
This course provides an introduction to the study of contemporary Europe through an historical examination of the moments of crisis, and their political and cultural aftermath, that shaped modern Europe and continue to define it today. These crises will include: the revolutions of 1848, the advent of 19th-century nationalisms, the Great War, the Spanish Civil War, the rise and defeat of state fascism, the Cold War, the formation of the EEC and Union, May 1968, and the return of right-wing politics. After the study of these traditions, the final portion of the semester will consider contemporary Europe since 1991, considering such subjects as Green politics, internal migration and immigration, and the culture of the European Union.
Same as L97 IAS 244
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 2443 First-Year Seminar: The Nuremberg Trials and International Justice
This course is an exercise in understanding how professional historians and the general public discover and use the past. The main goals of this course are to understand the many different methods and standards applied to the past; to understand how and why each generation changes the past as it seeks to make it "usable"; and to develop the skills of exposition and argumentation necessary to describe and analyze complex historical issues and to express critical ideas effectively. The subject of this inquiry will be the Nuremberg trials: the innovations and critiques around the law and politics of the trials themselves as well as the trials' legacies for ideas about international justice in postwar America and the world. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2561 Urban America
The city is a crucial frame for understanding the nation's cultural, economic, social, political and ecological concerns. This course discusses its importance in shaping American society and considers urban environments as living, breathing, contracting and expanding regions in the landscape. Questions of race, class and gender will be explored in an attempt to understand the current configuration of American cities, and to allow students to engage meaningfully with the continual transformation of urban space. Attention will be paid to the role played by popular imagination in the formation of public policy, civic spatial arrangement, suburban development and urban historical geography.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 2650 First-Year Seminar: Renaissance Florence from Dante to Machiavelli
The city of Florence has long held an important place in the history of the Western world. Hailed as the birthplace of the Renaissance and of the modern state, Florence exerts a seemingly natural appeal as an object of study. But why did these things happen in Florence, and why at this particular time? This course will explore these issues as well as others through the close reading of a wide range of texts produced by Florentines who left enduring marks on the history of Europe and the world. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.
Credit 3 units. A&S: FYS A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2674 Sophomore Seminar: Slavery and Memory in American Popular Culture
Sophomores receive priority registration. The history of slavery has long created a sense of unease within the consciousness of many Americans. Recognizing this continued reality, this seminar examines how slavery is both remembered and silenced within contemporary popular culture. Although slavery scholarship continues to expand, how do everyday Americans gain access to the history of bondage? Taking an interdisciplinary approach to these intriguing queries, we will examine a range of sources: literature, public history, art/poetry, visual culture, movies and documentaries, as well as contemporary music including reggae and hip-hop. The centerpiece of this course covers North American society, however, in order to offer a critical point of contrast students will be challenged to explore the varied ways slavery is commemorated in others parts of the African diaspora.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 270 Globalization and its Discontents
Today, the heady promises of globalization appear to have failed us. The notion of global markets and global citizens seems to have remained at best, an ideal. Meanwhile the world's majority has witnessed a staggering decline in education, nutrition, health and even physical mobility. Nowhere have these developments passed unquestioned: from the rise of the so-called Maoist insurgency in India to the Occupy movement in the U.S., people and especially the youth have expressed their outrage in creative and unconventional ways. This course plots the long and necessarily violent history of forging global interconnections. The lens for our analysis will be India, South Asia and their relationship with the United States. We will approach a range of novels, films and popular cultural artifacts as we build our own understanding of the nature, critique and promise of globalization.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2700 Sophomore Seminar: U.S.-China Relations: Perceptions and Realities
The United States and China are the two most important global powers today, and the bilateral relationship is one of the most comprehensive, complex, consequential, and competitive major-power relations in the world. The course aims to examine the attitudes, ideas, and values that have shaped the relationship, from the era of colonial expansion in the 1800s to the rise of China as a major political and economic power in the 21st century. Drawing upon visual images, literature, films, policy statements, and other materials, the course will analyze the patterns of perceptions that have informed and shaped the understanding of realities. This course, which uses an interdisciplinary approach, will include discussions and debates from both American and Chinese perspectives.
Same as L04 Chinese 270
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 2907 Sophomore Seminar: From the Suez Canal to Hoover Dam: Infrastructure & Empire in World History
Do bridges, dams, or clocks have a history? How can we read the histories of mobility and segregation from the built environment? In this seminar, we will explore the comingled history of infrastructure and empire in their political, economic, cultural, and scientific dimensions from the 1860s through the early 1940s. We will situate projects such as the Suez Canal, the standardization of international time, and the Boulder/Hoover Dam project within meta- and counter-narratives of imperial and colonial activities around the world, ending with the Manhattan Project in St. Louis.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 299 Undergraduate Internship in History
Students receive credit for a faculty-directed and approved internship. Registration requires completion of the Learning Agreement, which the student obtains from the Career Center and which must be filled out and signed by the Career Center and the faculty sponsor prior to beginning internship work. Credit should correspond to actual time spent in work activities, e.g., eight to 10 hours a week for 13 or 14 weeks to receive 3 units of credit; 1 or 2 credits for fewer hours. Students may not receive credit for work done for pay but are encouraged to obtain written evaluations about such work for the student's academic adviser and career placement file.
Credit variable, maximum 3 units.
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L22 History 3002 Independent Work
Permission of the instructor is required.
Credit 3 units.
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L22 History 3011 Biblical Law and the Origins of Western Justice
This course will explore how law developed from the earliest periods of human history and how religious ideas and social institutions shaped law. The course will also illuminate how biblical law was influenced by earlier cultures and how the ancient Israelites reshaped the law they inherited. It will further analyze the impact of biblical law on Western culture and will investigate how the law dealt with those of different social classes and ethnic groups, and we will probe how women were treated by the law.
Same as L75 JIMES 3012
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: ETH, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 301A Historical Methods in African History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis will be on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically, and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. See Course Listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 301C Historical Methods — Caribbean History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis will be on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically, and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Consult course listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 301E Historical Methods — East Asian History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis is placed on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically, and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Consult course listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 301F Historical Methods — African History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis will be on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically, and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Consult course listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 301L Historical Methods — Latin American History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis is on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Consult course listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 301M Historical Methods — Middle Eastern History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis is on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Consult course listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 301R Historical Methods — European History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis is on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Consult course listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H UColl: HEU, HSM
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L22 History 301S Historical Methods — South Asian History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis is on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Consult course listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 301T Historical Methods — Transregional History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis is on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Consult course listings for current topics. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 301U Historical Methods — United States History
This is a small-group reading course in which students are introduced to the skills essential to the historian's craft. Emphasis will be on acquiring research skills, learning to read historical works critically, and learning to use primary and secondary sources to make a persuasive and original argument. Required for history majors. Preference given to history majors; other interested students welcome.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3044 Humors, Pox and Plague: Medieval and Early Modern Medicine
This course examines how people thought about, experienced and managed disease in the medieval and early modern periods. Students will consider developments in learned medicine alongside the activities of a diverse range of practitioners — e.g., surgeons, empirics, quacks, midwives, saints, and local healers — involved in the business of curing a wide range of ailments. Significant attention will be paid to the experiences of patients and the social and cultural significance of disease. Major topics include: the rise and fall of humoral medicine; religious explanations of illness; diseases such as leprosy, syphilis and plague; the rise of anatomy; herbs and pharmaceuticals; the experience of childbirth; and the emergence of identifiably "modern" institutions such as hospitals, the medical profession, and public health. The focus will be on Western Europe but we'll also consider developments in the Islamic world and the Americas.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3051 Topics on Africa
Nearly fifty percent of Africa's population now lives in urban areas. By 2050 this number is expected to triple to 1.23 billion or what will then be sixty percent of the continent's total population. This urban growth is happening alongside rapid economic expansion, technological innovations, and-in some cities-political insurrection. Many of these developments are taking place in peripheral urban areas that lack formal planning, basic infrastructure, and security. Yet, as many theorists point out, the very lack of cohesive planning and stable infrastructure in urban Africa has produced flexible spaces where novel forms of dwelling, work, and leisure are possible. Many residents, often by necessity, rearrange their built environments to make the city function beyond the limits of its original design. In the process, urban dwellers produce new built spaces, aesthetics, and economic practices, calling into question assumptions about what a city is and how it works. What are the implications of Africa's urban revolution for both the people who inhabit these cities and the world at large? How will Africa's urban future shape what some theorists are calling "the African century?" What can contemporary cities across the continent tell us about the future of urban life everywhere? In this seminar, we will explore these questions by surveying a variety of case studies and topics from across the African continent. The purpose in focusing on Africa in general is not to homogenize an incredibly diverse continent, but to make connections across a variety of different contexts in order to explore conceptual debates and assemble a theoretical tool-kit that is useful for grappling with themes that are simultaneously abstract and concrete. For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 4.
Same as L90 AFAS 305C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: IS EN: S
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L22 History 3052 Life and Death on the High Seas
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3054 Superhuman Histories: Living, Working, and Dying with Animals
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3056 Material Culture in Modern China
In this course, we will explore change and continuity from late imperial to postsocialist China through an analysis of everyday material culture. Drawing upon material objects, historical texts, ethnographic studies and films, we will investigate values, beliefs and attitudes toward the material world in modern Chinese life. Readings, lectures and discussions will focus on how political, ethnic, regional, religious, and gender identities have been constructed and shaped by the use and production of material artifacts ranging from household goods and tomb objects to built forms and bodily dispositions. Case studies include foot-binding, opium use, fashion, tea culture, fast food consumption, sports and nation building, contemporary art markets, the privatization of housing, and worker discipline in transnational factories.
Same as L48 Anthro 3056
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC EN: S
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L22 History 3066 The American City in the 19th and 20th Centuries
This course explores the cultural, political and economic history of U.S. cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course focuses on New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles and Atlanta, although other cities may be included. Students conduct significant primary research on sections of St. Louis, developing a detailed history of one of the city's neighborhoods. Much of the course readings address broad themes such as immigration, industrialization, deindustrialization and race and gender relations in American cities.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Art: HUM BU: HUM
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L22 History 3067 Topics in the History of Medicine: History of Madness
Mental health — its diagnosis, social implications and experience — is a central and increasingly visible part of the practice of medicine. This course explores "madness." How have different societies explained and responded to states of mind, behavior and emotion judged to be unreasonable? What role has medicine played in framing understandings about mental disorders and their management? During this course we will engage these questions, charting the shifting experience of mental illness roughly from the Middle Ages to the present. Themes covered include: religious models of madness; humoral medicine and disorders such as melancholy; the premodern madhouse and the emergence of the modern asylum; the history of psychiatry; the insanity defense in the courtroom; patient autobiography; gender, race and mental health.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L22 History 3068 An Inconvenient Truth: The Human History of Climate Change
While climate change has become a hot-button issue in recent decades, it is by no means a new concern. Advisers to the king of France were warning against deforestation in the 18th century and 19th century. Scientific experiments revealed the arrival of acid rain in the industrial centers of Great Britain. This course examines the longer history of climate change and how it has been addressed as a scientific, political and environmental issue. Students will be introduced to the field of environmental history and explore how the methods of this field of inquiry challenge traditional historical categories.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3073 The Global War on Terrorism
This course presents an historical assessment of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) from the perspective of its major participants: militant Sunni Islamist jihadists, especially the Al-Qaeda network, and the nation-states that oppose them, particularly the United States and its allies. The course concludes by analyzing the current state and future of Islamist jihad and the GWOT.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3074 Hinduism & the Hindu Right
We are witnessing a global rise in rightwing politics, and India is no exception. In May 2019, Narendra Modi and his "Hindu Nationalist" party were elected to power for a second term. Observers in the United States and Europe may be stunned by what seems to be a new development, but observers in India have been following the rise of the Hindu Right since the early 1990s. In its wake, the Hindu Right has brought violence against minorities; curbs on free speech; and moves toward second-class citizenship for Indian Muslims. This course will track the history of the Hindu Right in India from its 19th-century roots to the present. The struggle to come to grips with the Hindu Right is of immediate political relevance. It also raises big questions about the history of religion and the politics of secularism.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3082 City on a Hill: The Concept and Culture of American Exceptionalism
This course examines the concept, history, and culture of American exceptionalism — the idea that America has been specially chosen, or has a special mission to the world. First, we examine the Puritan sermon that politicians quote when they describe America as a "city on a hill." This sermon has been called the "ur-text" of American literature, the foundational document of American culture; learning and drawing from multiple literary methodologies, we will re-investigate what that sermon means and how it came to tell a story about the Puritan origins of American culture — a thesis our class will reassess with the help of modern critics. In the second part of this class, we will broaden our discussion to consider the wider (and newer) meanings of American exceptionalism, theorizing the concept while looking at the way it has been revitalized, redefined and redeployed in recent years. Finally, the course ends with a careful study of American exceptionalism in modern political rhetoric, starting with JFK and proceeding through Reagan to the current day, ending with an analysis of Donald Trump and the rise of "America First." In the end, students will gain a firm grasp of the long history and continuing significance — the pervasive impact — of this concept in American culture.
Same as L98 AMCS 3081
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3091 Poverty and Social Reform in American History
This course explores the history of dominant ideas about the causes of and solutions to poverty in American society. We will investigate changing economic, cultural, and political conditions that gave rise to new populations of impoverished Americans, and to the expansion or contraction of poverty rates at various times in American history. We will, however, focus primarily on how various social commentators, political activists and reformers defined poverty, explained its causes, and struggled to ameliorate its effects. The course aims to highlight changes in theories and ideas about the relationship between dependence and independence, personal responsibility and social obligation, and the state and the citizen.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3122 Race, Caste, Conversion: Social Movements in South Asia
It is a truism that caste-based injustice is one of the abiding forms of inequality in South Asia. But what precisely is a caste, and how is injustice to be removed? In this course, students explore different theories of caste, beginning with the race-inflected theories of the 19th century; and different approaches to the remediation of inequalities, including social reform, religious conversion, political organization and legal remedies. Students also compare caste reform with gender reform and consider how the experience of caste is inflected by gender.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 313C Islamic History: 600-1200
The cultural, intellectual and political history of the Islamic Middle East, beginning with the prophetic mission of Muhammad and concluding with the Mongol conquests. Topics covered include: the life of Muhammad; the early Muslim conquests; the institution of the caliphate; the translation movement from Greek into Arabic and the emergence of Arabic as a language of learning and artistic expression; the development of new educational, legal and pietistic institutions; changes in agriculture, crafts, commerce and the growth of urban culture; multiculturalism and inter-confessional interaction; and large-scale movements of nomadic peoples.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3149 The Late Ottoman Middle East
This course surveys the Middle East in the late Ottoman period (essentially the 18th and 19th centuries, up to World War I). It examines the central Ottoman state and the Ottoman provinces as they were incorporated into the world economy, and how they responded to their peripheralization in that process. Students focus on how everyday people's lived experiences were affected by the increased monetarization of social and economic relations; changes in patterns of land tenure and agriculture; the rise of colonialism; state efforts at modernization and reform; shifts in gender relations; and debates over the relationship of religion to community and political identity.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 314C Islamic History: 1200-1800
An introduction to Islamic politics and societies from the Mongol conquests to the 13th century to the collapse and weakening of the colossal "gunpowder" empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals in the early 18th century. Broadly speaking, this course covers the Middle Period (1000-1800) of Islamic history, sandwiched between the Early and High Caliphal periods (600-100) on the one hand and the Modern Period (1800-present) on the other hand. Familiarity with the Early and High Caliphal periods is not assumed. The course is not a "survey" of this period but a series of "windows" that allows students to develop both an in-depth understanding of some key features of Islamic societies and a clear appreciation of the challenges (as well as the rewards!) that await historians of the Middle Period. Particular attention is given to the Mamluk and Ottoman Middle East, Safavid Iran and Mughal India.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 3150 The Middle East in the 20th Century
This course surveys the history of the Middle East since World War I. Major analytical themes include: colonialism; Orientalism; the formation of the regional nation-state system; the formation and political mobilization of new social classes; changing gender relations; the development of new forms of appropriation of economic surplus (oil, urban industry) in the new global economy; the role of religion; the Middle East as an arena of the Cold War; conflict in Israel/Palestine; and new conceptions of identity associated with these developments (Arabism, local patriotism, Islamism).
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3153 Sex and Gender in Greco Roman Antiquity
Ideas about sex and gender have not remained stable over time. The ancient Greeks and Romans had their own ideas — ideas that strike us today as both deeply alien and strikingly familiar. This course will consider questions such as: What constituted "normal" sex for the Greeks and for the Romans? What sex acts did they consider to be problematic or illicit, and why? What traits did the Greeks and Romans associate with masculinity? With femininity? How did society treat those who did not quite fit into those categories? How did peoples of the ancient world respond to same-sex and other-sex relationships, and was there an ancient concept of "sexuality"? How did issues of class, ethnicity and age interact with and shape these concepts? How does an understanding of these issues change the way we think about sex and gender today? We will read an array of ancient texts in translation, consider various theoretical viewpoints, and move toward an understanding of what sex and gender meant in the ancient world.
Same as L08 Classics 3152
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3162 Early Modern China
This course examines political, socioeconomic and intellectual — cultural developments in Chinese society from the middle of the 14th century to 1800. This chronological focus largely corresponds to the last two imperial dynasties, the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911). Thematically, the course emphasizes such early-modern indigenous developments as increasing commercialization, social mobility and questioning of received cultural values.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3163 Historical Landscape and National Identity in Modern China
This course attempts to ground the history of modern China in physical space such as imperial palaces, monuments and memorials, campus, homes and residential neighborhoods, recreational facilities, streets, prisons, factories, gardens, and churches. Using methods of historical and cultural anthropological analysis, the course invests the places where we see with historical meaning. Through exploring the ritual, political, and historical significance of historical landmarks, the course investigates the forces that have transformed physical spaces into symbols of national, local, and personal identity. The historical events and processes we examine along the way through the sites include the changing notion of rulership, national identity, state-building, colonialism and imperialism, global capitalism and international tourism. Acknowledging and understanding the fact that these meanings and significances are fluid, multiple, contradictory, and changing over time are an important concern of this course.
Same as L03 East Asia 3163
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 3165 Chinese Diasporas: A Social History of Global Migration
Five hundred years ago, the Chinese population was concentrated in core areas of China Proper. Beginning in the 16th century, significant numbers of Chinese people moved to the frontiers of an expanding China and across its borders, to Japan and Southeast Asia, to the Americas and Australia, and to Africa and Europe. Although Chinese migration certainly existed beforehand, the period from the 16th century to the present day is marked by the emergence of sustained movement of non-state actors and the development of institutions — ranging from native-place associations to tourist agents' websites — that supported this vast circulation of people. Likewise, in many emigrant communities and host societies, Chinese diasporic families adapted to migration as a way of life. This course traces this worldwide circulation of Chinese people over these five centuries.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 316C Modern China: 1890s to the Present
A survey of China's history from the clash with Western powers in the 1800s to the present day economic revolution. This course examines the background to the 1911 revolution that destroyed the old political order. Then it follows the great cultural and political movements that lead to the Communist victory in 1949. The development of the People's Republic will be examined in detail, from Mao to the global economy.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3172 Queer Histories
Queer history is a profoundly political project. Scholars and activists use queer histories to assert theories of identity formation, build communities, and advance a vision of the meanings of sexuality in modern life and the place of queer people in national communities. This history of alternative sexual identities is narrated in a variety of settings-the internet as well as the academy, art and film as well as the streets-and draws upon numerous disciplines, including anthropology, geography, sociology, oral history, fiction and memoir, as well as history. This discussion-based course will examine the sites and genres of queer history, with particular attention to moments of contestation and debate about its contours and meanings.
Same as L77 WGSS 3172
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3173 Service Learning: Documenting the Queer Past in St. Louis
Around the U.S. and the world, grassroots LGBTQ history projects investigate the queer past as a means of honoring the courage of those who have come before, creating a sense of community today, and understanding the exclusions and divisions that shaped their communities and continue to limit them. In this course, we participate in this national project of history-making by helping to excavate the queer past in the greater St. Louis region. Course readings will focus on the ways that sexual identities and communities in the United States have been shaped by urban settings since the late 19th century, with particular attention to the ways that race, class and gender have structured queer spaces and communities. In their community service project, students will work with local LGBTQ groups, including the St. Louis LGBT History Project, to research St. Louis's queer past. Each student will also conduct an oral history interview with an LGBTQ community member. Important Note: This is a service-learning class, which means it combines classroom learning with outside work at a community organization. In addition to regular class time, there is a service requirement, which necessitates an additional 3-5 hours a week. Before beginning community service, students must complete required training. Prerequisite: Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies or Introduction to Queer Studies, or permission of instructor.
Same as L77 WGSS 3173
Credit 4 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3192 Modern South Asia
This course covers the history of the Indian subcontinent in the 19th and 20th centuries. We look closely at a number of issues including colonialism in India; anticolonial movements; the experiences of women; the interplay between religion and national identity; and popular culture in modern India. Political and social history are emphasized equally.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3193 Engaging the City: The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson
See course listings for current offering.
Same as L98 AMCS 3190
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SC, SD Art: CPSC BU: HUM EN: S
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L22 History 3194 Environment and Empire
In this course we study British imperialism from the ground up. At bottom, the British empire was about extracting the wealth contained in the labour and the natural resources of the colonized. How did imperial efforts to maximize productivity and profits impact the ecological balance of forests, pastures and farm lands, rivers and rainfall, animals and humans? We ask, with environmental historians of the U.S., how colonialism marked a watershed of radical ecological change. The course covers examples from Asia to Africa, with a focus on the "jewel in the crown" of the British empire: the Indian subcontinent. We learn how the colonized contributed to the science of environmentalism, and how they forged a distinctive politics of environmentalism built upon local resistance and global vision, inspired by religious traditions and formative thinkers, not least Mahatma Gandhi.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 320C Japan Since 1868
For some, the word Japan evokes Hello Kitty, animated films, cartoons, and sushi. For others, it makes them think of the Nanjing Atrocity, "comfort women," the Bataan Death March, and problematic textbooks. Still others will think of woodblock prints, tea ceremonies, and cherry blossoms or perhaps of Sony Walkmans and Toyota automobiles. At the same time, still others may have no image of Japan at all. Tracing the story of Japan's transformations - from a preindustrial peasant society managed by samurai-bureaucrats into an expansionist nation-state and then into its current paradoxical guise of a peaceful nation of culture led by conservative nationalists - provides the means for deepening our understandings of historical change in one region and grappling with the methods and aims of the discipline of history.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 321C Introduction to Colonial Latin America until 1825
This course surveys the history of Latin America from the pre-Columbian civilizations through the Iberian exploration and conquest of the Americas until the Wars of Independence (roughly 1400-1815). Stressing the experiences and cultural contributions of Americans, Europeans and Africans, we consider the following topics through primary written documents, first-hand accounts, and excellent secondary scholarship, as well as through art, music and architecture: Aztec, Maya, Inca and Iberian civilizations; models of conquest in comparative perspective (Spanish, Portuguese and Amerindian); environmental histories; consolidation of colonialism in labor, tributary and judicial systems; race, ethnicity, slavery, caste and class; religion and the Catholic Church and Inquisition; sugar and mining industries, trade and global economies; urban and rural life; the roles of women, gender and sexuality in the colonies. Geographically, we cover Mexico, the Andes, and to a lesser extent, Brazil, the Southwest, Cuba, and the Southern Cone. Premodern, Latin America.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3220 Modern Mexico: Land, Politics and Development
This course is designed to provide students with an overview of the political, social, economic and cultural history of Mexico from the era of Independence (roughly 1810) to the present. Lectures outline basic theoretical models for analyzing historical trends and then present a basic chronological historical narrative.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 322C Modern Latin America
This course aims to present a survey of Latin American history from Independence to the present. Topics to be covered include the Wars of Independence; caudillismo; nationalism; liberalism; slavery and indigenous peoples; urbanization, industrialization and populism; ideas of race & ethnicity; the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions; US intervention; modernity, modernism and modernization; motherhood and citizenship; the Cold War; terror and violence under military dictatorships and popular resistance movements. While the course aims to provide students with an understanding of the region, it will focus primarily on the experiences of Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and Central America.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3230 Black Power Across Africa and the Diaspora: International Dimensions of the Black Power Movement
This seminar explores the Black Power Movement as an international phenomenon. By situating Black Power within an African World context, this course examines the advent and intersections of Black Power politics in the United States, parts of Africa (including Ghana, Algeria, Nigeria and Tanzania), the Caribbean (Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas and Cuba), South America (Brazil) and Canada. Particular emphasis is placed upon unique and contested definitions of "Black Power" as it was articulated, constructed and enacted in each region.
Same as L90 AFAS 3231
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3260 Topics in East Asian Studies: US-China Relations, from 1949 to the Present
This course examines the tangled relations between the United States and China in the competitive geopolitics since 1949. The intensity of U.S.-China partnership and rivalry can be discerned in a wide range of national and international events such as the Chinese Revolution, the Korean War and the Cold War, the pro-democracy movement in China and the human rights debate, and China's economic reform and its rise as a global economic and political power in the 21st century. By drawing on scholarship in political and social history and area studies, this course analyzes both the historical context and contemporary developments of US-China relations. It helps students better understand the formation and transformation of US-China relations and its impacts on domestic, regional, and global history.
Same as L03 East Asia 3263
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H UColl: CD
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L22 History 3262 The Early Medieval World: 200-1000
This course begins with the crisis of the Roman Empire in the third century and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312. We will study the so-called "barbarian invasions" of the fourth and fifth centuries and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. The Roman Empire in the East (commonly known as the Byzantine Empire after the seventh century) survived intact, developing a very different style of Christianity than in the lands of the former Western Empire. Apart from examining Christianization in the deserts of Egypt or the chilly North Sea, we will discuss the phenomenon of Islam in the seventh century (especially after Prophet Muhammad's death in 632) and the Arab conquests of the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa. Premodern Europe will also be discussed. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or permission of the instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3263 The High Middle Ages: 1000-1500
This course begins with the first millennium in western Europe and ends with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. We will study, amongst other topics, the relationship of popes to kings, cities to villages, Jews to Christians, vernacular literature to Latin, knights to peasants, the sacred to the profane, as well as different forms of religious life, farming, heresy, the shift from a penitential culture to a confessional one, the crusades and Islam, troubadour poetry, the Mongol Empire, universities, leprosy, the inquisition, Gothic art, the devil, chivalry, manuscript illumination, shoes, definitions of feudalism, environment, trade, scholastic philosophy, female spirituality, witchcraft, sex, the Black Death, food, the Hundred Years War, the renaissance in Italy, African slaves in the Iberian peninsula, and the conquest of New Spain.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3266 Scholarship and the Screen: Medieval History and Modern Film
Historical films are surprisingly accurate reflections of modern historiographical trends in the study of the Middle Ages. This course uses films on the Middle Ages, medieval documentary evidence, scholarship from the time the film was released, and current scholarship. It explores the shifts in historical interpretation of the Middle Ages over the past century and engages in debates over what evoking the past means for the scholar and the filmmaker.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3293 Beautiful Losers: The French in North America, 1500-1850
Adventurous fur-traders, fun-loving carnival-goers, magnanimous noblemen, simple but goodhearted Catholic peasants: the portrait of the French in the Americas rarely goes beyond these time-honored stereotypes. The French have usually been treated as quaint remnants of a bygone age, vanquished first by the British army and then by the march of modernity. This course seeks to rescue these historical actors from the typecasting to which we often condemn them. Through this examination of the French presence in the Americas, we will rethink and revisit the familiar stories of British North America: stories of slavery, commerce, property, piety and migration. The contrasted differences will also allow us to reflect on the nature of colonialism and question some ready-made understandings about colonial British America and the Early Republic.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3306 Native American/Euro-American Encounters: Confrontations of Bodies and Beliefs
This course surveys the history and historiography of how Native Americans, Europeans and Euro-Americans reacted and adapted to one another's presence in North America from the 1600s to the mid-1800s, focusing on themes of religion and gender. We will examine the cultural and social implications of encounters between Native peoples, missionaries and other European and Euro-American Protestants and Catholics. We will pay particular attention to how bodies were a venue for encounter — through sexual contact, through the policing of gendered social and economic behaviors, and through religiously-based understandings of women's and men's duties and functions. We will also study how historians know what they know about these encounters, and what materials enable them to answer their historical questions.
Same as L57 RelPol 330
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 331 19th-Century China: Violence and Transformation
This course traces the history of China over the course of the 19th century, with an emphasis on social and cultural history. This was one of the most tumultuous centuries in Chinese history, during which China faced threats from abroad in the form of Western and Japanese imperialism as well as from within in the form of environmental degradation and rebellions resulting in an unprecedented loss of human life. The 19th century has thus often been portrayed as a period of sharp decline for China. At the same time, we will explore the ways in which the origins of the dynamic society and economy found in China today -- as well as the worldwide influence of overseas Chinese -- can be traced to this century of turmoil.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3320 Explosion on Contact: Combustible Politics of Medical Science in America from Colonial Times to the Present
From Cotton Mather in 1721 weighing in on the rectitude of smallpox vaccination in Massachusetts to actor Michael J. Fox joining the 2006 Amendment 2 stem-cell debate in Missouri, Americans have fought vehemently about the politics of medical science. Arguments over what counts as legitimate medical science, and about the proper relationship of such science to public policy, have been central in U.S. political contestation over such seemingly unrelated themes as: immigration, race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, reproduction, crime and punishment, land use, ethics and religion.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 333 The Holocaust: History and Memory of the Nazi Genocide
Origins, causes and significance of the Nazi attempt to destroy European Jewry within the context of European and Jewish history. Related themes: the Holocaust in literature; the psychology of murderers and victims, bystanders and survivors; and contemporary implications of the Holocaust for theology and politics.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Art: HUM BU: ETH, HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 334C Crusade, Conflict, and Coexistence: Jews in Christian Europe
This course will investigate some of the major themes in the history of the Jews in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the eve of the French Revolution. Jews constituted a classic, nearly continuous minority in the premodern Christian world — a world that was not known for tolerating dissent. Or was it? One of the main purposes of the course is to investigate the phenomenon of majority/minority relations, to examine the ways in which the Jewish community interacted with and experienced European societies, cultures and politics. We will look at the dynamics of boundary formation and cultural distinctiveness; the limits of religious and social tolerance; the periodic eruption of persecution in its social, political, and religious contexts; and the prospects for Jewish integration into various European societies during the course of the Enlightenment era.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD BU: ETH, HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3350 Out of the Shtetl: Jewish Life in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
"Out of the Shtetl" is a course about tradition and transformation; small towns and urban centers; ethnicity and citizenship; and nations, states, and empires. At its core, this course asks the following questions: What did it mean for the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe to emerge from small market towns and villages to confront modern ethnicities, nations, and empires? What lasting impact did the shtetl experience have on Jewish life in a rapidly changing environment? The focus is on the Jewish historical experience in the countries that make up Central and Eastern Europe (mainly the Bohemian lands, Hungary, Poland, and Russia) from the late 18th century to the fall of the Soviet Union. Among the topics that we will cover are Jews and the nobility in Poland-Lithuania; the multicultural imperial state; Hasidism and its opponents; absolutism and reform in imperial settings; the emergence of modern European nationalisms and their impact on Jewish identity; antisemitism and popular violence; nationalist and radical movements among Jews; war, revolution, and genocide; and the transition from Soviet dominion to democratic states.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3352 China's Urban Experience: Shanghai and Beyond
The course studies the history of Chinese cities from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. It situates the investigation of urban transformation in two contexts: the domestic context of modern China's reform and revolution; and the global context of the international flow of people, products, capitals and ideas. It chooses a local narrative approach and situates the investigation in one of China's largest, complex, and most dynamic and globalized cities — Shanghai. The experience of the city and its people reveals the creative and controversial ways people redefined, reconfigured and reshaped forces such as imperialism, nationalism, consumerism, authoritarianism, liberalism, communism and capitalism. The course also seeks to go beyond the "Shanghai model" by comparing Shanghai with other Chinese cities. It presents a range of the urban experience in modern China.
Same as L03 East Asia 3352
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 3354 Vienna, Prague, Budapest: Politics, Culture and Identity in Central Europe
The term Central Europe evokes the names of Freud and Mahler; Kafka and Kundera; Herzl, Lukács, and Konrád. In politics, it evokes images of revolution and counter-revolution, ethnic nationalism, fascism and communism. Both culture and politics, in fact, were deeply embedded in the structures of empire (in our case, the Habsburg Monarchy) — structures which both balanced and exacerbated ethnic, religious, and social struggles — in modern state formation, and in the emergence of creative and dynamic urban centers, of which Vienna, Budapest and Prague were the most visible. This course seeks to put all of these elements into play — empire, nation, urban space, religion and ethnicity — in order to illustrate what it has meant to be modern, creative, European, nationalist or cosmopolitan since the 19th century. It engages current debates on nationalism and national identity; the viability of empires as supranational constructs; urbanism and modern culture; the place of Jews in the social and cultural fabric of Central Europe; migration; and authoritarian and violent responses to modernity.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 335C Becoming "Modern": Emancipation, Antisemitism and Nationalism in Modern Jewish History
This course offers a survey of the Jewish experience in the modern world by asking, at the outset, what it means to be — or to become — modern. To answer this question, we look at two broad trends that took shape toward the end of the 18th century — the Enlightenment and the formation of the modern state — and we track changes and developments in Jewish life down to the close of the 20th century with analyses of the (very different) American and Israeli settings. The cultural, social, and political lives of Jews have undergone major transformations and dislocations over this time — from innovation to revolution, exclusion to integration, calamity to triumphs. The themes that we will be exploring in depth include the campaigns for and against Jewish "emancipation"; acculturation and religious reform; traditionalism and modernism in Eastern Europe; the rise of political and racial anti-Semitism; mass migration and the formation of American Jewry; varieties of Jewish national politics; Jewish-Gentile relations between the World Wars; the destruction of European Jewry; the emergence of a Jewish nation-state; and Jewish culture and identity since 1945.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H UColl: HEU, HSM
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L22 History 3363 Topics in American Culture Studies
The topic of this course varies from semester to semester. Please refer to the Course Listings for a description of the current offering.
Same as L98 AMCS 3360
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC Arch: SSC Art: SSC BU: BA, IS EN: S
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L22 History 336C History of the Jews in Islamic Lands
This course is a survey of Jewish communities in the Islamic world, their social, cultural, and intellectual life from the rise of Islam to the Imperial Age. Topics include: Muhammad, the Qur'an and the Jews; the legal status of Jews under Islam; the spread of Rabbinic Judaism in the Abbasid empire; the development of new Jewish identities under Islam (Karaites); Jewish traders and scholars in Fatimid Egypt; the flourishing of Jewish civilization in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus); and Sephardi (Spanish) Jews in the Ottoman empire. On this background, we will look closely at some of the major Jewish philosophical and poetical works originating in Islamic lands. Another important source to be studied will be documents from the Cairo Genizah, reflecting social history, the status of women, and other aspects of daily life.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3402 Money and Morals in the Age of Merchant Capital
Current events have showcased both the tremendous power and the moral questions surrounding global capitalism. Neither of these elements is new. Between the late medieval period and the 18th century, Europe underwent an economic transformation that, while creating an expansive and dynamic European economy, also prompted much debate and discussion about the changing patterns of production, consumption and social relations that went hand-in-hand with new economic practices. As state officials worked to make economic policies fit in with national priorities, other writers proclaimed that stock market bubbles, shady business practices,and the materialism and fickleness of consumers signaled the decline of morality and civilization. This course examines both theory and practice to develop a cultural history of merchant capitalism. Topics covered include: merchant training, the creation of public financial and stock markets, proto-industrialization, European colonization and trade, mercantilism, the figure of the merchant in literature, and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 3404 The Creation of Capitalism
This course examines the emergence of commercial, financial, and labor practices prior to the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century. At the same time that students look at how money was made, they will consider contemporary responses to these economic practices, from concerns about usury, market manipulations, and increasing luxury consumption to the promotion of commerce as essential to the prosperity and strength of the nation. The course begins by defining the basic institutions and structures of the medieval Mediterranean, such as banking and credit operations, trading partnerships, and the position of the merchant within Renaissance society. The focus then shifts to merchant capital in an era of centralization, as the Dutch develop their world trade hegemony and the increasingly centralized states support of monopoly companies and mercantilist policies. The course ends by looking at the expanding world of commerce in the era of integration, as European merchants entrench their control of production and trade throughout the globe through their increased social and political importance, the spread of the putting-out system, and the refinement of colonial policies.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3407 Renaissance to Revolutions: Crisis & Continuity in Early Modern Europe
This course surveys the history of Europe from the end of the Middle Ages to Napoleon. Topics will include the Renaissance, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Wars of Religion, the emergence of the State, the creation of transatlantic empires, Absolutism, the Enlightenment, and Napoleon.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 3413 Women in Early Modern Europe
From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, European women experienced tremendous change as Europe witnessed religious upheaval, economic retrenchment, political consolidation and intellectual revolution. However, many of the core ideas about women's role and status remained remarkably stable during this period, and women continually struggled to create opportunity for themselves. We examine both the changing and unchanging nature of women's lives through sources such as conduct manuals for women; biographies about women from different economic, social and religious backgrounds; and the works of female authors.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Art: HUM BU: BA
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L22 History 3414 The World is Not Enough: Europe's Global Empires, 1400-1750
"Non sufficit orbis" (the world is not enough) became the motto for King Philip II of Spain, whose empire touched nearly every part of the globe. Europe's expansion to Africa, Asia and the Americas was a transforming event for world history and for its willing and unwilling participants. This course examines the religious, political, and economic forces driving the overseas expansion of Europe, compares the experience of European sailors, soldiers and merchants in different parts of the world, and analyzes the effect of empire on the colonizers, the colonized, and the balance of world power. Topics covered include: Portuguese and Spanish conquests in the East and West Indies, religious conversion and resistance, trade routes and rivalries, colonial practices and indigenous influence, the establishment of Atlantic slavery, and the rise of the Dutch and English empires.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 3416 War, Genocide and Gender in Modern Europe
This course explores the way in which gender and gender relations shaped and were shaped by war and genocide in 20th-century Europe. The course approaches the subject from various vantage points, including economic, social and cultural history, and draws on comparisons between different regions. Topics covered will include: new wartime tasks for women; soldiers' treatment of civilians under occupation, including sexual violence; how combatants dealt with fear, injury and the loss of comrades; masculine attributes of soldiers and officers of different nations and in different wartime roles; survival strategies and the relation to expectations with regard to people's (perceived) gender identity; the meanings of patriotism for women and men during war; and gender-specific experiences of genocide.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 341C Ancient History: The Roman Republic
Rome from its legendary foundation until the assassination of Julius Caesar. Topics include: the establishment, development, and collapse of Rome's Republican government; imperial expansion; Roman culture in a Mediterranean context; and the dramatic political and military events associated with figures like the Carthaginian general Hannibal, the Thracian rebel Spartacus, and the Roman statesman Cicero.
Same as L08 Classics 341C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3424 Childhood, Culture, and Religion in Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean World
From child saints to child scholars and from child crusaders to child casualties, the experience of childhood varied widely throughout the European Middle Ages. This course will explore how medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims developed some parallel and some very much divergent concepts of childhood, childrearing, and the proper cultural roles for children in their respective societies. Our readings will combine primary and secondary sources from multiple perspectives and multiple regions of Europe and the Mediterranean World, including a few weeks on the history and cultural legacy of the so-called Children's Crusade of 1312. We will conclude with a brief survey of medieval childhood and its stereotypes as seen through contemporary children's books and TV shows. This course fulfills the Language & Cultural Diversity requirement for Arts & Sciences.
Same as L66 ChSt 342
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L22 History 342C Ancient History: The Roman Empire
An introduction to the political, military, and social history of Rome from the first emperor Augustus to the time of Constantine. Topics include: Rome's place as the center of a vast and diverse empire; religious movements, such as Jewish revolts and the rise of Christianity; and the stability of the state in the face of economic crises, military coups, and scandals and intrigues among Rome's imperial elite.
Same as L08 Classics 342C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 343C Europe in the Age of Reformation
How should people act toward each other, toward political authorities and toward their God? Who decided what was the "right" faith: the individual? the family? the state? Could a community survive religious division? What should states do about individuals or communities who refused to conform in matters of religion? With Martin Luther's challenge to the Roman Catholic Church, the debates over these questions transformed European theology, society and politics. In this class we examine the development of Protestant and Radical theology, the Reformers' relations with established political authorities, the response of the Catholic Church, the development of new social and cultural expectations, the control of marginalized religious groups such as Jews, Muslims and Anabaptists, and the experiment of the New World.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 3445 Riots and Revolution: A History of Modern France from 1789 to the Present
This course surveys the history of France in the 19th and 20th centuries, from the French Revolution through the European Union. The focus in this course will be on the relationship between Paris and the provinces and how the dynamic between the seemingly all-powerful capital and its periphery, both colonial and metropolitan, played into the history of modern France. Major topics include: the legacy of the French Revolution; the development of French nationalism; popular political uprisings; the meaning of modernity; colonialism; French cultural capital; and the changing fortunes of France on the international stage.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3447 Visualizing Blackness: Histories of the African Diaspora Through Film
The African diaspora and, more importantly, variations of blackness, black bodies, and black culture have long captured the imagination of audiences across the globe. Taking a cue from exciting trends in popular culture, this course bridges the world of history, film and culture to explore where and how historical themes specific to African-descended peoples are generated on screen (film and television). Fusing the film world with digital media (i.e., online series and "webisodes") this class allows students to critically engage diasporic narratives of blackness that emerge in popular and independent films not only from the United States but other important locales including Australia, Brazil, Britain and Canada. Moving across time and space, class discussions center on an array of fascinating yet critical themes including racial/ethnic stereotyping, gender, violence, sexuality, spirituality/conjuring and education. Students should be either of junior- or senior-level and have taken at least one AFAS course. Permission of the instructor is required for enrollment.
Same as L90 AFAS 3447
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3450 Modern Germany
This course surveys the political, social, economic and cultural forces that have shaped German history since 1800. After examining the multiplicity of German states that existed in 1800, we identify the key factors that resulted in unification in 1871. We then turn to a study of modern Germany in its various forms, from the Empire through the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, to postwar division and reunification. A major focus is the continuities and discontinuities of German history, particularly with regard to the historical roots of Nazism and attempts to "break with the past" after 1945.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3455 Cultural Encounters: China and Eurasia Since the Middle Ages
Eschewing traditional narratives of Chinese civilization, which imply a society closed to the outside world, this course follows current scholarship in situating Chinese history within a broader spatial context. In particular, this course explores cultural encounters between China and other subregions of the Eurasian continent to the north and west of China, from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) to the present. The course begins by analyzing the relationship between nomadic societies on the steppe (and, more generally, "non-state spaces") and settled agricultural societies such as China. We then turn to the influence of two religions imported from central Eurasia: Buddhism and Islam. A related theme is the relationship, in the early modern era, between trade, which tended to erode boundaries, and states, which sought to create boundaries. We will then trace the changing dynamics among commerce, religion, and nation-states in the 20th century. Finally, we return to the role of Buddhism and Islam in the contemporary relationship between China and the various peoples and states across its western frontier.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 346C Greek History: The Age of Alexander
From the death of Socrates until the foundation of the Roman Empire, Greece and the Ancient Near East underwent profound changes that still resonate today. This course surveys the political, social, economic, and military developments of this period, especially Alexander the Great's legacy.
Same as L08 Classics 346C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 348 Europe in the Age of Imperialism: 1870-1940
This course will cover Europe at the height of its power and influence as well as the expansion of European control in Africa and Asia, international relations, and the problems of war and peace. We will also study the social tensions in mature industrial societies and the particular characteristics of the major European states -- England, France, Germany, and Russia -- and of some of the smaller countries.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM, IS
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L22 History 3521 Topics in American Culture Studies: The Great Migration and Its Legacies in St. Louis, 1910-1960
The topic of this course varies from semester to semester. Please see the Course Listings for a description of the current offering.
Same as L98 AMCS 3520
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3548 Gender, Sexuality and Communism in 20th-Century Europe
This upper-division course examines the role of gender and sexuality for the establishment of communist societies in Europe in 20th century. We will explore to what extent societies built on the communist model succeeded with the achievement of gender equality and allowed for sexual relations liberated from religious or economic constraints. Class materials examine how state socialism shaped gender roles and women's and men's lives differently as well as how gays and lesbians struggled against social taboo and state repression. Students analyze the impact of modernization, industrialization, war and other conflicts on concepts of femininity and masculinity as well as on the regulation of sexuality and family relations in several Eastern European countries. We will place these dynamics within the context of broader political and cultural developments, ending with an analysis of the breakdown of socialism in the early 1990s and its impact on gender relations and the freedom of expression. The course provides students with a basic knowledge of the history of Eastern Europe and of left-wing movements active in the area, emphasizing the effects of communist ideas on women, gender equality, and non-normative sexual orientations.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3554 Revolution with an Accent: The Haitian and French Revolutions, 1770-1805
How can politics enact fundamental changes? What makes those changes a "revolution"? How do we judge the legitimacy of such changes? When these questions arise over the course of ordinary political arguments, the example of the French Revolution often looms large, casting a shadow tinted with blood and Terror. Much less present in the collective political imagination is the Haitian Revolution. These two events are complex and complicated, and are filled with fascinating, chilling, inspired characters, enflamed rhetoric and challenging questions. This course examines both the unfolding of events and the rise and fall of protagonists within these two revolutions and explores the ways that issues such as religion, state finance, loyalty, race and slavery became politicized.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H UColl: HEU, HSP, HTR
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L22 History 3559 Socialist and Secular? A Social History of the Soviet Union
This class explores daily life and cultural developments in the Soviet Union, 1917 to 1999. Focusing on the everyday experience of Soviet citizens during these years, students learn about the effects of large-scale social and political transformation on the private lives of people. To explore daily life in the Soviet Union, this class uses a variety of sources and media, including scholarly analysis, contemporaneous portrayals, literary representations and films. Students receive a foundation in Soviet political, social and cultural history with deeper insights into select aspects of life in Soviet society.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3561 Andean History: Culture and Politics
Since pre-Columbian times, the central Andean mountain system, combining highlands, coastal and jungle areas, has been the locus of multiethnic polities. Within this highly variegated geographical and cultural-historical space, emerged the Inca Empire, the Viceroyalty of Peru — Spain's core South American colony, and the central Andean republics of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Taking a chronological and thematic approach, this course will examine pre-Columbian Andean societies, Inca rule, Andean transformations under Spanish colonialism, post-independence nation-state formation, state-Indian relations, reform and revolutionary movements, and neoliberal policies and the rise of new social movements and ethnic politics. This course focuses primarily on the development of popular and elite political cultures, and the nature and complexity of local, regional, and national power relations.
Same as L97 IAS 356
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC BU: IS EN: S
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L22 History 3563 Ancient Sport and Spectacle
Ancient sport and spectacle seem both familiar and foreign to us today. We share the Greek obsession with athletic success, and we have revived their Olympic games — and yet the Greeks competed nude and covered in oil and included in their celebration a sacrifice of 100 oxen to Zeus. So too do we recognize the familiar form of the Roman arena, but recoil from the bloody spectacles that it housed. In this class we will examine the world of ancient Greco-Roman sport and spectacle, seeking to better understand both ancient culture and our own. We will consider Greek athletic competition, Roman gladiatorial combat, chariot racing, and other public performances. We will set these competitions in their social and historical context, considering both their evolution and their remarkable staying power.
Same as L08 Classics 3563
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 357 All Measures Short of War
This course focuses on the return of great power competition in the 21st century. In particular, it examines the security challenges facing the United States in the form of strategic competition from revisionist states (Russia and China) and hostile threats from rogue regimes (Iran and North Korea). Through a consideration of the strategic, military, political, economic, and intelligence dynamics germane to foreign policy and national security, it will examine the hypothesis that the United States is not likely to go to hot war with any of these four nations but instead resort to what President Roosevelt in another context and time famously called "all measures short of war" -- in other words, engaging one another through new technologies such as cyber, artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, hypersonics, biotechnology, and other means that have come to demarcate a hybrid battlefield in an age of hostile competition. As such, the course will assess the recent past, current state, and likely future of American power in the new global security environment.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3587 From Genghis Khan to the Taliban: War and Peace in Central Asia
From romantic invocations of the Silk Road and isolated nomads to medieval barbarisms of the Taliban, Western media and popular culture often portray Central Asia as a region out of step with time. However, Central Asia has long been a center for culture, innovation, and political power, and it has a history that is hard to reconcile with popular images of a place stuck in the past. This course, which is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, traces the transformation of Central Asia from Genghis Khan's 13th-century conquests to the present, covering the territories of former Soviet Central Asia, Western China (Xinjiang), and Afghanistan. Although the course covers nearly 1000 years, the primary emphasis is on the imperial schemes and transformations of the past 300 years. All readings will be in English, and no prior knowledge in Central Asian history is expected or required.
Same as L93 IPH 3587
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 359 Topics in European History: Modern European Women
This course examines the radical transformation in the position and perspective of European women since the 18th century. The primary geographical focus is on Britain, France and Germany. Topics include: changing relations between the sexes; the emergence of mass feminist movements; the rise of the "new woman"; women and war; and the cultural construction and social organization of gender. We will look at the lives of women as nurses, prostitutes, artists, mothers, hysterics, political activists, consumers and factory hands.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3593 The Wheels of Commerce: From the Industrial Revolution to Global Capitalism
This course introduces the methods, issues, and debates that shape our understanding of economic change and development from the Industrial Revolution to the post-industrial age. Engaging economic theorists from Marx to Smith, to Weber and Wallerstein, this course problematizes the notion of rational economic actors and interrogates notions of free trade in an attempt to understand the impact of capitalism on the world. We start the course with a discussion of the "exceptionalism" of Great Britain as the first industrial nation and reconsider the impact of new trade, production, property and monetary/financial regimes that resulted in the so-called "Great Divergence" between China and the West. We then turn to the "late industrializers" of China, Japan, and Mexico in order to investigate the varieties of development, specifically focusing on monetary integration, legal integration and the global impact of the great depression. Continuing into the Bretton Woods Conference and the post-war international monetary systems, we bring the course to a close with the advent of the "post-industrial age." This course is designed both for students specializing in economic history and students in all disciplines interested in historical approaches to political/economic development.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3598 The First World War and the Making of Modern Europe
The First World War ushered our age into existence. Its memories still haunt us, and its aftershocks shaped the course of the 20th century. The Russian Revolution, the emergence of new national states, Fascism, Nazism, the Second World War, and the Cold War are all its products. Today, many of the ethnic and national conflicts that triggered war in 1914 have resurfaced. Understanding the First World War, in short, is crucial to understanding our own era.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3599 Travelers, Tricksters, and Storytellers: Jewish Travel Narratives and Autobiographies
Jewish literature includes a number of highly fascinating travel accounts and autobiographies that are still awaiting their discovery by a broader readership. In this course, we will explore a broad range of texts originating from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. They were written by both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews hailing from countries as diverse as Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. Among the authors were pilgrims, rabbis, merchants, and one savvy business woman. We will read their works as responses to historical circumstances and as expressions of Jewish identity, in its changing relationship to the Christian or Muslim environment in which the writers lived or traveled. Specifically, we will ask questions such as: How do travel accounts and autobiographies enable their authors and readers to reflect on issues of identity and difference? How do the writers produce representations of an "other," against which and through which they define a particular sense of self? To what extent are these texts reliable accounts of their authors' personal experiences, and where do they serve their own self-fashioning? How do the writers portray Christians, Muslims and Jews from other cultural backgrounds than their own? How do they construe the role of women in a world dominated by men? How do they reflect on history, geography, and other fields of knowledge that were not covered by the traditional Jewish curriculum; and how do they respond to the challenges and opportunities of early modernity? This course is open to students of varying interests, including Jewish, Islamic, or Religious Studies, medieval and early modern history, European or Near Eastern literatures. All texts will be read in English translation.
Same as L75 JIMES 359
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 35SM Hands on the Past: History, Murder and the Archive
The future depends on the past. This course taps into that understanding by offering an alternative hands-on methods class to encourage undergraduate student engagement with history and archives, both on- and offline. In this particular class, students will be nurtured to more deeply interact with the historical past by exploring gender, race, violence and sexuality through three central questions explored throughout the course: What and how is African-American history conducted? How do we best document the past with students fully at the intellectual table of production and preservation? How do we make history with history? These exciting and diverse interests will be pursued through in-class discussions and course assigned readings, but especially by taking a spring break research project trip across Missouri to various local repositories and the state archives, to activate and fuel the idea of putting hands on the past.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: SSC, SD BU: BA, HUM EN: S
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L22 History 3600 Beyond Sea, Sunshine and Soca: A History of the Caribbean
This course examines major themes in the history of the Caribbean from the 15th to the 20th century. The first half of the course will focus on the 15th to the 19th century, exploring issues such as indigenous societies, European encounter and conquest, plantation slavery, the resistance of enslaved Africans and emancipation. The remainder of the course focuses on aspects of the cultural, economic, political and social experiences of Caribbean peoples during the 20th century. Major areas of inquiry include the labor rebellions of the 1930s, decolonization, diasporic alliances, Black Power, identity construction and the politics of tourism. While the English-speaking Caribbean constitutes the main focus, references will be made to other areas such as Cuba and Haiti.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3603 Renaissance Italy
This course examines the social, cultural, intellectual and political history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy: civic life and urban culture; the crisis of the 14th century; the city-states of Renaissance Italy; the revival of classical antiquity; art and humanism of the Renaissance; culture, politics and society; Machiavelli and Renaissance political thought; the wars of Italy; religious crisis and religious reaction in the 16th century.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H UColl: HEU, HSP
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L22 History 3608 Science and Society Since 1800
This course surveys selected topics and themes in the history of modern science from 1800 to the present. Emphasis is on the life sciences, with some attention to the physical sciences.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3609 Jamaica: A Political History
This course examines the political history of Jamaica from the colonial period to the 1970s. Students will use primary documents (speeches, policy documents, etc.), secondary sources (historical monographs, political biographies, etc.), and film to engage the evolution of Jamaica's government. The course begins by exploring the colonial governmental apparatus with a view to grasping the impact of the British system on the island's current political apparatus. This will allow students to engage important debates concerning the transition from colony to postcolony. Additionally, students will discuss the relationship between the governmental structure and the ever-evolving socio-cultural realities in Jamaica, especially as it pertains to race, class, gender, culture, clientelism, patronage, and national identity.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H UColl: HSM, HTR
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L22 History 361 Topics in History and Technology
The history of computing from mechanical calculating devices to electronic digital computers. This course will examine technical systems in terms of the nexus between technologies and the humans who operate them. Emphasis will be placed on the interconnections between technological and cultural change.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L22 History 3610 City of Peace: Baghdad in Medieval Times
The subject of this course is an exploration of the city of Baghdad in medieval times from its foundation in the eighth century to its sack by the Mongols in the 13th. Starting from the background history of its location in Mesopotamia, we study the reasons of its foundation in that location and examine its topography, city planning and layout, institutions, citizens, neighborhoods, markets, libraries and workshops to discuss life in the city. Because Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid caliphate at the time, we examine its role as the hub of the empire (in politics, administration, economy and literature), and its links to and rivalries with other provincial cities.
Same as L75 JIMES 361
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3613 Women and Social Movements: Gender and Sexuality in U.S. Social Movements with History
This course examines the history of grassroots activism and political engagement of women in the United States. Looking at social movements organized by women or around issues of gender and sexuality, class texts interrogate women's participation in, and exclusion from, political life. Key movements organizing the course units include, among others: the Temperance Movement, Abolitionist Movements, the Women's Suffrage Movements, Women's Labor Movements, Women's Global Peace Movements, and Recent Immigration Movements. Readings and discussion will pay particular attention to the movements of women of color, as well as the critiques of women of color of dominant women's movements. Course materials will analyze how methods of organizing reflect traditional forms of "doing politics," and we will also examine strategies and tactics for defining problems and posing solutions particular to women. Prerequisites: any 100- or 200-level Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course or permission from the instructor.
Same as L77 WGSS 361
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3622 Topics in Islam
Selected themes in the study of Islam and Islamic culture in social, historical, and political context. The specific area of emphasis will be determined by the instructor.
Same as L75 JIMES 3622
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H UColl: CD
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L22 History 3630 Mapping the World of Black Criminality
Ideas concerning the evolution of violence, crime, and criminal behavior have been framed around many different groups. Yet, what does a typical criminal look like? How does race - more specifically blackness - alter these conversations, inscribing greater fears about criminal behaviors? This course taps into this reality examining the varied ways people of African descent have been and continue to be particularly imagined as a distinctly criminal population. Taking a dual approach, students will consider the historical roots of the policing of black bodies alongside the social history of black crime while also foregrounding where and how black females fit into these critical conversations of crime and vice. Employing a panoramic approach, students will examine historical narratives, movies and documentaries, literature, popular culture through poetry and contemporary music, as well as the prison industrial complex system. The prerequisite for the course is L90 3880(Terror and Violence in the Black Atlantic) and/or permission from the instructor, which will be determined based on a student´s past experience in courses that explore factors of race and identity. For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 2.
Same as L90 AFAS 363
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 365 The Birth Crisis of Democracy: The New United States of America, 1776-1850
"Go get yourself some democracy!" Americans have so often preached to other nations, but just how did Americans themselves go about creating the world's largest and most successful democratic republic? How democratic was this violent new nation that reeled from one crisis to another and ultimately to the brink of collapse in its first 75 years? This survey of American history from the creation of the Republic to the eve of the Civil War explores the Revolution and its ambiguous legacies, the starkly paradoxical "marriage" of slavery and freedom, and the creation of much of the America that we know; mass political parties; a powerful presidency; sustained capitalist growth; individualistic creeds; formalized and folkloric racism; heteronormative patriarchal family life; technological innovation; literary experimentation; distinctively American legal, scientific and religious cultures; and the modern movements of labor, feminism, and African-American empowerment. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or permission of the instructor. Modern, U.S.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H UColl: HSP, HUS
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L22 History 366 The Living American Civil War
This course focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction as the central drama of American life in the 19th century, and also, the central event of American history itself, to the present day. How do we begin to understand the significance of the killing fields of the American Civil War, its three quarters of a million dead? The bloody conflict, and its causes and consequences, are explored from multiple perspectives: those of individuals such as Lincoln, McClellan, Davis, Douglass, Grant, Longstreet, and Lee, who made momentous choices of the era; of groups such as the African American freedpeople and the Radical Republicans, whose struggles for freedom and power helped shape the actions of individuals; and of the historians, novelists, filmmakers and social movements that have fought to define the war's legacy for modern America. How is the Civil War both long ended and, at the same time, very much alive and still contested in contemporary America? How has it shaped modern Americans' eruptive engagement with race?
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3660 Narratives of Discovery
This course examines Europe's encounter with the newly discovered lands and peoples of Africa, Asia and America through the writings of the travelers themselves. We read stories of exploration and conquest, cultural and commercial exchanges, religious visions and cannibal practices.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3662 Experts, Administrators and Soldiers: Governance and Development in Postcolonial Africa
Between 1957 and 1975, one African territory after another made the transition from European colony to independent nation-state. Widespread optimism that these "transfers of power" would bring a new era of prosperity and dignity dissipated quickly as the new nations struggled with political instability, military coups, social unrest, and persistent poverty. Consequently many western observers and development specialists are certain that they have become "failed states" requiring foreign assistance to develop properly. This course challenges these assumptions by tracing the origins of African governance and economic development from their imperial origins into the independence era. By exploring nation building, economic planning, and public administration from the perspective of political elites, foreign experts, and ordinary people, the class takes an intimate look at how colonies became nation-states. These new perspectives offer students a historical grounding in international public administration and development by exploring how imperial ideas and concepts continue to influence contemporary social planning and development policy in both Africa and the wider world.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 367 America in the Age of Inequality: The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, 1877-1919
This course explores dramatic changes in American society during the half-century from the Civil War to the end of World War I. We discuss industrialization; mass immigration from Europe, Asia and Latin America; the vast movement of rural people to cities; the fall of Reconstruction and rise of Jim Crow; the expansion of organized labor; birth of American Socialism; and the rise of the American empire in the Caribbean and the Philippines. The course, in addition, analyzes the many and varied social reform efforts of the turn of the 20th century, from women's suffrage to anti-lynching campaigns; from trust-busting and anti-immigrant crusades to the settlement house movement.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3670 The Long Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement is known as a southern movement, led by church leaders and college students, fought through sit-ins and marches, dealing primarily with non-economic objectives, framed by a black and white paradigm, and limited to a single tumultuous decade. This course seeks to broaden our understanding of the movement geographically, chronologically and thematically. It pays special attention to struggles fought in the North, West and Southwest; it seeks to question binaries constructed around "confrontational" and "accommodationist" leaders; it reveals how Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans impacted and were impacted by the movement; and it seeks to link the public memory of this movement with contemporary racial politics.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3672 Medicine, Healing and Experimentation in the Contours of Black History
Conversations regarding the history of medicine continue to undergo considerable transformation within academia and the general public. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment serves as a marker in the historical consciousness regarding African Americans and the medical profession. This course taps into this particular evolution, prompting students to broaden their gaze to explore the often delicate relationship of people of African descent within the realm of medicine and healing. Tracing the social nature of these medical interactions from the period of enslavement through the 20th century, this course examines the changing patterns of disease and illness, social responses to physical and psychological ailments, and the experimental and exploitative use of black bodies in the field of medicine. As a history course, the focus is extended toward the underpinnings of race and gender in the medical treatment allocated across time and space — the United States, Caribbean and Latin America — to give further insight into the roots of contemporary practice of medicine.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3673 Gurus, Saints and Scientists: Religion in Modern South Asia
Many long-standing South Asian traditions have been subject to radical reinterpretation, and many new religious movements have arisen, as South Asians have grappled with how to accommodate their traditions of learning and practice to what they have perceived to be the conditions of modern life. In this course we consider some of the factors that have contributed to religious change in South Asia, including British colonialism, sedentarization and globalization, and new discourses of democracy and equality. We consider how new religious organizations were part and parcel with movements for social equality and political recognition; examine the intellectual contributions of major thinkers like Swami Vivekananda, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, and Mohandas Gandhi; and explore how Hindu, Islamic, and other South Asian traditions were recast in the molds of natural science, social science, and world religion.
Same as L23 Re St 3670
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: ETH EN: H
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L22 History 3680 The Cold War, 1945-1991
This course presents an assessment of the Cold War from the perspective of its major participants. Topics include: the origins of the Cold War in Europe and Asia; the Korean War; the Stalin regime; McCarthyism and the Red Scare; the nuclear arms race; the conflict over Berlin; Cold War film and literature; superpower rivalry in Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, Africa and the Middle East; the rise and fall of detente; the Reagan years and the impact of Gorbachev; the East European Revolutions; and the end of the Cold War.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3681 The U.S. War in Iraq, 2003-2011
This course presents a historical assessment of the United States' eight year war in Iraq from its inception on March 20, 2003, to the withdrawal of all combat troops on December 15, 2011. Topics covered include: the Bush Administration's decision to make Iraq part of the "War on Terror" and the subsequent plan of attack; the combat operations; losing the victory; sectarian violence; torture; the insurgency; battling Al-Qaeda in Iraq; reassessment; the surge; the drawdown; and the end of the war. The course concludes with an assessment of the war's effectiveness regarding the Global War on Terrorism and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 36CA Heroes and Saints in India: Religion, Myth, History
This course provides an introduction to the history of modern India and Pakistan through the voices of the Indian subcontinent's major thinkers. We will spend time in the company of saints, from the "great-souled" Mahatma Gandhi to the Sufi scholar Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi, and we will travel alongside the heroes of peasant politics, women's rights, and struggles for national and social freedom and equality. We will immerse ourselves in the rich narrative heritage of India -- as it has been challenged, reworked, and harnessed for present and future needs -- from the 19th century through the present. Lecture and discussion format; prior knowledge of India or Pakistan not required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 3729 The United States in the 20th Century
This course explores the dramatic changes that transformed American society from the 1890s to the 1980s. Covering the main themes of 20th-century U.S. history, students connect domestic policies and developments to international events, and study how Americans of diverse backgrounds thought about, experienced, and defined democracy and citizenship in the United States.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 373 History of United States Foreign Relations to 1914
This course explores the major diplomatic, political, legal, and economic issues shaping U.S. foreign relations in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, up until the U.S. entry into the First World War.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3731 Topics in Near Eastern Cultures: Democracies and Dictatorships in the Middle East
The topic for this course will change each semester; the specific topic for each semester will be given in course listings.
Same as L75 JIMES 373
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3743 History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1920
This course explores the major diplomatic, political, legal, and economic issues shaping U.S. relations with the wider world from the 1920s through the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H UColl: HSM, HUS
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L22 History 3748 Of Dishes, Taste, and Class: History of Food in the Middle East
When the 13th-century author Ibn al-Adim from the city of Aleppo, Syria, titled his book on food Reaching the Beloved through the Description of Delicious Foods and Perfumes, he was perhaps not concerned so much with simply how to satisfy hunger. Thinking through the title alone opens a window for us on all sorts of cultural, social, economic, and political questions about food and drink. Our history as humans with food is long and complicated. It extends from seeking basic nutrition to sustain our livelihood to contracting diseases. Food also plays a fundamental role in how humans organize themselves in societies, differentiate socially, culturally, and economically, establish values and norms for religious, cultural, and communal practices, and define identities of race, gender, and class. Food has been one of the most visible signs of social status in any given society and a vital part of many movements of political and social reform and transformation. Food has been a major question in trans-regional, international, and recently global cooperation and conflict as well. This course will cover the history of food and drink in the Middle East to help us understand our complex relation with food and look at our lives from perspectives we intuitively feel or by implication know, but rarely critically and explicitly reflect on. This course does not intend to spoil, so to speak, this undeniably one of the most pleasurable human needs and activities, but rather to make you aware of how food shapes who we are as individuals and societies. We will study the history of food and drink in the Middle East across the centuries until the present time, but be selective in choosing themes, geographic regions, and historical periods to focus on. Course work is geared toward increasing your ability to think about food and drink analytically as a socio-economic and cultural capital, noticeable marker of identity, and indicator of a political position. In a sense we will try to tease out in class why we are what we eat! Please consult the instructor if you have not taken any course in the humanities.
Same as L75 JIMES 374
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, IS EN: H UColl: CD
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L22 History 3751 Women, Gender and Sexuality in Postwar America
We explore the history of the United States since 1945 by focusing on the ways that gender and sexuality have shaped the lives of Americans, particularly the diverse group of women who make up more than half the nation's population. Topics include: domesticity and the culture of the 1950s; gendering the Cold War; the gender politics of racial liberation; the sexual revolution; second-wave feminism and the transformation of American culture; the new right's gender politics; and the impact of new conceptions of sexual and gender identity at century's end. Course texts include scholarly literature, memoirs, novels and film.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3770 History of Slavery in the Middle East
This course examines slavery and its abolition in the Middle East and North Africa from 600 C.E. to the 20th Century. It addresses slavery as a discourse and a question of political economy. We begin with an overview of slavery in late antiquity to contextualize the evolution of this practice after the rise of Islam in the region. We then examine how it was practiced, imagined, and studied under major empires, such as the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and the Safavids. In addition to examining the Qur'anic discourse and early Islamic practices of slavery, to monitor change over time we address various forms of household, field, and military slavery as well as the remarkable phenomenon of "slave dynasties" following a chronological order. We discuss, through primary sources, theoretical, religious, and moral debates and positions on slavery, including religious scriptures, prophetic traditions, religious law, and a plethora of narratives from a range of genres. We highlight a distinct theme each week to focus on until we conclude our discussion with the abolition of slavery in the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics of discussion include various forms of male and female slavery, Qur'anic and prophetic discourse on slavery, legal and moral views on slavery, slavery as represented in religious literature, political, military, and economic structures of slavery, issues of race and gender as well as slave writings to reflect on the experiences of slavery from within. The goal is to enable students to understand the histories of slavery in the Middle East and eventually compare it to that of other regions and cultures, such as European and Atlantic slavery. No second language required.
Same as L75 JIMES 377
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3785 The Second British Empire in World History
Throughout most of the 19th century it appeared that the British Empire was winding down. Most of British North America was now the United States of America, and the remaining West Indian colonies were less valuable after the abolition of slavery. The Indian mutiny and the demise of the Imperial British East India Company raised similar doubts about the worth of Britain's Asian possessions. Yet by 1900 Britain ruled 400 million people and one-quarter of the habitable globe, and most Britons were confident that this new "second" British Empire would rival the Roman Empire by lasting for centuries. This course surveys the sudden rise and equally unexpected collapse of the 20th-century British Empire from the perspective of its subjects.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3803 Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine
This course introduces students to the practice and theory of medicine in the ancient Mediterranean, beginning in Egypt and continuing through Greece and Rome. It ends in the Middle Ages. Greco-Roman medicine will be our focus. How was disease understood by practitioners and, as far as can be reconstructed, by laypeople? What form did surgical, pharmacological, and dietetic treatment take? What were the intellectual origins of Greek medicine? The social status of medical practitioners? How was medicine written and in what terms did its practitioners conceive it?
Same as L08 Classics 3801
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 3810 Between Sand and Sea: History, Environment, and Politics in the Arabian Peninsula
Although it is today primarily associated with oil, the Arabian peninsula was for most of its history defined by water: its surrounding seas, its monsoon-driven winds, and its lack of water in its vast and forbidding interior deserts. As home to the major holy cities of Islam and a key source of global oil, the region has played an important role in the Western European and North American imagination. Despite being relatively sparsely populated, the peninsula hosts millions of believers each year on the annual Muslim pilgrimage, and it has been the site of major wars and military occupations by European, American, and other Middle Eastern countries for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has been an outpost of the Ottoman Empire, a center of British colonialism and (at Aden) an axis of its global empire, the location of Egypt's "Vietnam" (its long war in Yemen in the 1960s), the Gulf Wars I and II, and the recent wars in Yemen, to name just a few of the major conflicts. Often depicted as unchanging until caught up by the influx of massive oil wealth, this region is frequently characterized as a place of contradictions: home to some of the world's largest skyscrapers and also the most inhospitable and largest sand desert in the world, known as "the Empty Quarter"; the location of crucial American allies and the home of al-Qa'eda founder `Usama Bin Laden. In this course, we will examine the development of the peninsula historically to understand these contradictory images. We will investigate changes in the following arenas: environment and society; colonial occupation; newly independent states; the demise and development of key economic sectors (pearling; shipping; agriculture; oil; finance; piracy); political regimes; resources such as water, oil, and date palms; the growth of oil extraction infrastructure and its effects on the political regimes and societies in the region; the emergence of new Gulf cities; Islamic law; women's rights; human rights debates; and religious and ethnic minorities.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3843 Filming the Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis
This inter-disciplinary course introduces students to the history of the Black freedom struggle in St. Louis and to the complex and multiple ways historic narratives are constructed. We will explore the political, economic and cultural history of St. Louisans who challenged racial segregation in housing and work, fought white mobs in city streets, and battled the destruction of Black communities by federal urban renewal and public housing policies. Students, working with a historian and a filmmaker, will research and make a documentary film on a piece of St. Louis' crucial contribution to the Black Freedom Struggle in America. We bring together documentary filmmaking and history research to draw attention to the multiple narratives (many long-neglected) of African American and urban history, and to the multiple approaches to presenting history.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Art: CPSC, HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3856 The Sephardic World: 1492 to the Present
This course explores the history and culture of the Sephardic diaspora from the expulsion of Spanish and Portuguese Jewry at the end of the 15th century to the present. We will start with a brief introduction into the history of Iberian Jews prior to 1492, asking how this experience created a distinct subethnic Jewish group: the Sephardim. We will then follow their migratory path to North Africa, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands and the Americas. The questions we will explore include: In what sense did Jews of Iberian heritage form a transnational community? How did they use their religious, cultural, and linguistic ties to advance their commercial interests? How did they transmit and transform aspects of Spanish culture and create a vibrant Ladino literature? How did the Sephardim interact with Ashkenazi, Greek, North African, and other Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities? How did Jewish emigres from Spain and Portugal become intermediaries between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire? What was the role of Sephardim in Europe's transatlantic expansion? How did conversos (converts to Christianity) return to Judaism and continue to grapple with their ambiguous religious identity? How did Ottoman and North African Jews respond to European cultural trends and colonialism and create their own unique forms of modern culture? How did the Holocaust impact Sephardic Jewry? The course will end with a discussion of the Sephardic experience in America and Israel today.
Same as L75 JIMES 366
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3857 Losing the Farm: 20th-Century Agriculture in a Global Context
Recent debates regarding food and farming have tended to turn on the question of industrialization. In this course, we will excavate the history of these debates by examining how agriculture has changed in the 20th century. We will begin with the industrialization of agriculture in the United States and then move to Mexico and Africa to discuss the Green Revolution, Cold War food politics, and the relationship between the developed and developing worlds. The course will end by using what we have learned from the readings to engage in an informed evaluation of contemporary critiques of agricultural industrialization.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 3860 Empire in East Asia: Theory and History (Writing Intensive)
An introduction to how historians and anthropologists incorporate theoretical insights into their work, this course first "reverse engineers" the main arguments in several insightful books and articles on empire in Asia, all of which are informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Retaining our theoretical knowledge, we then focus on the more empirical aspects of the Japanese empire in Korea, including settler colonialism, the colonial economy, representations of colonialism and the long-term ramifications of empire. We conclude with a general assessment of the history of empire. In these ways, this course seeks to equip students with a knowledge of empire in East Asia in the late 19th and 20th centuries while simultaneously investigating the nature of that knowledge.
Same as L97 IAS 386
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, WI BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 3865 Topics in Jewish History
Consult course listings for current topics. Prerequisite: permission of instructor.
Same as L75 JIMES 386
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 3875 The Second British Empire in World History
Throughout most of the 19th century it appeared that the British Empire was winding down. Most of British North America was now the United States of America, and the remaining West Indian colonies were less valuable after the abolition of slavery. The Indian mutiny and the demise of the Imperial British East India Company raised similar doubts about the worth of Britain's Asia possessions. Yet by 1900, Britain ruled 400 million people and one-quarter of the habitable globe, and most Britons were confident that this new "second" British Empire would rival the Roman Empire by lasting for centuries. This course surveys the sudden rise and equally unexpected collapse of the 20th-century British Empire from the perspective of its subjects.
Credit 3 units.
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L22 History 3880 Terror and Violence in the Black Atlantic
From the period of bondage through the 21st century, terror and racialized violence have consistently been used as a form of social control. This course is constructed to explore the historical foundations of extreme threats of violence inflicted among populations of African descent. The fabric of American culture has given birth to its own unique brand of terrorism, of which this class spends considerable time interrogating. Yet, in recognizing that these practices are commonly found in other parts of the Black Atlantic, students will be encouraged to take a comparative view to better tease out the wider strands of violence operative in places like England, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Within this course, we will explore the varied ways in which music, films, newspapers, and historical narratives shed light on these often life-altering stories of the past. Some of the themes touched upon include: the use of punishment/exploitation during the era of slavery; lynching; sexual violence; race riots; police brutality; motherhood; black power; and community activism.
Same as L90 AFAS 3880
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 388C How Free is Free?: African-American History Since Emancipation
The events that unfolded in Ferguson revealed the contradictions of a national government that is led by a black president yet also sanctions the susceptibility of its black citizens to police brutality. What has freedom really meant for African Americans since emancipation? This course addresses key events and movements that shaped African Americans' definition and pursuit of freedom and citizenship, emphasizing various strategies, successes, failures and legacies developed as a result. Key developments will include the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the World Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, and mass incarceration.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Art: HUM
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L22 History 3891 East Asia Since 1945: From Empire to Cold War
This course examines the historical forces behind the transformation of East Asia from war-torn territory under Japanese military and colonial control into distinct nations ordered by Cold War politics. We begin with the 1945 dismantling of the Japanese empire and continue with the emergence of the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), the two Koreas and Vietnam, all of which resulted from major conflicts in post-war Asia. We conclude with a look at East Asia in the post-Cold War era.
Credit 3 units. EN: H
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L22 History 38B9 Understanding Lincoln: Writing-Intensive Seminar
This course explores the life, art (political and literary) and historical significance of Abraham Lincoln. It focuses first on how he understood himself and foregrounds his inspired conception of his own world-historical role in the Civil War. The course also traces how the larger world furnished the contexts of Lincoln's career, how his consciousness, speeches and writings, and presidential decisions can be understood against the backdrop of the revolutionary national democratic upheavals of the 19th century. Finally the course investigates how the 16th president, so controversial in his day, has remained a subject of cultural contestation, with historians, novelists, poets, cartoonists, filmmakers, advertisers and politicians struggling over his memory and meaning, to the present.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI EN: H
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L22 History 38C8 Religion and Politics in South Asia: Writing-Intensive Seminar
The relationship between religion, community and nation is a topic of central concern and contestation in the study of South Asian history. This course will explore alternative positions and debates on such topics as: changing religious identities; understandings of the proper relationship between religion, community and nation in India and Pakistan; and the violence of Partition (the division of India and Pakistan in 1947). The course will treat India, Pakistan and other South Asian regions in the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, WI BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 3900 Mormon History in Global Context
The focus of this seminar is Mormonism, meaning, primarily, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is the largest Mormon body. Mormons in the United States have gone from being one of the most intensely persecuted religious groups in the country's history to the fourth largest religious body in the U.S., with a reputation for patriotism and conservative family values. In addition to introducing who the Mormons are, their beliefs and religious practices, this seminar will explore issues raised by Mormonism's move toward the religious mainstream alongside its continuing distinctiveness. These issues include: What is the religious "mainstream" in the U.S.? How did conflicts over Mormonism during the 19th century, especially the conflict over polygamy, help define the limits of religious tolerance in this country? How have LDS teachings about gender and race, or controversies about whether or not Mormons are Christian, positioned and repositioned Mormons within U.S. society?
Same as L57 RelPol 390
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L22 History 3921 Secular & Religious: A Global History
Recent years have seen a dramatic rethinking of the past in nearly every corner of the world as scholars revisit fundamental questions about the importance of religion for individuals, societies and politics. Is religion as a personal orientation in decline? Is Europe becoming more secular? Is secularism a European invention? Many scholars now argue that "religion" is a European term that doesn't apply in Asian societies. This course brings together cutting-edge historical scholarship on Europe and Asia in pursuit of a truly global understanding. Countries covered vary, but may include Britain, France, Turkey, China, Japan, India and Pakistan.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 393 Medieval Christianity
This course surveys the historical development of Christian doctrine, ecclesiastical organization, and religious practice between the fifth century and the 15th, with an emphasis on the interaction of religion, culture, politics and society. Topics covered include: the Christianization of Europe; monasticism; the liturgy; sacramental theology and practice; the Gregorian reform; religious architecture; the mendicant orders and the attack on heresy; lay devotions; the papal monarchy; schism and conciliarism; and the reform movements of the 15th century.
Same as L23 Re St 393
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 394C African Civilization to 1800
Beginning with an introduction to the methodological and theoretical approaches to African history, this course surveys African civilization and culture from the Neolithic age until 1800 A.D. Topics include African geography and environmental history, migration and cross-cultural exchange, the development of Swahili culture, the Western Sudanese states, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the historical roots of Apartheid. For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 4.
Same as L90 AFAS 321C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 395C African Civilization: 1800 to the Present
Beginning with social and economic changes in 19th-century Africa, this course is an in-depth investigation of the intellectual and material culture of colonialism. It is also concerned with the survival of precolonial values and institutions, and examines the process of African resistance and adaptation to social change. The survey concludes with the consequences of decolonization and an exploration of the roots of the major problems facing modern Africa.
Same as L90 AFAS 322C
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H UColl: HAF, HSM
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L22 History 3961 Comintern: The Communist International's Global Impact
The Communist International was the third of the global left-wing organizations aimed to develop communist organizations around the globe to aid the development of a proletarian revolution. Begun in 1919, hosted in Moscow, and closely tied to the developing USSR, the Comintern hosted seven World Congresses and 13 Enlarged Plenums before Stalin dissolved it in 1943. This course examines the history of the nearly 25 years of the Comintern, paying particular attention to engagement with countries outside of the Soviet sphere. Class texts provide a general historical overview and interrogate central ideological arguments/debates across several countries and political systems. Course materials look at the Comintern's engagement with Fascism and the Spanish Civil War, ideas of Nationalism and Internationalism, and Self-Determination in the Colonial World. Class units are designed to highlight regional similarities and differences, taking a global approach to the study of Communism. Students gain an understanding of the global political complexities developing after World War I and leading to World War II. Reflecting on the critique of imperialist capitalism offered by the Comintern, students explore liberation struggles and ideological dictatorships around the globe.
Same as L97 IAS 396
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 3977 The Making of the Modern Catholic Church
This course examines the work of three church councils that put their stamp on the Catholic Church at key moments in its history, making it what it is today. The first section is dedicated to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which defined the high medieval church as an all-encompassing papal monarchy with broad powers over the lives of all Europeans, Christian and non-Christian alike. In the second section we turn our attention to the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which responded to the threat posed by the Protestant Reformation by reforming the Catholic church, tightening ecclesiastical discipline, improving clerical education, and defining and defending Catholic doctrine. We conclude with a consideration of the largest church council ever, Vatican II (1962-1965), which reformed the liturgy and redefined the church to meet the challenges of the modern, multicultural, postcolonial world.
Same as L23 Re St 3977
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: ETH, IS EN: H
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L22 History 399 Senior Honors Thesis and Colloquium: Writing-Intensive Seminar
Prerequisites: satisfactory standing as a candidate for Senior Honors and permission of thesis director.
Credit variable, maximum 4 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI EN: H
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L22 History 39CJ The City in Early Modern Europe: Writing-Intensive Seminar
From the city-states of Renaissance Italy to the 18th-century boomtowns of London and Paris, cities functioned as political, economic, and cultural centers, creating unique opportunities and challenges for their diverse inhabitants. Their conflicting experiences and expectations created not only social and economic unrest, but also a resilient social infrastructure, a tradition of popular participation in politics, and a rich legacy of cultural accomplishment.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 39F8 Gender and Sexuality in 1950s America: Writing-Intensive Seminar
Historians have recently begun to reconsider the dominant view of the 1950s as an era characterized by complacency and conformity. In this writing-intensive seminar we use the prism of gender history to gain a more complex understanding of the intricate relationship between conformity and crisis, domesticity and dissent that characterized the 1950s for both women and men.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD, WI BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 39J8 Mapping the Early Modern World: Writing-Intensive Seminar
Societies use maps not just to see the world, but also to assign meaning and order to space: both nearby spaces and spaces on the other side of the world. In this seminar, we will study how maps were created, circulated and interpreted between the 16th and 18th century, when Europeans came into contact with new regions throughout the world and reshaped their own backyards through the rise of the modern state and the development of national identity.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, WI EN: H
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L22 History 39SC Imperialism and Sexuality: India, South Asia and the World: Writing-Intensive Seminar
What is the connection between the appropriation of other people's resources and the obsession with sex? Why is "race" essential to the sexual imperatives of imperialism? How has the nexus between "race," sexuality and imperial entitlement reproduced itself despite the end of formal colonialism? By studying a variety of colonial documents, memoirs produced by colonized subjects, novels, films and scholarship on imperialism, we seek to understand the history of imperialism's sexual desires and its continuation in our world today.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, WI BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 4010 Capstone Seminar: Antisemitism and Islamophobia: A Comparative Perspective
The capstone course for Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies majors, Arabic majors, and Hebrew majors. The course content is subject to change.
Same as L75 JIMES 4001
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4040 Senior Seminar: Convivencia or Reconquista? Muslims, Jews and Christians in Medieval Iberia
Senior seminar. This seminar will provide an opportunity to explore in some depth various facets of the convivencia ("dwelling together"; coexistence) of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in medieval Iberia. While we will pick up the timeline with the emergence of an Ibero-Islamic society in the eighth century CE, the seminar's historical horizon stretches up to the turn of the 15th to the 16th century, when Spanish Jews and Muslims were equally faced with the choice between exile and conversion to Christianity. Until about the mid-11th century, Muslims dominated most of the Iberian Peninsula. From roughly the mid-11th through 15th centuries, Christians ruled much and eventually all of Spain and Portugal. Through a process termed, from a Christian perspective, as reconquista ("reconquest"), Catholic kingdoms acquired large Muslim enclaves. As borders moved, Jewish communities found themselves under varying Muslim or Christian dominion, or migrated from one realm to the other. Interactions between the three ethno-religious communities occurred throughout, some characterized by mutual respect and shared creativity and others by rivalry and strife. The course focuses on these religious and cultural contacts, placing them in various historical and geographic contexts. It will raise questions concerning the ambiguities of religious change and concerning the interplay of persecution and toleration. Methodologically, the seminar emphasizes the study of primary sources, including documentary, historiographical, literary and poetical texts. In the course of their study, attention will be paid to peculiarities of genre, and difficulties involved in formulating historical assessments. In this sense, we will also aim at developing critical reading skills in relation to secondary literature. Seniors in Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies will be given preference in admission. Advanced students in other fields are asked to contact the instructor prior to enrollment.
Same as L75 JIMES 4060
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 4051 Diaspora in Jewish and Islamic Experience
Tensions between center and periphery; migration and rest; power and powerlessness; exile, home, and return are easily found in the historical record of both Jews and Muslims. For Muslims, it can be said that it was the very success of Islam as a world culture, and the establishment of Muslim societies in in all corners of the globe, that lay at the root of this unease. But the disruptions of the post-colonial era, the emergence of minority Muslim communities in Europe and North America, and the recent, tragic flow of refugees following the Arab Spring have created a heightened sense of displacement and yearning for many. Of course, the very term "diaspora"-from ancient Greek, meaning dispersion or scattering-has most often been used to describe the Jewish condition in the world. The themes of exile and return, catastrophe and redemption, are already woven into the Hebrew Bible and continued to be central motifs in Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity and the middle ages. This, despite the fact that more Jews lived outside the borders of Judea than within the country many years before the destruction of Jewish sovereignty at the hands of the Romans. In the twentieth century, European imperialism, nationalisms of various types, revolution, and war-including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-have done much to underscore the continuing dilemmas of Diaspora and home in both Jewish and Islamic identity. The goal of this course is to offer a comparative, historical perspective on the themes of migration and displacement, center and periphery, home and residence, exile and return, and to give students the opportunity to examine in depth some aspect of the experience of "Diaspora". Note: This course fulfills the capstone requirement for Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. The course also counts as an Advanced Seminar for History. (Students wishing to receive History Advanced Seminar credit should also enroll in L22 491R section 19 for 1 unit.) The course is open to advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
Same as L75 JIMES 405
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4080 Nuns
Nuns — women vowed to a shared life of poverty, chastity, and obedience in a cloistered community — were central figures in medieval and early modern religion and society. This course explores life in the convent, with the distinctive culture that developed among communities of women, and the complex relations between the world of the cloister and the world outside the cloister. We look at how female celibacy served social and political, as well as religious, interests. We read works by nuns: both willing and unwilling; and works about nuns: nuns behaving well, and nuns behaving scandalously badly; nuns embracing their heavenly spouse, and nuns putting on plays; nuns possessed by the devil, and nuns managing their possessions; nuns as enraptured visionaries, and nuns grappling with the mundane realities of life in a cloistered community.
Same as L23 Re St 408
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA EN: H
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L22 History 4120 Rainbow Radicalisms: Ethnic Nationalism, the Black Panther Party and the Politics of the New Left
The Black Panther Party remains one of the most iconic groups of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps one of the most understudied aspects of the Panther's legacy is their radical influence upon other American racial and ethnic groups, including Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and American Indians, among others. This seminar will consider the emergence of ethnic and racial nationalism among these various groups, as a result of their contact and relationship(s) with the Black Panther Party. Considering the politics of groups like the Red Guard, the Brown Berets, the Young Lords and the American Indian Movement, this course will chart the rise and fall of rainbow radicalism as a general offspring of the Black Power Movement and part and parcel of what is commonly referred to as "the New Left." It will also consider these groups in relation to the State by probing the dynamic push and pull between repression and democracy. Ultimately, this course will grant insight into the contemporary racial domain and current political landscape of America as we discuss how these groups helped to shape modern identity formations, discourses on multiculturalism and definitions of "minority," "diversity," and "equality."
Same as L90 AFAS 4121
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4154 From Decolonization to Globalization: Postcolonial South Asia
Independence from European colonialism was a victory for some people, although for the majority, the experience of nation-building and the Cold War only sanctioned further inequities. A further set-back arrived in the guise of globalization. The countries of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri-Lanka have grappled differently with the many varieties of 20th-century transnational power. This course studies the histories of decolonization, nation-building and the Cold War for those South Asian countries created since the 1940s and traces the manner by which ordinary people have interrogated the multiple levels of state power unleashed upon them since the formal end of European colonialism.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4242 Culture and Politics in the People's Republic of China: New Approaches
This course inquires into the political, ideological and social frameworks that shaped the cultural production and consumption in the People's Republic of China (PRC). In the realm of literature, film, architecture, and material culture and everyday life, this course pays a close attention to the contestation and negotiation between policy makers, cultural producers, censors and consumers. Understanding the specific contour of how this process unfolded in China allows us to trace the interplay between culture and politics in the formative years of revolutionary China (1949-1966), high socialism (1966-1978), the reform era (1978-1992), and post-socialist China (1992 to present). The course examines new scholarship in fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, and gender studies; and it explores the ways in which new empirical sources, theoretical frameworks, and research methods reinvestigate and challenge conventional knowledge of the PRC that have been shaped by the rise and fall of Cold War politics, the development of area studies in the U.S., and the evolving U.S.-China relations. Prerequisites: Advanced undergraduate students must have taken no fewer than two China-related courses at the 300 level or higher. Graduate students should be proficient in scholarly Chinese, as they are expected to read scholarly publications and primary materials in Chinese.
Same as L03 East Asia 4242
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4274 Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
This course examines the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the mid-19th century to the present. Topics include: Palestine in the late Ottoman period; the development of modern Zionism; British colonialism and the establishment of the Palestine Mandate; Arab-Jewish relations during the Mandate; the growth of Palestinian nationalism and resistance; the establishment of the state of Israel and the dispersion of the Palestinians in 1948; the Arab-Israeli wars; both Palestinian uprisings; and the peace process.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 4288 Higher Education in American Culture
Colleges and universities in the United States have been the sites of both cultural conservation and political and cultural subversion from their founding in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They have been integral to the nation's and to regional cultural and economic development. In addition, they have functioned as one component of an increasingly diversified and complex system of education. This course surveys higher education in American history, including the ideas that have contributed to shaping that history, beginning with its origins in European institutional models. We use primary and secondary readings to examine critically its conflict-ridden institutional transformation from exclusively serving the elite to increasingly serving the masses. We explore the cultural sources of ideas as well as the growth and diversification of institutions, generations of students and faculty as they changed over time, and curricular evolutions and revolutions in relation to the larger social and cultural contexts of institutional expansion.
Same as L12 Educ 4288
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4390 The Arab & Muslim Americas: Feminist Perspectives
Migratory movements from the Middle East and North Africa into the Americas were precipitated by multiple and intersecting factors. This course will examine the historical and contemporary waves of Arab and Muslim migrants and refugees into the Americas from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It will explore how empire, globalization, and war influenced and continue to influence the flow of people across borders and impact policies and ideas of belonging in receiving nation-states. We will examine Arab and Muslim identity in light of gendered, ethnoreligious, class, and national affiliations and investigate the racialization of Islam and the gendered-Orientalist constructions of Arabs and Muslims in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Honduras, Cuba) and the US. Utilizing interdisciplinary texts in Transnational Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies, and history, we will trace the ways that specific diasporic subjects have been incorporated into host nation-states and analyze, through a comparative framework, the receptions and rejections of Arabs and Muslims in the US and Latin America.
Same as L77 WGSS 439
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC, SC, SD EN: S
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L22 History 4442 The Jewish Experience in Eastern Europe
A study of Jewish culture, society and politics in Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, the Czech lands, Russia, Romania and the Ukraine, from the 16th century through the 20th century. Among the topics covered are: economic, social and political relations in Poland-Lithuania; varieties of Jewish religious culture; Russian and Habsburg imperial policies toward the Jews; nationality struggles and anti-Semitism; Jewish national and revolutionary responses; Jewish experience in war and revolution; the mass destruction of East European Jewish life; and the transition from Cold War to democratic revolution.
Credit 3 units.
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L22 History 4444 The Mystical Tradition in Judaism
What is Jewish "mysticism"? What is its relationship to the category of "religion"? Is Jewish mysticism just one form of a general phenomenon common to a variety of religious traditions or is it a specific interpretation of biblical, rabbinic, and other Jewish traditions? Taking the above questions as a starting point, this course aims at a systematic and historically contextualized analysis of a broad range of Jewish texts that are commonly classified as "mystical." (All primary texts are read in translation.) At the same time, we explore such overarching themes as: the interplay of esoteric exegesis of the Bible and visionary experiences; the place of traditional Jewish law (halakhah) within mystical thought and practice; the role of gender, sexuality, and the body in Jewish mystical speculation and prayer; the relationship between mysticism and messianism; Ashkenazic and Sephardic traditions and their mutual impact on Jewish mysticism; the "absence of women" from Jewish mystical movements; esoteric traditions of an elite vs. mysticism as a communal endeavor; and the tension between innovation and (the claim to) tradition in the history of Jewish mysticism.
Same as L23 Re St 444
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH, IS EN: H
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L22 History 4450 Topics in Islam: History of Political Thought
Spring 2019 Topic: History of Political Thought---------This course aims to study political thought and practice in Islamic history (ca.8-13th centuries) through a close reading of a selection of primary sources in translation (and in their original language if language proficiency is satisfactory). Particular attention will be given to historical contexts in which thoughts are espoused and texts written. We plan to examine the development of political concepts and themes as articulated in diverse literary genres (legal, theological, political) from the 8th through the 13th century. We hope to engage various theoretical models to analyze the relationship between politics and religion and tease out the role of power in determining socio-political relations, distinctions, and structures. We hope to have a better grasp on the historicity of ideas presented in timeless categories in political discourse. Prereqs: Advanced knowledge of Arabic preferred but not required.
Same as L75 JIMES 445
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 4451 Religion and the State: Global Mission, Global Empire
This course explores the complex intersections among U.S. political power on a global stage, and religious institutions and identities. Readings and discussions are organized around two very broad questions. First: How has this nation's history been shaped by religious "others" both inside and outside its borders? Second: How have perceptions of those others in turn affected U.S. responses to circumstances of global consequence — including, for example, foreign policy and diplomacy, missionary activity, and economic practices?
Same as L57 RelPol 495
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4491 American Unbelief from the Enlightenment to the New Atheism
This seminar examines American secularism, humanism, and atheism from the Enlightenment forward to the present. Topics emphasized include: the relationship between believers and nonbelievers, the civil liberties of atheists, religion in the public schools, social radicalism and women's rights, and the more recent growth of religious disaffiliation and public atheism. The course considers not only the intellectual dimensions of freethinking unbelief but also the broader politics of secularism in a nation routinely imagined as "under God."
Same as L57 RelPol 4491
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: SSP Art: SSP EN: H
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L22 History 4511 Urban Culture in Modern China
The narrative of rural crisis and peasant revolution has dominated China's modern history for decades. But there has been a growing interest in China's urban past and present with the increased prominence of cities in China's breathtaking economic development and the opening of municipal archives in post-Mao era. The course aims to introduce students to "conventional wisdoms," new directions, and major debates in the urban history field. Topics include: the urban political economy, the cultural dynamics of modernity, the reconstruction of traditions in the making of modernity, the cultural production and consumption, colonialism and imperialism in the urban setting, nationalism, and reform and revolution. Acknowledging and understanding the nuance and difference in views and interpretations in historical writings (historiography) are essential. The course seeks to develop students' research and analytical skills, such as locating secondary sources, incorporating scholarly interpretations, and developing and sustaining a thesis based on secondary and primary sources in student research. Prerequisites: This is an interdisciplinary seminar designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Advanced undergraduate students must have taken at least one China-related course at the 300-level or higher.
Same as L03 East Asia 4510
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 4564 American Pragmatism
This course examines the history of American pragmatism through three of its primary founders, the philosophers Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. It considers pragmatism as a response to the experience of uncertainty brought on my modernity and contextualizes it amid late 19th- and early 20th-century thought and politics, namely, scientific methodology, evolutionary theory, the probabilistic revolution, Transcendentalism, the rise of secularism, slavery, Abolitionism and the Civil War. Major essays by each thinker are read as well as three intellectual biographies and one critical survey.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4610 Latin American Populism and Neo-Populism
A salient feature of Latin America in the 20th and early 21st centuries has been the recurrence of populism. Mass-based political and social movements animated by nationalist and reformist impulses dominated Latin American politics in the 1920s, 1930s-60s, and 1980s to the present. This course provides a general historical and theoretically informed analysis of the origins, internal dynamics, and outcomes of classical populist and neo-populist governments and parties. Among the notable populist and neo-populist cases to be examined include: Peronism in Argentina , Velasquismo in Ecuador, Cardenismo in Mexico, APRA in Peru, Varguismo in Brazil, Garcia/Fujimori in Peru, Menen/Kirchners in Argentina, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Issues pertaining to leader-follower relations, populist discourses, citizenship rights, populist gender and racial policies, labor and social reforms, and mass mobilization politics will also be explored.
Same as L97 IAS 4611
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4633 20th-Century Latin American Revolutions
Latin America was arguably one of the most "revolutionary" regions of the world in the 20th century. It registered four "great revolutions": Mexico 1910, Bolivia 1952, Cuba 1959, and Nicaragua 1979. These social revolutions entailed a substantial, violent, and voluntarist struggle for political power and the overthrow of the established political, economic, social, and cultural orders. In the wake of these successful revolutions, new revolutionary institutions of governance were founded, radical structural changes were implemented, and a new revolutionary ethos was adopted. With the exception perhaps of the Bolivian Revolution, these revolutions had a profound impact on Latin American and world politics. The primary aim of this course is to analyze and compare the causes, processes and outcomes of the Mexican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolutions.
Same as L97 IAS 4633
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: LCD, SSC, SC, SD EN: S
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L22 History 4675 Beyond the Harem: Women, Gender, and Revolution
This course examines the history and current situations of women in Middle Eastern societies. The first half of the course is devoted to studying historical changes in factors structuring women's status and their sociopolitical roles. The second half of the course will focus on several case studies of women's participation in broad anticolonial social revolutions and how these revolutions affected the position of women in those societies.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4689 American Intellectual History to 1865
This course presents an overview of American intellectual history from the early 17th century and the founding of the first English settlements in North America to the mid-19th century and the American Civil War. We investigate how different thinkers responded to and helped shape key events and processes in colonial and early American history, concentrating in particular on developments in religious, political, social, scientific and educational thought. We cover major topics such as: Puritanism, the Enlightenment, Evangelicalism, Romanticism and the inner Civil War. We address concepts central to the formation of the nation's identity including those of the covenant, republicanism, citizenship, equality, freedom, liberty, natural law, transcendentalism, order, reason, progress and democracy.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 469 American Intellectual History Since 1865
This course concentrates on social, cultural, philosophical and political thought since the end of the Civil War, and investigates how American thinkers have responded to the challenge of modernity. After an examination of the end of the old religious order and the revolt against Victorianism, it analyzes the subsequent rise of pragmatism, progressivism, literary modernism, radical liberalism, political realism, protest movements and the New Left, neo-conservatism and the New Right, and the current state of intellectuals in post-9/11 America.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4710 Topics in Japanese Culture
A topics course on Japanese culture; topics vary by semester.
Same as L03 East Asia 471
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4741 Frankenstein: Origins and Afterlives
Same as L14 E Lit 474
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4742 Americans and Their Presidents
How have Americans understood what it means to be President of the United States? This seminar uses that question as a point of departure for a multidisciplinary cultural approach to the presidency in the United States, examining the shifting roles of the chief executive from George Washington through George W. Bush. In addition to a consideration of the President's political and policymaking roles, this course examines how the lived experiences of presidents have informed the ways Americans have conceived of public and private life within a broader political culture. In the process, this course uses the presidency as a means to explore topics ranging from electioneering to gender, foreign policy to popular media. Readings are drawn from a broad range of fields.
Same as L98 AMCS 474
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4751 Reformers and Radicals: Feminist Thinking through History
We focus on feminist thought in Western culture but also examine non-Western ideas about feminisms. We trace the relationship among emergent feminist ideas and such developments as the rise of scientific methodology, Enlightenment thought, revolutionary movements and the gendering of the political subject, colonialism, romanticism, socialism, and global feminisms. Readings are drawn from both primary sources and recent feminist scholarship on the texts under consideration. Note: This course is in the core curriculum for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate. Permission of instructor required. Prerequisite: completion of at least one Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course or permission of the instructor. Students who have taken L77 WGSS 475 Intellectual History of Feminism can not take this class.
Same as L77 WGSS 475
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4761 Money, Exchange and Power: Economy and Society in the Ancient Mediterranean World
From seaborne trade and banking to slavery and the impact of new technology, the economy of the ancient Mediterranean world constitutes a particularly dynamic field of study. To examine a society's underlying economics is to gain critical insight into those historical phenomena that are themselves the product of multiple, overlapping dimensions of human action and thought. This course engages directly with a fascinating array of primary evidence for economic behaviors, beliefs, structures, and institutions among the Romans, Greeks, and their neighbors. We will also explore the methodological challenges and implications of that evidence as well as a variety of modern theoretical approaches. This year our focus is mainly upon developments among the Greeks, ranging from the transformative invention of coinage to the rise of commercial networks centered around religious sanctuaries like Delos. Prerequisites: Classics 341C or 342C or 345C or 346C or permission of instructor.
Same as L08 Classics 476
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 4763 Olympian Shadows: Macedon and Its Neighbors in Antiquity
The home of both Alexander the Great and Aristotle, Macedon was pivotal to the course of ancient Greek and Roman history and yet stood apart as a culturally and politically distinct region. Macedonian dynasts dominated the Hellenistic world and deeply shaped Roman reception of Greek culture, while others profoundly affected the intellectual life of antiquity. We will explore topics ranging from ethnicity, religion, and the nature of kingship to urbanization and Macedon's emergence as a great power until its subsequent transformation at the hands of the conquering Romans. We will pay special attention to Macedon's neighbors, especially Thrace and Illyria, as well as to Macedon's relationships with the Persian Empire and the Greek coastal colonies. Prerequisites: at least one semester of Classics 341C, 342C, 345C, or 346C, or instructor's permission.
Same as L08 Classics 4763
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 481W History of Education in the United States
Examines education within the context of American social and intellectual history. Using a broad conception of education in the United States and a variety of readings in American culture and social history, the course focuses on such themes as the variety of institutions involved with education, including family, church, community, work place, and cultural agency; the ways relationships among those institutions have changed over time; the means individuals have used to acquire an education; and the values, ideas, and practices that have shaped American educational policy in different periods of our history. NOTE ABOUT ENROLLMENT: All students will be initially waitlisted. Because this is a writing intensive course, enrollment will most likely be 12-15 students. Enrollment preference will be given to students who are majoring/minoring in Educational Studies, Teacher Education, Applied Linguistics, History, American Culture Studies, and Children's Studies and to students needing to complete their Writing Intensive requirement. Instructor will e-mail students about enrollment.
Same as L12 Educ 481W
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SC, SD, WI Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: BA, HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4823 Senior Seminar in Religious Studies:
The topic for this seminar differs every year. Previous topics include Religion and Violence; Governing Religion; Saints and Society; and Religion and the Secular: Struggles over Modernity. The seminar is offered every spring semester and is required of all Religious Studies majors, with the exception of those writing an honors thesis. The class is also open, with the permission of the instructor, to other advanced undergraduates with previous coursework in Religious Studies.
Same as L23 Re St 479
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: ETH EN: H
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L22 History 4841 Core Seminar in East Asian Studies
Introduction to problems and approaches in East Asian Studies.
Same as L03 East Asia 484
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4842 The Japanese Empire in Asia, 1874-1945
This course examines the expansion of the Japanese Empire in Asia from 1874 to 1945, focusing on Japan's acquisition of neighboring territory and the subsequent building of colonies in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. The course explores the concepts of imperialism and colonialism, how they functioned in East Asia, and how they intersect with other major developments in Asia, including ideas of civilization and race, the formation of the nation, and the growth of capitalism.
Credit 3 units.
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L22 History 4844 Women and Confucian Culture
This course explores the lives of women in East Asia during a period when both local elites and central states sought to Confucianize society. The course focuses on Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) China, but also examines these issues in two other early-modern East Asian societies: Yi/Choson (1392-1910) Korea and Tokugawa (1600-1868) Japan. Course readings are designed to expose students both to a variety of theoretical approaches and to a wide range of topics, including: women's property rights; the medical construction of gender; technology, power and gender; and state regulations on sexuality.
Credit 3 units.
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L22 History 487 Topics in American History: Race and Drugs in American History
This course explores the racial construction of the use of legal and illegal substances in American history from the mid-19th century to the present. We will spend time engaging in a historical analysis of the social, economic, and racial dynamics that defined drug addiction in popular imagination, and examine how these factors contributed to discussions about legality, access to substances, one's ability to be rehabilitated, and criminal status. Regarding criminality we will particularly explore sociological and theoretical perspectives of labeling, habitual and occasional offenders, and moral panic in order to understand how racial minority groups were targeted for different rhetorical, legislative, and economic purposes. One major goal of the course will be to outline the early 20th century beginnings of the war on drugs and connect it to the century-long growth of a militarized police system and prison industrial complex. We will secondly work to understand the role of local and national political actors, law enforcement, and the media in manufacturing and maintaining connections between race, crime and drugs. Ultimately, we will use our study of drugs to contextualize 21st-century issues of police violence, increases in homicide in minority communities, mass incarceration, poverty, segregation, and mass movements of protest.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4872 Colonial Cities and the Making of Modernity
Massive urban growth has been a central result of the incorporation of many areas — both central and peripheral — into the global economy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Scholars have long theorized urbanization as a key component of modernity, but they have usually done so by looking at urbanization and modernization from the perspective of the West. This course investigates the character of cities in the colony and then uses these empirical and analytical entry points to examine critically some theories of modernity. The geographical focus of the course is primarily on cities in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4876 Advanced Seminar: Mexican Agriculture: Land, Politics and Development
Access to and ownership of land has been a major issue in Mexican history. Land tenure in economic development has been a constant source of tension and debate since the 18th century. Paradoxically, land tenure has been put forth as both the obstacle and the solution to the country's modernization. Given its centrality in the construction of the modern period, this course examines liberalism, agrarian revolts, the revolution, the green revolution and neoliberalism through the lens of land issues. This course will also explore how these have shaped and have been shaped by indigenous peoples and peasants, from land disentailment to the fight against GMO maize. Students will evaluate agrarian reforms, agricultural modernization programs, concepts of and transformations of natural resources, food production/consumption and social policies.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4881 Advanced Seminar: Mad: Mental Illness, Power and Resistance in Africa and the Caribbean
This seminar explores the history of mental illness in Africa and the Caribbean during the colonial and postcolonial periods. We will be guided by the following questions: What is mental illness? How do social, cultural and political realities affect how mental illness is defined? Should mental illness always be analyzed within a specific cultural context? How did psychiatry factor into the efforts of European colonizers to maintain social order in their colonies? How have colonized people resisted colonial notions of madness? What is the place of religion in these histories? How did mental institutions change after the end of colonial rule and how was postcolonial Caribbean and African psychiatry harnessed in service of decolonization? The course will pay special attention to how European colonial powers employed similar understandings of blackness across regions as they formulated ideas concerning the black populations they deemed "mad" across Africa and the Caribbean.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 4885 Advanced Seminar: Medicine, Disease and Empire
This course examines the history of medicine in connection to the politics of colonialism and empire-building, spanning the 16th century through the 20th century. Topics covered include: epidemic disease outbreaks (e.g., smallpox, cholera, malaria); the role of science and medicine in endorsing the "civilizing missions" of empires; tropical climates and tropical diseases as western constructs; tensions between western medicine and indigenous healing practices and beliefs; ideas of race and racism in science and medicine; modern advancements in sanitation and public health and their implementation overseas; and the historical roots of the modern global health movement.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 4894 Advanced Seminar: The U.S. in Vietnam: Origins, Developments and Consequences
This course focuses on America's involvement in Vietnam from the era of French colonialism through the collapse of U.S. intervention. Special attention to political, military, economic and cultural aspects, as well as to international relationships, and the significance of the experience and subsequent developments upon both American and Vietnamese societies.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 48AD Advanced Seminar: Enlightenment, Then
The Enlightenment. The word is laden with polemical meaning, at once celebrated as the beginnings of modernity -- whatever that may mean -- and charged with everything wrong with it. Its main intellectual figures -- Adam Smith, Kant, Voltaire, Beccaria -- are frequently celebrated, sometimes reviled. But can one even speak of the Enlightenment? Was there a program, a goal, a hidden five-year plan devised by a central committee? Was it truly dedicated to reason, liberty, and human rights? If so, why did so many of its thinkers champion and embrace inequality, slavery, racism, and despotism? Was it a movement or a set of ideas? Did it emancipate or exclude? If there was no core tenet, why has the label stuck? Could we not say that something changed in the 18th century? And if so, what? What were the hopes and the critiques that people, then and now, have invested in the idea of the Enlightenment? That is a long list of questions; if nothing else, the Enlightenment was all about providing answers.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SC BU: HUM
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L22 History 48IB Advanced Seminar: New York, New York: The Empire City from Stuyvesant to Trump
This research seminar engages the long history of greater New York City: from the place Native Americans called Manna-hata to the largest city in the United States and the world political, financial, and cultural capital that it is today. The course explores New York City's ambivalent relationship with America, with the world, and with itself. It focuses on matters of power - how, in different moments of the city's history, it was defined, who held it, and how various groups managed to contest for it; matters of exchange and extraction - political, cultural, and economic; and matters of belonging - whether a city of immigrants, exiles and refugees succeeded in becoming a home for the homeless. It pays close attention to both the micro - the street corner and the political ward; the bridge and the tunnel; the gentrifying neighborhood; the mosaic of the city's foodways; the theater, financial, slaughterhouse, brothel, and other districts - and the macro - the banks and the stock exchange; the port and transit authorities; the instrumentalities of knowledge and cultural production in the city's universities, print media, clubs, and salons; the sports empires; and the political machines, organized crime, grassroots labor and political movements, insurgencies, and undergrounds. Above all, the course will foreground the city's massive and unbearable contradictions, as a city of skyscrapers and of basement dives, lures, and snares; as a symbol of the future and freedom bound to traumatic, slave, and unfree pasts; as a symbol of modern independence bound to modern interdependence; and as a place of renaissances and ruinations, where the world either comes together or spectacularly falls apart. Sites of potential investigation, in a list that is suggestive rather than exhaustive, range from the African Burial Ground to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, from Hamilton to Hamilton, from Boss Tweed to Robert Moses, from the Five Points to Chinatown, from Delmonico's to Sylvia's, from Blackwell's Island Lunatic Asylum to Hart Island Potter's Field, from the African Free School to Ocean Hill-Brownsville, from Marcus Garvey to Amadou Diallo, from Billie Holiday to Andy Warhol, from James Baldwin's Harlem to Stonewall, from George Steinbrenner to Jerry Seinfeld, from the Gowanus Canal to Estée Lauder, and, in the spirit of the course title, from Stuyvesant to Trump. Students will engage with the history of New York City vai two three-page book reviews, a three-page site analysis, and two five-minute oral reports on assigned readings before conducting their own original research in consultation with the instructor that will culminate in a 15-page final essay. Attendance at all classes and participation in class discussions required.
Credit 3 units. BU: HUM
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L22 History 4905 Advanced Seminar: Issues in the History of American Medicine
This seminar examines major issues and themes in the history of American medicine. Specific topics include: the changing image of the physician; professional authority; and the rise in the status of the medical profession during the past one hundred years.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM
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L22 History 4914 Advanced Seminar: Japan in World War II — History and Memory
This course examines the history of World War II in Asia and how it has been remembered in the postwar era. We trace the war, from the first Japanese military attack on China in 1931 through the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. We also examine several postwar controversies concerning how the war has been forgotten and remembered in Japan, in the rest of Asia and in the United States. Goals include grasping the empirical history of the war as a step to becoming familiar with the theories and methods of memory studies in History.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4918 Advanced Seminar: Sexuality in the United States
Does sex have a history, and if so, how can we study it? This seminar examines important themes in the history of sexuality: the relationship between sexual ideologies and practices; racial hierarchy and sexuality; the policing of sexuality; construction of sexual identities and communities; and sexual politics at the end of the century. Students also spend time discussing theoretical approaches to the history of sexuality, as well as methodological issues, including problems of source and interpretation.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Art: HUM
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L22 History 4941 Advanced Seminar: The Inquisition in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, 1200-1700
This seminar will study the history of the Inquisition from its beginnings in southern France in the first half of the 13th century up to the investigations undertaken by Dominicans and Franciscans in 17th-century Mexico and Peru. Along the way the seminar will focus upon other inquisitions in Europe (especially those made in Italy, Spain and Germany), and the hunt for heresy in Goa and the Philippines. This course will read inquisitional manuals (books on how to conduct an inquisition) and original inquisitional documents (the records of the trials and interrogations). Consequently, the history of heresy and witchcraft, as understood by people in the past and historians in the present, will be discussed.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Art: HUM
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L22 History 4965 Advanced Seminar: Magic, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Medieval World, 350-1550
This seminar will study the history of magic, heresy, and witchcraft in the medieval world. It will begin in the fourth century after the conversion of Constantine the Great and end with the great witchcraft trials of the 15th and 16th centuries. The seminar will read magical treatises, ecclesiastical polemics against vulgar belief, inquisitorial trials, chronicles, and histories, in our attempt to define what was considered the ordinary and the extraordinary, the natural and the supernatural, good and evil, the boundaries of heaven and earth. How do modern historians use medieval documents to evoke the lives of men, women, and children who believed in magic or were accused of heresy? Can this only be done through a form of historical anthropology? What methods do historians use in trying to understand past ideas and practices? What is historical truth then? What is the relationship of supposedly heterodox belief and behavior with religious orthodoxy? How do we define religion? A theme throughout this seminar will be the definition of evil and the powers of the devil. Students will write a short historiographic essay and a long research essay. Pre-modern, Europe. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or permission of the instructor.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4976 Advanced Seminar: The American Trauma: Representing the Civil War in Art, Literature and Politics
This seminar is an interdisciplinary examination of how Americans represented the Civil War during and after the titanic conflict, with special attention given to the period between 1865 and 1915. The course explores how painters, novelists, photographers, sculptors, essayists, journalists, philosophers, historians and filmmakers engaged the problems of constructing narrative and reconstructing national and individual identity out of the physical and psychological wreckage of a war which demanded horrific sacrifice and the destruction of an enemy that could not be readily dissociated from the self.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4977 Advanced Seminar: A Long Road to Uhuru and Nation: The Social History of Modern Kenya
This seminar challenges the popular Western view that the African continent is a single place and that Africans are homogenous or inherently tribal. Focusing on the lived experiences of imperial rule, the struggle for independence, and the process of nation building, it explores the development of an African country. The seminar focuses on how common men, women and adolescents wrestled with the problem of turning a colony into the modern Kenyan nation. Admission to the seminar requires permission of the instructor and at least one previous upper-level course in African history.
Same as L90 AFAS 4977
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4981 Advanced Seminar: Historical Perspectives on Human Rights
This course offers a historical perspective on the modern international human rights regime, using materials drawn from diplomatic, legal, political and cultural studies. Successful completion of this seminar involves designing, researching, and writing a 25- to 30-page paper on a historically oriented, human rights-related topic of student's choice.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4982 Advanced Seminar: Women and Confucian Culture in Early Modern East Asia
This course explores the lives of women in East Asia during a period when both local elites and central states sought to Confucianize society. We focus on Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) China, but also examine these issues in two other early-modern East Asian societies: Yi/Choson (1329-1910) Korea and Tokugawa (1600-1868) Japan.
Credit 3 units.
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L22 History 4983 Advanced Seminar: Renaissance Florence and Venice
Venice was the most famously stable city-state in Renaissance Italy, Florence the most notoriously unstable one. This course explores how those contrasting political environments and experiences shaped social relations and cultural production (and vice versa) in those two cities.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 4984 Advanced Seminar: The Problem of Freedom: The Age of Democratic Revolution in the Americas
Ever since the improbable alliance of the English pirate and slave trader Sir Francis Drake and the fugitive slave Cimarrons on the Atlantic coast of Panama many centuries ago, the history of freedom in the New World has unfolded in unlikely fits and starts. The course explores two related conjectures: first, that maroon politics (the often short-lived alliances between slaves, quasi-free blacks and white allies), slave rebellion, provincial secession and civil war were the widespread and normative conditions of postcolonial regimes throughout the New World; and second, that the problem of freedom was especially challenging in a New World environment in which freedom was fleeting and tended to decompose. Special attention is given to antislavery insurgencies, interracial politics and alliances in the United States and the perspectives on freedom they produced, but the readings also include materials on debates over freedom in the Caribbean and South America over the course of the long age of democratic revolution, 1760-1888.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD EN: H
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L22 History 4990 Advanced Seminar: History of the Body
Do bodies have a history? Recent research suggests that they do. Historians have tapped a wide variety of sources — including vital statistics, paintings and photographs, hospital records, and sex manuals — to reconstruct changes in how humans have conceptualized and experienced their own bodies. We pay particular attention to the intersection of European cultural history and history of medicine since 1500.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 4993 Advanced Seminar: Women and Religion in Medieval Europe
This course explores the religious experience of women in medieval Europe and attempts a gendered analysis of the Christian Middle Ages. In it, we examine the religious experience of women in a variety of settings — from household to convent. In particular, we try to understand how and why women came to assume public roles of unprecedented prominence in European religious culture between the 12th century and the 16th, even though the institutional church barred them from the priesthood and religious precepts remained a principal source of the ideology of female inferiority.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 4998 Advanced Seminar: The Crusades
This seminar will study the phenomenon of crusading in medieval Latin Christendom, from the First Crusade proclaimed by Pope Urban II in 1095 to the late crusades of the 14th and 15th centuries. We will particularly focus on crusading in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the ideas and practices of being a martial pilgrim were developed and formalized by the church. The concept of holy war in Latin Christianity and Islam will be examined. We will analyze the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204. We will investigate the Albigensian Crusade (1208-1229) into what is now southern France, when Christians were promised salvation for killing other Christians. Topics to be discussed are the Kingdom of Jerusalem and other crusader colonies in the Levant, women on crusade, the poetry of crusading, chivalry, military orders like the Knights Templars and the Hospitallers, and violence as a redemptive act. One historiographic paper and a research essay are required.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 49BV Advanced Seminar: Topics in Environmental History
This course is an introduction to the study of environmental history. The semester begins with a general inquiry into the methods of the field and then we use what we have learned to move into a focused subtopic. Readings include seminal works in the field, as well as philosophical, scientific and science fiction texts that help us to explore more abstract questions dealing with the relationship between humankind and the natural world.
Credit 3 units.
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L22 History 49CA Advanced Seminar: Religion and the Secular: Struggles Over Modernity
A generation ago, scholars and observers around the world felt assured that modernization would bring the quiet retreat of religion from public life. But the theory of secularization now stands debunked by world events, and a host of questions has been reopened. This course provides students with a forum to think through these issues as they prepare research papers on topics of their own choosing.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 49CJ Advanced Seminar: Medicine on the Frontiers
When Europeans established maritime empires and trading routes beginning in the 16th century, they encountered not only new cultures, but new environments, natural products, and understandings of the human body. The encounters also introduced new ideas and vectors of disease, injury and death to the societies of Africa, Asia and the New World. This course examines how ideas about health and healing shaped global interactions in the early modern period and how these ideas were transformed by the movement of information, drugs and medical practitioners around the world.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD EN: H
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L22 History 49DB Advanced Seminar: Women in Renaissance Italy
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD Arch: HUM Art: HUM BU: HUM, IS EN: H
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L22 History 49DM Advanced Seminar: Meet Me in St. Louis
This seminar uses the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis as a lens to explore the intersection of exhibitionary culture, nation building and history. In the second half of the 19th century, world's fairs became a fact of life in many parts of the world. By the end of the century, American historian and cultural critic Henry Adams argued there was indeed a "religion of world's fairs." These international expositions, as sites of pilgrimages not only informed people's perception of the world but also were ideal stages for young countries to showcase their achievements, to attract investors and to craft a national identity. Students will examine the rise of exhibitionary culture and the construction of patriotic histories and national symbols, the manufacturing of racial ideologies and otherness, and how these were all embedded in debates on civilization, modernity and progress.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 49IR Independent Research for Capstone
This course is to be taken in addition to any Advanced Seminar for which a student registers.
Credit 1 unit. EN: H
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L22 History 49JK Advanced Seminar: Blood and Sacred Bodies: Ritual Murder and Host Desecration Accusations
This seminar follows the history of the ritual murder and Host desecration accusations from the origins in 12th- and 13th-century Europe to the 20th century. It pays close attention to the social and political functions of the narratives; their symbolic importance in Christianity's salviric drama; attacks on such beliefs from both within and outside the community of the faithful; the suppression and decline of the ritual murder accusation; the integration of Jews into European societies in the 19th century; and the reappearance of the blood libel in the aftermath of emancipation.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 49MB Advanced Seminar: Women and Gender in Modern Caribbean History
This course will highlight women in the "making" of Caribbean history, and it will consider how "men" and "women" were made in the English-speaking Caribbean from emancipation (1838) to the present. We will explore women and gender issues within the context of significant political shifts including the transition from slavery to wage and indentured labor, the labor rebellions of the 1930s, the rise of labor unions and political parties, anti-colonial activism, decolonization and nationalism. The course will also situate the Caribbean within an international context, paying attention to migration, black internationalism and the Third World movement.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD, SD BU: IS EN: H
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L22 History 49MG Advanced Seminar: Planning Global Cities
This team-taught advanced seminar addresses the history and theory of a variety of metropolitan environments from the mid-19th century to the present. Readings move from the 19th-century state-centered urbanism of Paris or Vienna, through the colonial remaking of cities such as Manila or Caracas and their connections to urban reform and the City Beautiful movement in the U.S., then through the rise of planning, zoning, auto-centered cities, federal interventions such as urban renewal, the emergence of the preservation movement and new urbanism.
Credit 3 units.
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L22 History 49NR Advanced Seminar: Egypt and the Arab Spring: Middle Eastern Revolution in Historical Perspective
The uprisings of the "Arab Spring" of 2011 captivated global media and observers. The movements brought down established regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Egypt. The focus of this course will be to understand the historical background and primary contemporary issues that have shaped Egypt's Arab Spring, and to examine the huge popular effort to document Egypt's revolution. Each student will design, research and write a 25-page paper on a topic of their choice related to the Arab Spring.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 49PK Advanced Seminar: The Founding Fathers' Government in an Electronic Age
This is a research seminar that examines how Americans sought to translate their notions of government into a realistic set of priorities and a functioning set of public institutions. Extending from 1789 through the 1820s, this course investigates how the federal government came into being, what it did, and who populated the civilian and military rank of American officialdom. This is also a course in digital history. Students create new knowledge through their own contributions to an ongoing digital project that seeks to reconstitute the early federal workforce. In the process, students learn a variety of digital techniques, ranging from encoding languages to electronic systems to software packages.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM EN: H
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L22 History 49SA Advanced Seminar: Slavery in America: The Politics of Knowledge Production
This course focuses on the long history of black chattel slavery in America, from origins to emancipation. The course foregrounds the struggles over power, life and death that were at the heart of slavery's traumatic and grotesquely violent 250-year career in North America, with attention to hemispheric context. At the same time, it highlights the fiercely contested historical battleground where scholars have argued about how to define American slavery — as a system or site of labor; reproduction; law; property and dispossession; racial and gender domination; sexual abuse and usurpation; psychological terror and interdependency; containment and marooning; selfhood and nationality; agency; revolutionary liberation; and millennial redemption.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, SD EN: H
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L22 History 49SC Advanced Seminar: Incredible India!
Sex and sexuality are recurring aspects of India's engagement with "the West." In this advanced seminar, we trace the incredible history of India's global sexual engagements, chiefly in its relationship with the United States. Whether it be the Kamasutra, the Taj Mahal, Bhagwan Rajneesh (the "sex guru"), surrogacy, transnational adoption, or tantra, Indians have frequently traded sex to build cultural power and exceptionalism. The United States has provided an especially fertile terrain for the expansion of Indian sexual capital. How did this process produce mobility, exclusion, and violence? Why did India deploy sex to communicate with, translate, and even control an empire? How have seemingly traditional social categories of caste, gender, religion, and even language been reshaped by India's global sexual history? Is it possible to interrupt the rise of globally mobile, normative sexual subjects and their entanglement with the U.S. empire?
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 49TP Advanced Seminar: Whose Nairobi? Opportunity and Inequality in a 20th-Century African City
Visitors to East Africa often hear the cautionary refrain, "Nairobi is not Kenya." However, over the past century, Kenya's largest city has meant distinctly different things to distinctly different people. Starting as a simple railway camp in the late 19th century and shaped by decades of colonial racial and ethnic segregation, it has grown into a global "mega-city," where Kenyans from every background and every corner of the country interact with an equally diverse cast of foreigners. Focusing on the realities of the day-to-day, this research seminar deploys a wide variety of historical evidence to better understand how ordinary people experienced and were shaped by Nairobi during the long and turbulent 20th century. This seminar's centerpiece is an extensive and original research paper that offers students the opportunity to work with a wide variety of primary sources, including archives, city planning reports, maps, images of the built environment, music, material culture, memoirs, and narrative fiction.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM, LCD EN: H
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L22 History 49VB Advanced Seminar: Money Talks: Readings in Economic History
To date, economic history has been dominated by quantitative research. In recent years, however, there has been a turn toward more qualitative analysis. With his landmark "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," Thomas Piketty argued that economics ought to return to its origins in political and moral philosophy. Similarly, on this side of the Atlantic, a new generation of historians has begun to revisit the history of capitalism with methods that combine both numbers and narrative. In this advanced seminar, students will read both contemporary and seminal works in the field of economic history as well as writings from a wide variety of social scientists and humanistic scholars who study the economy. The aim of this course is to think critically about the historical construction of both economics as a discipline and "the economy" as a field of inquiry.
Credit 3 units. A&S IQ: HUM Arch: HUM Art: HUM EN: H
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