This course presents an overview of the major questions of European history from the late 18th century to the present.  In the first part of the course, we’ll investigate the transformation of European culture, society, and politics in the aftermath of the French and Industrial Revolutions; topics covered will include the tensions among conservatism, liberalism, and socialism; industrialization; nationalism; and imperialism.  In the second, focusing on the 20th century, we’ll turn to the problems an increasingly mobile and diverse society confronted in world wars hot and cold, while tracing the gradual emergence of a new European order.

Throughout the course, we’ll be interested in comparisons and trends across the European continent.

Readings:

•           Hunt et al, The Making of the West, volume C

•           Lualdi, Sources of the Making of the West, volume II (packaged free with textbook)

•           Dickens, Hard Times

•           Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

•           Spiegelman, The Complete Maus

•           Additional primary and secondary source readings available on Smartsite

Grading/Assignments:  essay-based midterm and final exams; two short (4-5 pp.) primary source papers.  In lieu of quizzes, students will also define key terms on a collaborative online forum four times during the quarter.

This course is a survey of the major social, economic, political, and cultural transformations in the Middle East from the rise of Islam (c. 600 CE) to the present.  Some of the topics covered are Muhammad and the Qur'an, the formation of Islamic orthodoxy, the Abbasid Empire, the formation of regional dynasties, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, the Ottoman Empire, the colonial period, nationalism, the formation of the modern Middle Eastern states, the Islamic political movements, the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, the invasion of Iraq, and the Arab Spring. GE credit: ArtHum or SocSci, Div, Wrt | AH or SS, WC, WE.

Readings:

• Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Lawrence Davidson, A Concise History of the Middle East, tenth edition (Boulder: Westview, 2012).
• In addition, there will be a course reader to be purchased at Copyland (231 G St, Suite 6; 756-2679).

Grading: First paper (10%); second paper (15 %); third paper (20 %); final exam (25 %); section participation (20 %); lecture participation (10 %).

This is an introductory course to the history of Spanish and Portuguese America from the late pre-Columbian period through the initial phase and consolidation of a colonial regime (circa 1700). The lectures, readings, and discussion sections offer a broad overview of the indigenous roots and realities of the hemisphere, the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of this region, and the emergence of colonial regimes in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. It will explore the contrasting experiences of Indians, Africans, and Europeans and their mixed descendants in this evolving colonial world. Particular attention is devoted to the disruptions and continuities in the major indigenous civilizations of the continent, colonialism, racial mixture and race relations, gender, labor systems, identity, religion and spirituality, and environmental transformation. This is the beginning of a three-course sequence devoted to the history of Latin America. Each course can be taken independently.

Readings:         TBA

Grading:           TBA

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, a sourcebook of primary source documents, and additional primary source documents.

Grading: 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.

This is a survey of the world from pre-history 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 to be mindful of continuities and differences across human societies. We will concentrate on broad themes as opposed to detail narrative of thousands of 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

Grading: TBA

“World History, 1350-1850” is an introduction to the large-scale structures and processes that transformed the world between the mid-fourteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. These five centuries marked an era in which cross-cultural contacts between the peoples of the world increased dramatically, laying the foundations for today’s global connectedness. We will explore these interactions and their effects on peoples and cultures around the world. Because this course is truly global, coverage cannot be comprehensive. Instead, we will take a topical and chronological approach, focusing in major events and trends through the broad themes of networks, such as ocean systems, cultural zones, empires, and long-distance trade; and cross-cultural interaction, including global religions, colonial and creole cultures, and the interplay between tradition and change. Together, the lectures, readings, discussions, and assignments will explore these themes at both the macro and micro levels, considering global trends and changes and their effects at the regional and local levels. Readings include a textbook, primary source documents, and a selection of short monographs.

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:

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

Grading: TBA

The experience of the American people from the Civil War to the War on Terror

Readings:

• Hull and Hoffer, Roe vs. Wade
• Richards, Sodomy Cases
• Fisher, Nazi Saboteurs
• Goldman, Reconstruction and Black Suffrage
• Papke, Pullman Case

Grading: TBA

Witchcraft and Magic in Early Modern Europe

This class explores practices of witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe. About 60,000 people, 85% of them women, perished in the European witch-hunt, mostly in the century between 1560 and 1660. We explore the particular set of circumstances that encouraged these “burning times” in the era of the baroque. Most victims of the witch-hunt were older, post-menopausal woman. What were the gender stereotypes that led to this particular construction of the witch?  Children played a problematic role in the witch-hunts. Witchcraft often served as an explanation for high infant mortality, and children featured prominently among the accusers of witches. But after 1680, children took on a new role: as perpetrators of witchcraft. We will explore the paradox that on the eve of the Enlightenment, the so-called “Age of the Child” that recognized childhood as a special stage of life that needed to be protected and nurtured, children were accused of—and executed—for witchcraft more than ever before.  Finally, we ask when, how, and why the witch-hunts ended. People didn’t stop believing in witchcraft—why did they stop burning witches?

Reading: TBA

Grading: TBA

Boxers, Bandits, and Rebels: State, Society and Popular Violence in China

The eighteenth century was perhaps the high water mark of the Chinese dynastic system. This period saw prolonged peace, massive and unprecedented territorial expansion, economic and demographic growth as well as cultural and artistic advancement. In the 19^th century, long simmering demographic and ecological pressures placed increasing strain on Qing society and social tensions increased and flared violently. By mid-century, China was embroiled in the Taiping Rebellion and descended into history’s largest civil war, one claiming the lives of an estimated 20 million Chinese and profoundly altering the landscape and possibilities of late Qing China.

Less than fifty years later, north China was boiling with the violent uprising of the Boxers United in Righteousness who attacked both foreign missionaries and their Chinese converts. Their cause briefly taken up by the Qing throne, the Boxers became the leading edge of Chinese anti-imperialism. These attacks by ordinary Chinese led to a vicious punitive expedition by Western forces against the Qing and its subjects.

In the first decades of the 20^th century, the Republic of China turned into a “bandit world.” The dissolution of central state authority that began in the mid-nineteenth century reached its apex and opened China to roving gangs of bandits.

These three episodes in Chinese history weave a narrative of popular violence and its relation to the state. If the Taipings were clearly rebellion (if not revolution) against the state, then the Boxers were perhaps a rebellion for the state, and the bandits a rebellion without a state. In all three of these cases, we will examine the violent choices made by common people. We will employ a variety of primary sources such as oral histories, newspapers, poetry, fiction, legal records, official proclamations and government communication, and consider their strengths and shortcomings.

Readings:

• Hong Xiuquan’s “Ten Commandments,” 1852, and “The Ode for Youth,” 1853
• “An Anti-Manchu Declaration” 1852
• Selections from The Book on the Principles of the Heavenly Nature
• Selection from The Land System of the Heavenly Dynasty
• The Tian Wang’s Manifesto to the Foreign Brothers
• Zeng Guofan: “A Proclamation Against the Bandits of Guangdong and Guanxi,” 1854
• The Confession of Shi Dakai
• British Government Communication and English and American Missionary Reports
• Harvey James Howard’s Ten Weeks with Chinese Bandits (1926)
• Paul Cohen: History in Three Keys: the Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997)
• Joseph Esherick: The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (1987)

Grading: Active participation in discussion and close reading of all assigned materials are a major part of the grade. Additional assignments include a map quiz; short reading responses; and a final paper.

Dictatorship and the Politics of Memory in South America

This course will examine the late 20th century history of dictatorship in South America, with a special emphasis on Argentina and Chile.  The first half of the class will investigate the rise of these regimes, exploring how and why they came about, who supported and opposed them, and what explains their turn to  institutionalized state repression and widespread violations of human rights.  In the second half of the course we will discuss the post-regime societies that resulted, focusing on collective efforts to come to terms with this violent past, efforts that gave rise to a "“politics of memory."”  Besides gaining an historical understanding of this important period in Latin America, you will also engage with recent theoretical issues regarding testimonial literature, oral history and memory studies.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

The Politics of Memory

This seminar will introduce students to the topic of "historical" (or "collective") memory, that is, how a culture or community remembers important events or shared experiences from its past.  In other words, we will study how and why significant historical moments remain a vital part of the present in the United States, and what kinds of institutions mediate our recollections.  To do this, we will discuss three locations and/or kinds of texts that are often subject to contests over memory or act as arbiters of how we recall the past:  historical commemorations and reenactments; memorials, museums, and historic sites; and historical documentary and fiction films.  This course will be organized around three events that have been especially important in creating American identity and thus subject to conflicts over their memory:  the Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust.  This course assumes no previous experience with the topic of memory, and thus is open to all interested students.  That said, this is a history seminar, designed for majors in the discipline, and therefore will be particularly challenging for non-majors.

Readings: The reading load will be very heavy in this course.

• David Blight, Race and Reunion
• Michael Hogan (ed.), Hiroshima in History and Memory
• Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic
• Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory
• Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt (eds.), History Wars
• Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life

Grading: This course will be writing intensive. You will be expected to write weekly 1-page response papers, due at the beginning class, for the assigned readings.  At the end of the quarter, you will also have to complete a longer paper of 12-15 pages.  There will be no exams in this course, but there may be other minor assignments. In-Class Performance: 40%, Final Paper: 40%, Weekly Papers and Questions: 20%

American Leadership in Depression and War: The United States in the Roosevelt Administration

Readings:

• Hofstadter, American Political Tradition
• Robinson, By Order of the President
• Leuchtenburg, In The Shadow of FDR
• Brinkley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
• Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks
• Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days
• Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances
• Clarke, Last Thousand Days of British Empire
• Katznelson, Fear Itself
• Phillips, This Land, This Nation
• Rauchway, The Great Depression and the New Deal

Grading:  TBA

This course will provide an overview of the environmental history of the world and an analysis of environmental change over time. Environmental history encompasses the history of environmental change and also the history of how human perceptions and manipulations of nature have changed over time. Environmental history is an inherently interdisciplinary topic with a complex subject matter. It differs in several ways from standard approaches to historical study and this diversity, including some basic earth science material, will be apparent from our readings and lectures. By learning how much the environment has changed due to natural and human forces over the last 10,000 years, we will be better able to understand, and hopefully help to solve, the pressing environmental problems we face today. Fulfills GE SocSci and Art Hum. This is not a writing course.

Readings:

•    Arnold, David. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion.
•    McNeill, John. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World.
•    Articles and book chapters will compliment the main texts.

Grading: Students will be evaluated based on their performance in class discussions and exams and quizzes that include short essays, multiple choice

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. These 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. This is not a writing course.

Readings:

•    Desowitz. New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers
•    Schlosser. Fast Food Nation
•    Kidder. Mountains Beyond Mountains
•    Guthman. Weighin In.
•    Articles and book chapters will compliment the main texts.

Grading: Students will be evaluated based on their performance in class discussions and exams and quizzes that include short essays, multiple choice and true false questions. Other assignments may be added.

The Ancient Near East from the Sumerian city-states 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 Among Muslims: The History and Cultures of “Sephardim”

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:

• Sasson Somekh, Baghdad Yesterday
• Albert Memmi, Pillar of Salt
  Andre Aciman, Alexandria, Capitol of Memory
• Orit Bashkin, The New Babylonians
• Salim Tamari, Mountains Against the Sea

Grading: TBA

Topics include the rise and fall of utopian Zionism, the century-long struggle between Jews and Arabs, the development of modern Hebrew culture, the conflict between religious and secular Jews, and the nature of Israel's multicultural society.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

History of North Africa in the Modern World

The history of the modern Maghrib (North Africa) has been deeply marked by the experience of colonization. For many years, critical scholarship on the colonial Maghrib focused on big events, “great men,” and political outcomes; in so doing, it often reduced a complex encounter into a series of simple oppositions: colonizer/colonized, white/black, European/native. More recent scholarship pays greater attention to the bit actors, the women and minorities, and the marginal figures that made “history from below,” generating fresh questions for historical discussion: How did Maghribis regard their colonial masters, and how did Europeans in turn restructure their ideas about the  native “Other” over the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries?  How did Maghribi culture influence society in the metropole?  What role did language and literature play in shaping colonial and indigenous mentalities?  What institutions and practices introduced by foreign rule had a lasting effect on post-independence regimes?  What roles do memory and forgetting play in writing the contemporary history of the region?  Proceeding more or less chronologically, each week we shall engage with a different problem relating to the North African colonial experience and its aftermath.  Film and fiction will give us a “feel” for how individuals traversed this long moment in Maghribi history.

Readings:

• Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery
• Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized
• Mu’ammar al-Gathafi  (Qaddafi)   The Green Book
• Muhammad al-Saffar, Dusorienting Encounters
• Tahar Ben Jelloun, This Blinding Absence of Light
• Susan Slyomovics, The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco

Grading:           TBA

“European History During the Renaissance and Reformation” explores the history of western Europe between the late fifteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, a complex period that marked the turn from the medieval to the modern world. This course will explore this slow shift and the ideas and events which characterized it, devoting particular attention to changing concepts of community and to links between religious ideas and social, political, and cultural change. Topics include humanism, European expansion in the Americas and beyond, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, social status and gender roles, and the development of the modern state. Readings include a textbook, primary source documents, and a selection of short monographs.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

This course traces the emergence of the Soviet Union as a socialist system, its rise to global prominence, and its eventual decline and collapse.  We will pay particular attention to the multi-ethnic nature of the Soviet state – taking seriously the changing relationship of the union as a whole with its component republics.

Other key topics will include the tension between the ideals and outcomes of the October Revolution; the relationship between Leninism and Stalinism; the extent to which the USSR may be described as a “totalitarian” state; and the legacy of the Soviet era in both the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet states.

Readings:

•           Riasanovsky and Steinberg, A History of Russia, 8th ed.

•           Suny, The Structure of Soviet History

•           Kotkin, Armageddon Averted

•           Mochulsky, Gulag Boss:  A Soviet Memoir

•           Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years

•           Additional primary and secondary source readings available on SmartSite

Grading/Assignments:  essay-based midterm and final exams; three response papers (2-3 pp.); map quiz; primary source-based final research paper (10 pp.)

Analysis of arguments about the transformation of a kingdom famed as the most chaotic in Europe into the world's pre-eminent power.

Readings:

• Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers. Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords
• Trevelyan, George M. The English Revolution
• Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost
• Plumb, J.H. The Growth of Political Stability
• Arnstein, W. and Willcox. W.B. Age of Aristocracy
• J. Swift, Gulliver's Travels
  There will also be other online readings.
  
  

Grading: 20% Midterm; 40% Essay; 40% Final. The class will also give students opportunities to participate in discussion. Participation is not required, but it is acknowledged in the grading as follows: if the student's grade for discussion is higher than the student's grade for all the written work, then the student's final grade will be based on 70% of the grade for written work and 30% of the grade for discussion.

This course examines the history of Brazil from the 16^th century to the present.  Main themes include: the construction of a colonial society; the formation of the Brazilian nation-state; the multiple and shifting meanings of race; the various forms of political expression used by different groups; and social and cultural responses to dictatorship.  In addition, we will pay attention to the craft of history by examining primary historical sources, including non-textual sources such as film and music.

Reading: TBA

Grading: TBA

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

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

This course examines the European colonization of North America after 1492 until approximately 1760.  We will explore the interaction of European colonists with the native inhabitants of North America and with enslaved Africans.  We will investigate the remaking of the North American landscape and demography by the invasion of European peoples, plants, and domesticated livestock.  These colonial encounters created a distinctive, multi-racial and multi-cultural society, whose legacies continue to shape the United States and Canada.

Reading:

• Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin, 2001)
• Kirsten Fischer and Eric Hinderaker, eds., Colonial American  History (Malden: Blackwell, 2002)
  
  

Grading: There will be a paper built in two installments, an hour exam, a final exam, and class participation.

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, Classic Slave Narratives
• Shaara, Killer Angels
• McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom
• Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment
• McPherson, Drawn with the Sword

Grading: TBA

This course examines the history of the United States from the end of the Second World War to the present.  We’ll examine social movements (civil rights, feminism, black power, gay rights, environmentalism, the New Right); economic changes; the Cold War and its domestic effects; the growth of executive power; political realignments; and post-Cold War foreign policy.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

Study of social and cultural forces in American society in the twentieth century with emphasis on social structure, work and leisure, socialization and the family, social reform movements and changes in cultural values.

Readings: TBA

Grading: TBA

History of black people in the United States from the African background to the Civil War.

Readings:

• Louis Gates, Henry, Classic Slave Narratives
• Lepore, Jill, King Phillips War
• Hinks, Peter, David Walker’s Appeal
• Johnson, Michael, Black Masters
• Sparks, Randy, Two Princes of Calabar
• Litwack, Leon, North of Slavery

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 (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties, with special focus on the period from 900-1200. 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.

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.

Patterns and problems of Chinese life traced through the Ming and Qing dynasties (c. 1500-1800). In the sixteenth century, when Europeans first reached the far eastern shores of Eurasia, the Ming Empire was one of the most populous, urbanized, economically advanced, and culturally sophisticated societies in the world. By the early twentieth century, that status quo had been turned on its head.  European and American steamships now dominated the Pacific while China was in the throes of social and political upheaval. Using documents, fiction, art, architecture, and selected scholarly writings, we will try to understand the historical dynamics of this enormous change.

Grading: Assignments include a map quiz, short response papers, in-class midterm, and final exam.

Modern Iran from the mid-19th century to the present. Themes include the legacy of imperialism, cultural renaissance, the World Wars, nationalism, modernization, Islamic revival, gender, revolutionary movements, politics of oil and war.

Reading: TBA

Grading: TBA