History

A survey of the history of ancient Egypt from the first appearance of the state to the conquest of the country by Alexander of Macedon, with emphasis of the political history, but also with attention to the cultural, social, and economic developments.

This course examines the history of the Roman Empire from the formation of the Roman monarchy in 753 BCE to the collapse of the Western Empire in 476 CE. At the heart of the class is a single question: how did the Roman Empire come to be, and why did it last for so long? We will trace the rise and fall of the Republic, the extension of its power beyond Italy, and the spread of Christianity. Epic poetry, annalistic accounts, coins, papyri, inscriptions, and sculpture will illuminate major figures like Cleopatra, and features of daily life like Roman law and religion. The destructive mechanics by which Rome sustained itself--war, slavery, and environmental degradation--will receive attention, too, with the aim of producing a holistic understanding this empire.  Discussion Section Required.

Emergence of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary mass political movements; European industrialization, nationalism, and imperialism; 20th-century world wars, the Great Depression, and Fascism.

Survey of African history from the 18th century to the contemporary period. We will explore six major themes in African History: Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World, Colonialism in Africa, the 1940s, Nationalism and Independence Movements, Post-Colonialism in Africa, and Issues in the Making of Contemporary Africa.

This course is designed to introduce students to the study of premodern history, with a substantive focus on the variety of cultures flourishing across the globe 1000 years ago.  Methodologically, the course will emphasize the variety of primary sources historians use to reconstruct those cultures, the various approaches taken by the discipline of history (and neighboring disciplines) in analyzing those sources, and the particular challenges and pleasures of studying a generally “source poor” period. The course queries the concepts of “global history” and “world history” as applied to the “middle millennium” (corresponding to Europe’s “medieval history”), by exploring approaches that privilege connection, comparison, combination, correlation, or coverage.

Required zero-credit/ungraded discussion for The Year 1000: A World History lecture (HIST UN1942). Discussion section day & times to be determined.

Required zero-credit/ungraded discussion for The Year 1000: A World History lecture (HIST UN1942). Discussion section day & times to be determined.

Required zero-credit/ungraded discussion for The Year 1000: A World History lecture (HIST UN1942). Discussion section day & times to be determined.

Required zero-credit/ungraded discussion for The Year 1000: A World History lecture (HIST UN1942). Discussion section day & times to be determined.

This course will examine key cultural, political, and religious developments in early modern Western Europe (c. 1500-1800) using the lens of print technology and culture as entry point. From the Reformation of Luther, to the libelles of pre-revolutionary France, from unlocking the mysteries of the human body to those of the heavens, from humanist culture to the arrival of the novel, no important aspect of European culture in the early modern centuries can be understood without taking into account the role of print. Its material aspects, its marketing and distribution channels, and its creation of new readers and new “republics” form the contours of this course.

This lecture course examines the social, cultural, and legal history of witchcraft, magic, and the occult throughout European history. We will examine the values and attitudes that have influenced beliefs about witchcraft and the supernatural, both historically and in the present day, using both primary and secondary sources. This course will pay specific attention to the role of gender and sexuality in the history of witchcraft, as the vast majority of individuals charged in the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were indeed women. We will also study accusations of witchcraft, breaking down the power dynamics and assumptions at play behind the witch trials, and the impacts of these trials on gender relations in European society. This class will track the intersections of magic and science throughout the early-modern period, and the reconciliation of belief systems during the Enlightenment. We will carry our analysis into the modern period, touching on Victorian spiritualism and mysticism, McCarthyism in the United States, and contemporary goddess worship. We will conclude the semester with an investigation into the role of witchcraft in discussions of gender, race, and sexuality in popular culture.

An introductory survey of the history of Russia, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union over the last two centuries. Russia’s role on the European continent, intellectual movements, unfree labor and emancipation, economic growth and social change, and finally the great revolutions of 1905 and 1917 define the “long nineteenth century.” The second half of the course turns to the tumultuous twentieth century: cultural experiments of the 1920s, Stalinism, World War II, and the new society of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Finally, a look at very recent history since the East European revolutions of 1989-91. This is primarily a course on the domestic history of Russia and the USSR, but with some attention to foreign policy and Russia’s role in the world.

This course will offer a survey of French history from the Wars of Religion to the Revolution, when the kingdom was the predominant power in Europe. Topics to be addressed include the rise of the Bourbon monarchy, the crystallization of absolutism as a political theology, the spectacular rise and collapse of John Law’s financial system, the emergence of the philosophe movement during the Enlightenment, and the gradual de-legitimation of royal power through its association with despotism. Thematically, the course will focus on shifting logics of representation—that is, the means by which political, economic, and religious power was not only reflected, but also generated and projected, through a range of interrelated practices that include Catholic liturgy, courtly protocols, aristocratic codes of honor, financial experimentation, and the critical styles of thinking and reading inculcated by the nascent public sphere.

What was Fascism? What kind of appeal did authoritarianism and dictatorship have in interwar Europe? How did the Fascist “New Order” challenge liberal democracies and why did it fail in World War II? What was the common denominator of Fascist movements across Europe, and in particular in Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, culminating in Nazi Germany?

This class examines the history of Fascism as an ideology, constellation of political movements, and authoritarian regimes that aimed at controlling the modernization of European societies in the interwar period. Thus, the course focuses in particular on the relationship between politics, science and society to investigate how Fascism envisioned the modernity of new technologies, new social norms, and new political norms. The class will also explore Fascism’s imperialist goals, such as the calls for national renewal, the engineering of a new race, and the creation of a new world order.

This course offers a survey of the political history of contemporary Africa, from independence to the present day, with a focus on the states and societies south of the Sahara. We will use the tools of historians to study African political life: who held political power; how they wielded it and to what ends; and what kinds of opposition they faced. An important sub-theme involves American policy and actions, including those of civil society organizations, vis-à-vis African nation-states.

April 30, 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Upon the semicentennial, this special edition lecture course will reflect on the half century of scholarship and art to examine war’s history, including its origins, evolution, and conclusion, and assess its legacies today. Rather than just view the war as an event in American or Vietnamese history, this course will examine the war from a multitude of perspectives by inviting special lecturers, analyzing primary documents, dissecting novels and memoirs, screening war films, and drawing from the rich historiography of that oft-studied war. Throughout this course, we will ask questions that continue to elicit fierce debate: What brought the United States and Vietnam to war? What impact did the war have on North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and American politics? How did decisions made in the corridors of power on both sides of the Pacific affect everyday people on the battlefronts and homefronts? Why did it end the way it did? What lessons can we draw from the Vietnam War?

Attendance and participation in lectures and weekly discussion sections is mandatory. All the readings and episodes are available online through Butler Library (CLIO) or Canvas (C).  

The objectives of this course are: to gain familiarity with the major themes of New York History since 1898, to learn to think historically, and to learn to think and write critically about arguments that underlie historical interpretation. We will also examine and analyze the systems and structures--of race and class--that have shaped life in New York, while seeking to understand how social groups have pursued change inside and outside of such structures

This course examines major themes in U.S. intellectual history since the Civil War. Among other topics, we will examine the public role of intellectuals; the modern liberal-progressive tradition and its radical and conservative critics; the uneasy status of religion ina secular culture; cultural radicalism and feminism; critiques of corporate capitalism and consumer culture; the response of intellectuals to hot and cold wars, the Great Depression, and the upheavals of the 1960s. Fields(s): US

This lecture explores major topics in modern American history through an examination of the American film industry and some of its most popular films and stars. It begins with the emergence of “Hollywood” as an industry and a place in the wake of WWI and ends with the rise of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ in the 1970s and its treatment of the 1960s and the Vietnam War. For much of this period, Hollywood’s films were not protected free speech, making movies and stars peculiarly reflective of, and vulnerable to, changes in broader cultural and political dynamics. Students will become familiar with Hollywood’s institutional history over this half-century in order to understand the forces, both internal and external, that have shaped the presentation of what Americans do and don’t see on screens and to become skilled interpreters of American history at the movies.

This course will survey a century of Mexican history that oscillated between an authoritarian regime (Porfirio Díaz’s presidency, 1876-1911), a massive revolutionary upheaval (1911-1920), the construction of a single-party, corporatist regime that became a model of stability and economic success (that of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional), and a complex transition to democracy (culminated in the July 2000 presidential elections but, one might argue, still ongoing).

Politics will be defined in broad terms. Lectures and readings will consider social and cultural processes from diverse perspectives. Topics will include: migration and population growth; economic expansion and stagnation; urban history, crime and punishment; gender, women and families; elite and popular culture; labor, agrarian reform; the left, electoral and armed insurgency; relations with the United States and other countries of Latin America. Local and regional perspectives will be offered as an alternative against prevailing state-centered, national narratives. Combining thematic and chronological lectures and discussion of primary sources, the course will examine the most exciting recent literature on Mexican society, culture, and politics.

Discussion of primary sources will be an important component of this course. Classes will combine lecture and discussion of historical contents with discussion of primary documents. These documents will include texts (political manifestos, essays, letters, testimonies, legislation, literature) as well as movies, music and visual records (mostly photography and painting). Discussions sections will also use those documents to expand on topics presented in the lectures and the required readings.

Examines immigrations to Latin America from Europe, Africa, and Asia and the resulting multiracial societies; and emigration from Latin America and the formation of Latino communities in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. Analyzes the socioeconomic and discursive-cognitive construction of ethno-racial identities and hierarchies, and current debates about immigration and citizenship.

This is the discussion section for HIST BC2699: Latin American Civilization II. 

This is the discussion section for HIST BC2699: Latin American Civilization II. 

This is the discussion section for HIST BC2699: Latin American Civilization II. 

This course is intended to offer a survey of the history of a complex and vast region through two centuries. In order to balance the specificity of particular histories and larger processes common to Latin America, units will often start with a general presentation of the main questions and will be followed by lectures devoted to specific countries, regions, or themes. We will look closely at the formation of class and ethnic identities, the struggle around state formation, and the links between Latin America and other regions of the world. We will stress the local dimension of these processes: the specific actors, institutions and experiences that shaped the diversity and commonalities of Latin American societies. The assignments, discussion sections, and lectures are intended to introduce students to the key conceptual problems and the most innovative historical research on the region and to encourage their own critical reading of Latin American history. 

“The Ottoman Empire and the West” is a course designed to familiarize undergraduate students with the major developments concerning the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the West throughout the ‘long’ nineteenth century, roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The course will adopt a predominantly chronological structure but will address a wide range of themes, from politics and ideology to economics and diplomacy, and from religion and culture to gender and orientalism.

This course will familiarize students with major debates around questions in the study of diaspora and migration while providing a sense of their interlinkages with large scale socio-political processes such as the globalization of labor, the formation of social hierarchies, as well as movements for survival and belonging.

Students who complete this course will learn how to:

1) Use and evaluate primary materials through critical reading and interpretation
2) Conduct close readings of key texts in multimedia formats (posters and ephemera, digital archives, art and cultural production, manifestos, etc.)
3) Evaluate divergent perspectives and representations by combining historical accounts with memory and personal narratives
4) Adopt methods of public outreach and neighborhood ethnography to understand the imprint of the past on the present
5) Present arguments cogently and logically in writing and speaking, including through collaborative learning and presentation

Globalization emerged as a concept in the 1990s to describe the various supranational forces that shape the contemporary world. Its history, however, is much older, and it encompasses major historical developments such as the formation and global spread of empires, of trade and capitalism, slavery, and migratory movements, as well as environmental and ecological issues. Processes of globalization and deglobalization affect central categories with which to interpret social, political and economic dynamics such as sovereignty, hegemony, and inequality.

This course will offer students the critical instruments to discuss globalizing dynamics and how they have affected human societies historically. We will proceed both thematically and chronologically, to develop the analytical instruments to understand how various dimensions of globalization emerged and transformed over time, as well as the different interpretations that scholars have offered to interpret them.

Economic inequality characterizes virtually every human society, informing deep social dynamics. And yet scholars and lay people alike hold vastly differing opinions about the effects that inequality has on the social fabric, and the need to combat it. The question of how wealth and income are distributed among the members of a national community as well as among nations has acquired center stage in analyses about fundamental issues such as the causes of the progress and decline of societies and the dynamics of globalization. Inequality issues are at the heart of discussions about international economic relations, transnational phenomena such as migrations and the domestic economic platforms of political parties.

This course will provide students with the critical instruments with which to analyze the main interpretations of economic inequality from the eighteenth century to the present. We will read and discuss authors who have addressed the question of inequality and distribution: how did they frame the issue? What visions of society emerged from their analyses? We will see how the concept of inequality has changed historically, how different dimensions (e.g., national and international) have appeared and disappeared, and how visions of national, international and global inequality inform debates about the foundational elements of the social compact.

Between the mid-third century BCE and mid-second century BCE, Rome rapidly acquired a Mediterranean empire consisting of territories that it divided into administrative units called provinces. Through the examination of documentary and literary sources, and art and archaeology, this seminar traces the formation and growing complexity of Roman provincial administration and life in the provinces during the Republic and imperial period. Topics of study include the responsibilities of the provincial governor and his staff; the creation of provincial landscapes through the destruction of cities and construction of long-distance roads; the emergence of new provincial identities; revolts against Rome; and provincial expressions of loyalty to the emperor.

The central demand in numerous contemporary emancipation movements is “decolonization,” irrespective of the presence of a formal empire. This class addresses how we think about decolonization today. What does paying attention to the big picture view of decolonization reveal about the term’s changing meaning? We will look at events, paying attention to how decolonization is perceived by different people, in different places, at different times–not only in the colony but in the metropole. How do “sympathetic” members of society react? What does it mean to sympathize? What kinds of solidarity were formed between metropolitan activists and anti-colonial leaders? What about solidarity-activists in the empire? What counts as solidarity? How does this fit into our understanding of decolonization? These are the questions that will be guiding our course. We will focus our topic by concentrating on liberation from the maritime empires of Great Britain and France (though these are just a fraction of independence movements), starting with the independence of the American colonies and ending with contemporary debates on the notion of decolonization. We will also direct our attention to specific global issues connected to the process of decolonization: the world economy, human rights, apartheid, and transnational protest.The course will be organized like a seminar–there are no lectures, only discussions of the assigned texts.

This undergraduate seminar offers students an introduction to the histories of gender and sexuality in Modern Britain since the early-nineteenth century. The advent of new nation states, industries, empires, and political ideologies transformed the place of gender and sexuality in British society. Yet the attempt to document those historical transformations changed the ways that feminist historians wrote that history too. This class thus introduces students to the major topics in the history of gender and sexuality in modern Britain: the relationship between industrialization and family labor, conceptions and categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality, the impact of imperialism on gender roles, queer histories of urbanization and the metropolis, and the place of gender, race, and sexuality in the development of the modern state. But it will also ask students to consider how historians like Sally Alexander, Catherine Hall, Judith Walkowitz, Durba Mitra, Samuel Rutherford, and Kennetta Hammond Perry have applied and engaged the major theorists of gender and sexuality, including Frederick Engels, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Carole Pateman, Henri Lefebvre, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Stuart Hall, and Hazel Carby. In doing so, students will learn both the histories and the theories that comprise the feminist historical tradition of Modern Britain.

Science and colonialism were driving forces in the making of the global and interconnected world where we live today. The history of “Western science” is deeply intertwined with Europe’s encounter with the world, as colonialism provided the laboratory for disciplines such as geography, natural history, medicine, and anthropology. The challenges and opportunities of new natural environments shaped the way Europeans explored, analyzed, and studied nature and society. The circulation of specimens, data, and scientific expertise made colonial governance possible. This course will introduce students to major themes regarding the relationship between science, colonial environments and European empires. Students will develop reading skills and will explore key topics in early and late modern European history, the history of science, and environmental history.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

Prerequisites: Open to Barnard College History Senior Majors. Individual guided research and writing in history and the presentation of results in seminar and in the form of the senior essay. See Requirements for the Major for details.

In this course we will explore the social and cultural landscape of urban Britain throughout seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Specifically, we will look to the urban centers of London, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. This period saw large-scale urbanization across Britain and with this urbanization came dramatic changes in the social, cultural, political, and economic spheres. We will map the socio-spatial intricacies of seventeenth-century London, question the notion of an “urban renaissance” in the eighteenth century, and trace the explosion of rapid industrialization in nineteenth-century Manchester. In doing so, we will examine how questions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality played out within the urban landscape. A portion of the course will be dedicated to the development of student research projects.

In recent years, the American public has ranked worries over the future of American democracy among its top concerns. American citizens consider free and fair elections to be the bedrock of U.S. representative democracy. However, for most of U.S. history, there has been a profound gap between the ideals of democratic representation and its reality, with many Americans being disenfranchised. This course will examine the history of efforts to secure voting rights for U.S. citizens, including women and people of color, as well as continuing attempts to curtail or suppress these rights. Further, we will survey how debates over voting rights intersected with conflicts over the nature of political representation, and how the ideal of “fair representation” has been construed and fought over during the 20th century. Topics will include: the nineteenth amendment, Jim Crow disenfranchisement in the U.S. South, the Voting Rights Act, histories of apportionment and redistricting, as well as fights over the electoral college.

This course examines women’s experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean from colonial times to current days. We will investigate debates on class, race, religion and ethnicity while looking at major historical events. We will rely on several primary and secondary sources such as archival documents, oral histories, arts and visual resources that will help us understand how gender shaped the political, social, and economic structures of Latin America and the Caribbean.

We will also learn about important women, such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Chica da Silva, examine the role of women warriors and spies in the Wars of Independence and the Haitian Revolution, and discuss how multiple gender-based issues are deeply tied to the history of Latin America and the Caribbean, such as indigenous gender systems, Catholicism and education, female suffrage, feminism and populism, conservatism, the ideology of separate spheres, the politicization of motherhood, among others.

A seminar on the historical, political, and cultural developments in the Jewish communities of early-modern Western Europe (1492-1789) with particular emphasis on the transition from medieval to modern patterns. We will study the resettlement of Jews in Western Europe, Jews in the Reformation-era German lands, Italian Jews during the late Renaissance, the rise of Kabbalah, and the beginnings of the quest for civil Emancipation. Field(s): JWS/EME

This undergraduate seminar offers an introduction to the study of mass media and politics in Latin America from the early 19th to the early 21st century. Throughout the course, the students will get acquainted with some of the key concepts, problems, and methods through which historians and communication scholars have probed the relationship between mass media and political power in the region. We will define and understand media broadly, but we will focus largely on printed media and, to a lesser extent, radio, cinema, and television. We will discuss both breaks and continuities between different media technologies, journalistic cultures, and political regimes. Knowledge of Spanish is welcome, but not mandatory.

This seminar uses the celebrated city of Timbuktu as a starting point from which to explore the history of West African Muslims and their scholarship from the age of the Sudanic empires (10th-17th centuries) through the troubled present in the Republic of Mali. Key questions include the relationship between scholars and rulers, the boundaries of the Muslim community, the entanglements of race, slavery, and religious practice, and the impact of secular governance on the Muslim scholarly tradition.

Lagos: The City Is…

• the unofficial capital of Nigeria
• the go-slow capital of the world
• Rem Koolhaas’ planning mystery
• George Packer’s mega-city nightmare

Above all, as social scientist Margaret Peil once said, Lagos: The city is the people. At last count, over 15 million people to be (in)exact which makes Lagos the second most densely populated city in Africa. How does a city like Lagos come into being? What are its origins?  What is its history in regional, continental, and global context?  How does it ‘work’ and what work does it do for our understandings of cities, urbanization, urbanism, colonialism, globalization, trans-nationalism, and the spatial factor in Africanist historical analyses?  This course examines the many Lagoses that have existed over time, in space, and in the imagination from the city’s origins to the 21st century.  This is a reading, writing, viewing, and listening intensive course.  We will be reading scholarly, policy-oriented, and popular sources on Lagos as well as screening films and audio recordings that feature Lagos in order to learn about the social, cultural, and intellectual history of this West African mega-city.

RACE/RACISM/ANTIRACISM: STUDIES IN GLOBAL THOUGHT

Recent protests against racial violence erupting across the United States have demanded that the United States address systemic injustice entrenched in its national history. The Black Lives Matter movement has extended still further, inciting communities across the globe to raise their voices against discrimination and inequality.

Rather than viewing the United States— and the north Atlantic, more generally— through an exceptionalist lens, this seminar draws on the strong transnational resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement and the compelling responses of global communities across distinct demographics and colonial histories to decenter the historical origins of race thinking and provincialize its conceptual centrality as a first step in understanding its reach and relevance as a global signifier of “difference” today.

How might we develop critical studies of race and racism that are truly global and extend beyond the historical experience of the North Atlantic, and North America in particular? Might we consider the concept history of race, commonly associated with the Atlantic World and plantation slavery as a form of historical difference proximate to other practices of social hierarchy and distinction across the modern world? How can scholarship that addresses questions of black vitality, fugitivity and Afropessimism engage productively and rigorously with questions of colonial servitude and postcolonial sovereignty that emanates from anticaste thought, ideas of Islamic universality, Pan-Africanism, or heterodox Marxisms?

An exercise in comparative thinking, this seminar will function as an interstitial home for intellectual engagements in both the Global South and North, excavating linkages between injustices perpetrated through divisions of race, caste, and minority status, as well as the conceptual innovations born from struggles against them. We are explicitly focused on the relationship between worldmaking and concept formation. Questions of historical comparison and conceptual convergence are important. So, too the forms of sociopolitical solidarity and political utopias that have arisen as a consequence of struggles against enslavement and imperialism.

Every seminar session will open with a twenty-minute discussion about political and social historical contexts. However, this is a course focused on the close and careful reading of ideas and concepts in a manner similar to courses in the history of ideas and/or political thought.

Food has always been a central concern in Chinese politics, religion, medicine, and culture. This course takes an ecological approach to the provision, preparation, and consumption of food in Chinese history, from the Neolithic times to the post-socialist era today. In examining Chinese approaches to soil fertility, healthy diet, and culinary pleasures, we explore alternative food systems for a more sustainable future.

In this course, the concept of religion stands at the heart of our exploration, as it shaped and was shaped by the medieval world. We will critically engage with definitions and interpretations of religion, both as a subject of scholarly debate in the study of religions and as a pivotal force in medieval history. The course will examine how Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were not only systems of belief but also comprehensive frameworks that structured medieval society, politics, and intellectual life. Through an analysis of religious texts, practices, and institutions, we will explore how religion was lived and understood in the Middle Ages, while also addressing broader theoretical debates in the history of religion. This approach invites us to reflect on the historical construction of "religion" as a category and its relevance in shaping our understanding of the medieval world.

A study of the French Atlantic World from the exploration of Canada to the Louisiana Purchase and Haitian Independence, with a focus on the relationship between war and trade, forms of intercultural negotiation, the economics of slavery, and the changing meaning of race.

The demise of the First French Colonial Empire occurred in two stages: the British victory at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and the proclamation of Haitian Independence by insurgent slaves in 1804. The first French presence in the New World was the exploration of the Gulf of St. Lawrence by Jacques Cartier in 1534. At its peak the French Atlantic Empire included one-third of the North American continent, as well as the richest and most productive sugar and coffee plantations in the world.

By following the history of French colonization in North America and the Caribbean, this class aims to provide students with a different perspective on the history of the Western hemisphere, and on US history itself. At the heart of the subject is the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans and between Europeans and Africans. We will focus the discussion on a few issues: the strengths and weaknesses of French imperial control as compared with the Spanish and the British; the social, political, military, and religious dimensions of relations with Native Americans; the extraordinary prosperity and fragility of the plantation system; evolving notions of race and citizenship; and how the French Atlantic Empire shaped the history of the emerging United States.

Environmental historical research began to intensify in the 1960s to interpret human history through the lens of historical and ecological processes. This framework of interpretation gained impetus with the growing concerns of environmental degradation, pollution, and man-induced climate change. The course is intended to demonstrate the intricate relationship and the intertwined nature of societies with their environments using case studies and examples from Central Europe. Firstly, there will be a review of how environmental history thinks of processes in the disciplines and sub-disciplines that have developed and what approaches exist in the field to human-nature relations. Then sources the discipline utilizes will be overviewed. Classes then look at the formation of water management systems, forest utilization the exploitation of soil and mineral goods, and the impact of the different political, economic, and social changes on the landscapes from the period of state formations in the region (ca. tenth – eleventh centuries) to the change of regimes at the turning of the 1980s and the 1990s. While the main focus will be on the long-term changes, case studies look at short-term environmental processes – floods, droughts, sea surges, tornadoes, epidemic diseases – to introduce concepts of resilience and vulnerability.

Looking at Central and Eastern Europe through the systematic application of transnational methods and from a truly global perspective can offer original and valuable insights. Central and Eastern Europe has tended to be a semi-peripheral area in the global scheme of things, and it has thus been much closer to the global average than some of the parts of the world on which much of recent global historiography has focused. Central and Eastern European countries have also developed numerous and still underexplored intercontinental connections outside the Western core that should be of special interest in our age of multipolarity. At the same time, it can be assumed that this diverse area, as a peripheral part of Europe in a formerly largely Eurocentric world. The global history of the region is not intended to exaggerate the role Central and Eastern Europe played in transcontinental processes in the last millennia. It rather aims to show how the diverse people of the region have come to be interconnected with and shaped by phenomena originating in all the various parts of the globe, transnational and global trends that certainly have exerted a much greater impact on their country’s multifaceted history than the other way round.

The course does not intend to deconstruct national narratives as such. It attempts to substantially enrich such narratives and reconceptualize them for an age of manifold global interconnectedness. To put it differently, the words “East Central European” and “global” are equally significant parts of the course’s title. It aims to re-contextualize medieval and early modern histories of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland by looking at global processes in their regional context rather than looking at the region as an exceptional and distinct area. While the region has traditionally been described in scholarship as the periphery of Western Christianity, there has been little understanding of the region as an area with close ties towards the Eastern Mediterranean (Byzantium), towards Eastern Europe (towards the Ruses) and how global processes such as climate change, trade connections, political representation or artistic changes reached (and spread from) the region.

In the English-language literature, the history of the Soviet Union is often dominated by the Cold War. As a result, events central to the lives of Soviet citizens are viewed within a wider geopolitical context that often overlooks regional and ethnic specificity. Cultural products from music, film, dance, and literature provide insight into individual and collective responses to traumatic events. In this course, students study the history of the USSR through the lens of memory and trauma studies by analyzing cultural artifacts as a form of testimony and social history. This course engages with varied cultural products chronologically from the formation of the Union and Revolution through Soviet collapse and the kleptocratic rise of Putin. Materials include poetry and prose by Solzhenitsyn, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova, music by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Vysotski, primary sources and speeches, and historical analyses by Kotkin, Snyder, and Fitzpatrick. To present a de-Russified view of the USSR, materials also include those produced by marginalized Soviet populations like Indigenous and Eveny scholars, Holocaust and GULAG survivors, and veterans.

This class offers an introduction to the history and the practice of European integration since 1945. In 1945, western Europe lay in ruins after one of the largest and most destructive wars in world history. By 1957, however, six European governments decided to come together in a European Economic Community and, some sixty years later, they had built a European Union that included twenty-seven countries and, by combined size, constituted the second largest economy in the world. Why would six states just ravaged by occupation and war so quickly volunteer to share sovereignty with one another and why did so many other governments decide to join up later? What kinds of European unification did they envisage, how did these visions of European integration change, and what kind of united Europe did they build?

To answer these questions, this class explores the evolution of European integration from the end of the Second World War and the collapse of European empires to the end of the Cold War and the creation of the European Union. We will reconstruct various and evolving visions for the integration of Europe, studying the place of Europe in a world of empires to the place of Europe in a globalizing economy. We will examine the rise of the major policies and institutions of the European Community: from agricultural policy to environmental law, from demands for democratic representation to the regulation of international migration. All the while, we will assess how the European Community responded to the major events of the late twentieth century – including decolonization, the oil crisis, neoliberalism, the end of the Cold War, the migrant crisis, and the rise of right-wing populism – and interrogate the impact of European institutions upon those events. To do so, we will read widely across history and political science and we will make extensive use of new primary source collections, especially those newly digitized by the Historical Archives of the European Union. This course thus doubles as a history of European integration and an examination of Europe’s changing place in the world.

This seminar is the third in a series on the history of modern conceptions of the self.  Other figures in the series include Montaigne, Pascal, and Tocqueville.

This seminar focuses on Rousseau, and in particular Emile, his treatise on education and psychology.  We will pay particular attention to how he draws from both Montaigne and Pascal to develop a third conception of the self and its development.  We also examine Reveries of a Solitary Walker to see how Rousseau’s general theory of the self relates to his understanding of himself at the end of his life.

Anglo-American colonists enjoyed a relatively high degree of literacy, and what they mostly did with that literacy was read the Bible. This course shows how early American culture and the course of American history were shaped by extraordinarily widespread reading and oral transmission of the Bible. Each week will focus on the biblical texts, dilemmas, and crises of a different period in early American history. Topics include Puritan colonization, Native American conversion, Black Bible culture, American nationalism, religious mysticism, and the slavery debate.

This course will have an immersive element: in order to better understand the intellectual and psychological effect of constant contemplation of the Bible, students will experiment with text exegesis, memorization, dream analysis, and the interpretation of contemporary events in the style of early Anglo-American Bible readers.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Through a series of secondary- and primary-source readings, digital archive research, and writing assignments, we will explore the history of harm reduction from its origins in activist syringe exchange, health education, and condom distribution, to the current moment of decriminalization, safe consumption politics, and medically assisted treatment (MAT). At the same time, we will think about how harm reduction perspectives challenge us to rethink the histories and historiography of substance use, sexuality, health, and research science. Along with harm reduction theory and philosophy, relevant concepts and themes include syndemic theory and other epidemiological concepts; structural inequities (structural violence, structural racism); medicalization; biomedicalization; racialization; gender theory and queer theory; mass incarceration, hyperpolicing, and the carceral state; Transformative Justice; Liberatory Harm Reduction; the “housing first” approach; political and other subjectivities; and historical constructions of “addiction”/“addicts”, rehabilitation/recovery, what are “drugs,” and the “(brain) disease model”/NIDA paradigm of addiction.

Readings are multidisciplinary and include works in history, epidemiology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines, and the syllabus will include at least one field trip to a harm reduction organization. As an upper-level seminar course, this one will emphasize inquiry and original analysis. The writing component of the course therefore is a short research paper of 3,500-4,000 words.

There are no official prerequisites. However, this is an upper-level course, and students should have some academic or professional background in health studies (especially public health), African-American/ethnic studies (history or social science), or some other work related to the course material.

Admission to this course is by application only, at https://forms.gle/b9Nww6QvbzmgpR1b7.  Students from all schools, including Teachers College, are welcome to apply. Students may not enroll in this course on a pass/fail basis or as an auditor without instructor permission.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Through assigned readings and a 3500-4000 word paper, students will gain familiarity with a range of historical moments in the history of public health in the 20th-century United States. Themes will include ethnic and racial formations, technological development, biopolitics and biopower, medicalization, geography, political economy, and biological citizenship, among others.. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, women’s health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; reproductive justice; “benign neglect”; urban renewal and gentrification; social movements, and environmental justice.  Previous coursework in relevant fields required (U.S. history or health history, certain area studies, Public Health/Sociomedical Sciences, medical humanities, etc.).

GUIDELINES & REQUIREMENTS

There are no official prerequisites. However, this is an upper-level course, and students should have some academic or professional background in health studies (especially public health), African-American/ethnic studies (history or social science), or some other work related to the course material.

ADMISSION

Admission to this course is by application only, Students from all schools, including Teachers College, are welcome to apply. Students may not enroll in this course on a pass/fail basis or as an auditor without instructor permission.

Few events in American history can match the significance of the American Civil War and Reconstruction and few left a better cache of records for scholars seeking to understand its signal events, actors, and processes.  Starting with the secession of eleven southern states, white southerners’ attempts to establish a proslavery republic (the Confederate States of America) unleashed an increasingly radical, even revolutionary war.  Indeed, as the war assumed a massive scope it drove a process of state building and state-sponsored slave emancipation in the United States that ultimately reconfigured the nation and remade the terms of political membership in it.

This course will examine the experience of Jews in the cities of the eastern Roman Empire, offering a challenge to modern hypotheses of Jewish corporate stability in that setting and contributing to modern discussions of the relations between the Roman state, Greek cities, and Jewish and Christian subjects.

This seminar is devoted to examining the work of writers who address the nature and course of history in their imaginative and non-fiction work. This semester we will be exploring the work of Thomas Mann in the context of the First and Second World Wars. This will include his relation to the German “conservative revolution,” the Weimar political experience, and the United States, where he spent several years in exile. We will pay particular attention to his conceptions of modern history as expressed in his novels.

How does climate change transform how we read, write and tell urban histories? How can the so-called Anthropocene change how we do urban ethnography? How does it affect how we imagine viable, desirable urban futures? Finally, how do we reassess agency, social change, and collective life in the face of challenges brought about by the entanglement of human and non-human actions in phenomena like melting icebergs, air pollution, viruses and pandemics, floods and landslides, or rising sea levels? Addressing these questions requires expanding the temporal and spatial scopes and scales usually deployed in modern urban histories. With this end in mind, we will engage with readings that explore how ports, landfills, pollution, rivers, lakes, pipes and wells, wastewater, beaches and disasters constitute sites of city making in different cities and time periods, and therefore of instituting, reproducing or perpetuating inequalities. We will focus mostly but not exclusively on case studies of Latin American cities, drawing scholarly work in history, anthropology, social and environmental history, urban political ecology, geography, science and technology studies, architecture, urbanism and urban planning.

This seminar is designed to explore the rich but sorely understudied occult scientific lore in the pre-modern Islamic world. For over a millennium, from the seventh through even the twenty-first century, and spanning a broad geographical spectrum from the Nile to Oxus, different forms and praxis of occult scientific knowledge marked intellectual and political endeavors, everyday lives and customs, and faith-based matters of individuals constituting the so-called Islamicate world. However, despite the impressive array of textual, material, and visual sources coming down to us from the Muslim past, the topic has been severely marginalized under the post-Enlightenment definitions of scientific knowledge, which also shaped how the history of sciences in the Islamicate world was written in the last century. One of this seminar’s main objectives is to rehabilitate such biased perspectives through a grand tour of occult knowledge and practice appealed in the pre-modern Muslim world.

Over the semester, by relying on a set of secondary studies and translated primary sources, we will revisit the question of the marginalization of Islamicate occult sciences, explore the actors’ definitions and discussions about the epistemic value of these sciences, trace their social and political implications in everyday life and imperial politics, and examine the key textual, technical, and material aspects of the occult tradition. In several of our sessions, we will have hands-on practice to better familiarize ourselves with the instructed techniques and methods in different branches of occult sciences. We will also regularly visit the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library to view texts and materials available in our collection.

“Imag(in)ing the Ottoman Empire: A visual history, 18th-20th centuries” is an undergraduate/graduate seminar focusing on visual representations of the Ottoman Empire during the last two centuries of its existence, from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The objective is to study the development of visual representations both by and about the Empire, from Ottoman miniatures to early European paintings, and from the surge of Western illustrated magazines to the local uses of photography. The seminar’s chronological thread will be complemented by a thematic structure designed to explore different aspects and influences concerning the production and diffusion of images: curiosity, documentation, exoticism, propaganda, orientalism, modernity, self-fashioning, eroticism, policing, to name just a few.

This course trains students in approaching sources in Arabic and Persian from the premodern period. Depending on interest and experience, the course will expand to include Turkic and Hindvi/Urdu as well too. Students will gain a solid understanding of the wide range of historical writings in these languages, the conceptual and methodological problems involved in working with each, and how this source base changed over the centuries all the while reading exemplary historical studies that creatively and proficiently engaged with these materials. Students will gain proficiency in archival research while also reading a wide swathe of primary texts in the target languages (or in translation if students lack the proper language training). Upper intermediate Arabic and/or Persian preferred.

This course offers an understanding of the interdisciplinary field of environmental, health and population history and will discuss historical and policy debates with a cross cutting, comparative relevance: such as the making and subjugation of colonized peoples and natural and disease landscapes under British colonial rule; modernizing states and their interest in development and knowledge and technology building, the movement and migration of populations, and changing place of public health and healing in south Asia. The key aim of the course will be to introduce students to reading and analyzing a range of historical scholarship, and interdisciplinary research on environment, health, medicine and populations in South Asia and to introduce them to an exploration of primary sources for research; and also to probe the challenges posed by archives and sources in these fields. Some of the overarching questions that shape this course are as follows: How have environmental pasts and medical histories been interpreted, debated and what is their contemporary resonance? What have been the encounters (political, intellectual, legal, social and cultural) between the environment, its changing landscapes and state? How have citizens, indigenous communities, and vernacular healers mediated and shaped these encounters and inserted their claims for sustainability, subsistence or survival? How have these changing landscapes shaped norms about bodies, care and beliefs? The course focuses on South Asia but also urges students to think and make linkages beyond regional geographies in examining interconnected ideas and practices in histories of the environment, medicine and health. Topics will therefore include (and students are invited to add to these perspectives and suggest additional discussion themes): colonial and globalized circuits of medical knowledge, with comparative case studies from Africa and East Asia; and the travel and translation of environmental ideas and of medical practices through growing global networks.

How to write the city? What is an archive for writing the city? What liminal and marginal perspectives are available for thinking about writing the city? What is the place of the city in the global south in our historical imagination? Our attempt in this seminar is to look at the global south city from the historical and analytical perspectives of those dispossessed and marginal. Instead of ‘grand’ summations about “the Islamic City” or “Global City,” we will work meticulously to observe annotations on power that constructs cities, archives and their afterlives. The emphasis is on the city in South Asia as a particular referent though we will learn to see Cairo, New York, and Istanbul.

North Korea is widely regarded as a country without a history; as enigmatic as it is isolated. Dispensing with this cliché, this course invites students to engage with North Korean history using a variety of primary and secondary sources. We begin in the medieval period to trace the distinct features of the northern region that made it uniquely receptive to outside ideas. Understanding the north as a frontier zone of experimentation and adaption allows us to examine the attractive power of modernity in the north during the early twentieth century via the influence of Christianity, capitalism and communism. Utilizing texts and materials made in North Korea and internationally, including feature and documentary films, women’s magazines, graphic novels, literary fiction and testimony, the course investigates the conditions within which knowledge about North Korea has been produced, circulated and repressed. Key topics to be explored include the history of Christianity and capitalism in Pyongyang and the northern provinces, communist cadres in the 1930s, the allure of the North in the 1940s, the Korean War and the purges that followed, North Korea’s relations with neighbors and the world, and the high cost its citizens pay for the country’s brutal sanction economy.

“American Radicalism in the Archives” is a research seminar examining the multiple ways that radicals and their social movements have left traces in the historical record. Straddling the disciplines of social movement history, public humanities, and critical information studies, the seminar will use the archival collections at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library to trace the history of social movements and to consider the intersections of radical theory and practice with the creation and preservation of archives.

In the first semester a series of workshops will introduce the field of international history and various research skills and methods such as conceptualization of research projects and use of oral sources. The fall sessions will also show the digital resources available at Columbia and how students can deploy them in their individual projects. In the second semester students will apply the skills acquired in the fall as they develop their proposal for the Masters thesis, which is to be completed next year at the LSE. The proposal identifies a significant historical question, the relevant primary and secondary sources, an appropriate methodology, what preliminary research has been done and what remains to be done. Students will present their work-in-progress.

This course gives students the opportunity to design their own curriculum: To attend lectures, conferences and workshops on historical topics related to their individual interests throughout Columbia University. Students may attend events of their choice, and are especially encouraged to attend those sponsored by the History Department. The Center for International History and the Heyman Center for the Humanities have impressive calendars of events and often feature historians. The goal of this mini-course is to encourage students to take advantage of the many intellectual opportunities throughout the University, to gain exposure to a variety of approaches to history, and at the same time assist them in focusing on a particular area for their thesis topic.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

HIST 6999 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History seminar provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 3000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

From about 1400, Europe saw very rapid expansion of industries such as shipbuilding, mining, wood extraction and transport. These industries have mainly been studied by economic and technology historians along a short timeline of boom, outputs, and decline. In contrast, this course aims to introduce and investigate natural, social, cultural, and material ecologies of these industries over the long term to track change over time in relationships between humans and the environment. The course will introduce students to the concepts and methods of describing and analyzing socio-natural sites, to recent research and conceptualization of “extraction,” “resource,” and consider attitudes to the natural world foreclosed by European colonial extraction.

This is a graduate reading course focusing on twentieth century US historiography. The goal of the course is to introduce students to some of the pressing historiographic questions in the field. The first part of the semester will be spent thinking through periodization and its limits. How useful are periodizations such as “the progressive era” and the “the Cold War”? What are the major historiographic arguments surrounding their use?  In the second part of the semester, we will take a thematic approach. We will read some of the newest (and award-winning) books published in the past few years. Many of these books originated as dissertations and should be useful for students to read as they think about constructing their own research projects.

This course will argue for a broader spatial history of empire by looking at sites such as frontiers and borderlands in a theoretical and comparative perspective. From the works of nineteenth century historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner to formulations of spatial perspectives by Foucault, Bauchelard and Lefebvre we will look at specific sites from the American West to Northeast India. Our effort will be to situate borderlands and frontiers not at the margins but t the center of the relationship between power and narrative, between empire and colony. Formulations of race, gender, class will be central to our comparative units of historical analysis and allow us to create conversations across area-studies boundaries within the discipline.

What is a family? What makes a household? These are social units that vary significantly in meaning and composition across time and across space. African households and families have long been the focus of scholarship, not least in colonial ethnographies of the twentieth century. But those works imagined them as timeless. Historical scholarship and later anthropologists have challenged that notion and shown that these were and are complicated and diverse social institutions with specific histories and consequences. Yet, they rarely feature in archives other than at moments of crisis. We will explore how historians have sought to write histories of families and households. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with central debates around the meaning and form of these social institutions and with the critical place of households and families to social and political history in Africa.

It is a common-place that the twentieth century ended with the establishment of capitalism and democracy as the “one best way”. In triumphalist accounts of the end of the Cold War the two are commonly presented as sharing a natural affinity. As never before the democratic formula was recommended for truly global application. To suggest the possibility of a contradiction between capitalism and democracy has come to seem like a gesture of outrageous conservative cynicism, or leftist subversion. And yet the convergence of capitalism and democracy is both recent and anything other than self-evident. It has been placed in question once again since 2008 in the epic crisis of Atlantic financial capitalism. This course examines the historical tensions between these two terms in the Atlantic world across the long 20th century from the 1890s to the present day.

Prerequisites: the instructors and the departments permission. To register for G9000, students must request a section number from the departments graduate administrator.

History Doctoral students who are for TAs for a course must enroll in this independent study seminar. The DGS is always listed as instructor.