UC Davis | Department of History

This course presents a survey of European society, politics, and culture from 1350 to 1800. Topics include the Italian and Northern Renaissance, the Protestant reformation, the Catholic counter-reformation, the European witch-hunt, absolutism, the scientific revolution, and the enlightenment. We end with the French Revolution and the collapse of the old regime. Readings will include both primary and secondary sources.

Readings:

• Voltaire. Candide
• Brucker. Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence
• Brown. Immodest Acts
• Wunderli. Peasant Fires
• Machiavelli. The Prince
• McKay. A History of Western Society: From Renaissance to 1815

This introduction to European history will focus on the question of how indignation has influenced European history from the time of the French Revolution in 1789 to today's discussions of whether "Europe" should exist.  We will explore concepts of human rights, social class, race, religion, nation, and others.

Readings:

• Hunt. The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History
• Blaisdell (ed.). Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings
• Hessel. Time for Outrage
• Speilvogel. Western Civilization vol. C
• Charef. Tea in the Harem
• Wiesel. Night

This course examines Latin American history from 1900 to the present. It is the third section of the introductory survey of Latin American history that begins with History 7A (Prehistoric times to 1700), followed by 7B (1700-1900).  Some students in this course will have taken 7A and/or 7B, but those courses are not a prerequisite to this one, and no prior knowledge of Latin America is required to take this course. In addition to providing a general sense of the major events and trends that marked this period, important themes to be covered include: the diversity of struggles to defend or overturn inequalities (racial, economic, political, etc.); the national and international uses of culture as a political force; the processes of developing political consciousness; and the multi-faceted nature of U.S.-Latin American relations.  In addition, we will pay attention to the craft of history by examining primary historical sources, and we will discuss the uses of history in various media.

Readings:

• Meade. A History of Modern Latin America
• Azuela. The Underdogs
• Ramirez. Adios Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution

This is a course in the history of the world since 1850 that will highlight five themes: the global formation of capitalism and industrialism; warfare and techno-politics; the rival ideologies of liberalism, fascism, and communism; nationalism, decolonization and revolutionary struggles; and globalization. In particular, the course aims to help students appreciate the role of non-Europeans in the making of the modern world and will encourage students to think historically about global structures of inequality. Our focus will be on modernity as a process of creative destruction. We will begin with the global world of the 19th century and end with the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring. The emphasis will be on understanding comparisons and connections across multiple societies and histories rather than comprehensive coverage.

Reading:

• Ibrahim. The Committee: A Novel
• Levi. Survival in Auschwitz
• Chen. Dragon’s Village
• De Chungara. Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila
• Tignor. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart vol. C

With 54 countries, over 2,000 languages, and a geographic area larger than the United States, China, and Europe, combined, the defining characteristic of the continent of Africa is its diversity.  This course is a broad introduction to Africa’s diverse past.  We will explore, among other things, the relationship between environment and history, political organizations (including small, acephalous societies, city-states, and large empires), shifting religious orientations, trade systems, technological innovations, cultural influences and transformations, and social (re)organization (by age, gender, ethnicity, race, class, etc.).  This course serves as a foundation for upper division courses in more specialized regional or thematic topics.

Readings:

• Getz. Abina and Important Men: A Graphic Novel
• Northrup. Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450-1850
• Niane. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali
• Gilbert. Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present

This course covers American history from the Euro-American Encounter in 1492 through the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. It examines not only the political master-narrative, but also the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the emerging American nation, and includes the experience of Native Americans, Women and African-Americans, among other groups.

Readings:

• Murrin. Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People vol. 1 to 1877
• Hollitz. Contending Voices, vol. 1
• Klepp. The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley
• Hinks. David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

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

Readings:

• Brinkley. The Unfinished Nation vol. 2
• Wheeler. Discovering the American Past vol. 2
• Flehinger. The 1912 Election and the Power of Progressivism
• Belknap. The Vietnam War on Trial

History 72A is an introduction to the history of early American women—as a group, as individuals, and as members of different classes, races, and ethnic communities. Using the themes of production and reproduction, we will explore both the daily lives of women and the changing concepts of “woman” and “womanhood” over time and region. Through primary sources, scholarly literature and films, we will meet native American traders, accused witches, seduced girls, “true women,” enslaved mothers and western missionaries. The course will pay particular attention to the interactions between groups of women and the significance of gender in determining women’s experiences, using comparisons among groups, individuals, regions, and across time wherever possible.

Readings:

• McLaurin. Celia, a Slave
• Cott. Root of Bitterness
• Rowson. Charlotte Temple
• Karlsen. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman
• Townsend. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma

This course explores the history of historical writing, from its origins in classical Greece to the present. Limited to 15 students.

Readings:

• Evans. Lying About Hitler
• Breisach. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern
• Finlay. The Portable Greek Historians
• Vico. The New Scince
• Burckhardt. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
• Braudel. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World vol. 1
• Foucault. Discipline and Punish
• Morris. Why the West Rules—For Now
• Fritze. Invented Knowledge

History of the Ancient World

Readings: TBA

This seminar will examine criminal justice in early modern England. Students will: read analyses of law and crime, and of the courts, police, and prisons; and examine trials at London's premier court -- the Old Bailey. As all the eighteenth-century criminal trials at the Old Bailey have been put on a web site, students' papers can focus on the insights these trials provide on life in early modern London and on the way in which crime was treated under the common law.

Readings:

• Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900

This course traces Asian American history in the twentieth century through the lived experiences 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:

• Pham. Catfish and Mandala
• Chin. Paper Son: One Man’s Story
• Lahiri. The Namesake
• Lee. Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America
• Scharlin. Philip Vera Cruz. A Personal History
• Takaki. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
• Huang. Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective
• Sone. Nisei Daughter

Readings:

• Clegg. The Price of Liberty
• Hartman. Lose Your Mother
• Asante. Afrocentricity
• Campbell. Middle Passages
• Swedenberg. Memoires of Revolt
• Avishai. The Tragedy of Zionism
• Sand. The Invention of the Jewish People

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 Arts & Humanities requirement.

Readings:

• Desowitz. New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers
• Schlosser. Fast Food Nation
• Kidder. Mountains Beyond Mountains
• Davis. Monster at Our Door

Rise and fall of the Roman Republic and Empire.

Readings:

• M. Rostovtzeff, Rome
• Boardman, The Oxford History of the Roman World
• Nystrom-Spyridakis, Ancient Rome – Documentary Perspectives

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:

• Avishai. The Tragedy of Zionism
• Segev. 1949: The First Israelis
• Oz. In the Land of Israel
• Laqueur. The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict

The Central Middle Ages was a period of intense growth and development, in which many of the greatest medieval achievements – castles, cathedrals, universities, scholastic summas, epic ballads, chivalry, courtly love, and romantic lais – were created. This course will focus on history as an interpretative discipline, through analysis of primary sources and historians’ arguments. One theme will be the peculiar nature of medieval power, which was multi-centered, communal and decentralized among kings, nobles, clerics and others. Competition for ideological and political control of the western Christian church and for the hearts and minds of medieval people will be a second theme. Finally, we will explore the flowering of medieval literature and art in what some historians call the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.” We will read a textbook, an epic ballad, letters between intellectual lovers, a modern biography of a saint, and many shorter primary and secondary sources.

Readings:

• Radice. Lettes of Abelard and Heloise
• Burgess. The Song of Roland
• Jordan. Europe in the High Middle Ages
• Spoto. Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi

In the sixteenth century, you would be executed for throwing dung at a statue of the Virgin Mary. Nowadays, this might be considered offensive, but you will no longer be prosecuted for the capital crime of “blasphemy.” In other words, the definition of crime and the classification of criminals changes over time. In this class we explore when, how, and why this happened from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. We will contrast "real" crimes such as vagrancy and theft with imaginary crimes such as Jewish ritual murder and witchcraft. One segment of the course covers prostitution, infanticide and witchcraft as specifically female crimes. We will examine to what extent it is possible to relate long-term changes in the incidence and prosecution of particular crimes to changes in economy, social structure, government, religion and culture. We will discuss changes in the nature and purposes of punishment in the early modern period, as public rituals of execution and other bloody punishments to the body were replaced by the penalty of imprisonment in the eighteenth century.

Readings:

• Perry. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville
• Fillingham. Foucault for Beginners
• Huppert. After the Black Death
• Goffman. Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity
• Robisheaux. The Last Witch of Langenburg
• Hsia. Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial

This course deals with the myriad ways the memory of genocide has been constructed in the half century since the event. The goal of the course is to teach students how to analyze critically the way memory shapes and sometimes distorts our images of the past, especially when that past involves a collective trauma that may defy representation. The course is interdisciplinary in nature, involving varied texts from memoirs, literature, film, architecture and philosophy.

Readings:

• Appelfeld. Badenheim 1939
• Albahari. Gotz and Meyer
• Spiegelman. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale vol. 1 and 2
• Loshitzky. Spielberg’s Holocaust
• Wiesel. Night

This course will cover the interrelations among philosophy, science, economics, politics, and art. Topics will include the Enlightenment; Romanticism; Modernity and Aestheticism.

Readings:

• Goethe. Faust: Part One
• Mill. Utilitarianism and Other Essays
• Bronte. Wuthering Heights
• Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling
• Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto
• Flaubert. Three Tales
• Dostoevsky. Notes from the Underground
• Baudelaire. The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen

This course offers an overview of the experiences of Spanish-speaking people and their relations with others from the sixteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth within the region that became the U.S. Southwest. The two-part theme of this course is conquest and responses to conquest. The course begins with the conquest of the Aztec kingdom in 1519. It then examines the expeditions north of conquistadores, colonists and missionaries, the construction of a colonial society in the northern reaches of Spanish America, and the changes wrought upon that society as a result of Mexican independence.

The second half of the course is devoted to studying the repercussions of a second conquest, that of the United States over half the national territory of Mexico. The arrival of Anglo Americans and their institutions dramatically altered the lives of Mexican nationals, including native people, living within the ceded territory. The class will study the political legacy of war, the impact of U.S-style capitalism upon the former Mexican frontier, and the social strategies adopted by the ethnic Mexican population in the face of sweeping political and economic change.  We will also explore the historical memory of these events and their relevance to more recent historical trends.

Readings:

• Gomez. Manifest Destinies
• Townsend. Malintzin’s Choices
• Monroy. Thrown Among Strangers
• Weber. The Spanish Frontier in North America: Brief Edition

TBA

Readings:

• Frey. Water from the Rock
• Holton. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
• Nash. The Unknown American Revolution
• Fox. Sweet Land of Liberty
• Hartigan-O’Connor. The Ties that Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America

This course explores the relationships between peoples and environments in American history, focusing on the roles of resources (natural and human), identity, power relations, and geography in order to understand relationships between US society and the natural environment, as well as the development of unequal access to environmental resources. We will explore the theoretical and material implications of the different ways in which nature has been imagined in US society. The course will consider ideas about nature circulated by American transcendentalists, conservationists, and explorers, as well as nature as understood by African American sharecroppers, Native tribes in the Southwest, and migrant laborers in California’s Central Valley. Taking these often-­divergent understandings of nature into account, students will consider what happens when oppositional notions of nature come into conflict in US history. Engaging a range of interdisciplinary texts and historical accounts, students will be challenged to think through contemporary problems (and potentially, solutions) for environmentalism and environmental justice.

Readings:

• Cronon. Chanes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
• Warren. American Environmental History
• Weisiger. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country
• McKibbon. The End of Nature

Between the Civil War and the First World War, the US became the nation we know today: the world's preeminent economic powerhouse, with enviable military capacity, a nation of immigrants, capable of containing the old South and the new West in its vision of itself. It was also a nation beset by troubles, including a dire economic collapse and corruption of government. The course examines how the nation grew into its new capacities and dealt with its divisions and failing.

Readings:

• Brandeis. Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It
• Fitzpatrick. Muckraking: Three Landmark Articles
• McDonald. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
• Lippmann. Drift and Mastery

This course will explore the history of the United States during one of its most dynamic periods.  During these years, the United States experienced unprecedented economic prosperity and depression, as well as two world wars.  America solidified its position as the premier economic power in the world, while becoming the world’s strongest military force.  The United States also experienced great demographic shifts.  The mass movement of European immigrants into this country ended, while the mass movement of African Americans from the South to the North commenced.  The labor movement, at first representing only a small portion of American workers, became a powerful economic and political force by 1945, achieving a revolution in civil rights for workers.  Women won voting rights during this period and struggled to define further their rights and position in society during war and peace.  Large movements of the political right and left flourished, as they all sought to define the meaning of America.

How did Americans come to define their rights and the rights of others?  Who exercised political power in this period?  How effective were the institutions of this nation in dealing with the profound changes and upheavals that rocked the country?  These are some of the questions we will explore in this course.

Readings:

• Brinkley. Unfinished Nation vol. 2
• Dower. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
• Rauchway. Blessed Among Nations
• Steinbeck. In Dubious Battle
• Boyle. Arc of Justice

Beginning with the emergence of the Ghost Dance in 1889, this course traces the history of indigenous social movements in North America, turning an analytic eye to the ways in which indigenous resistance has imagined decolonization, and what form indigenous resistance has taken in the direction of decolonization. Traversing histories and geographies, we will trace the sexual, gender, and class politics of social movements ranging from the Ghost Dances, to the work of the American Indian Movement and Women of All Red Nations, to contemporary incarnations of indigenous politics of resistance in California and the US Southwest.

Readings:

• Johnson. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk
• Wilson. For Indigenous Eyes Only
• Silva. Aloha Betrayed
• Frank. Defying the Odds

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 War
• Sweet. Bodies Politic
• Rodediger. The Wages of Whiteness
• Gates. The Classic Slave Narrative
• Litwack. North of Slavery

This course provides a comprehensive overview of California history from the pre-Columbian period to the present, structured around the twin themes of how diverse individuals, groups, empires, and nations have struggled to control and define the geographic space called California, and the myths and realities that have shaped the lives of Californians. Topics include: experiences of California Indians, the political economy of the Spanish and Mexican period, effects of the Gold Rush, industrialization, race relations, immigration, agricultural development, progressive-era politics and reform, environmental battles, urbanization and suburban sprawl, and the creation of a distinctive regional culture in the country’s most diverse and populous state today.

Readings:

• Steinbeck. Harvest Gypsies
• De la Perouse. Life in a California Mission: Monterey in 1786
• Smith. Twilight: Los Angeles 1992
• Rice. The Elusive Eden: A New History of California

Middle Eastern history focusing on Safavid Empire (present-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, up to Georgia), beginning with the origins of the dynasty as a powerful religious family, to the establishment of the Empire, focusing on Social, Religious, Economic, and Political History.

Readings: TBA

This course introduces late imperial Chinese history, from the Ming (1368-1644) to the middle of the Qing period (1644-c.1820). It will focus on the important historical issues of those centuries, including economic development and commercial expansion, ethnic conflict and ethnic consciousness, family and gender relations, population growth and social mobility, as well as the empire’s changing position in the global economy and polity. The goal for this class is to show the social transformations and characteristics during these two dynasties that some define as “early modern China”. The class will combine lecture and discussion on primary sources including imperial documents, local archives, scholars’ writing, literature, material objects, and visual arts. As an upper-division class, students will also be trained to conduct historical research and practice academic writing on the historical issues and problems of the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Readings:

• Huang. 1587: A Year of No Significance (Note: before you purchase this book, please check the pagination to make sure you have a complete edition; some printings of the book omit key chapters and still circulate in the used book market)
• Kuhn. Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1786