An overview of the myriad cultures and religions that went into the making of the West. The themes of the lectures and readings will cover the political and social history of the peoples of Europe, beginning with the Roman Empire and ending at the end of the Middle Ages. The political, economic, and cultural components of Europe took recognizable shape during the two millennia between the founding of Rome and the Reformation. But Europe as geopolitical concept and European as a cultural term only gradually emerged over time. Understanding how the countries of Europe evolved from Christendom into the West is the chief aim of the material presented.

Readings:

• Kidner, Frank et al. Making Europe: People, Politics, and Culture, vol 1.
• Geary, Patrick. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe
• Procopius. The Secret History
• Gregory of Tours. A History of the Franks
• Einhard. Two Lives of Charlemagne

This course is an entry-level survey of the central political, social, economic, cultural and intellectual developments in Europe since the French Revolution. Readings include works by Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Karl Marx, H. Rider Haggard, Sigmund Freud, Art Spiegelman, James J. Sheehan.

Readings:

• Jackson Spielvogel, Western Civilization, Volume C (Since 1789)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• Robert Blaisdell, The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings
• Haggard, She
• Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
• Spiegelman, The Complete Maus
• Voltaire, Letters on England
• James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

History 7A is an introduction to the History of Pre-Hispanic and Early Colonial Spanish America.  We begin before the arrival of the Europeans and end in 1700.  Although the focus is on the areas occupied by the Spanish, we also deal with the Portuguese and what became Brazil.  No prior knowledge of the area is required. The course focuses on social history—how different groups lived and shaped these processes.

Readings:

• Schwartz, Victors and Vanquished
• Mann, 1491
• Reséndez, A Land So Strange
• Restall, Latin America in Colonial Times
• And a few copies articles
  

Grading: Participation, mid-term and final exams, 2 papers.

This course is an introduction to the cultural history of China. Through a survey of Chinese history from earliest times to the present day, we attempt to identify the cultural attitudes and practices that have shaped and continue to shape the course of Chinese history. Readings include a textbook to help provide general background and chronology, supplemented with selections from Chinese fiction and from primary source documents.
The course meets thrice weekly, twice a week for 80 minutes of lecture and once a week for a 50-minute discussion section. The discussion is an extremely important aspect of the course. Written assignments include a map exercise, weekly reading questions, essays, surprise quizzes, a midterm and a final.

Readings:

• Ebrey, Patricia. Chinese Civilization A Sourcbook.
• Ebrey, Patricia. Cambridge Illustrated History of China.

Grading: TBA

This is a survey of the world from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The goal is to be acquainted with common global themes in the past, and especially to be aware of connections across various regions and continents. But also it is to learn how to think historically and analytically. The most important thing to be aware of is how societies change over time, and continuities and differences across human societies. We will concentrate on broad themes as opposed to detail narrative of 3500 years. To do well in this class, complete each week’s reading before the first meeting of that week, don’t try to memorize every detail but look for big patterns, ask questions and participate in class, write well.

Readings: TBA

This course explores the large-scale processes and patterns that transformed the world between the mid-fourteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, such as the emergence of the first truly global exchange network, the intensification of cross-cultural contacts and conflicts, the rise of centralized bureaucratic states, increasingly rapid technological innovation, and environmental change.

Readings:

• Tignor, et al. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, vol. B
• Said Hamdun, Ibn Battuta in Black Africa
• Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun
• Spaarks, Two Princes of Calabar

Grading: TBA

The histories and cultures of Jews in Western and non-Western settings, from 1700 to the present.  Topics include: Jewish diasporas, tyranny and enlightenment, the roots of anti-Semitism, Jewish nationalism, representations of the Holocaust, post-World War II reconstruction, changing ideas of the body, Jews in America, Jewish-Muslim relations, and contemporary visions of Jewish history.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

This course introduces students to U.S. history through the era of the Civil War. Course topics will include: freedom and slavery; the experiences of Native Americans; gender ideologies; the tension between the British crown and its colonies; the seeds of revolution; the creation of a new nation; the road to the Civil War.

Readings:

• Gates, Classic Slave Narratives
• Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium
• Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
• Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
• William Wheeler and Susan Becker (eds.), Discovering the American Past

This course will cover the social, political, and foreign policy history of the United States since the end of the Civil War.  We will discuss Reconstruction, westward expansion, immigration and industrialization, the progressive era, World War I, modernization, the New Deal, the vast changes wrought by U.S. participation in World War II, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Watergate, the decline of trust in government, the Reagan administration, and America in our time.

Readings:

• Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal
• Brinkley, Unfinished Nation Vol. 2
• Sinclair, The Jungle
• Ingalls, The United States since 1945: A Documentary Reader
• Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed

This course is designed to give students a broad understanding of the different ways in which social scientists, historians, novelists, and terrorists themselves have sought to understand, and to portray, terrorism in Europe the past 125 years.  We will read selections from a number of autobiographical accounts written by terrorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; from several novels about terrorism in both centuries; and from the extensive academic historical and social-science literature on the subject.  Throughout the course, our focus will be on understanding the place of terrorism in European culture--its origins in fundamental features and problems of European social, political, and intellectual life, its echoes in European culture and literature, and what both authors of fictional works and academic and police experts on the history, methods, psychology, and aims of terrorism have believed it told them about their societies.  What did terrorists think they were doing, and how did their involvement in terrorist activity fit their understanding of their own lives and the lives of those around them?  What caused people to use terrorist methods?  What kind of persons did so?  What kinds of societies produced terrorist movements?  What kinds of social problems, failures, and successes did terrorism seek to address?  How effective was it, and under what conditions was it effective?  We will address these questions in the forms and instances in which they have preoccupied the authors of the works we will be reading.

Students in this course will be expected to participate actively in weekly discussions of our common readings; take the lead in framing discussion for the class—by summing up key issues and introducing suggested questions for discussion—once during the quarter; and write two short (7-10 page) essays on topics central to our weekly readings, due October 28 at 5:00 and December 2 at 5:00.

Readings: TBA

Grading: Each of the essays will count for 45 percent of the grade; the presentation will count for 10%.

Modern information technology can seem very recent, but enough time has gone by to put the genesis of "cyberculture" into historical perspective. This course will look at the origins of the information technology, consider its scientific as well as utopian impulses, examine its connections with counter-cultures and corporate cultures, and explore its possibilities and liabilities.

Readings:

• Gleick, The Information
• Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral
• Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future
• Markoff, What the Doormouse Said
• Turner, From the Counterculture to Cyberculture
• Levy, Hackers (25^th Anniversary Edition)
• Wu, The Master Switch
• Turkle, Alone Together
• Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near
• Gibson, Neuromance

Grading: TBA

This course examines truth commissions, “bodies established to research and report on human rights abuses over a certain period of time in a particular country or in relation to a particular conflict.” (http://www.usip.org/library/truth.html) While focusing on the Latin American countries of Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and Argentina, we will also look at other cases such as South Africa and Sierra Leone.  We will begin by reading about the emergence of truth commissions and some of their pitfalls or limitations.  We will then look at specific cases.  Students will develop a final project that examines a particular country and some aspect of the Truth Commission report or this country’s human rights record.

Readings:

• Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture
• Hayner, Unspeakable Truths
• Rothenberg, Memory of Silence: The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report

Grading: Short Paper #1 (Jan. 30) 25%, Short Paper #2 (Feb. 27) 15%, Final Paper (March 20) 40%, Participation (includes weekly reaction papers) 20%

This course grapples with notions of colonialism and imperialism in a United States context.  When can we start speaking about an American empire? What does U.S. interactions with Native American groups tell us about the phenomenon called settler colonialism? Was U.S. expansion overseas a culmination or an aberration?  What do New Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Philippines have in common?

Readings:

• McCaffrey, Katherine, Military Power and Popular Protest: The US Navy in Vieques Puerto Rico.
• Smith, Andrea, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.
• Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.
• Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes
• Kramer, The Blood of the Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines
• Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism
• Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance

Grading: TBA

This course explores Asian American history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lives of individuals to understand the variety and complexity of the Asian American experience.  We will discuss how individuals narrate their life stories, how historians reconstruct individual lives from the historical record, and the art of biography, autobiography, and memoir writing.

Readings:

• Chan, Asian Americans: and Interpretive History

Grading: TBA

This course analyzes environmental change at multiple scales and how these changes have influenced public health over time.  It takes as a starting point that the “environment” includes not only deserts, mountains, plains and rivers, but also slaughter houses, hospitals and our own and other animal bodies.  The changes that have taken places in these varied environments have included the obvious like deforestation and the damming of rivers and the not so obvious like creating antibiotic resistance and the conditions for super contamination of large quantities of food with pathogenic organisms such as E. coli 0157:H7 and Salmonella.  All of these changes have had impacts on human health.  Many of these environmental changes have been driven by human action over the last several millennia.  The pace and scope of such changes have become quicker and more pervasive during our era of “globalization.”  This course aims to make clear many of the complex connections between political economy, environmental change and public health around the world throughout history. **Fulfills the GE Science & Engineering and Social Sciences requirement.

Readings:

• Desowitz. New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers
• Schlosser. Fast Food Nation
• Kidder. Mountains Beyond Mountains
• Langston. Toxic Bodies

Grading: TBA

The Ancient Near East from the Sumerian city-state to the Persian Empire. The cultures of Babylon and Egypt will be emphasized.

Readings:

• J. Oates, Babylon
• N.K. Sanders, ed. The Epic of Gilgamesh
• J. A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt
• H. M. Orlinsky, Ancient Israel

Grading: Midterm: 25%; paper: 25%; final exam: 50% of course grade.

Jews and Muslims have coexisted in the Mediterranean and the Middle East for more than a thousand years--- sometimes in harmony, other times in conflict, but always with intensity. This course traces Jewish-Muslims relations from their origins in early Islam to the present, focusing on the cultural group known as “Sephardim.” Topics include: legal structures for co-existence, the medieval consensus, the rise of Jewish and Arab nationalism, the impact of Zionism, new diasporas of the twentieth century, the Palestine conflict, Sephardim in Israel, and Muslim-Jewish relations in America.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

Themes of African history such as African states and empires, slave trade, relationship of Egypt to the res of Africa, Bantu origins and migrations, and French policy of Assimilation and Association.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

The Second World War from 1931 to 1945 in all of its theaters. Causes, conduct, and consequences of the war including military, political, economic, social, and cultural factors, with special emphasis on battlefield strategy and mobilization of the home front.

Readings:

• Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
• Boehm, A Woman in Berlin
• Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary

When does modernity begin? This course examines European intellectual history from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Through lectures, discussion, and reading of primary sources by authors such as Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, and Rousseau, we will explore the momentous changes that took place in how Europeans sought knowledge of politics, religion, nature, God, and the human condition between 1500 and 1800.

Readings:

• Rousseau, A Discourse of Inequality
• Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditation on First Philosophy
• Voltaire, Candide
• Wooton ed. Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings

Grading: TBA

This course will cover the history of Europe in the first part of the twentieth century, from the 1890s through to the outbreak of World War II. Lectures and the course textbook will examine the broad pattern of the evolution of European societies and the European states in these decades, focusing on political, social, and cultural change. The first few weeks of the course will focus on long-term trends and changes in the decades around 1900. Our understanding of the problems and potentials of European civilization in this period will then serve as a basis for understanding the violent upheavals of the first decades of the twentieth century, from 1914 to 1939. Our readings--in addition to the textbook--will be drawn from primary documents written during the period, and from scholarly articles examining particular aspects of European social and cultural history. The documents will focus on the daily lives of particular Europeans, on key moments of political conflict, and on key ideas that shaped the thinking and expectations of Europeans in this period. These readings will focus on the ways that individual Europeans' lives "fit into" the broader sweep of history and social development, and on ways in which they experienced and thought about moments of crisis in the development of their societies. The articles we will read will present close analysis of particular aspects of the broader trends and grander events discussed in lectures and in the textbook.

Readings: Readings from the course will include a textbook, some scholarly articles by historians, and selections from several autobiographies, from several novels and short stories, from a number of scholarly monographs, and from a number of works of political and social philosophy.

Major social upheavals since 1900 in selected Latin American nations; similarities and differences in cause, course, and consequence.

Readings:TBA

Grading: TBA

This course offers an overview of the political, social and cultural experiences of Mexicans and Mexican Americans within the United States since 1900.  Throughout this century, people of Mexican descent have found themselves valued as laborers in the United States but more rarely considered worthy of first-class citizenship.  Thus, a central task for members of this ethnic group  --women and men alike -- has been defining and defending their place within the United States. To better understand the continual negotiation between this ethnic Mexican margin and the American mainstream, the themes of the course include the malleability of ethnic identity, the struggle for economic and political justice, the construction of Mexican American communities, and the changing significance of the border.

Readings:

• Sterling, Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone
• Rosales, Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican American Struggle for Civil Rights
• Garcia, Blowout!: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice
• Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community

Grading: TBA

This course introduces students to the causes and consequences of the largest and most controversial armed conflict in U.S. history: the Civil War. We will examine Southern and Northern culture, the problem of slavery, the issue of states-rights, the emerging sectional crisis, the war itself, the roles of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, among other key actors, and the difficult process of reuniting the nation.

Readings:

• Gates (ed.), The Classic Slave Narratives
• Shaara, Killer Angels
• McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom
• Wenworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment
• McPherson, Drawn with the Sword

Grading: TBA

An introduction to the wide range of immigrant experiences and cycles of nativism that have shaped American culture in the twentieth century.  From novels, memoirs and films, students will explore how external and internal immigration has created a multicultural society.  We will use a comparative framework to explore the history of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America roughly from the 1880s through 1965.  Themes will include debates in immigration history, community building, acculturation, racial formation, victimization vs. agency, America’s treatment of immigrants, and competing notions of citizenship.

Readings:

• Yezierska, Bread Givers
• Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
• Guilbault, Farmworker’s Daughter
• Bulosan, America is in the Heart
• Kiyama, The Four Immigrants Manga

Grading: TBA

This course focuses on racial formation in America from the Age of Exploration to 1860. Race is a social construction. That is, it is ideology not biology. In this class we will examine how ideas about race have influenced American political, popular, social, and economic culture.

Readings:

• Cave. The Pequot Wars
• Sweet. Bodies Politic
• Rodediger. The Wages of Whiteness
• Litwack. North of Slavery
• Stampp, The Peculiar Institution
• Winthrop, The White Man’s Burden

Grading: Students will write two 5-6 page essays and take an in class final

Spread of the mining kingdom, the range cattle industry, Indian-military affairs, settlement of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain Regions and political organization of the West.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

This course explores aspects of the cultural, social, and intellectual history of China from the Six Dynasties period (beginning 220 A.D.) through the Tang and Song, with special focus on the period from 1000-1260. In this period China came to surpass the rest of the world in economic, social, and cultural development. We examine how foreign influences such as Buddhism changed (and were changed by) indigenous Chinese thought and institutions, and how the economic prosperity and population growth of the Tang and Song periods gave rise to new social structures, philosophical movements, and technological advances. We will also explore China’s interactions with the rest of Asia and beyond, through the silk roads and maritime trade.

Readings:

• Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History of China

Grading: Active class participation, including weekly responses to assigned reading; short assignments including a map exercise, text-analyses, and poetry assignments; a 5-7 page paper based on course readings; midterm and final examinations.

This course examines history of Japan from the birth of the modern Japanese nation in 1868 to the present day.  Throughout the course we shall explore the last 130 years of Japanese experience, which encompasses political upheavals, convulsive social changes, magnificent cultural and intellectual achievements, wars, atrocities, devastation and the economic superpowerdom of recent years.  No previous exposure to Japanese history or culture is required, although some familiarity with basic methodology of historical investigation is likely to be helpful.

WARNING: Some of these materials will feature graphic violence and disturbing subject matter (such as victims of bombings).

Readings:

• Hiratsuka, In the Beginning There was the Sun
• Gordon, A Modern History of Japan
• Dower, Embracing the Defeat
• Fukuzawa, An Outline of a Theory of Civilization
• Hagio, Drunken Dream and Other Stories

This course provides an introduction to the history of modern Korea, the only Humanities-Social Sciences course offered on Korea at UC Davis.  The course surveys political, socioeconomic and cultural developments in the last 130 years of Korean history, from the collapse of the Yi Dynasty (Chosen) Korea to today. Main topics examined in the course include: socioeconomic and political changes in late 19th-century Korea; decline and collapse of the Yi dynasty monarchy; growth of nationalism and reform movements; modernization under Japanese colonialism in the first half of 20th century; decolonization and the Korean War; postwar economic growth and effects of the Cold War; comparison of North and South Korea.
The course requirements include lecture and discussion sections. No prior exposure to East Asian history is necessary, although previous exposure to Chinese or Japanese history may be helpful.

Readings:

• Robinson, Korea’s Twentieth Century Odyssey
• Kang, Under the Black Umbrella
• Se-huai, A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball
• Yongho, Sources of Korean Tradition
• Man-sik, My Innocent Uncle

Grading: The grading will be based on a paper, class participation and examinations.