History

Social environment, political, and religious institutions, and the main intellectual currents of the Latin West studied through primary sources and modern historical writings.

Political, economic, social, religious, and intellectual history of early modern Europe, including the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, absolutism, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment.

The major theological and social concerns of 17th-century English colonists; the political and ideological process of defining an American; the social and economic forces that shaped a distinctive national identity; the nature of the regional conflicts that culminated in civil war.

Examines the major intellectual and social accommodations made by Americans to industrialization and urbanization; patterns of political thought from Reconstruction to the New Deal; selected topics on post-World War II developments.

Introduction to South Asian history (17-20 c.) that explores the colonial economy and state formation; constitution of religious and cultural identities; ideologies of nationalism and communalism, caste and gender politics; visual culture; and the South Asian diaspora.

Development over three centuries of a language of the heart, of the intellect, and of the polity. Primary readings in devotional and courtly literature, university speculation, and political thought, discussed in their historical and cultural contexts.

Examining the history of money and the history of ways of thinking about money. We investigate how different monetary forms developed and how they have shaped and been shaped by culture, society, and politics. Tracing money from gift-giving societies to the European Monetary Union, the focus is on early modern Europe.

Examines how the Atlantic Ocean and its boundaries were tied together through the flow of people, goods, and ideas. Studies the cultures of the communities formed by merchants, pirates, and slaves; investigates how their interactions and frictions combined to shape the unique combination of liberty and oppression that characterizes early modern capitalism.

The making and re-making of Central Europe as place and myth from the Enlightenment to post-Communism. Focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and political struggles of the peoples of this region to define themselves. Themes include modernization and backwardness, rationalism and censorship, nationalism and pluralism, landscape and the spatial imagination.

The course examines the social, economic and political impact World War I had on the Balkans, Italy, and Turkey.  In particular, the growing influence of fascism from its birthplace in Italy to its emergence in various forms throughout the Balkans will be the central theme in the course.

Situates key scientific and technological innovations of the modern era in their cultural context by focusing on the interactions between bodies and machines. Through our attention to bodily experience and material culture, we will explore the ways in which science and technology have shaped and been shaped by the culture of modernity.

Exploration of the origins of the "modern" European woman: changing political and legal definitions of women; new concepts of women's work and authority during industrialization; women's involvement in religion and reform; and emergence of socialist and feminist critiques of 19th-century womanhood.

Explores the history of modern France in its wider European Mediterrean and imperial contexts.  Major themes include: republicanism and rights; revolution and reaction; terror and total war; international rivalry and imperial expansion; cultural and political avant-gardes; violence and national memory; decolonialization and postcolonial migration; May '68 and temporary challenges to the republican model.

How has modern science acquired its power to explain and control the world? What are the limits of that power? Topics: the origins of scientific institutions and values; the rise of evolutionary thought and Darwin's impact; the significance of Einstein's physics; ecology and environmental politics; the dilemmas of scientific warfare.

This course will examine the historical development of crime and the criminal justice system in the United States since the Civil War. The course will give particular focus to the interactions between conceptions of crime, normalcy and deviance, and the broader social and political context of policy making.

Examines the history of Mexican migration in the United States since the end of the XIX century. The course will analyze the role played by U.S. immigration policy, the labor demands of U.S. employers, the social and economic conditions of Mexico, and the formation of Mexican immigrant communities.

Urban history of 19th century cities in Europe and the Americas. First, we study the economic, geographic, and demographic changes that produced 19th century urbanization in the Western world. Second, we examine issues of urban space: density, public health, housing conditions, spatial reforms, and the origins of the modern city planning.

Emphasis on foreign policies as they pertain to the Second World War, the atomic bomb, containment, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam. Also considers major social and intellectual trends, including the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture, feminism, Watergate, and the recession of the 1970s.

Development of constitutional doctrine, 1787 to the present. The Constitution as an experiment in Republicanism; states' rights and the Civil War amendments; freedom of contract and its opponents; the emergence of civil liberties; New Deal intervention and the crisis of the Court; and the challenge of civil rights.

Thematically and chronologically ordered narrative of the impact of the Atlantic Ocean and its tidal tributaries upon the beginnings and subsequent development of the American colonies and of the Early American Republic. Special stress will be placed upon the physical givens and cultural implications of the coastal environment in which early Americans went about their lives.

Traces the University's history from 1754 to the present; will focus on institutional interaction with NYC, governance and finance, faculty composition and the undergraduate extra-curriculum; attention also to Columbia professional schools and Barnard College.

Examination of the major ideas engaging American intellectuals from Appomattox to the present, with special attention to their institutional settings. Topics include Darwinism, the rise of the professoriate, intellectual progressivism, inter-war revisionism, Cold War liberalism, and neoconservatism.

Comparative examination of colonial independence struggles in the New World, c. 1760-1830. The transition from the monarchical ancient regime to a more or less "republican" order. State formation and the invention of nationality. Special attention to the cases of the United States, Haiti, and Mexico.

Looking beyond the usual factors of historical inquiry, this course incorporates a curiosity about the natural world into the interpretation of American society. From Columbus to the Cold War, conservation to climate change, flora and fauna move to the forefront, while presidents and military leaders recede to the margins.

The founding, growth, and present condition of American colleges and universities, with particular attention to the social history of Columbia University. Issues of governance, faculty rights and responsibilities, student activism and the public perception of institutions of higher learning will be considered.

See W3661 Modern Latin American History (Latin American CivII). Explores major themes in Latin American history from independence to the present, with a special focus on the evolution of socio-racial inequality, political systems, and U.S.-Latin America relations. We will discuss not only "what happened" in Latin America's past, but how historians know what they know, the sources and methods they use to write history, and the theoretical frameworks they employ to interpret the past.

Examines how women experienced empire and asks how their actions and activities produced critical shifts in the workings of colonial societies worldwide. Topics include sexuality, the colonial family, reproduction, race, and political activism.

Examines law as a critical site from which to explore changing conceptions of self and community from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial periods.

Examines caste and gender as an important lens for understanding the transformations of intimate life and political culture in colonial and post-colonial India. Topics include: conjugality; popular culture violence, sex and the state; and the politics of untouchability.

This course will take the historical fact of decolonization in Asia and Africa as a framework for understanding the thought of anticolonial nationalism and the political struggles that preceded it, and the trajectories of postcolonial developmentalism and the contemporary new world order.

This course explores the power dynamics of gender relations in Chinese history and contemporary society. Specifically, we seek to understand how a range of women--rulers, mothers, teachers, workers, prostitutes, and activists--exercised power by utilizing available resources to overcome institutional constraints.

Urban history of 20th century cities in the Americas and Europe. Examines the modern city as ecological and production system, its form and built environment, questions of housing and segregation, uneven urban development, the fragmentation of urban society and space. Course materials draw on cities in the Americas and Europe. General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS). General Education Requirement: Social Analysis (SOC).

Overview of human migration from pre-history to the present. Sessions on classical Rome; Jewish diaspora; Viking, Mongol, and Arab conquests; peopling of New World, European colonization, and African slavery; 19th-century European mass migration; Chinese and Indian diasporas; resurgence of global migration in last three decades, and current debates.

Traces the development of economic enterprises and techniques in their cultural context: agricultural markets, industry, commercial partnerships, credit, large-scale banking, insurance, and merchant culture. Examines usury and just price theory, the scholastic analysis of price and value, and the recognition of the market as a self-regulating system, centuries before Adam Smith.

Traces the lively debates amongst the major European Enlightenment figures about the formation of capitalism. Was the new market society ushering in an era of wealth and civilization or was it promoting corruption and exploitation? Particular emphasis on debates about commerce, luxury, greed, poverty, empire, slavery, and liberty.

The develoment of constitutional doctrine, 1787 to the present.  The Constitution as an experiement in republicanism; states' rights and the Civil War amendments; freedom of contract and its opponents; the emergence of civil liberties; New Deal intervention and the crisis of the Court; the challenge of civil rights. Field(s): US

A social history of the city in Europe from early modern times; the economic, political, and intellectual forces influencing the growth of Paris, London, Vienna, and other urban centers.

Examines Vienna from the 1860s through the 1930s as the site of intellectual, political, and aesthetic responses to the challenges of modern urban life. Through readings in politics, literature, science, and philosophy, as well as through art and music, we explore three contested elements of personal identity: nationality, sexuality, and rationality.

Transformations in the culture of leisure from the onset of industrialization to the present day. Relations between elite and popular culture and the changing relationship between the work world and the world of leisure will be among the topics considered in such settings as the department store, the pub, the cinema, and the tourist resort.

Examination of European understandings of human senses through the production and reception of art, literature, music, food, and sensual enjoyments in Britain and France. Readings include changing theories concerning the five senses; efforts to master the passions; the rise of sensibility and feeling for others; concerts and the patronage of art; the professionalization of the senses.

Critical examination of recent trends in modern U.S. women's history, with particular attention to the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, and race. Topics will include: state regulation of marriage and sexuality, roots of modern feminism, altered meanings of motherhood and work, and changing views of the body.

An examination of the creation of the Constitution; consequences of independence; ideological foundations; the Articles of Confederation and the Critical Period; the nationalist movement and the Convention; anti-federalism and ratification; and the Bill of Rights. Readings from selected secondary and primary sources, including The Federalist.

This course will interrogate freedom as a conceptual categroy and explore how the meaning and practice of freedom has been deployed in different historical moments. We will consider how gender, race, sexuality, slavery, colonization, work and religion influenced thinking about individual and collective notions of freedom.

This seminar introduces students to the key issues and the interdisciplinary practice of modern urban history. Readings draw from the scholarly literature on 19th and 20th century cities from across Europe and the Americas. We explore economic, spatial, ethnographic, and cultural approaches to studying modern cities.

How did a tiny Dutch outpost become a bustling colonial urban society and a major port in the British Empire? New York City's first two centuries offer more than just "pre-history" to the modern metropolis. Topics include frontier wars, slave conspiracies, religious revivals, conflicts between legitimate and contraband economies.

The role of the 14th Amendment in shaping the modern American Constitution; theories of judicial review; the rise and fall of economic due process; the creation of civil liberties; the civil rights revolution; and the end of states' rights.

Coercion, war, rape, murder, and riots are common in American History from the European invasion to the Civil War. How did violent acts transform early American societies? Readings are a mix of primary sources and scholarship. First and second year students are welcome with permission.

The enslavement of people of African descent signifies a crucial historical and cultural marker not only for African-Americans but also for Americans in general. We will interrogate how and why images of slavery continue to be invoked within the American sociocultural landscape (e.g., in films, documentaries, historical novels, and science fiction).

Critical consideration of the maritime aspects of American life and culture since the Civil War: rise of American sea power; peaking of American maritime commerce and labor; historic seaports and coastal areas as recreational resources; marine science and environmentalist concerns in shaping recent American maritime policies. Seminar will make extensive use of the web for resources and communication.

Examines Jewish immigrant experience in New York, Buenos Aires, London, and Paris, c.1880-1930. Focus on the Old World origins of the arrivals, the formation of neighborhoods, ethnic institutions, family, work, cultural expressions, and relations with the rest of society. Based on readings and primary research (newspapers, letters, songs, photographs, etc.).

Explores historical constructions of heredity, origins, and identity in the modern world in terms of family/genealogy; race/ethnicity; and citizenship. Drawing on evidence from diverse societies around the globe, considers how science, law, and culture define origins and how definitions have changed over time. Interdisciplinary focus ranges across history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.

Latin America has long been characterized by extreme and enduring inequalities - of class, income, race, and ethnicity. Examines patterns of inequality from different disciplinary perspectives, both historically and in the present. Examines not only causes and solutions but how scholars have approached inequality as an intellectual problem.

Examination of recent Latin American historiography concerns with power in the context of 20th-Century Latin America. Focus on such diverse topics as the Mexican Revolution and migrant culture in Costa Rica, labor mobilization in Chile and the dirty war in Argentina. Themes include the relationship between popular culture and the state; the power of words and the power of symbols; structure and agency; the role of the law; the relationship between leaders and followers; and the intersections of gender, race, and power.

This course focuses on the history of childhood and youth in African societies and how young people as historical agents have impacted the social histories of their communities. How did young Africans live in past times? What forces shaped understanding of their status as children or youth? How have major historical processes such as colonialism, industrialization, apartheid, and liberation, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism impacted and been impacted by children and youth in Africa? What roles have young people themselves played in the making of African histories? These questions will be explored in course readings, discussions, and students' original research projects.

Critically examines the relationship between social difference and narratives and practices of power in historical and contemporary African publics. Race and Ethnicity are the key axes of social difference that will be examined. Other axes of difference such as gender, sexuality, class, caste, generation and nationality will also be examined through points of intersection with race and ethnicity.

This course deals with the scholarship on gender and sexuality in African history. The central themes of the course will be changes and continuities in gender performance and the politics of gender and sexual difference within African societies, the social, political, and economic processes that have influenced gender and sexual identities, and the connections between gender, sexuality, inequality, and activism at local, national, continental, and global scales.

Examines the many Lagoses that have existed over time, in space, and in the imagination from its origins to the 21st century. This is a reading, writing, viewing, and listening intensive course. We read 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.

                      Draws on the experiences of life and thought of caste subalterns to explore the challenges to caste exploitation and inequality.

The deceptively small subject of footbinding provides a window into the larger family dynamics and sexual politics in Chinese history and society. Explores the multiple representations of footbinding in European travelogues, ethnographic interviews, Chinese erotic novels and prints, and the polemics of modern and feminist critiques.

This course challenges the long-standing association of fashion with the West. We will trace the transformation of China's sartorial landscape from the premodern era into the present. Using textual, visual, and material sources, we will explore: historical representations of dress in China; the politics of dress; fashion and the body; women's labor; consumption and modernity; industry and the world-market. We will also read key texts in fashion studies to reflect critically on how we define fashion in different historical and cultural contexts. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, embracing history, anthropology, art, and literature. Field(s): EA

Explores migration as a gendered process and what factors account for migratory differences by gender across place and time; including labor markets, education demographic and family structure, gender ideologies, religion, government regulations and legal status, and intrinsic aspects of the migratory flow itself.

Explores the intellectual, social and cultural grounds for the establishment and transmission of feminist traditions in China before the 19th century.  Topics include pre-modern Chinese views of the body, self, gender, and sex, among others.  Our goal is to rethink such cherished concepts as voice, agency, freedom, and choice that have shaped the modern feminist movement.

Investigates the cultural, material and technological conditions that facilitated the development of "fashion systems" in early modern Europe, Japan and contemporary Asian diasporic communities. In the global framework, "fashion" serves as a window into the politics of self-presentation, community formation, structure of desires, and struggles over representation.

Collision of ideas in two of the following three contexts: "Rousseau, Burke and Revolution in France, 1791;" "The Struggle for Palestine: The British, Zionists, and Palestinians in the 1930s," or "India on the Eve of Independence, 1945".

Confronts a set of problems and questions attached to the writing of good history by examining the theories and methods historians have devised to address these problems. Its practical focus: to prepare students to tackle the senior thesis and other major research projects. The reading matter for this course crosses cultures, time periods, and historical genres. Fulfills all concentrations within the history major.

From Indian Ocean worlds of the seventeenth century, to Atlantic world slavery, to the establishment of colonies in Asia and Africa during the nineteenth century, colonization was critical to the development of metropolitan ideas regarding politics and personhood. This seminar will examine these histories, along with emerging constructions of race and gender, as precursors to debates about human rights and humanitarianism in the twentieth century.

Conflicts emerging from the production and consumption of food from prehistoric to modern times. Settled agriculture and the significance of geography and social stratification in determining food consumption; ideologies of social status and "taste" in Europe; impact of knowledge about health and hygiene on European dietary habits; drink in diets and social life; dining out in European culture; role of transport and technology in consumer culture; food and the welfare state; mass production and globalization of food.

Comparative, cross-cultural examination of social organization and historical construction of human reproduction, with emphasis on 20th century. Topics include role of states and local and transnational "stratification" of reproduction by race, class, and citizenship; eugenics; population politics; birth control; kinship as social and biological relationship; maternity; paternity; new reproductive technologies.

Explores the historical development of anarchism as a working-class, youth, and artistic movement in Europe, North and Latin America, the Middle East, India, Japan, and China from the 1850s to the present. Examines anarchism both as an ideology and as a set of cultural and political practices.

Urban history of 20th century cities in the Americas and Europe. Examines the modern city as ecological and production system, its form and built environment, questions of housing and segregation, uneven urban development, the fragmentation of urban society and space. Course materials drawing on cities in the Americas and Europe.

Examines the theory and practice of transnational feminist activism. We will explore the ways in which race, class, culture and nationality facilitate alliances among women, reproduce hierarchical power relations, and help reconstruct gender.  The course covers a number of topics:  the African Diaspora, suffrage, labor, development policy, colonialism, trafficking, consumerism, Islam, and the criminal justice system.

In this course we will read and discuss key contributions to a young and growing field, the history of culture in the Cold War, which includes the cultural history of the Cold War and the history of the cultural Cold War, closely related but analytically distinct categories.

In addressing issues of general and acknowledged relevance for the study of archaic Rome-from institutions and their interpretation to comparative religious history, from archaeological evidence and its uses to comparative linguistics-the colloquium will invite students to connect them in new and original ways. The colloquium will provide students with the opportunity to work on ancient languages other than Latin and Greek; some time over the semester will be devoted to familiarizing students with Archaic Etruscan Inscriptions and the Umbrian language. Field(s): ANC*

In this course graduate students will read ancient Mesopotamian sources in their original languages and scripts. The selected sources concentrate on a specific historical question. This semester they will deal with the dynasty of Akkad (ca. 2350-2000 BC) in later traditions.

It was once taken as axiomatic that the early modern period witnessed a decline in the scope and power of belief, culminating in the triumphant rationalism of the European Enlightenment. Behind this pronouncement stood the master narrative of secularization, which characterized modernity and religion as antithetical. Recent scholarship have done much to dismantle this once dominant interpretation. Historians and philosophers have gone so far as to locate the origins of secularization within religion itself, rather than in absolute opposition to it. Their efforts have produced significant insights, which in turn raise novel questions and give rise to new points of departure. This course, therefore, has a double agenda. It will offer a survey of the ways in which historians and philosophers have transformed our understanding of religious developments during the early modern period, including the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the rise of the "new science" in the seventeenth century, the crystallization of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement, and the appearance of modern atheism. Our review of these themes will further provide the basis for reflections on the status of the secularization as an explanatory framework, and on the functions of religion as a historical category.

The seminar treats biography as a historical research site, offering an opportunity to reflect about the conventions, resources, and historically changing patterns of giving accounts of an individual life, with special reference to writing about those who have led the "life of the mind"-- intellectuals, scientists, philosophers. Field(s): EME

This course puts the history of modern Ukraine into the context of East European and Soviet histories. The course highlights the political and ethnic complexities of the Ukrainian lands tracing the collapses of the Russian and Hapsburg Empires, the formation and disintegration of the USSR, shifting borders, ethnic cleansing, deportations and national revivals. It also presents various peoples of Ukraine, the diversity of their economic and cultural lives, and explores social mobility and modernization. Finally, the course explains the origins of contemporary society and changing political order not only in present day Ukraine but also in the Russian Federation and Belarus.

The field of Imperial Russian history has undergone profound transformations since the August Revolution of 1991. Curiously, the basic outlines of our understanding of Soviet history have remained fundamentally unchanged despite the explosion of new archival materials over the past twenty years. In contrast, interpretations of the pre-revolutionary period have changed dramatically. New chronologies, new thematic approaches, new topics, and new transnational juxtapositions all characterize the historiography of the last two decades. One particularly important element is attention to geographical space and location. In this colloquium, we will examine some of the most influential recent research in the field, using particular books as a jumping-off point to delve deeper into topics such as empire and frontier, environment, religion, monarchy, Russian-Ottoman encounters, and the transmission of ideas.

"A nomadic society does not have a history of its own," wrote the well-known Historian Arnold Toynbee. This course seeks to challenge this statement by employing new perspectives in examining the economic, political, cultural, and environmental history of the nomadic steppe populations of Eurasia, which main body lies within the borders of the former Soviet Union. Extended to the east into Mongolia and Northern China and to the west to the Carpathian Mountain range in Central Europe, the Steppe region has played a major role in Eurasian history, although its importance is often overlooked. By connecting east with west via trade routes (the Silk and Tea Roads), it facilitated travel of goods, cultures and ideas between their populations through its inhabitants, the nomadic peoples, who were the main mediators in bringing many innovations to both sides. This course is also open to approved undergraduates; please request instructor's permission and fill out an add/drop form to be added.

This course introduces students to the burgeoning litaerature on international ideas, relations, politics and movements between the wars, especially in Europe. The course will pay particular attention to the interaction between states, mobilized interests or "peoples", to new international organizations and structures that emerged out of war (especially the League of Nations), and to the contest between liberal and revisionist ideas, movements and states.

Examines how great powers sought to justify, expand, and stabilize their colonial empires in the period after the first World War. We will examine both the rhetorical frameworks through which imperial powers understood and explained their colonial efforts and the practices of international movements and institutions on colonial governance, to colonial legal systems, and economic structures, to conflicts between metropole and colony and to the ways in which colonial governments and administrators reacted to, and learned from, each other across national lines.

This course examines some recent trends in the vibrant field of British imperial history. We look at three themes in particular: (1) the relationship between internationalism and the "empire project," including efforts at cross-colony and intra-imperial collaboration, imperial federation, bloc formation and anti-imperial mobilization; (2) environmental and economic transformations and the uses of "expertise"; (3) the impact of empire on social and cultural practices and intimate relations both in the colonial sphere and in Britain.

Introduces recent problems and enduring issues in early American history. Students will be expected to learn three things: chronology (the basic timeline and narrative of historical developments), major events and historical watersheds, and critical analysis of the major works and themes in the field.

This seminar teaches writing serious research papers in various areas of 20th-century American history, based on primary sources.

This colloquium will concentrate on central issues and objects in the material and visual material culture of Early America.  We will consider how objects, artifacts, and things "do history" by studying current methodologies in material and visual culture studies; those discussions will focus on key debates in Early American History such as the nature of the encounter between Native American and Euro-American societies, the rise of provincial culture in the Atlantic world, the relationship of consumerism and refinement, and the boundaries between vernacular and cosmopolitan culture. Field(s): US

In 2009, historian Elliott West offered the term “Greater Reconstruction” to link the Indian Wars in the American West to the process of reconstruction underway in the southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War.  While provocative, the concept remains largely undeveloped.  This course takes up the historiographical challenge.  It explores, and attempts to define, the spatial, temporal and conceptual boundaries of Reconstruction by looking at the deployment of federal government power in processes of military conquest, state-building, and governance of people and territory in the South, the West and other parts of the rapidly expanding United States in the period after 1861.

This is a graduate reading course designed with orals preparation in mind. The class will read two monographs per week (or one monograph and selected chapters or journal articles). Main reading indicated by *. Selections emphasize newest work paired with older works. Students will prepare in-class presentations, write one short paper on the readings of a chosen week, and write a long historiographic paper (15 pp) on a selected theme, covering 4-5 books not read in class, to be approved by the instructor.

The course introduces the major works in the history of computing and information technologies, with particular attention to transformative methodologically important texts. Students will be likewise introduced to major current works in the history of technology and media studies. The course along the way provides an outline of the development of computing from the late nineteenth century. 

Offers varying interpretations of the history of race and public health in the United States. Students will examine issues dealing with epidemic and chronic disease, substance abuse, public health policy, and urban politics, among others. The texts selected in no way represent the full spectrum of this history – the field has grown rapidly in the past decade. Rather than a “comprehensive knowledge” of race and public health in the United States, a grasp of historical methods will be gained through the readings. In this sense, students will end the semester well prepared to tackle problems pertaining not only to public health, but to larger policy issues as well.

An introduction for graduate students to major issues in the political economic history of early and late developing economies, focusing on comparative institutional, legal, and monetary/financial transformation.

This course will study the materials, techniques, settings, and meanings of skilled craft and artistic practices in the early modern period (1350-1750), in order to reflect upon a series of issues, including craft knowledge and artisanal epistemology; the intersections between craft and science; and questions of historical methodology and evidence in the reconstruction of historical experience. The course will be run as a “Laboratory Seminar,” with discussions of primary and secondary materials, as well as text-based research and hands-on work in a laboratory. This course is one component of the Making and Knowing Project of the Center for Science and Society. This course contributes to the collective production of a transcription, English translation, and critical edition of a late sixteenth-century manuscript in French, Ms. Fr. 640. In 2014-15, the course concentrated on mold-making and metalworking; in 2015-16, on colormaking. In 2016-17, it will focus on natural history, researching the context of the manuscript, and reprising some color-making and moldmaking techniques. Students are encouraged to take this course both semesters (or more), but will receive full credit only once. Different laboratory work and readings will be carried out each semester. 

The course aims to introduce graduate students to some key topics in religious history in medieval Europe and early Latin America (12th to 16th centuries), analyzed through primary and secondary sources. Themes include: Mendicant orders, millenarianism, preaching, liturgy, conversion, sainthood, popular religion, and heresy. Students will give presentations and write reports and a final paper on a particular aspect of the course chosen in consultation with the instructors. Field(s): MED/LA

In the past twenty years, the historiography of France has been reshaped by new interest in the experience of empire. This graduate seminar will explore the "French imperial turn," and question its specificity vis-à-vis the historiographies of other European empires. Among the key questions for the seminar: what kind of historical processes are revealed (or masked) by the imperial perspective? How do we think historically about the relationships between nation, Republic, and empire? How do we evaluate the traditional distinction between the "first colonial empire" of the old Regime and the "modern Empire" of the 19th and 20th centuries? How has the 'imperial turn' shaped the categories and writing practices of historians? What are the contributions of historians to the understanding of postcolonialism? Field(s): INTL

This course will be a central part of the Columbia History Department's History in Action Program, a pilot program of the American Historical Association / Mellon Foundation initative Career Diversity for Historians. One of the central aims of the program is to provide graduate students in History with training that will allow for engagement outside the academy; the yearly clinic course is an opportunity to put this sort of training into practice. (In Spring 2015, the clinic course was built around workshops and projects supervised by practitioners in various fields such as journalism, filmmaking, and museum work; the 2016-17 iteration will be run in conjunction with Teacher's College and focus on pre-college history education.) The current course will focus on engagement with NGOs. Memory of historical violence and victimization plays an increasing role in international and intra-national conflicts. Numerous countries have focused on historical crimes and atrocities that occurred in prior regimes or during historical conflicts, but other states, including both new and established democracies, ignore past atrocities. In general, a demand to redress atrocities has become routine, and is framed as appeal to an international norm. In some cases, the memory of historical violence provides a foundation for reconciliation, but in many more it remains a continuous site of conflict and contention. Why this difference? How does a focus on the past incite conflict or contribute to reconciliation? These issues are particularly vexing in cases of historical atrocities: What are the standards for historical responsibility? How do efforts at reconciliation around historical conflicts differ from calls for immediate accountability for the past in newly democratic societies? The course examines these political and ethical dilemmas in comparative historical perspective.

The term "geopolitics" and its cognates emerged at the very end of the nineteenth century in connection to new forms of nationalism and inter-imperialist competition in Europe and the world. Emphasizing the mutually constitutive relationship among power, place, and knowledge, geopolitics has most often been associated with a "realist" and state-centric approach to international relations, although recent decades have seen the rise of a critical geopolitics that includes a far wider range of social actors. This course is both a conceptual history of geopolitics as the term has been defined and applied over the last hundred years, as well as a critical survey of the changing relations among technology, state power, and spatiality in connection to strategies of global competition and conflict. The course includes an introduction to Global Imaging Systems in the second week.

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.

In this course graduate students will read ancient Mesopotamian sources in their original languages and scripts. The selected sources concentrate on a specific historical question. This semester they will deal with the dynasty of Akkad (ca. 2350-2000 BC) in later traditions.

This course puts the history of modern Ukraine into the context of East European and Soviet histories. The course highlights the political and ethnic complexities of the Ukrainian lands tracing the collapses of the Russian and Hapsburg Empires, the formation and disintegration of the USSR, shifting borders, ethnic cleansing, deportations and national revivals. It also presents various peoples of Ukraine, the diversity of their economic and cultural lives, and explores social mobility and modernization. Finally, the course explains the origins of contemporary society and changing political order not only in present day Ukraine but also in the Russian Federation and Belarus.

In this course we will read and discuss key contributions to a young and growing field, the history of culture in the Cold War, which includes the cultural history of the Cold War and the history of the cultural Cold War, closely related but analytically distinct categories.

This class will explore the history of the relationship between law and violence in Europe and its imperial formations in the modern age. We will examine both debates and practices: readings will be drawn from intellectual and legal history as well as from the history of European imperialism and colonialism. The French and British cases will be at the center of our reflection but we will also envisage links with other European empires and with US History.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to key problems in modern German historiography focusing on the period from the late 18th century to the present. Germany is one of the homelands of the philosophy of history. So en route we will address a series of more general problems in the writing of modern history. These include the relationship of history to the critical project of the enlightenment in all its forms, the conceptualizations of the role of the individual actor in history, questions of the state and revolution, the concept of crisis, and the origins of our contemporary neoliberal order. The course is intended for PhD level graduate students.

This seminar explores the history and historiography of consumer capitalism in modern Europe, from the eighteenth through the middle of the twentieth centuries. We will trace the devleopment of a market culture and society, with a focus on the evolution of commercial practice as well as shifting attitudes towards commerce and consumption. The course will emphasize Britain and France, but we will be thinking and reading comparatively as well. Topics include the domestic and imperial origins of modern consumption, consumption in social thought, debt, credit, and social trust, attitudes towards risk and speculation, and the relationship between consumption and democratic citizenship. Historical studies will be complemented with readings from social theory and fiction.

No longer merely the study of thirteen mainland British colonies, “Early America” foregrounds Native and non-British actors like never before. Major themes include: the contesting of areas across the continent, everyday experiences of faith and work, race, class, and gender, rise and fall of empires, founding of the American republic, viewing U.S. history from a global perspective.

This is a graduate seminar on the history and dynamics of state and paramilitary violence directed against civilian populations in the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century. The focus will be on some of the most prominent massacres of the period, namely Chios in 1822, Syria in 1860, Bulgaria in 1876, and the Armenian massacres of the 1890s. A particular effort will be made to integrate contemporary Ottoman archival documentation into the course material in order to address what remains the most understudied dimension of the question.

This seminar will examine colonial urbanism from a comparative perspective. The focus is on the long nineteenth century, an era coined as “the connected world of empires,” and the goal is to open a window to understanding colonialism. The case studies are drawn from colonial cities of European empires, as well as the idiosyncratic Ottoman practices. A comprehensive study of examples from Algiers to Damascus, Calcutta, and Hanoi will reveal a rich array of experiments, each raising different sets of issues in the relationship between colonial policies and built forms. Situating urban forms, “the tangible substance, the stuff” of cities, at the center of our discussions, we will investigate political, social, cultural, and economic factors that framed their formation, as well as the subsequent effects the cities made on these webs—both waves working in a continuous dynamic. The interdisciplinary approach will capitalize on the surge of recent literature in the field, but also make use the wealth of untapped primary sources--textual and visual. Please note that the course does not offer a comprehensive survey; it focuses selected case studies in an in-depth manner. 

      We are used to thinking of history in national terms, or at least in reference to major civilizations (“Western civilization,”  “Near Eastern civilization,” etc.). In  “real life,” however, interactions among people, linguistic communities, and cultures frequently cut across political divisions. Water – rivers, streams, seas – is often an invitation to settlement, commerce, and conquest. This course offers a look (inspired in part by Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean) at a body of water – the Black Sea – and the lands around it, in sweeping historical perspective. Focus is on those moments when the various civilizations and empires that originated and flourished around the Black Sea met and intersected in friendship or in enmity. We will look at ancient civilizations, Greek colonization, Byzantine-Slav interactions, the period of Ottoman dominance, Russian-Turkish rivalry, and decolonization and wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. We hope that we will be able to pay particular attention to questions of ecology, language, religion, and cultural interaction throughout.

An examination of literary and cinematic narratives of the Second World War produced in the decades since 1940 in Europe, America, and Asia. The analytic approach centers both on the historicity of, and the history in, the texts, with the goal of questioning the nature of narrative in different forms through a blend of literary and historical approaches.

This course presents and at the same time critiques a narrative world history from prehistoric times to 1500. The purpose of the course is to convey an understanding of how this rapidly growing field of history is being approached at three different levels: the narrative textbook level, the theoretical-conceptual level, and through discussion sections, the research level. All students are required to enroll in a weekly discussion section. Graded work for the course consists of two brief (5 page) papers based on activities in discussion sections as well as a take-home midterm and a final examination. Field(s): *ANC/ME 

The seminar will combine cultural with economic history, but with more stress on the former. The aim is to investigate the meaning of being rich and being poor among the Greeks and Romans, that is to say in a pre-industrial society, with special attention to methods of research. We shall discuss among other topics ways of getting rich, contempt for wealth, safety nets, ostentation, consumption choices, bribery, markers of well-being - and money. The time period will extend from Homer to about 250 CE. Field(s): *ANC

The course will examine the relation between a rich and urban elite and artistic creativity during The Low Countries' several and successive ‘Golden Ages'. Therefore, the course will address the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, Antwerp and Brabant from c. 1480 to c. 1580, and the southern Low Countries as a whole from c. 1380 to c. 1480. The following questions will be considered: Who were the sponsors, and why did they invest in specific artistic genres? Why did the gravity centers regularly shift to a neighboring region, from south to north? What were the reasons for the dynamics in the system as a whole, which surely also have political dimensions? All these questions will be discussed for the period from the 13th to the 16th-early 17th century, keeping in mind that these patterns may have a more general character. Field(s): EME

A seminar reviewing some of the major works of Russian thought, literature, and memoir literature that trace the emergence of intelligentsia ideologies in 19th- and 20th-century Russia. Focuses on discussion of specific texts and traces the adoption and influence of certain western doctrines in Russia, such as idealism, positivism, utopian socialism, Marxism, and various 20th-century currents of thought. Field(s): MEU

This is an undergraduate research seminar which will allow students with an interest in the Balkans, eastern Europe and the Ottoman empire to trace in detail the emergence of the independent Greek nation-state in the early 19th century and to draw on contemporary literature and the secondary historiography to evaluate theories of ethnicity, nationalism and state formation. It is open to all students with a background in modern European or Middle Eastern history and covers the period from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries.

This seminar examines the history of the ambiguous concept "Soft Power," by bringing together literatures in European and U.S. history, international relations, and communications studies that are normally treated in isolation. After thoroughly familiarizing seminar participants with the recent U.S. evolution of the concept and comparing its usage to related terms, such as "normative power," "hegemony," "propaganda," "strategic communication," and "public diplomacy," weekly classes focus on several case studies. These span the period from the 19th to 21st centuries and include Napoleon's Propaganda Wars, France's "Civilizing Mission" in Africa, Germany's Kultur Empire, Wilson versus Lenin, The Nazi-Fascist Effort to coopt Muslim peoples, Vatican Diplomacy and the Holocaust, The Marshall Plan, Soviet Soft Power in Eastern Europe, and U.S. Public Diplomacy in the wake of 9/11. Class requirements include weekly reading, organizing class discussion, and a 15-page research paper to be presented at a final student-organized workshop.

This course will introduce students to the manifold expressions of Romanticism in Europe from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. It is geared both at History majors, particularly but not exclusively those specializing in European Intellectual History and at students interested in the literature and culture of Germany, France, and Graet Britain, as well as brief looks at Romantic writers in Eastern Europe.

This course explores critical areas of New York's economic development in the 20th century, with a view to understanding the rise, fall and resurgence of this world capital. Discussions also focus on the social and political significance of these shifts. Assignments include primary sources, secondary readings, film viewings, trips, and archival research. Students use original sources as part of their investigation of New York City industries for a 20-page research paper. An annotated bibliography is also required. Students are asked to give a weekly update on research progress, and share information regarding useful archives and websites.

This seminar explores the changing meaning of the term 'Europe" from its emergence as an organizing principle of international life after Napoleon's defeat in 1815 until the end of the First World War.  It aims to combine an exploration of the term's conceptual and intellectual history with a study of its deployment in practice in the realms of diplomacy, international law, and radical politics.  Topics to be covered include: the establishment and transformation of the Concert of Europe; the idea of European civilization, its rise and fall; the international thought of Mazzini, Mill, Marx, Cobden, Burckhardt and Nietzsche among others.

This course introduces students to the forces that transformed the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas into "Indians." The class takes a very broad approach, moving chronologically and thematically from the dawn of time to the present. The course aims to expose students to the diversity of the Native American experience by including all of the inhabitants of the Americas, from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, within its purview. Group(s): A, D Field(s): *US 

In this seminar we will examine interdisciplinary approaches to the writing of history using archival material. We will look at how knowledge is organized, stored, described, accessed, and replicated through the use of digital and material objects held in archives. The seminar takes as its point of departure the University of Michigan Sawyer Seminar's conception of archives "not simply as historical repositories but as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of the intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies." Among the topics we will explore are how archives and archiving intersect with the production of knowledge, with social memory, and with politics. This is a U.S. history course. While the theoretical approaches we will study are, of necessity, interdisciplinary, the application of them will be to archival material related to U.S. history. This seminar requires participants to commit substantial time outside of class working with unpublished materials in Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) both for reading assignments and as part of a final project. Field(s): US

This course interrogates the function of art and artists within modern capitalist societies. We will trace the cultural productions, internal dynamics, and social significance of bohemian communities from their origins in 1840s Paris to turn of the century London and New York to interwar Los Angeles to present day Chicago. Students will conduct research exploring the significance of some aspect of a bohemian community. Field(s): US

This seminar provides an intensive introduction to the history of the Atlantic slave trade. The course will consider the impact of the traffic on Western Europe and the Americas, as well as on Africa, and will give special attention to the experiences of both captives and captors. Assignments include three short papers and a longer research paper of 20 to 25 pages. Field(s): INTL 

An examination of the years from the end of World War II to the beginning of the 1960s, focusing on three areas:  the Cold War, the “Affluent Society,” and the “Haunted Fifties,” It includes both works of history and works of literature. Field(s): US

In this course, students will write​ ​ original, independent​ ​ papers of around 25 pages, based on research in both​ ​ primary and secondary sources, on an aspect of the relationship between Columbia​ ​ College​,​ and its colonial predecessor King's College, with the institution of slavery​.​

Field(s): US

This class begins during the fabled "Gilded Age," when the nation's capitalist expansion created the world's largest economy but splintered Americans' ideals. From the fin-de-siècle through the cataclysms of World War II, we will explore how Americans defined, contested, and performed different meanings of American civilization through social reform movements, artistic expressions, and the everyday habits and customs of individuals and groups. The class will pay particular attention to how gender, race, and location--regional, international, and along the class ladder--shaped perspectives about what constituted American civilization and the national discourse about what it should become. Field(s): US

This seminar examines the transformation of American society from national independence to the Civil War, paying particular attention to changes in agriculture, war, and treaty-making with Indian nations, the rise of waged labor, religious movements, contests over slavery, and the ways print culture revealed and commented on the tensions of the era. The readings include writings of de Tocqueville, Catherine Beecher, and Frederick Douglass, as well as family correspondence, diaries, and fiction. Students will write a 20 page research paper on primary sources. Field(s): US

This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to 1939. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish life, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include:  the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, Zionism, Jewish socialism, and Autonomism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and Ultra-Orthodoxy. 

This course seeks to analyze the period of military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), supported by many civilians as well. Different conjunctures will be studied, since the years before the coup of 1964 until the process of democratization. The course aims to understand a paradox: the dictatorship was established in the name of democracy, allegedly threatened. The main hypothesis is that the paradox was due to the character of the conservative modernization of society imposed by the military regime and its civilian allies. The dictatorship had ambiguities and distinct phases, involving a complex set of political and military forces. The involvement with the modernization also implied the use of illegitimate brute force against its enemies, which allows to characterize the regime as a dictatorship, in spite of its democratic façade. Special attention will be given to the opponents of the order. The relationship between the dominant and the dominated, even in authoritarian regimes, must be understood not only based on confrontation and repression, but also on negotiation and concessions to the opponents, without which it is impossible to build a base of legitimacy. The topics will be examined in the light of concepts such as conservative modernization (Barrington Moore Jr.), legitimate domination (Weber), hegemony (Gramsci), among others. The course also introduces students to critical interpretations of society and politics produced by Brazilian and Brazilianist historians and social scientists. Field(s): LA

This course seeks to elucidate the elective affinities between culture and politics in the activities of artists and intellectuals, especially those who opposed the military dictatorship in Brazil. The problem of the identity of the Brazilian people was essential for them. They sought alleged popular roots and wanted to overcome underdevelopment. At the time there was a revolutionary romanticism which involved the utopia of integrating intellectuals with the common man of the people, which could give life to an alternative project of society that was eventually defeated by the military dictatorship (1964-1985). Many artists and intellectuals engaged in the opposition to the regime, in spite of its efforts of modernization, which gave them good job opportunities, in a complex process that involved both dissent and integration to the established order. The lectures will analyze different conjunctures, from the years before the coup of 1964 until the end of the democratization process that was completed with the free elections of 1989. Particularly the decades of 1960 and 1970 were some of the most creative periods of Brazilian culture, including the Cinema Novo, the Teatro de Arena, the Bossa Nova and the Tropicalism. The topics will be examined in the light of concepts such as structures of feeling (Raymond Williams), field (Bourdieu), engagement (Sartre), commodity fetishism and reification (Karl Marx, G. Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, F. Jameson), society of the spectacle (Guy Debord), culture industry (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer), revolutionary romanticism (Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre), among others. The course also introduces students to critical interpretations of society and culture produced by Brazilian and Brazilianist historians and social scientists.

The idea of utopia can be traced across many different periods and places. This seminar explores (imagined or reasoned) conceptions of the perfect society in literary, intellectual, and political texts. The ambiguous character of the utopian ideal holds out the promise of human perfection but also encodes a precariousness that speaks to some inevitable future disorder. Reading across a variety of genres and times, examining this interplay between visions of collective redemption and human suffering allows us to consider the ways in which authors have recorded the ideals and fears of their own political or social orders. It thus examines the very idea, whether historical or "mythical", of human progression or retrogression (understood as the "fall") to examine conceptions of time, history and humanity across numerous discursive traditions. The course will pay special attention to a number of themes and ideals. Among these are: the idea of a "golden age," as exemplified in some of the earliest cosmological and other writings and found in number of "visions of paradise"; the rise of millenarianist movements, ideas of eschatology and apocalypse; the ideal republic, whether as a proper political order or as exemplified through a new epistemic community, or "republic of letters"; the "perfect state," ranging from revolutionary, democratic, anarchist and socialist ones; and, finally, ending finally with modernist visions of dystopia which many of these same ideals would come to inspire. We will read a selection of texts ranging from Hesiod's Works and Days, Plato's Republic, works by Augustine and Farabi, and Thomas More's Utopia to Voltaire's Candide and Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto.

This undergraduate seminar course will introduce students to major trends in modern Arabic intellectual history. Drawing on a range of intellectual movements from the 18th century to the present, we will cover such themes as: the history of readers and the role of publics and 'counter-publics' in the Middle east; encounters with Europe, Orientalism and its critics; the impact of liberalism, positivism and colonialism, and, finally, the rise of new discourses around law, science, socialism and religious reform.  We will end by paying special attention to contemporary religious movements, from the Salafiyya reformers to the Muslim Brotherhood and contemporary expressions of the new 'global Islam'. This is a general introductory course: no knowledge of Arabic or previous experience in modern Middle East history is necessary. Students who can work with Arabic of other language sources, however, are encouraged to do so, particularly for their final assignment. Field(s): ME

Unlike European history, which divides into generally agreed upon eras and is structured around a clear narrative of religious and political events from Roman times down to the present, the broad sweep of Islamic and Middle Eastern history appears in quite different lights depending on who is wielding the broom. Theories of Islamic history can embody or conceal political, ethnic, or religious agendas; and no consensus has gained headway among the many writers who have given thought to the issue. The study of theories of Islamic history, therefore, provides a good opportunity for history majors to explore and critique broad conceptual approaches. A seminar devoted to such explorations should be a valuable capstone experience for studnets with a special interest in Islam and the Middle East. One or two works will be read by the entire class each week, and two students will be assigned to lead the discussions of the week's readings. Grades for the course will be based half on class participation and half on a 15-page term paper devoted to a topic approved by the instructor. Field(s): ME

An exploration of the historiography of contemporary (post-1960) Africa, this course asks what African history is, what is unique about it, and what is at stake in its production. Field(s): AFR

This course explores five hundred years of the history of Islam and Muslims in India. It is concerned with understanding the many faces of Islam and the many ways of being Muslim in India and how these have changed over time. On one level we will study the connection between Islam and political power in South Asia: the course explores the ruling ideologies of the Mughal Emperors, the different ways in which Muslims responded to the rise of British power on the subcontinent, and the various responses Muslims articulated in response to the introduction of democracy in India. These questions naturally ensure that the course is also concerned the question of how different Muslims interacted with members of other religious groups in India. We will interrogate moments of coexistence and conflict between religious communities to try to understand their origins and nature. At another level, the course is concerned with the changing shape of Muslim lives over the same period. It explores everyday practices of Muslim belief as well as notions of gender, family and personhood, and explores the interplay of these with political, economic and cultural changes over five centuries of history.

The wars in Vietnam and Indochina as seen in historical scholarship, contemporary media, popular culture and personal recollection. The seminar will consider American, Vietnamese, and international perspectives on the war, paying particular attention to Vietnam as the "first television war" and the importance of media images in shaping popular opinion about the conflict. Group(s): B, C, D

This course raises the issues of the theory and practice of history as a discipline.  Considers different approaches to the study of history and offers an introduction to research and the use of archival collections. Special emphasis on conceptualization of research topics, situating projects historiographically, locating and assessing published and archival sources. Field(s): METHODS

This seminar seeks to analyze the ways by which medicine and culture combine to shape our values and traditions. To this end, it will examine notable literary, medical, and social texts from classical antiquity to the present.

This course will consider the evolution of human-animal relations on a global basis over the entire course of human history.  Student papers will engage specific topics from different times and places. Field(s): INTL

This seminar examines major texts in social and political theory and ethics written in Europe and the Mediterranean region between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries CE.  Students will be assigned background readings to establish historical context, but class discussion will be grounded in close reading and analysis of the medieval sources themselves. Field(s): MED

This course follows historical developments in the Atlantic World-across Western Europe, the Americas, West Africa, and-from the late fifteenth through early nineteenth century. It highlights both the comparative, structural evolutions of European colonial empires and the cultural experiences and perspectives of Atlantic World inhabitants-including soldiers, merchants, slaves, missionaries, and revolutionaries. 

This seminar deals with how Americans have treated and understood the natural world, connected or failed to connect to it, since 1800. It focuses on changing context over time, from the agrarian period to industrialization, followed by the rise of the suburban and hyper-technological landscape. We will trace the shift from natural history to evolutionary biology, give special attention to the American interest in entomology, ornithology, and botany, examine the quest to save pristine spaces, and read from the works of Buffon, Humboldt, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Darwin, Aldo Leopold, Nabokov, among others. Perspectives on naming, classifying, ordering, and most especially, collecting, will come under scrutiny.  Throughout the semester we will assess the strengths and weaknesses of the environmentalist movement, confront those who thought they could defy nature, transcend it, and even live without it. Field(s): US

This reading seminar will examine the history of colonial North America from the sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries.  Employing a comparative Atlantic framework to study Spanish, French, Dutch, and English settlements in North America, this course will explore key themes of conflict and community in the societies that developed during this era.  Readings will include some of the most important recent literature in the field and cover topics such as European-indigenous relations, race and slavery, religious culture, and gender construction. This seminar requires two response papers, a final historiographical essay, and class participation, including an oral presentation. Field(s): US

This course seeks to understand the Cold War and what it meant for the United States, inter-American relations and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. The course encourages students to consider to what extent the Cold War is helpful as a way of understanding Latin American nations and people, and their relationships with their Northern neighbor.

This is an advanced undergraduate seminar course that will retrace the history of the making of the Subaltern Studies problematic, considered a major intervention in both Indian nationalist history and the wider discipline of history itself, with a focus on the relationship between method, archives, and the craft of history writing. Group(s): A, C Fields: *SA

A global examination of the coming, course, and consequences of World War II from the differing viewpoints of the major belligerents and those affected by them.  Emphasis is not only on critical analysis but also on the craft of history-writing. Group(s): B, C, D Field(s): INTL

Many people in our time think some of the highest ethical purposes today were achieved in the struggle to establish the International Criminal Court in 2002, and continue to be at stake in the institution's first steps. Why do people think so, and of what use are the tools of history (assisted by theory) to put this belief in perspective? Answering this question is the main purpose of this course, which presupposes covering the court's origins and several dimensions of its doctrines and workings during its short existence. A main theme is the politics of law, and whether Judith Shklar's brilliant account of legalism is defensible. Field(s): INTL

This course will address critical turning points in the world history of wheeled transport, starting with the time, place, and rationale for the first appearance of wheels; moving onto the diffusion of wheeled transport to other parts of the world; and thence to the emergence of modern wheeled transport out of technological innovations that became evident in eastern Europe in late medieval times. Student papers may be devoted either to these early historical developments, or to episodes in motor-driven vehicular history from more recent times. Field(s): INTL

This course is a review of Greek and Roman political theory as it developed through historical events from the Homeric age of Greece to the Augustan principate at Rome. One of the principal contributions of the ancient Greco-Roman civilization to the western tradition is the rich and varied legacy of political theory developed over many centuries. It is the aim of this course to place ancient political theories in their historical contexts. Much ancient political theory can only be recovered from a close analysis of actual practice, since a good deal of ancient writing on the subject is lost. Even in the cases where great works of political theory survive, however, the historical context must always be emphasized. To take an obvious and well known example, much of the difference between Plato?s ideal state in the Republic and that of Aristotle in his Politics is due to the fact that Sparta, the admired and successful model for many of Plato?s ideas in the Republic, had declined into defeat and obscurity by the time Aristotle wrote, and hence was no longer an attractive model for political theorists. It is a truism, no doubt, that political theory can only be fully grasped and understood within a historical context: this course will apply that truism, and also the reverse notion that theory influences practice and hence history.

Social structure, class, slavery and manumission, social mobility, life expectation, status and behavior of women, Romanization, town and country, social organizations, education and literacy, philanthropy, amusements in the Roman Empire, 70 B.C. - 250 A.D. Field(s): *ANC

This course is a survey of the transformation of warfare between the American Civil War and 1945. Emphasis will be placed on military strategy, weaponry, and leadership.

An examination of literary and cinematic narratives of the Second World War produced in the decades since 1940 in Europe, America, and Asia. The analytic approach centers both on the historicity of, and the history in, the texts, with the goal of questioning the nature of narrative in different forms through a blend of literary and historical approaches.

This class will explore the history of the relationship between law and violence in Europe and its imperial formations in the modern age. We will examine both debates and practices: readings will be drawn from intellectual and legal history as well as from the history of European imperialism and colonialism. The French and British cases will be at the center of our reflection but we will also envisage links with other European empires and with US History.

A review of the history of the Greek world from the beginnings of Greek archaic culture around 800 B.C., through the classical and hellenistic periods to the definitive Roman conquest in 146 B.C., with concentration on political history, but attention also to social and cultural developments.Field(s): ANC

This course will cover the history of the Middle East from the 18th century until the present, examining the region ranging from Morocco to Iran and including the Ottoman Empire. It will focus on transformations in the states of the region, external intervention, and the emergence of modern nation-states, as well as aspects of social, economic, cultural and intellectual history of the region. Field(s): ME

An introduction to the historical origins of forecasting, projections, long-range planning, and future scenarios. Topics include apocalyptic ideas and movements, utopias and dystopias, and changing conceptions of time, progress, and decline. A key theme is how relations of power, including understandings of history, have been shaped by expectations of the future. Group(s): ABCD

This course surveys the history of the Mediterranean world and northern Europe from the Late Roman Empire to the eleventh century. We will begin (Part 1) by considering the interconnected Roman world of Late Antiquity, focusing on the changes brought about by Christianity. The second half (Part 2) will trace the emergence of new religious and political communities around the Mediterranean and in Northern Europe. Special attention will be given to the circulation of people, products and ideas across Europe and the Mediterranean and the changes that this brought about.   This course emphasizes the diverse but fragmentary textual and material evidence that survives from the period and the problems of interpreting this evidence. Students will begin acquiring the skills of a historian and learn why and how other historians have studied the period. No previous background in medieval history is required.

This undergraduate lecture course will introduce students to the broad sweep of Jewish history, from 600 BCE to the present. The focus will be on politics, society and culture, with particular attention to the interplay and tension between integration and separation, and such metahistorical questions as whether it is valid to posit a continuous Jewish history at all.

The conquests of Alexander the Great spread Greek Civilization all around the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. This course will examine the Hellenised (greek-based) urban society of the empires of the Hellenistic era (ca. 330-30BCE).

Standing at the intersection of the religious, cultural, and scientific upheavals within early modern Europe, the study of print and its intersection with culture allows students to learn how shifts in technology (much like those we are witnessing today) affect every aspect of society. This course will examine the signal cultural, political, and religious developments in early modern Western Europe, using the introduction and dissemination of printed materials as a fulcrum and entry point. From the sixteenth century Europeans were confronted with a technological revolution whose cultural consequences were incalculable and whose closest parallel might be the age of electronic information technology in our own day. 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 sixteen- through eighteenth centuries can be understood without factoring in the role of print: its technology, its marketing and distribution channels, and its creation of new readers and new "republics." This course will examine key political, religious, and cultural movements in early modern western European history through the prism of print culture.

Astrology, alchemy, and magic were central components of an educated person's view of the world in early modern Europe. How did these activities become marginalized, while a new philosophy (what we would now call empirical science) came to dominate the discourse of rationality? Through primary and secondary readings, this course examines these "occult" disciplines in relation to the rise of modern science. Group(s): A Field(s): *EME

This course follows interconnected historical developments in Western Europe, the Americas, and West Africa from the late fifteenth through early nineteenth century. It highlights both the comparative, structural evolutions of European colonial empires and the cultural experiences and perspectives of Atlantic World inhabitants, including soldiers, merchants, slaves, missionaries, and revolutionaries.

During the twentieth century, Eastern European borderland populations were devastated by episodes of mass violence during wars, revolutions, and even peacetime. The course focuses on this violence in four phases: the First World War and revolutions; the inter-war period; the Second World War; and the post-war period. Some of these episodes include pogroms, the Famine, deportations, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. After the First World War, as imperial empires dissolved and new nation-states emerged, a conflagration of violence swept through the borderlands causing further instability and civil war. While some of these interwar states provided a modicum of stability, the growth of nationalism, as well as support for fascism and communism, brought new volatility to the region. The most dramatic and violent changes during the inter-war period and Second World War were a result of Nazi and Soviet projects, both of which sought to engineer these borderland societies socially as well as economically to fit their respective visions. This course examines not only how states carried out mass violence against various populations in this explosive region, but also how local movements and Eastern European civilians contributed to these events or participated in violence on their own accord.

This course offers a critical examination of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, once one of Europe's largest military powers which disappeared from the map after World War I. A restructured version of the Habsburg Empire, the Monarchy was a lasting, authoritarian framework of Central European ethnic groups which, however, gave rise to modernism in the field of arts and sciences.The juxtaposition of authority and modernity provides the focus of this survey which includes the study of the Monarchy as the birthplace of both Zionism and modern anti-Semitism. Nurturing a pioneering culture and a pre-modern society, Austria-Hungary is an exciting case of pioneering spirit and decadence, experimentation and dissolution, novelty and decay. The "disintegration of Austrian political culture" is particularly relevant today when presented as the "seedtime for fascism" (George V. Strong). Group(s): B Field(s): MEU

A survey of Russian political, social, and intellectual developments from Peter the Great through the Revolution of 1917. Group(s): B

The course offers an introduction into the history of Russia and the Sovient Union in the twentieth century. It combines lectures and discussion sections as well as survey texts and a selection of sources, including documents generated by state/party bodies, various documents produced by individual authors (especially diaries, letters, and memoirs), and some film materials. Putting the Soviet phenomenon into its wider intellectual, cultural, and geographical contexts, we will also address questions of modernity and modernization, socialism and communism, and authoritarian practices in politics, culture, and society.   Field(s): MEU

The history of Europe's second Thirty Years War marked by economic crises, political turmoil, totalitarian ideologies, massive population transfers, and genocide; but also by extraordinary economic, scientific, and cultural developments. Group(s): B Field(s): MWE

The development of Germany has influenced the history of Europe and, indeed, the world in the 20th century in major and dramatic ways. Most historians agree that the country and its leaders played a crucial role in the outbreak of two world wars which cost at least 70 million lives. Germany experienced a revolution in 1918, hyperinflation in 1923, the Great Depression after 1929, and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Between 1939 and 1945 there followed the brutal conquest of most of its neighbors and the Holocaust. Subsequently, the country became divided into two halves in which emerged a communist dictotorship, on the one hand, and a Western-style parliamentary-representative system, on the other. The division ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Honecker regime and the unification of East and West Germany. No doubt, Germany's history is confused and confusing and has therefore generated plenty of debate among historians. This course offers a comprehensive survey of the country's development from around 1900 to 2000. It is not just concerned with political events and military campaigns, but will also examine in considerable detail German society and its structures, relations between women and men, trends in both high and popular culture, and the ups and downs of an industrial economy in its global setting. The weekly lectures and section discussions are designed to introduce you to the country's conflicted history and to the controversies it unleashed in international scholarship. Group(s): B Field(s): MEU

The history of Britain at the height of its global power. Particular attention will be paid to contestations over political power, and to the emergence of liberal economic and political institutions and ideas. Field(s):MWE

The history of Europe in the wider world from the Allies' victorious war against the Nazi New Order to the triumph of the European Union after the collapse of Soviet Empire. Lectures bring Eastern and Western Europe into one focus, to study the impact of the Cold War, the exit from colonial empire, Europe's "Economic Miracle, the sexual revolution, Europe's slowdown after the 1970s Oil Shock, Euro-Reaganism, and the impact of globalization from the 1990s to the 2008 crisis.  

This course surveys the history of the British Empire from its early modern origins to decolonization in the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the "long nineteenth century"-the heyday of British imperial ideology and colonial expansion. The geographical reach of the course, like the empire itself, is broad, covering parts of Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, South Asia and Australasia. While the course will often emphasize the ideological and material motivations for expansion, conquest, and colonization, close attention will be paid to the experience of, and resistance to, the Empire as well, on the part of both settler colonists and indigenous peoples throughout the "new worlds.

This course will offer a survey of French history from the Wars of Religion to the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789. This formative period witnessed 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, fiscal experimentation, and the critical styles of thinking and reading inculcated by the nascent public sphere.

 This course examines the political culture of eighteenth-century France, from the final decades of the Bourbon monarchy to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Among our primary aims will be to explore the origins of the Terror and its relationship to the Revolution as a whole. Other topics we will address include the erosion of the king's authority in the years leading up to 1789, the fall of the Bastille, the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793, civil war in the Vendée, the militarization of the Revolution, the dechristianization movement, attempts to establish a new Revolutionary calendar and civil religion, and the sweeping plans for moral regeneration led by Robespierre and his colleagues in 1793-1794.

The course looks at the American Presidency in historical perspective. It examines the powers of the office, its place in the American imagination, and the achievements of the most significant presidents. Structured chronologically, it emphasizes the growth and transformation of the office and how it has come to assume its dominant place in the political landscape. Individual presidents are studied to understand not only their own times but also salient issues with which they are associated (Jefferson and Adams with the rise of parties; Andrew Johnson with impeachment; etc.) Intermittent thematic lectures break from the chronological thrust of the course to explore aspects of the presidency in greater depth across time.

A survey of the economic and social history of British North America (with excursions into French, Dutch, and Native American communities) from 1607 to 1763. Major themes will include immigration, community structures, the household economy, slavery and other labor systems, and the cultural transformation of the colonies in the eighteenth century. Group(s): A, D

Examines the social conflicts that accompanied the transformation of the United States from an agrarian republic and slave society to one of the most powerful industrial nations in the world. Particular attention will be paid to the building of new social and economic institutions and to cultural and visual representations of the nation and its people. Readings include major secondary works and primary documents. Formerly: American Society in the age of Capital, 1819-1897. Field(s): US

This course examines the cultural, political, and constitutional origins of the United States. It covers the series of revolutionary changes in politics and society between the mid-18th and early 19th centuries that took thirteen colonies out of the British Empire and turned them into an independent and expanding nation. Starting with the cultural and political glue that held the British Empire together, the course follows the political and ideological processes that broke apart and ends with the series of political struggles that shaped the identity of the US. Using a combination of primary and secondary materials relating to various walks of life and experience from shopping to constitutional debates, students will be expected to craft their own interpretations of this fundamental period of American history. Lectures will introduce students to important developments and provide a framework from them to develop their own analytical skills. Group(s): D Field(s): US

The coming of the Civil War and its impact on the organization of American society afterwards. Group(s): D

Social history of the built environment since 1870, looking at urban and rural landscapes, vernacular architecture of industry, housing, recreation, and public space. Considers government policies, real estate investment, and public debates over land use and the natural environment. Group(s): D

American politics, society, and culture from the aftermath of World War I through the Great Depression and World War II. Field(s): US

Topics include the cold War, McCarthyism, the postwar economy, suburbanization, consumer culture, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and Watergate. Field(s): US

Although images of the frontier and of the west have long dominated the popular imagination of American history, in fact the United States urbanized rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and 80 percent of the national population now lives in metropolitan areas of more than a million people.  How did big cities respond to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, transportation, housing, open space, and recreation?  The course will feature frequent field trips via ferry, foot, and bus. Field(s): US

Since the emergence of a field called "women's history" in the early 1970s, the amount of information we have gathered about women has mounted astronomically. Historians have discovered the presence of women in every aspect of American life and culture. In more recent years they have begun to ask a different kind of question. Does it matter?  If so, how?  What is a gender analysis and how, if at all, does it alter the way we look at our past? How does the new knowledge we have acquired change our understanding of America's past? Or does it? This course is intended to introduce you to some of the newest questions now being asked by historians of women and gender and to some of the intriguing information we have uncovered about women in the American past.  Along the way, we will explore how this material shapes our interpretations of U.S. history and examine the relationship between the history of women and the history of gender. Readings are organized roughly chronologically, moving through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and rotating around encounters with some of the most salient ideas in American life, including: Liberty, Democracy, Equality, Individualism, and Nationalism. At each juncture we will ask how introducing a gendered perspective changes our perceptions of the past. Field(s): US

The aim is to provide an empirical grasp of U.S. foreign relations and to put in question the historiographical views of the periods and critical events that have come up to make that history. Emphasis will be put on determining how "the United States" has been grasped in relation to the world and how historiography has in turn grasped that retrospectively. Group(s): D Field(s): US

The history of work, workers, and unions during the 20th century.  Topics include scientific management, automation, immigrant workers, the rise of industrial unionism, labor politics, occupational discrimination, and working-class community life. Field(s): US

Major expressions of American radicalism, ranging from early labor and communitarian movements to the origins of feminism, the abolitionist movement, and on to Populism, Socialism, and the "Old" and "New" lefts. Field(s): US

The social, cultural, economic, political, and demographic development of America's metropolis from colonial days to present. Slides and walking tours supplement the readings (novels and historical works).Field(s): US

A survey of African-American history since the Civil War. An emphasis is placed on the black quest for equality and community. Group(s): D Formerly listed as "Explorations of Themes in African-American History, 1865-1945". 

Medieval Jews and Christians defined themselves in contrast to one another. This course will examine the conditions and contradictions that emerged from competing visions and neighborly relations. It is arranged to comprehend broad themes rather than strict chronology and to engage both older and very recent scholarship on the perennial themes of tolerance and hate. Field(d): JWS/MED

The political, cultural, and social history of the State of Israel from its founding in 1948 to the present. Group(s): C Field(s): ME

Explores the interaction between the changing makeup of Jewish immigration, the changing social and aconomic conditions in the United States, and the religious, communal, cultural, and political group life of American Jews. Group(s): D

Twentieth-Century Mexican History from the revolution to transition  to democracy. The Course review politics, society, culture, foreign relations, and urbanization. Group(s): D Field(s): LA

This undergraduate lecture course explores the events and currents that shaped the course of modern Egyptian history over the last two centuries. It ranges from the mid-18th century to present and covers such themes as Egypt under Ottoman, French and British rule; Egypt's dynastic rule, and its relation to neighbouring states in the 19th century; nationalism, modernism and feminism, and the role of cinema, literature and the politics of ideas in the 20th; and, finally, the regimes of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak and their relation to the region and the wider world. Field(s): ME

Taking the events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath as a point of departure, this course will begin by investigating in parallel histories of two sibling religious societies: Islam and western Christendom.  It will outline the European antecedents of American understandings and misunderstandings of the Muslim world down to World War I in comparison with Muslim experiences with, and selective efforts to appropriate, aspects of European society and thought over the same period. Field(s): INTL

This course offers a survey of main themes in West African history over the last millenium, with particular emphasis on the period from the mid-15th through the 20th century. Themes include the age of West African empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay); re-alignments of economic and political energies towards the Atlantic coast; the rise and decline of the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves; the advent and demise of colonial rule; and internal displacement, migrations, and revolutions. In the latter part of the course, we will appraise the continuities and ruptures of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Group(s): C Field(s): AFR 

This course provides a political and social history of India from the 16th-19th century, focusing on the Mughal empire. Two central concerns: first, the Mughal regnal politics towards their rival imperial concerns within India and West Asia (the Maratha, the Rajput, the Safavid, the Ottoman); and second, the foreign gaze onto the Mughals (via the presence of Portuguese, English, and French travelers, merchants, and diplomats in India). These interlocked practices (how Mughals saw the world and how the world saw the Mughals) will allow us develop a nuanced knowledge of universally acknowledged power of the early modern world. 

(No prerequisite.) We begin with the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire, and examine why and how the East India Company came to rule India in the eighteenth century. As the term progresses, we will investigate the objectives of British colonial rule in India and we will explore the nature of colonial modernity. The course then turns to a discussion of anti-colonial sentiment, both in the form of outright revolt, and critiques by early nationalists. This is followed by a discussion of Gandhi, his thought and his leadership of the nationalist movement. Finally, the course explores the partition of British India in 1947, examining the long-term consequences of the process of partition for the states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. We will focus in particular on the flowing themes: non-Western state formation; debates about whether British rule impoverished India; the structure and ideology of anti-colonial thought; identity formation and its connection to political, economic and cultural structures. The class relies extensively on primary texts, and aims to expose students to multiple historiographical perspectives for understanding South Asia's past.

Focus on the history of modern India, using the life and times of Mohandas Gandhi as the basis for not only an engagement with an extraordinary historical figure, but also for a consideration of a great variety of historical issues, including the relationship between nationalism and religion, caste politics in India and affirmative action policies in the United States today, and racism as encountered by Gandhi in relation to colonialism and the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. Field(s): SA 

This course presents and at the same time critiques a narrative world history from 1500 to the present. The purpose of the course is to convey an understanding of how this rapidly growing field of history is being approahced at three different levels: the narrative textbook level, the theoretical-conceptual level, and, through discussion sections, the research level. All students are required to enroll in a weekly discussion section. Graded work for the courses consists of two brief (5 page) papers based on activities in discussion sections as well as a take-home midterm and final examination. Graduate students who enroll in the course must take a discussion section conducted by the instructor and can expect heavier reading assignments. Field(s): INTL 

This course surveys the history of modern finance, from the origin of novel banking institutions in early-modern Italy (like the Medici Bank, founded 1397) to the financial crisis of 2008. "Finance," broadly understood as the activity of allocating capital (in particular, money) within communities, will be examined from a variety of historical perspectives-economic, political, intellectual, cultural. While the course often emphasizes "high" finance in centers of Western financial power (Florence in the 1400s, London in the 1800s, New York in the 2000s), careful attention is paid to how financial activities in such global centers have impacted people across different socioeconomic and geographic locations, from "Wall St." to "Main St." and from Illinois to Argentina.

This course examines the history of the quest to understand human society scientifically. The focus will be on one specific approach to social investigation-quantification-which has been central to the historical development of "social science" and which has become especially esteemed in the 21st-century "data" age. Built around careful reading of primary social-scientific texts, the course will span from the "political arithmetic" of the 17th century through the late 20th century, touching upon the historical aspects of several modern social-science disciplines (economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science). We will explore past attempts to count, calculate, measure, and model many dimensions of human social life: population, wealth, health, happiness, intelligence, crime, deviance, race. We will pay particular attention to how social-scientific numbers have not only reflected, but transformed, the individuals and communities they sought to measure. Readings will include Condorcet, Thomas Malthus, W. S. Jevons, Emile Durkheim, Francis Galton, Franz Boas, Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, and Ian Hacking.

This course compares and contrasts the paths to modernity of four societies: China, Germany, Japan, and Italy. By adopting a comparative approach, and looking closely at the way that international contexts influenced domestic developments, this course will give students the chance to view history from outside the nation-state focus that tended to dominate history in the past. In this sense, while students are expected to expand their familiarity with the basic history of these countries, more important will be the capacity to think about the world from multiple perspectives. Key topics include national consolidation, the growth of nationalist sentiment, imperialism and fascism, the impact of World War II and the Cold War, and historical memory. Based largely on primary sources, the course presents modernity both as understood by each of these societies and also in its global interconnectedness, an interconnectedness that shapes our world today. Field(s): MEU/EA

Empires have been consistent - but ever changing - forms of rule in the modern world. This course explores how empires and imperialism have connected the world by forging new forms of politics and culture from 1850 to 2011. It examines key dimensions of imperialism such as nationalism, capitalism, racism, and fascism in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America. Based largely on primary sources - novels, memoirs, official documents, and visual arts, including photographs and film - the course presents imperialism both as experienced in different societies and also in its global interconnectedness. Field(s): INTL 

The conquests of Alexander the Great spread Greek Civilization all around the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. This course will examine the Hellenised (greek-based) urban society of the empires of the Hellenistic era (ca. 330-30BCE) Field(s): ANC*

This course is a review of Greek and Roman political theory as it developed through historical events from the Homeric age of Greece to the Augustan principate at Rome. One of the principal contributions of the ancient Greco-Roman civilization to the western tradition is the rich and varied legacy of political theory developed over many centuries. It is the aim of this course to place ancient political theories in their historical contexts. Much ancient political theory can only be recovered from a close analysis of actual practice, since a good deal of ancient writing on the subject is lost. Even in the cases where great works of political theory survive, however, the historical context must always be emphasized. To take an obvious and well known example, much of the difference between Plato?s ideal state in the Republic and that of Aristotle in his Politics is due to the fact that Sparta, the admired and successful model for many of Plato?s ideas in the Republic, had declined into defeat and obscurity by the time Aristotle wrote, and hence was no longer an attractive model for political theorists. It is a truism, no doubt, that political theory can only be fully grasped and understood within a historical context: this course will apply that truism, and also the reverse notion that theory influences practice and hence history.

Social structure, class, slavery and manumission, social mobility, life expectation, status and behavior of women, Romanization, town and country, social organizations, education and literacy, philanthropy, amusements in the Roman Empire, 70 B.C. - 250 A.D. Field(s): *ANC

This is a fifteen-week undergraduate seminar.  It is designed to provide an introduction to the late antique period of the three great civilizations of the ancient Nile Valley, Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia.  Course material will cover the social and religious history of Egypt under Roman rule; the collapse of the ancient Nubian civilization of Meroe; the emergence of its independent successor kingdoms; the birth of a centralized and literate society in the Ethiopian highlands; the Christianization of Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia; and the survival of all three civilizations in the early medieval period, Egypt under Islamic rule and Nubia and Ethiopia as independent powers. Field(s): ANC*

This course introduces students to the study of coins as historical disciplines. It will provide a survey of the production and use of coinage in the Roman world from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD.  Students will also asses the contribution that the study of coinage makes to the study of Roman social, economic, and political history. The majority of the course will take place at the American Numismatic Society. Field(s): *ANC

This course will examine the role of love and hate and their changing place in the culture of the elite groups from Late Antiquity to the twelfth century. Medieval chronicles, poems, letters and legal texts, both religious and civil, will be used, deconstructed and decoded with a special attention to gender and to the emotional relations between men and women. Field(s): MED

This course is designed as traveller’s guide to medieval Europe. Its purpose is to provide a window to a long-lost world that provided the foundation of modern institutions and that continues to inspire the modern collective artistic and literary imagination with its own particularities. This course will not be a conventional history course concentrating on the grand narratives in the economic, social and political domains but rather intend to explore the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants, and attempts to have a glimpse of their mindset, their emotional spectrum, their convictions, prejudices, fears and hopes. It will be at once a historical, sociological and anthropological study of one of the most inspiring ages of European civilization. Subjects to be covered will include the birth and childhood, domestic life, sex and marriage, craftsmen and artisans, agricultural work, food and diet, the religious devotion, sickness and its cures, death, after death (purgatory and the apparitions), travelling, merchants and trades, inside the nobles’ castle, the Christian cosmos, and medieval technology. The lectures will be accompanied by maps, images of illuminated manuscripts and of medieval objects. Students will be required to attend a weekly discussion section to discuss the medieval texts bearing on that week’s subject. The written course assignment will be a midterm, final and two short papers, one an analysis of a medieval text and a second an analysis of a modern text on the Middle Ages. Field(s): MED

Standing at the intersection of the religious, cultural, and scientific upheavals within early modern Europe, the study of print and its intersection with culture allows students to learn how shifts in technology (much like those we are witnessing today) affect every aspect of society. This course will examine the signal cultural, political, and religious developments in early modern Western Europe, using the introduction and dissemination of printed materials as a fulcrum and entry point. From the sixteenth century Europeans were confronted with a technological revolution whose cultural consequences were incalculable and whose closest parallel might be the age of electronic information technology in our own day. 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 sixteen- through eighteenth centuries can be understood without factoring in the role of print: its technology, its marketing and distribution channels, and its creation of new readers and new "republics." This course will examine key political, religious, and cultural movements in early modern western European history through the prism of print culture.

Astrology, alchemy, and magic were central components of an educated person's view of the world in early modern Europe. How did these activities become marginalized, while a new philosophy (what we would now call empirical science) came to dominate the discourse of rationality? Through primary and secondary readings, this course examines these "occult" disciplines in relation to the rise of modern science. Group(s): A Field(s): *EME

Introduction to the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the upheavals of astronomy, anatomy, mathematics, alchemy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Field(s): EME

In this course we will examine theoretical and historical developments that framed the notions of censorship and free expression in early modern Europe. In the last two decades, the role of censorship has become one of the significant elements in discussions of early modern culture. The history of printing and of the book, of the rise national-political cultures and their projections of control, religious wars and denominational schisms are some of the factors that intensified debate over the free circulation of ideas and speech. Indexes, Inquisition, Star Chamber, book burnings and beheadings have been the subjects of an ever growing body of scholarship. Field(s): EME

This course examines western Europeans' encounters with Constantinople and Byzantine culture after the separation of the "Latin" from the "Greek." We will follow merchants, pilgrims and merchants as they visit, trade with, or march into Constantinople, study the sources they have left recording their impressions and their encounters, and consider what westerners took from Byzantium in the way of art forms, learning, sociopolitical practices, and material artifacts.

This course follows the spread and transformation of Christianity by Western missionaries in American, African, and Asian settings, from the late fifteenth through early nineteenth centuries. We examine what missionaries preached and urged others to believe and practice, and also what motivated missionaries, mission converts, and those who resisted proselytization. We also examine missions as sites of intercultural and colonial encounters with long-term impacts on politics, wars, and social dynamics.

This course follows interconnected historical developments in Western Europe, the Americas, and West Africa from the late fifteenth through early nineteenth century. It highlights both the comparative, structural evolutions of European colonial empires and the cultural experiences and perspectives of Atlantic World inhabitants, including soldiers, merchants, slaves, missionaries, and revolutionaries.

Boundary crossers have always challenged the way societies imagined themselves. This course explores the political, religious, economic, and social dynamics of religious conversion. The course will focus on Western (Christian and Jewish) models in the medieval and early modern periods. It will include comparative material from other societies and periods. Autobiographies, along with legal, religious and historical documents will complement the readings. Field(s): *JWS

This course explores manners of conceiving and being a self in early modern Europe (ca. 1400-1800). Through the analysis of a range of sources, from autobiographical writings to a selection of theological, philosophical, artistic, and literary works, we will address the concept of personhood as a lens through which to analyze topics such as the valorization of interiority, the formation of mechanist and sensationalist philosophies of selfhood, and, more generally, the human person's relationship with material and existential goods. This approach is intended to deepen and complicate our understanding of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and other movements around which histories of the early modern period have typically been narrated. 

A survey of the relationships between medical expertise and human dietary habits from Antiquity to the present, giving special attention to the links between practical and moral concerns and between expert knowledge and common sense. Field(s): EME

During the twentieth century, Eastern European borderland populations were devastated by episodes of mass violence during wars, revolutions, and even peacetime. The course focuses on this violence in four phases: the First World War and revolutions; the inter-war period; the Second World War; and the post-war period. Some of these episodes include pogroms, the Famine, deportations, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. After the First World War, as imperial empires dissolved and new nation-states emerged, a conflagration of violence swept through the borderlands causing further instability and civil war. While some of these interwar states provided a modicum of stability, the growth of nationalism, as well as support for fascism and communism, brought new volatility to the region. The most dramatic and violent changes during the inter-war period and Second World War were a result of Nazi and Soviet projects, both of which sought to engineer these borderland societies socially as well as economically to fit their respective visions. This course examines not only how states carried out mass violence against various populations in this explosive region, but also how local movements and Eastern European civilians contributed to these events or participated in violence on their own accord.

This course offers a critical examination of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, once one of Europe's largest military powers which disappeared from the map after World War I. A restructured version of the Habsburg Empire, the Monarchy was a lasting, authoritarian framework of Central European ethnic groups which, however, gave rise to modernism in the field of arts and sciences.The juxtaposition of authority and modernity provides the focus of this survey which includes the study of the Monarchy as the birthplace of both Zionism and modern anti-Semitism. Nurturing a pioneering culture and a pre-modern society, Austria-Hungary is an exciting case of pioneering spirit and decadence, experimentation and dissolution, novelty and decay. The "disintegration of Austrian political culture" is particularly relevant today when presented as the "seedtime for fascism" (George V. Strong). Group(s): B Field(s): MEU

This course concentrates on the early modern period (roughly 1500 to 1800) and addresses the history of the region which includes mainly the territories of present day Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The course presents the history of the region through the analysis of such important pan-European processes as the growth of empires and absolutism, the Reformation and revival of Catholicism, the Enlightenment and urbanization. It also emphasizes that that region's culture and society were in many ways unique and distinctive from the West European civilization.

A survey of Russian political, social, and intellectual developments from Peter the Great through the Revolution of 1917. Group(s): B

The course offers an introduction into the history of Russia and the Sovient Union in the twentieth century. It combines lectures and discussion sections as well as survey texts and a selection of sources, including documents generated by state/party bodies, various documents produced by individual authors (especially diaries, letters, and memoirs), and some film materials. Putting the Soviet phenomenon into its wider intellectual, cultural, and geographical contexts, we will also address questions of modernity and modernization, socialism and communism, and authoritarian practices in politics, culture, and society.   Field(s): MEU

The history of Europe's second Thirty Years War marked by economic crises, political turmoil, totalitarian ideologies, massive population transfers, and genocide; but also by extraordinary economic, scientific, and cultural developments. Group(s): B Field(s): MWE

The development of Germany has influenced the history of Europe and, indeed, the world in the 20th century in major and dramatic ways. Most historians agree that the country and its leaders played a crucial role in the outbreak of two world wars which cost at least 70 million lives. Germany experienced a revolution in 1918, hyperinflation in 1923, the Great Depression after 1929, and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Between 1939 and 1945 there followed the brutal conquest of most of its neighbors and the Holocaust. Subsequently, the country became divided into two halves in which emerged a communist dictotorship, on the one hand, and a Western-style parliamentary-representative system, on the other. The division ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Honecker regime and the unification of East and West Germany. No doubt, Germany's history is confused and confusing and has therefore generated plenty of debate among historians. This course offers a comprehensive survey of the country's development from around 1900 to 2000. It is not just concerned with political events and military campaigns, but will also examine in considerable detail German society and its structures, relations between women and men, trends in both high and popular culture, and the ups and downs of an industrial economy in its global setting. The weekly lectures and section discussions are designed to introduce you to the country's conflicted history and to the controversies it unleashed in international scholarship. Group(s): B Field(s): MEU

This course will include an in-depth examination of some major tinkers and texts of the French, Germans, and Scottish Enlightenments. By reading works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Hume, we will examine their radically divergent responses to the central intellectual quandries of their day, and in many ways our own: the realtionship between rationalism, science, and faith; religion and the state; the individual and the polity; cosmopolitanism and particularism; pluralism and relativism; and the meaning of liberty. Group(s): A, B

The history of Britain at the height of its global power. Particular attention will be paid to contestations over political power, and to the emergence of liberal economic and political institutions and ideas. Field(s):MWE

This seminar provides an introduction to key debates and historical writing in Irish history from 1700.  Topics include:  the character of Ascendancy Ireland; the 1798 rising and the Act of Union; the causes and consequences of the famine; emigration and Fenianism; the Home Rule movement; the Gaelic revival; the Easter Rising and the civil war; politics and culture in the Free State; the Northern Ireland problem; Ireland, the European Union, and the birth of the “celtic tiger”. Field(s): MEU

The history of Europe in the wider world from the Allies' victorious war against the Nazi New Order to the triumph of the European Union after the collapse of Soviet Empire. Lectures bring Eastern and Western Europe into one focus, to study the impact of the Cold War, the exit from colonial empire, Europe's "Economic Miracle, the sexual revolution, Europe's slowdown after the 1970s Oil Shock, Euro-Reaganism, and the impact of globalization from the 1990s to the 2008 crisis.  Group(s): B Field(s): MEU

This course surveys the history of the British Empire from its early modern origins to decolonization in the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the "long nineteenth century"-the heyday of British imperial ideology and colonial expansion. The geographical reach of the course, like the empire itself, is broad, covering parts of Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, South Asia and Australasia. While the course will often emphasize the ideological and material motivations for expansion, conquest, and colonization, close attention will be paid to the experience of, and resistance to, the Empire as well, on the part of both settler colonists and indigenous peoples throughout the "new worlds.

This seminar is dedicated to studying the historical developments of Europe in the Cold War, from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We will examine the major shifts in contemporary European history as they relate to Cold War conflicts and competitions, including the Yalta and Potsdam meetings; Marshall Plan reconstruction; the workings of NATO; the Prague Spring; non-proliferation movements; and Eurocommunism trends. We will consider a wide range of historical perspectives, including but not limited to political, geographic, economic, cultural, and military frameworks. Field(s): MEU

This course will offer a survey of French history from the Wars of Religion to the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789. This formative period witnessed 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, fiscal experimentation, and the critical styles of thinking and reading inculcated by the nascent public sphere.

The purpose of this course is to explore the mental horizon of the 1820s through the works of professional revolutionaries, artists, poets and writers, as well as via recent historical and literary studies. The period marked the intellectual origins of modernity and many of our key organizing principles - the very idea of socialism, liberalism and communism for instance - originated then. Readings connect political transformations in Europe and across the globe to a new sense of time and speed, history, technology and economics. Field(s): MEU

This course surveys the main currents of British history from 1867 to the present, with particular attention to the changing place of Britain in the world and the changing shape of politics. Group(s): B Field(s): MWE

In this seminar we will examine the immediate impact and the longer-running legacies of the Second World War in the Netherlands, with reference to several other Western European nations (France, Belgium). The ‘Long War' will relate to the Second World War as history in the first place, discussing the place of the occupied nation(s) in ‘Hitler's Empire' (Mark Mazower). We also will take into account that the end of the war in Europe was followed by new kinds of external conflicts with strong internal repercussions: the Cold War and the first wave of European decolonization. The perspective will focus on the nation-states, endangered in its very existence by oppressive foreign occupation, subsequently in need of rebuilding and reinventing themselves against many odds. The second element of the seminar is the legacy of the ‘Long War', stretching over the generations to the present day. The Long War has been subject to a never-ending series of controversies in the public sphere that have profoundly influenced the historiography of the war in the different nations. In the course, we will explore the interconnections between politics of memory, historiography and cultural interpretations of the embattled past (films, novels, televised documentaries in particular). Field(s): MEU

The seminar will attempt to offer a historical context for evaluating contemporary discussions of the role of the UN and the nature of international relations. It will cover the formation and metamorphoses of the United Nations itself, exploring in particular its role in the Cold War and in the decolonisation process. We will look too at why some international organisations [the IMF] appear to have flourished while others failed. Among the topics to be covered are the changing role of international law, sovereignty and human rights regimes, development aid as international politics, the collapse of the gold standard and its impact. We will end by looking at the politics of UN reform, and new theories of the role of institutions in global affairs, and ask what light they shed on the future of international governance now that the Cold War is over. Students will be expected to read widely in primary as well as secondary sources and to produce a research paper of their own. Field(s): MEU/US

Explores how conceptions of desire and sexuality, gendered and raced bodies, shaped major events and processes in modern Europe: the Enlightenment and European empires; political and sexual revolutions; consumption and commodity fetishism; the metropolis and modern industry; psychoanalysis and the avant-garde; fascism and the Cold War; secularization,and post-socialism. Featuring: political and philosophical tracts; law, literature and film. Field(s): MEU

 This course examines the political culture of eighteenth-century France, from the final decades of the Bourbon monarchy to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Among our primary aims will be to explore the origins of the Terror and its relationship to the Revolution as a whole. Other topics we will address include the erosion of the king's authority in the years leading up to 1789, the fall of the Bastille, the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793, civil war in the Vendée, the militarization of the Revolution, the dechristianization movement, attempts to establish a new Revolutionary calendar and civil religion, and the sweeping plans for moral regeneration led by Robespierre and his colleagues in 1793-1794. Field(s): MEU

The course looks at the American Presidency in historical perspective. It examines the powers of the office, its place in the American imagination, and the achievements of the most significant presidents. Structured chronologically, it emphasizes the growth and transformation of the office and how it has come to assume its dominant place in the political landscape. Individual presidents are studied to understand not only their own times but also salient issues with which they are associated (Jefferson and Adams with the rise of parties; Andrew Johnson with impeachment; etc.) Intermittent thematic lectures break from the chronological thrust of the course to explore aspects of the presidency in greater depth across time.

A survey of the economic and social history of British North America (with excursions into French, Dutch, and Native American communities) from 1607 to 1763. Major themes will include immigration, community structures, the household economy, slavery and other labor systems, and the cultural transformation of the colonies in the eighteenth century. Group(s): A, D

Examines the social conflicts that accompanied the transformation of the United States from an agrarian republic and slave society to one of the most powerful industrial nations in the world. Particular attention will be paid to the building of new social and economic institutions and to cultural and visual representations of the nation and its people. Readings include major secondary works and primary documents. Formerly: American Society in the age of Capital, 1819-1897. Field(s): US

This course examines the cultural, political, and constitutional origins of the United States. It covers the series of revolutionary changes in politics and society between the mid-18th and early 19th centuries that took thirteen colonies out of the British Empire and turned them into an independent and expanding nation. Starting with the cultural and political glue that held the British Empire together, the course follows the political and ideological processes that broke apart and ends with the series of political struggles that shaped the identity of the US. Using a combination of primary and secondary materials relating to various walks of life and experience from shopping to constitutional debates, students will be expected to craft their own interpretations of this fundamental period of American history. Lectures will introduce students to important developments and provide a framework from them to develop their own analytical skills. Group(s): D Field(s): US

This undergraduate lecture-seminar is about the making, endurance, and resurgence of modern American Indian nations. We will examine broadly the varied historical experiences of American Indians from the late 19thC to the present, with a special focus on the 20th century. We approach this study with an understanding that American Indians (as well as Native Hawaiians, and Alaska Natives) are and were actors in history and not just hapless victims of Euro-American imperialism and power. Over the semester, we will focus on the ways indigenous peoples in the United States adapted and responded to the host of stresses that accompanied the rapid and often violent social, cultural, and environmental transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries. We will historicize modern social and political issues in Indian Country and examine the processes of resistance, renewal, accommodation, and change from the reservation era to the present. Particular attention will be paid to the ways native people and their communities have met the challenges they have confronted as they persist in their efforts to preserve their homelands, their cultures, their sovereignty, and their rights to selfdetermination.

The period known as the "Progressive Era" in the United States witnessed major transformations in American society. We will examine currents of social change and reform in the terms of mass immigration, urbanization, and industrialization; commercialized culture; Jim Crow segregation; and U.S. projects on the world stage. The seminar will include history, historiography, and a term paper based on original research in archival and other primary materials. Field(s): US

The coming of the Civil War and its impact on the organization of American society afterwards. Group(s): D

Social history of the built environment since 1870, looking at urban and rural landscapes, vernacular architecture of industry, housing, recreation, and public space. Considers government policies, real estate investment, and public debates over land use and the natural environment. Group(s): D

Topics include the cold War, McCarthyism, the postwar economy, suburbanization, consumer culture, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and Watergate. Field(s): US

Although images of the frontier and of the west have long dominated the popular imagination of American history, in fact the United States urbanized rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and 80 percent of the national population now lives in metropolitan areas of more than a million people.  How did big cities respond to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, transportation, housing, open space, and recreation?  The course will feature frequent field trips via ferry, foot, and bus. Field(s): US

Since the emergence of a field called "women's history" in the early 1970s, the amount of information we have gathered about women has mounted astronomically. Historians have discovered the presence of women in every aspect of American life and culture. In more recent years they have begun to ask a different kind of question. Does it matter?  If so, how?  What is a gender analysis and how, if at all, does it alter the way we look at our past? How does the new knowledge we have acquired change our understanding of America's past? Or does it? This course is intended to introduce you to some of the newest questions now being asked by historians of women and gender and to some of the intriguing information we have uncovered about women in the American past.  Along the way, we will explore how this material shapes our interpretations of U.S. history and examine the relationship between the history of women and the history of gender. Readings are organized roughly chronologically, moving through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and rotating around encounters with some of the most salient ideas in American life, including: Liberty, Democracy, Equality, Individualism, and Nationalism. At each juncture we will ask how introducing a gendered perspective changes our perceptions of the past. Field(s): US

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

How have Americans used culture as a means of responding to, interpreting, and memorializing periods of social, economic, and political crisis? Do these periods create breaks in cultural forms and practices?  Or do periods of significant upheaval encourage an impetus to defend cultural practices, thereby facilitating the "invention of tradition"? How are the emotional responses produced by critical moments--whether trauma, outrage, insecurity, or fear--turned into cultural artifacts?  And, finally, how are cultural crises memorialized? This course focuses on Americans' cultural responses to the lynching of black Americans in the era of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II to answer these questions. We will examine a wide range of individual and collective cultural expressions, including anti-lynching plays and songs, WPA programs, the 1939 World's Fair, war photographs and radio broadcasts, the zoot suit and swing culture, and the military's effort to preserve culture in European war areas. Field(s): US

This seminar features extensive reading, multiple written assignments, and a term paper, as well as a likely trip to Gettsyburg.  It focuses on the Civil War and on World Wars I and II. Group(s): D Field(s): US

This course is a survey of the transformation of warfare between the American Civil War and 1945. Emphasis will be placed on military strategy, weaponry, and leadership.

The aim is to provide an empirical grasp of U.S. foreign relations and to put in question the historiographical views of the periods and critical events that have come up to make that history. Emphasis will be put on determining how "the United States" has been grasped in relation to the world and how historiography has in turn grasped that retrospectively. Group(s): D Field(s): US

The history of work, workers, and unions during the 20th century.  Topics include scientific management, automation, immigrant workers, the rise of industrial unionism, labor politics, occupational discrimination, and working-class community life. Field(s): US

The general object of this course is to illuminate how histories of the realm we think of as "international" are structured by means of key concepts, foundational concepts that form semantic fields of politics and policy. The seminar this year will be devoted, specifically, to the combined problem of representation, empire and world fairs, the fairs that enjoyed a particular vogue around 1900, outstandingly in France and the United States. Instructor's permission is required; please see: http://www.history.columbia.edu/undergraduate/seminars/index.html for more information.

Major expressions of American radicalism, ranging from early labor and communitarian movements to the origins of feminism, the abolitionist movement, and on to Populism, Socialism, and the "Old" and "New" lefts. Field(s): US

The social, cultural, economic, political, and demographic development of America's metropolis from colonial days to present. Slides and walking tours supplement the readings (novels and historical works).Field(s): US

A survey of the history of the American South from the colonial era to the present day, with two purposes: first, to afford students an understanding of the special historical characteristics of the South and of southerners; and second, to explore what the experience of the South may teach about America as a nation. Group(s): D Field(s): US 

An exploration in global context of science and technology in the United States and their dynamic roles in the larger society from the colonial period to recent years. Attention will be given to key figures and their contributions to the earth, physical, and biological sciences and to innovators and their achievements.  Among the major topics covered will be exploration, the agricultural, industrial, and information economies, the military and national defense, religion, culture, and the environment. Field(s): US

This seminar examines the history of narcotics, including sugar, tobacco, alcohol, opiates, and marijuana, in America from the colonial period to the early twentieth-century. It pays particular attention to the intoxicating and stimulating opportunities New World agriculture presented, alcohol- including its role in relations with Native Americans-, how tobacco influenced Chesapeake political culture, the spread of opiates and their medicalization, and the politics of anti-narcotic reform. The course considers the broad matters of economic role, social use, and political context. Students will propose and must receive approval for a twenty-page research paper based on primary sources, and present primary sources for discussion to the class.

A survey of African-American history since the Civil War. An emphasis is placed on the black quest for equality and community. Group(s): D Formerly listed as "Explorations of Themes in African-American History, 1865-1945". 

Students will gain a solid knowledge and understanding of the health issues facing African Americans since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's heath organization and care; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; sickle cell anemia; and substance abuse. Group(s): D Field(s): US Formerly listed as "History of African-American Health and Health Movements".

In this seminar we will use readings from the interdisciplinary study of memory (theory) to examine published and unpublished American letters, diaries, and autobiographies (practice). With regard to memory, we will be concerned with what is remembered, what is forgotten, and how this process occurs. We’ll explore concepts including collective/shared memory, commemoration, documentation, trauma, nation, autobiography, nostalgia, etc., and we’ll test this theory against written narratives of the self. The goals of the seminar are to explore theoretical concepts of memory, apply them to written examples of memory, and to develop proficiency in the use of these skills inside and outside an academic environment. This is a history course and many of the narratives we will read are American 19th-century texts. These will include, but not be limited to, those on the experience of the Civil War. The course requires participants to commit substantial time outside of class working with unpublished materials in Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library for assignments and as part of a final project. Field(s): US

This class will explore the everyday culture reflected in the Geniza manuscripts through the lens of kinship relations and family life. The course will introduce a range of genres of Geniza documents (court records, contracts and deeds, legal responsa, and personal letters). We will read examples of these documents alongside contemporary Jewish legal and literary works, Islamic literature, and recent work in medieval Islamic social history. Taking a comparative approach to this material, we will work to understand how the authors of these documents understood marriage, divorce, and parenthood, and how these relationships positioned individuals economically and socially within the broader communities in which they lived. In the process, you will learn how to use documents and literary sources as evidence for social history, as well as learn a great deal about Jews' everyday life in medieval Egypt.

Field(s): ANC

The seminar will focus on traditional Jewish life, in the Eastern European towns known as shtetlekh, from the early modern period until late 19th century. Through study of various primary sources, mainly memoirs, autobiographies, stories and poetry, we will portray the everyday life, especially childhood and adolescence, and the confrontation between tradition and modernity. Field(s): JEW

The political, cultural, and social history of the State of Israel from its founding in 1948 to the present. Group(s): C Field(s): ME

Explores the interaction between the changing makeup of Jewish immigration, the changing social and aconomic conditions in the United States, and the religious, communal, cultural, and political group life of American Jews. Group(s): D

Twentieth-Century Mexican History from the revolution to transition  to democracy. The Course review politics, society, culture, foreign relations, and urbanization. Group(s): D Field(s): LA

In this colloquium we will examine what the Cold War meant in a Latin American context and how historians today are interpreting it. We will primarily be focusing on new conceptual frameworks and historiographical trends that have emerged in the last decade as a result of archival openings, oral histories and the publication of memoirs. Although it would be helpful to have a background in US-Latin American relations and/or Latin American history it is not a prerequisite of the course. Because the colloquium is largely structured chronologically, students will gain an understanding of events, turning points, and developments in Latin America throughout the twentieth century that will allow them to understand the region's past. It worth underlining that this is not a course about US interventions in the region, although the United States often contributed to the way in which the Cold War in Latin America unfolded. Instead, we will be focusing squarely on Latin American perspectives and looking at what the Cold War meant to those inside the region. Specifically, we will be addressing the role of ideology and ideological struggles in twentieth-century Latin America; how these ideas responded to the challenges of modernity and development; why Marxism was popular in the region and how it was interpreted; the extent to which it influenced nationalists and revolutionaries; and who opposed it, why, and how. Throughout the semester we will be focusing in on international and intra-regional dimensions to the conflict as well as transnational stories of exile and movements. Students will therefore also be exploring how events in one part of Latin America impacted upon people in other areas of region either directly or indirectly. In this respect, we will be paying particular attention to the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, the Cuban Revolution's impact on revolutionary and counter- evolutionary trends in Latin America in the 1960s, the significance of the Brazilian coup of 1964 and the subsequent influence that Brazil's military regime had in shaping politics the Southern Cone. The colloquium is also designed to allow students to examine how Latin American populations, parties, leaders and exiles interacted with their contemporaries in other parts of the world and to draw comparisons. Field(s): LA

An exploration of Cuba's late colonial period, wars of independence, republican/neocolonial period, 1933 and 1959 revolutions, and eras under the governments of Fidel and Raúl Castro, including recent history.  Topics considered will include: Cuban sovereignty; the agricultural basis of the Cuban economy under colonialism and neocolonialism; enslaved labor and abolition; social and political struggles, both nonviolent and armed; the development of Cuban nationalisms, with an emphasis on the roles of race, diaspora, and exile in this process; Cuban-U.S. relations over many decades; and Cuba's role as a global actor, particularly after the 1959 revolution. Field(s): LA

This undergraduate seminar deals with the presence of indigenous peoples in Latin American colonial societies and aims to analyze indigenous responses to conquest and colonization. How did indigenous people see themselves and interact with other groups? What roles did they play in shaping Latin American societies? What spaces were they able to create for themselves? These and similar questions will guide our discussion through the semester. The course will offer a survey of all the main indigenous groups; however, the case studies are by necessity just a selection, and quite a few come from Mexico, reflecting the state of the scholarship in the field.

This course focuses on the cases of Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay to explore the complex relationships between social conflict, youth counterculture, and leftist radicalism which characterized the 1960s all over the region.  In-depth reading and discussion of a number of relevant primary sources and available scholarship in English will build a foundation for thinking through these issues.  In the first part of the class, we will analyze the political mobilization and cultural modernization in the framework of the conflicts that shaped the Cold War in the subcontinent.  After this general introduction, we will focus on 1968 to examine the impact of countercultural ideas and practices on different political traditions, particularly student and leftist politics.  Next we will analyze the rise and fall of the New Left, which challenged the ideological commitment, political strategies, and conservative cultural politics of the traditional left. Discussion will incorporate conventional views and recent academic debates on this shift in the region, which also addressing the spiraling of state repression that forced both old and new groups to reconsider strategies in the three countries under examination.  Finally, students will be encouraged to assess how all of these events and themes echoed in social memory through cultural representations and their increasing power to either legitimize or discredit political positions. Field(s): LA

Focusing on the cases of  Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, this course examines the birth and development of the movements that protested human rights violations by right-wing authoritarian regimes in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the first part of the class, we will explore some of the basic concerns that historians, political theorists, and social scientists have raised about authoritarian regimes in late twentieth-century South America. We will aim at concocting a working definition of authoritarianism, discussing the emergence of a new authoritarian model in the Southern Cone and examining the specific challenges confronted by the human rights movements. After this brief survey, the class will focus on the different ways of dealing with the repressive, legal, and political legacies of these regimes. We will analyze the first efforts at denunciation launched by political exiles and transnational human rights groups, as well as the formation of groups of victims' relatives that aimed at exposing ongoing abuses in their countries. We will also study the role of human rights claims during the transitional periods and the ways in which the post-transitional democratic governments faced these calls for accountability. The course will make a basic distinction between concrete legal actions taken to punish those accused of human rights violations, where the state was called to play a decisive role, and more disorganized efforts to know what happened and spread this knowledge to the society at large. We will explore this distinction, discussing how different actors posed their claims and constructed narratives to account for human rights violations and past political violence. This exploration will include the existing literature on justice and truth telling in the politics of transition, as well as scholarship on social memory and historical commemorations. Field(s): LA

This undergraduate lecture course explores the events and currents that shaped the course of modern Egyptian history over the last two centuries. It ranges from the mid-18th century to present and covers such themes as Egypt under Ottoman, French and British rule; Egypt's dynastic rule, and its relation to neighbouring states in the 19th century; nationalism, modernism and feminism, and the role of cinema, literature and the politics of ideas in the 20th; and, finally, the regimes of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak and their relation to the region and the wider world. Field(s): ME

This course will examine some of the problems inherent in Western historical writing on non-European cultures, as well as broad questions of what itmeans to write history across cultures. The course will touch on therelationship between knowledge and power, given that much of the knowledge we will be considering was produced at a time of the expansion of Western power over the rest of the world. By comparing some of the "others" which European historians constructed in the different non-western societies they depicted, and the ways other societies dealt with alterity and self, we may be able to derive a better sense of how the Western sense of self was constructed. Group(s): C Field(s): ME

This course will cover the history of the Middle East from the 18th century until the present, examining the region ranging from Morocco to Iran and including the Ottoman Empire. It will focus on transformations in the states of the region, external intervention, and the emergence of modern nation-states, as well as aspects of social, economic, cultural and intellectual history of the region. Field(s): ME

Taking the events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath as a point of departure, this course will begin by investigating in parallel histories of two sibling religious societies: Islam and western Christendom.  It will outline the European antecedents of American understandings and misunderstandings of the Muslim world down to World War I in comparison with Muslim experiences with, and selective efforts to appropriate, aspects of European society and thought over the same period. Field(s): INTL

In this seminar we will put the histories of the modern Balkans and Middle East in conversation by seeing them through the lens of the "post-Ottoman world." Moving beyond the national histories of countries such as Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, we will examine the common dilemmas and divergent paths of a variety of groups, institutions, and individual figures throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Field(s): ME

This seminar focuses on how the discovery and exploitation of petroleum at the turn of the 20th century has shaped the formation and consolidation of Arab states of the Persian Gulf, permanently changing the geo-political and social landscape of the Arabian Peninsula. We will study economic, social, and political formations across the Gulf on the eve of the discovery of oil and the attendant transformations that accompanied its exploitation. We will also pay close attention to the role that imperial rivalries and foreign oil companies played in shaping the Gulf states, their economies, systems of rule, foreign relations, borders, and built environment. We also study the populist, anti-imperialist movements of the mid-twentieth century in the context of the "Arab Cold War". Saudi Arabia has received more academic attention than the other Gulf states and thus takes up a larger part of the course, but we will also cover Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Oman. We will read historical, anthropological, literary and political economy studies and oil firm histories, drawing on works on Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and the US, to follow transformations in political, social and economic life in this understudied region that has played a central role in world politics and economy since the 1900s. Field(s): ME

A survey of East African history over the past two millennia with a focus on political and social change. Themes include early religious and political ideas, the rise of states on the Swahili coast and between the Great Lakes, slavery, colonialism, and social and cultural developments in the 20th century.  This course fulfills the Global Core requirement. Field(s): AFR  

This course offers a survey of main themes in West African history over the last millenium, with particular emphasis on the period from the mid-15th through the 20th century. Themes include the age of West African empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay); re-alignments of economic and political energies towards the Atlantic coast; the rise and decline of the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves; the advent and demise of colonial rule; and internal displacement, migrations, and revolutions. In the latter part of the course, we will appraise the continuities and ruptures of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Group(s): C Field(s): AFR 

Focus on the history of modern India, using the life and times of Mohandas Gandhi as the basis for not only an engagement with an extraordinary historical figure, but also for a consideration of a great variety of historical issues, including the relationship between nationalism and religion, caste politics in India and affirmative action policies in the United States today, and racism as encountered by Gandhi in relation to colonialism and the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. Field(s): SA 

This course provides a political and social history of India from the 16th-19th century, focusing on the Mughal empire. Two central concerns: first, the Mughal regnal politics towards their rival imperial concerns within India and West Asia (the Maratha, the Rajput, the Safavid, the Ottoman); and second, the foreign gaze onto the Mughals (via the presence of Portuguese, English, and French travelers, merchants, and diplomats in India). These interlocked practices (how Mughals saw the world and how the world saw the Mughals) will allow us develop a nuanced knowledge of universally acknowledged power of the early modern world. 

(No prerequisite.) We begin with the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire, and examine why and how the East India Company came to rule India in the eighteenth century. As the term progresses, we will investigate the objectives of British colonial rule in India and we will explore the nature of colonial modernity. The course then turns to a discussion of anti-colonial sentiment, both in the form of outright revolt, and critiques by early nationalists. This is followed by a discussion of Gandhi, his thought and his leadership of the nationalist movement. Finally, the course explores the partition of British India in 1947, examining the long-term consequences of the process of partition for the states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. We will focus in particular on the flowing themes: non-Western state formation; debates about whether British rule impoverished India; the structure and ideology of anti-colonial thought; identity formation and its connection to political, economic and cultural structures. The class relies extensively on primary texts, and aims to expose students to multiple historiographical perspectives for understanding South Asia's past.

This course presents and at the same time critiques a narrative world history from prehistoric times to 1500. The purpose of the course is to convey an understanding of how this rapidly growing field of history is being approached at three different levels: the narrative textbook level, the theoretical-conceptual level, and through discussion sections, the research level. All students are required to enroll in a weekly discussion section. Graded work for the course consists of two brief (5 page) papers based on activities in discussion sections as well as a take-home midterm and a final examination. Field(s): *ANC/ME 

This course presents and at the same time critiques a narrative world history from 1500 to the present. The purpose of the course is to convey an understanding of how this rapidly growing field of history is being approahced at three different levels: the narrative textbook level, the theoretical-conceptual level, and, through discussion sections, the research level. All students are required to enroll in a weekly discussion section. Graded work for the courses consists of two brief (5 page) papers based on activities in discussion sections as well as a take-home midterm and final examination. Graduate students who enroll in the course must take a discussion section conducted by the instructor and can expect heavier reading assignments. Field(s): INTL 

This course surveys the history of modern finance, from the origin of novel banking institutions in early-modern Italy (like the Medici Bank, founded 1397) to the financial crisis of 2008. "Finance," broadly understood as the activity of allocating capital (in particular, money) within communities, will be examined from a variety of historical perspectives-economic, political, intellectual, cultural. While the course often emphasizes "high" finance in centers of Western financial power (Florence in the 1400s, London in the 1800s, New York in the 2000s), careful attention is paid to how financial activities in such global centers have impacted people across different socioeconomic and geographic locations, from "Wall St." to "Main St." and from Illinois to Argentina.

This course examines the history of the quest to understand human society scientifically. The focus will be on one specific approach to social investigation-quantification-which has been central to the historical development of "social science" and which has become especially esteemed in the 21st-century "data" age. Built around careful reading of primary social-scientific texts, the course will span from the "political arithmetic" of the 17th century through the late 20th century, touching upon the historical aspects of several modern social-science disciplines (economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science). We will explore past attempts to count, calculate, measure, and model many dimensions of human social life: population, wealth, health, happiness, intelligence, crime, deviance, race. We will pay particular attention to how social-scientific numbers have not only reflected, but transformed, the individuals and communities they sought to measure. Readings will include Condorcet, Thomas Malthus, W. S. Jevons, Emile Durkheim, Francis Galton, Franz Boas, Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, and Ian Hacking.

Surveying major moments in history of information technologies, this course introduces students to major kinds of historical inquiry-philosophical, engineering, labor, material, social, and cultural-necessary to understand the creation and impact of computers and other information technologies in the last 150 years.

This course compares and contrasts the paths to modernity of four societies: China, Germany, Japan, and Italy. By adopting a comparative approach, and looking closely at the way that international contexts influenced domestic developments, this course will give students the chance to view history from outside the nation-state focus that tended to dominate history in the past. In this sense, while students are expected to expand their familiarity with the basic history of these countries, more important will be the capacity to think about the world from multiple perspectives. Key topics include national consolidation, the growth of nationalist sentiment, imperialism and fascism, the impact of World War II and the Cold War, and historical memory. Based largely on primary sources, the course presents modernity both as understood by each of these societies and also in its global interconnectedness, an interconnectedness that shapes our world today. Field(s): MEU/EA

Dedicated to four main topics on human rights: 1) long-term origins; 2)short-term origins; 3) evolution through the present; 4) moral defenses and ideological criticisms Field(s): INTL

Empires have been consistent - but ever changing - forms of rule in the modern world. This course explores how empires and imperialism have connected the world by forging new forms of politics and culture from 1850 to 2011. It examines key dimensions of imperialism such as nationalism, capitalism, racism, and fascism in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America. Based largely on primary sources - novels, memoirs, official documents, and visual arts, including photographs and film - the course presents imperialism both as experienced in different societies and also in its global interconnectedness. Field(s): INTL 

The seminar will combine cultural with economic history, but with more stress on the former. The aim is to investigate the meaning of being rich and being poor among the Greeks and Romans, that is to say in a pre-industrial society, with special attention to methods of research. We shall discuss among other topics ways of getting rich, contempt for wealth, safety nets, ostentation, consumption choices, bribery, markers of well-being - and money. The time period will extend from Homer to about 250 CE. Field(s): *ANC

The 5th century BCE, beginning with the Persian Wars, when the Athenians fought off the might of the Persian Empire, and ending with the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War in 404, is generally considered the "Golden Age" of ancient Athens. This is the century when Athenian drama, both tragedy and comedy, throve; when the Greeks began to develop philosophy at Athens, centered around the so-called "Sophistic movement" and Sokrates; when classical Greek art and architecture approached perfection in the monuments and sculptures of the great Athenian building programs on and around the Akropolis. This seminar will cover the political, military, economic, social, and cultural history of Athens' "Golden Age". Much of the course reading will be drawn from the ancient Athenian writing themselves, in translation. Everyone will be required to read enough to participate in weekly discussions; and all students will prepare two oral reports on topics to be determined. The course grade will be based on a ca. 20-25 page research paper to be written on an agreed upon topic. Group(s): A Field(s): *ANC

This is a fifteen-week undergraduate seminar.  It is designed to provide an introduction to the late antique period of the three great civilizations of the ancient Nile Valley, Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia.  Course material will cover the social and religious history of Egypt under Roman rule; the collapse of the ancient Nubian civilization of Meroe; the emergence of its independent successor kingdoms; the birth of a centralized and literate society in the Ethiopian highlands; the Christianization of Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia; and the survival of all three civilizations in the early medieval period, Egypt under Islamic rule and Nubia and Ethiopia as independent powers. Field(s): ANC*

This course introduces students to the study of coins as historical disciplines. It will provide a survey of the production and use of coinage in the Roman world from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD.  Students will also asses the contribution that the study of coinage makes to the study of Roman social, economic, and political history. The majority of the course will take place at the American Numismatic Society. Field(s): *ANC

This seminar examines major texts in social and political theory and ethics written in Europe and the Mediterranean region between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries CE.  Students will be assigned background readings to establish historical context, but class discussion will be grounded in close reading and analysis of the medieval sources themselves. Field(s): MED

This course will examine the role of love and hate and their changing place in the culture of the elite groups from Late Antiquity to the twelfth century. Medieval chronicles, poems, letters and legal texts, both religious and civil, will be used, deconstructed and decoded with a special attention to gender and to the emotional relations between men and women. Field(s): MED

This course will consider the history of religious objects from ca. 1200 to ca. 1600 mostly in northern Europe, examining both what kind of religious "charge" they carried and what sorts of ambivalence and/or rejection they met with in the period of the Protestant Reformation. Although we will spend approximately half the course time studying examples of what we would today call "art"-that is panel paintings, miniatures, and statues-we will place these in the context of other sorts of things (for example, relics of the saints, the Eucharist, and religious clothing) that also expressed the sacred through their materiality, as well as in the context of written sources.

This course follows historical developments in the Atlantic World-across Western Europe, the Americas, West Africa, and-from the late fifteenth through early nineteenth century. It highlights both the comparative, structural evolutions of European colonial empires and the cultural experiences and perspectives of Atlantic World inhabitants-including soldiers, merchants, slaves, missionaries, and revolutionaries. 

The course will examine the relation between a rich and urban elite and artistic creativity during The Low Countries' several and successive ‘Golden Ages'. Therefore, the course will address the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, Antwerp and Brabant from c. 1480 to c. 1580, and the southern Low Countries as a whole from c. 1380 to c. 1480. The following questions will be considered: Who were the sponsors, and why did they invest in specific artistic genres? Why did the gravity centers regularly shift to a neighboring region, from south to north? What were the reasons for the dynamics in the system as a whole, which surely also have political dimensions? All these questions will be discussed for the period from the 13th to the 16th-early 17th century, keeping in mind that these patterns may have a more general character. Field(s): EME

In this course we will examine theoretical and historical developments that framed the notions of censorship and free expression in early modern Europe. In the last two decades, the role of censorship has become one of the significant elements in discussions of early modern culture. The history of printing and of the book, of the rise national-political cultures and their projections of control, religious wars and denominational schisms are some of the factors that intensified debate over the free circulation of ideas and speech. Indexes, Inquisition, Star Chamber, book burnings and beheadings have been the subjects of an ever growing body of scholarship. Field(s): EME

This course examines western Europeans' encounters with Constantinople and Byzantine culture after the separation of the "Latin" from the "Greek." We will follow merchants, pilgrims and merchants as they visit, trade with, or march into Constantinople, study the sources they have left recording their impressions and their encounters, and consider what westerners took from Byzantium in the way of art forms, learning, sociopolitical practices, and material artifacts.

This course follows the spread and transformation of Christianity by Western missionaries in American, African, and Asian settings, from the late fifteenth through early nineteenth centuries. We examine what missionaries preached and urged others to believe and practice, and also what motivated missionaries, mission converts, and those who resisted proselytization. We also examine missions as sites of intercultural and colonial encounters with long-term impacts on politics, wars, and social dynamics.

Boundary crossers have always challenged the way societies imagined themselves. This course explores the political, religious, economic, and social dynamics of religious conversion. The course will focus on Western (Christian and Jewish) models in the medieval and early modern periods. It will include comparative material from other societies and periods. Autobiographies, along with legal, religious and historical documents will complement the readings. Field(s): *JWS

This course explores manners of conceiving and being a self in early modern Europe (ca. 1400-1800). Through the analysis of a range of sources, from autobiographical writings to a selection of theological, philosophical, artistic, and literary works, we will address the concept of personhood as a lens through which to analyze topics such as the valorization of interiority, the formation of mechanist and sensationalist philosophies of selfhood, and, more generally, the human person's relationship with material and existential goods. This approach is intended to deepen and complicate our understanding of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and other movements around which histories of the early modern period have typically been narrated. Field(s): EME

A survey of the relationships between medical expertise and human dietary habits from Antiquity to the present, giving special attention to the links between practical and moral concerns and between expert knowledge and common sense. Field(s): EME

The emancipation of serfs in Prussia, Habsburg empire and Russia (1780s to 1860s) coincided with the process of rejection of slavery. All over the globe, the acts of emancipation unleashed political contestations, socioeconomic experiments and population policies that targeted former serf/slaves and generations of their descendants. Postemancipation as a predicament of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Eastern and Central Europe, in other words, the abolition of serfdom and its historical significance, is the keynote of the seminar. We will focus on pivotal issues in Eastern and Central European modernity: unfree/free labor, backwardness/progress, mass emigration vs. access to ethnic nationalism, as well as politics of class, race and ethnicity from the Enlightement to the establishment of communist rule. The seminar asks: what happened to the populations and economies of the region in the wake of enserfed labor? How can we historically relate postemancipation Eastern and Central Europe to postemancipation societies in other parts of the modern world? Students of modern Europe, but also those interested in modern history of bondage, labor, empire and social migrations are welcome.

This course concentrates on the early modern period (roughly 1500 to 1800) and addresses the history of the region which includes mainly the territories of present day Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The course presents the history of the region through the analysis of such important pan-European processes as the growth of empires and absolutism, the Reformation and revival of Catholicism, the Enlightenment and urbanization. It also emphasizes that that region's culture and society were in many ways unique and distinctive from the West European civilization.

The course explores the dramatically changing human landscape of modern Poland through personal narratives (diaries, letters, memoirs) and social documentation (autobiography contests, life-record method, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive in the Warsaw ghetto). The course serves as an introduction to key personal experiences of the Poland's twentieth century: social distress, emigration and forced dislocation, genocide, and political violence. We will reflect critically on the main categories of "the era of the witness," such as personal experience and literary responses to it, testimony, memory and eye-witnessing. The course aims to broaden, both historically and conceptually, our understanding of the witness as an iconic figure of the twentieth-century atrocities by including the East Central European tradition of personal writing and social documentation of the interwar and postwar periods. Field(s): MEU

The Soviet Union ceased to exist within living memory. Its dissolution largely coincided with the end of much of the post-World-War-Two international order, whether called Cold War or Détente. We are still living through the reverberations of these two "ends of history." One consequence is that our perspective on Soviet history has been changing and will continue to change.  This course will introduce its participants to what is new about the Soviet past. It will combine approaches that are mostly still new when applied to Soviet history (subaltern studies or the history of sexuality, for instance), topics that are largely new (capitalism, for instance), and topics that are traditional (revolution or Communism, for instance), which we will seek to look at in a fresh way. Focusing on what is new does not mean to exclude the "classics"; in fact, sometimes it means to return to them.   Field(s); MEU

The rise, decline, and fall of the Soviet Union, the first Communist state (and great power), and its postwar sphere of hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe largely coincided with the development and pervasive spread of a defining technology of twentieth-century modernity: film and cinema. Moreover, while Communism in power was always authoritarian, massively violent over substantial periods, and consistently hostile to individual freedom and self-expression for masses as well as cultural elites, many of the classic masterpieces of cinema were produced by artists working under Communist regimes. These regimes were modern and modernizing but illiberal and societies under Communist rule were not open. Yet their film-makers and audiences were never entirely cut off from the rest of the world, quite the opposite: film was an area of human activity and experience in which global interaction, influence, and emulation was woven into as well as constantly tearing at the texture of ideological divides and geopolitical rivalries that shaped the last century. In sum, film offers us a way to learn about the true complexity of a paradoxical century that witnessed two World Wars, one Cold War, and the somehow apparently inexorable shrinking of global imaginary space. In this course, we will not be able to explore all the possibilities offered by film as a quintessential cultural artifact of modernity and we will also not be able to cover films, schools, or countries comprehensively. But we will be able to use film selectively to reflect about the history of Communism (as realized in the former Soviet Union and it client states) and we will use Communism to think about the place of film in modernity. We will watch and discuss select movies and read a sample of texts. Field(s):MEU

This class focuses on the history of the Soviet Union and Russia between the death of Stalin/the end of totalitarianism and the present. It spans the turning-point date of 1991 when the Soviet Union abolished itself and was replaced by successor states, the most important of which is Russia. Not ending Soviet history with 1991 and not beginning Russian history with it either, we will seek to understand continuities as well as change. We will also draw on a diverse set of texts (and movies), including history, political science, journalism, fiction, and memoirs, feature and documentary movies. Geographically weighted toward Russia (and not the other also important successor states), in terms of content, this class concentrates on politics and society, including, crucially, the economy. These concepts, however, will be understood broadly. To come to grips with key issues in Soviet and Russian history in the historically short period after Stalinist totalitarianism, we will have to pay close attention to not only our analytical categories, but also to the way in which the political and the social have been understood by Soviet and Russian contemporaries. The class will introduce students to crucial questions of Russia's recent past, present, and future: authoritarianism and democratization, the role of the state and that of society, reform and retrenchment, communism and capitalism, and, last but not least, the nature of authority and legitimacy. 

To this day, the power of Russia's rulers often appears to be uncommonly expansive and even consecrated by its centuries-old tradition of monarchical government. This course will begin with medieval Eastern Slavic conceptions of kingship and focus on the emergence and development of unlimited monarchy as a key political institution in Russia, discussing the ways in which ordinary individuals -rich and poor- responded to these presentations. We will consider several of Russia's most prominent historical figures as case studies, including Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas II, as well as Stalin, described by one recent biographer as the "red tsar.

This is an undergraduate research seminar which will allow students with an interest in the Balkans, eastern Europe and the Ottoman empire to trace in detail the emergence of the independent Greek nation-state in the early 19th century and to draw on contemporary literature and the secondary historiography to evaluate theories of ethnicity, nationalism and state formation. It is open to all students with a background in modern European or Middle Eastern history and covers the period from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries.

This seminar examines the history of the ambiguous concept "Soft Power," by bringing together literatures in European and U.S. history, international relations, and communications studies that are normally treated in isolation. After thoroughly familiarizing seminar participants with the recent U.S. evolution of the concept and comparing its usage to related terms, such as "normative power," "hegemony," "propaganda," "strategic communication," and "public diplomacy," weekly classes focus on several case studies. These span the period from the 19th to 21st centuries and include Napoleon's Propaganda Wars, France's "Civilizing Mission" in Africa, Germany's Kultur Empire, Wilson versus Lenin, The Nazi-Fascist Effort to coopt Muslim peoples, Vatican Diplomacy and the Holocaust, The Marshall Plan, Soviet Soft Power in Eastern Europe, and U.S. Public Diplomacy in the wake of 9/11. Class requirements include weekly reading, organizing class discussion, and a 15-page research paper to be presented at a final student-organized workshop.

This course will include an in-depth examination of some major tinkers and texts of the French, Germans, and Scottish Enlightenments. By reading works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Hume, we will examine their radically divergent responses to the central intellectual quandries of their day, and in many ways our own: the realtionship between rationalism, science, and faith; religion and the state; the individual and the polity; cosmopolitanism and particularism; pluralism and relativism; and the meaning of liberty. Group(s): A, B

This seminar is dedicated to studying the historical developments of Europe in the Cold War, from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We will examine the major shifts in contemporary European history as they relate to Cold War conflicts and competitions, including the Yalta and Potsdam meetings; Marshall Plan reconstruction; the workings of NATO; the Prague Spring; non-proliferation movements; and Eurocommunism trends. We will consider a wide range of historical perspectives, including but not limited to political, geographic, economic, cultural, and military frameworks. Field(s): MEU

The purpose of this course is to explore the mental horizon of the 1820s through the works of professional revolutionaries, artists, poets and writers, as well as via recent historical and literary studies. The period marked the intellectual origins of modernity and many of our key organizing principles - the very idea of socialism, liberalism and communism for instance - originated then. Readings connect political transformations in Europe and across the globe to a new sense of time and speed, history, technology and economics. Field(s): MEU

The idea of Europe implies the notions of "Civilization" and "Modernity," but also images of conquest, tyranny and mass annihilation. This seminar will explore the "dark side of Europe:" the succession of genocidal episodes perpetrated during the long 20th century by Europeans in colonial expeditions overseas and in murderous campaigns on the subcontinent itself. The assigned literature ranges from anthropology, sociology and political science, to psychology and contemporary history. It contains a variety of perspectives on genocidal regimes and their perpetrators, as well as an array of descriptive accounts of episodes of mass anihilation. An overall theoretical framework is provided by Prof. Abram de Swaan's The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder (Yale UP, 2015). The experience with mass violence of the Dutch - a nation with a relatively peaceful past and a self-image of righteousness - will serve as a touchstone for a subcontinent that at the dawn of the 20th century was considered the epitome of peace an progress. Field: MEU  

In this seminar we will examine the immediate impact and the longer-running legacies of the Second World War in the Netherlands, with reference to several other Western European nations (France, Belgium). The ‘Long War' will relate to the Second World War as history in the first place, discussing the place of the occupied nation(s) in ‘Hitler's Empire' (Mark Mazower). We also will take into account that the end of the war in Europe was followed by new kinds of external conflicts with strong internal repercussions: the Cold War and the first wave of European decolonization. The perspective will focus on the nation-states, endangered in its very existence by oppressive foreign occupation, subsequently in need of rebuilding and reinventing themselves against many odds. The second element of the seminar is the legacy of the ‘Long War', stretching over the generations to the present day. The Long War has been subject to a never-ending series of controversies in the public sphere that have profoundly influenced the historiography of the war in the different nations. In the course, we will explore the interconnections between politics of memory, historiography and cultural interpretations of the embattled past (films, novels, televised documentaries in particular). Field(s): MEU

This seminar explores the changing meaning of the term 'Europe" from its emergence as an organizing principle of international life after Napoleon's defeat in 1815 until the end of the First World War.  It aims to combine an exploration of the term's conceptual and intellectual history with a study of its deployment in practice in the realms of diplomacy, international law, and radical politics.  Topics to be covered include: the establishment and transformation of the Concert of Europe; the idea of European civilization, its rise and fall; the international thought of Mazzini, Mill, Marx, Cobden, Burckhardt and Nietzsche among others.

This course has three purposes: (i) to examine the role of culture and the arts as a reflection and enactment of Cold War politics; (ii) to provide an understanding of the arts as a cultural force in building ideas in foreign markets; (iii) to reframe the arts as a part of Cold War cultural battles.

The seminar will attempt to offer a historical context for evaluating contemporary discussions of the role of the UN and the nature of international relations. It will cover the formation and metamorphoses of the United Nations itself, exploring in particular its role in the Cold War and in the decolonisation process. We will look too at why some international organisations [the IMF] appear to have flourished while others failed. Among the topics to be covered are the changing role of international law, sovereignty and human rights regimes, development aid as international politics, the collapse of the gold standard and its impact. We will end by looking at the politics of UN reform, and new theories of the role of institutions in global affairs, and ask what light they shed on the future of international governance now that the Cold War is over. Students will be expected to read widely in primary as well as secondary sources and to produce a research paper of their own. Field(s): MEU/US

Explores how conceptions of desire and sexuality, gendered and raced bodies, shaped major events and processes in modern Europe: the Enlightenment and European empires; political and sexual revolutions; consumption and commodity fetishism; the metropolis and modern industry; psychoanalysis and the avant-garde; fascism and the Cold War; secularization,and post-socialism. Featuring: political and philosophical tracts; law, literature and film. Field(s): MEU

This seminar deals with how Americans have treated and understood the natural world, connected or failed to connect to it, since 1800. It focuses on changing context over time, from the agrarian period to industrialization, followed by the rise of the suburban and hyper-technological landscape. We will trace the shift from natural history to evolutionary biology, give special attention to the American interest in entomology, ornithology, and botany, examine the quest to save pristine spaces, and read from the works of Buffon, Humboldt, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Darwin, Aldo Leopold, Nabokov, among others. Perspectives on naming, classifying, ordering, and most especially, collecting, will come under scrutiny.  Throughout the semester we will assess the strengths and weaknesses of the environmentalist movement, confront those who thought they could defy nature, transcend it, and even live without it. Field(s): US

This course introduces students to the forces that transformed the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas into "Indians." The class takes a very broad approach, moving chronologically and thematically from the dawn of time to the present. The course aims to expose students to the diversity of the Native American experience by including all of the inhabitants of the Americas, from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, within its purview. Group(s): A, D Field(s): *US 

The course introduces students to a historical perspective on religion in the settlement of the New World, in particular North America. It looks at Islam, Judaism, Native American religion, and different kinds of Christianity. The course emphasizes the formative influence of social and political context as well as the dynamism of religion. How and why did Judaism and Islam come to the New World? How did Protestantism influence Anglo colonial society, and how did Catholicism shape New Spain and New France? What about African religions and why is Afro-American Christianity different? Who were the Puritans and why are they famous? The course concludes with a look at the beginnings of Mormonism, perhaps the characteristic American religion.

This reading seminar will examine the history of colonial North America from the sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries.  Employing a comparative Atlantic framework to study Spanish, French, Dutch, and English settlements in North America, this course will explore key themes of conflict and community in the societies that developed during this era.  Readings will include some of the most important recent literature in the field and cover topics such as European-indigenous relations, race and slavery, religious culture, and gender construction. This seminar requires two response papers, a final historiographical essay, and class participation, including an oral presentation. Field(s): US

In this seminar we will examine interdisciplinary approaches to the writing of history using archival material. We will look at how knowledge is organized, stored, described, accessed, and replicated through the use of digital and material objects held in archives. The seminar takes as its point of departure the University of Michigan Sawyer Seminar's conception of archives "not simply as historical repositories but as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of the intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies." Among the topics we will explore are how archives and archiving intersect with the production of knowledge, with social memory, and with politics. This is a U.S. history course. While the theoretical approaches we will study are, of necessity, interdisciplinary, the application of them will be to archival material related to U.S. history. This seminar requires participants to commit substantial time outside of class working with unpublished materials in Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) both for reading assignments and as part of a final project. Field(s): US

This undergraduate lecture-seminar is about the making, endurance, and resurgence of modern American Indian nations. We will examine broadly the varied historical experiences of American Indians from the late 19thC to the present, with a special focus on the 20th century. We approach this study with an understanding that American Indians (as well as Native Hawaiians, and Alaska Natives) are and were actors in history and not just hapless victims of Euro-American imperialism and power. Over the semester, we will focus on the ways indigenous peoples in the United States adapted and responded to the host of stresses that accompanied the rapid and often violent social, cultural, and environmental transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries. We will historicize modern social and political issues in Indian Country and examine the processes of resistance, renewal, accommodation, and change from the reservation era to the present. Particular attention will be paid to the ways native people and their communities have met the challenges they have confronted as they persist in their efforts to preserve their homelands, their cultures, their sovereignty, and their rights to selfdetermination.

This course seeks to understand the Cold War and what it meant for the United States, inter-American relations and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. The course encourages students to consider to what extent the Cold War is helpful as a way of understanding Latin American nations and people, and their relationships with their Northern neighbor.

The period known as the "Progressive Era" in the United States witnessed major transformations in American society. We will examine currents of social change and reform in the terms of mass immigration, urbanization, and industrialization; commercialized culture; Jim Crow segregation; and U.S. projects on the world stage. The seminar will include history, historiography, and a term paper based on original research in archival and other primary materials. Field(s): US

A remarkable array of Southern historians, novelists, and essayists have done what Shreve McCannon urges Quentin Compson to do in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!--tell about the South--producing recognized masterpieces of American literature.  Taking as examples certain writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, this course explores the issues they confronted, the relationship between time during which and about they wrote, and the art of the written word as exemplified in their work. Group(s): D Field(s): US  Limited enrollment. Priority given to senior history majors. After obtaining permission from the professor, please add yourself to the course wait list so the department can register you in the course.

This course interrogates the function of art and artists within modern capitalist societies. We will trace the cultural productions, internal dynamics, and social significance of bohemian communities from their origins in 1840s Paris to turn of the century London and New York to interwar Los Angeles to present day Chicago. Students will conduct research exploring the significance of some aspect of a bohemian community. Field(s): US

This seminar provides an intensive introduction to the history of the Atlantic slave trade. The course will consider the impact of the traffic on Western Europe and the Americas, as well as on Africa, and will give special attention to the experiences of both captives and captors. Assignments include three short papers and a longer research paper of 20 to 25 pages. Field(s): INTL 

In the decades since the publication of Silent Spring and the rise of the environmental movement, public awareness of the impact of industrial products on human health has grown enormously. There is growing concern over BPA, lead, PCBs, asbestos, and synthetic materials that make up the world around us. This course will focus on environmental history, industrial and labor history as well as on how twentieth century consumer culture shapes popular and professional understanding of disease. Throughout the term the class will trace the historical transformation of the origins of disease through primary sources such as documents gathered in lawsuits, and medical and public health literature. Students will be asked to evaluate historical debates about the causes of modern epidemics of cancer, heart disease, lead poisoning, asbestos-related illnesses and other chronic conditions. They will also consider where responsibility for these new concerns lies, particularly as they have emerged in law suits. Together, we will explore the rise of modern environmental movement in the last 75 years. Field(s): US

How have Americans used culture as a means of responding to, interpreting, and memorializing periods of social, economic, and political crisis? Do these periods create breaks in cultural forms and practices?  Or do periods of significant upheaval encourage an impetus to defend cultural practices, thereby facilitating the "invention of tradition"? How are the emotional responses produced by critical moments--whether trauma, outrage, insecurity, or fear--turned into cultural artifacts?  And, finally, how are cultural crises memorialized? This course focuses on Americans' cultural responses to the lynching of black Americans in the era of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II to answer these questions. We will examine a wide range of individual and collective cultural expressions, including anti-lynching plays and songs, WPA programs, the 1939 World's Fair, war photographs and radio broadcasts, the zoot suit and swing culture, and the military's effort to preserve culture in European war areas. Field(s): US

This seminar features extensive reading, multiple written assignments, and a term paper, as well as a likely trip to Gettsyburg.  It focuses on the Civil War and on World Wars I and II. Group(s): D Field(s): US

An examination of the years from the end of World War II to the beginning of the 1960s, focusing on three areas:  the Cold War, the “Affluent Society,” and the “Haunted Fifties,” It includes both works of history and works of literature. Field(s): US

The general object of this course is to illuminate how histories of the realm we think of as "international" are structured by means of key concepts, foundational concepts that form semantic fields of politics and policy. The seminar this year will be devoted, specifically, to the combined problem of representation, empire and world fairs, the fairs that enjoyed a particular vogue around 1900, outstandingly in France and the United States. Instructor's permission is required; please see: http://www.history.columbia.edu/undergraduate/seminars/index.html for more information.

This course explores critical areas of New York's economic development in the 20th century, with a view to understanding the rise, fall and resurgence of this world capital. Discussions also focus on the social and political significance of these shifts. Assignments include primary sources, secondary readings, film viewings, trips, and archival research. Students use original sources as part of their investigation of New York City industries for a 20-page research paper. An annotated bibliography is also required. Students are asked to give a weekly update on research progress, and share information regarding useful archives and websites.Field(s): US

This seminar examines the history of narcotics, including sugar, tobacco, alcohol, opiates, and marijuana, in America from the colonial period to the early twentieth-century. It pays particular attention to the intoxicating and stimulating opportunities New World agriculture presented, alcohol- including its role in relations with Native Americans-, how tobacco influenced Chesapeake political culture, the spread of opiates and their medicalization, and the politics of anti-narcotic reform. The course considers the broad matters of economic role, social use, and political context. Students will propose and must receive approval for a twenty-page research paper based on primary sources, and present primary sources for discussion to the class.

Field(s): US

This class begins during the fabled "Gilded Age," when the nation's capitalist expansion created the world's largest economy but splintered Americans' ideals. From the fin-de-siècle through the cataclysms of World War II, we will explore how Americans defined, contested, and performed different meanings of American civilization through social reform movements, artistic expressions, and the everyday habits and customs of individuals and groups. The class will pay particular attention to how gender, race, and location--regional, international, and along the class ladder--shaped perspectives about what constituted American civilization and the national discourse about what it should become. Field(s): US

Students will gain a solid knowledge and understanding of the health issues facing African Americans since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's heath organization and care; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; sickle cell anemia; and substance abuse. Group(s): D Field(s): US Formerly listed as "History of African-American Health and Health Movements".

This seminar examines the transformation of American society from national independence to the Civil War, paying particular attention to changes in agriculture, war, and treaty-making with Indian nations, the rise of waged labor, religious movements, contests over slavery, and the ways print culture revealed and commented on the tensions of the era. The readings include writings of de Tocqueville, Catherine Beecher, and Frederick Douglass, as well as family correspondence, diaries, and fiction. Students will write a 20 page research paper on primary sources. Field(s): US

In this seminar we will use readings from the interdisciplinary study of memory (theory) to examine published and unpublished American letters, diaries, and autobiographies (practice). With regard to memory, we will be concerned with what is remembered, what is forgotten, and how this process occurs. We’ll explore concepts including collective/shared memory, commemoration, documentation, trauma, nation, autobiography, nostalgia, etc., and we’ll test this theory against written narratives of the self. The goals of the seminar are to explore theoretical concepts of memory, apply them to written examples of memory, and to develop proficiency in the use of these skills inside and outside an academic environment. This is a history course and many of the narratives we will read are American 19th-century texts. These will include, but not be limited to, those on the experience of the Civil War. The course requires participants to commit substantial time outside of class working with unpublished materials in Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library for assignments and as part of a final project. Field(s): US

This course will explore the background and examine some of the manifestations of the first Jewish cultural explosion after 70 CE. Among the topics discussed: the Late Roman state and the Jews, the rise of the synagogue, the redaction of the Palestinian Talmud and midrashim, the piyyut and the Hekhalot. Field(s): JWS, ANC

Over the course of the nineteenth century, millions of Jews uprooted themselves from their places of birth and moved to cities scattered throughout the world.  This mass urbanization not only created new demographic centers of world Jewry, but also fundamentally transformed Jewish political and cultural life.  In this course, we shall analyze primary source material, literary accounts as well as secondary sources as we examine the Jewish encounter with the city, and see how Jewish culture was shaped by and helped to shape urban culture.  We shall compare Jewish life in six cities spanning from Eastern Europe to the United States and consider how Jews’ concerns molded the urban economy, urban politics, and cosmopolitan culture.  We shall also consider the ways in which urbanization changed everyday Jewish life.  What impact did it have on Jewish economic and religious life?  What role did gender and class play in molding the experiences of Jews in different cities scattered throughout the world?

This course introduces the central historical issues raised by ancient Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic literature through exploration of some of the crucial primary texts and analysis of the main scholarly approaches to these texts.

This class will explore the everyday culture reflected in the Geniza manuscripts through the lens of kinship relations and family life. The course will introduce a range of genres of Geniza documents (court records, contracts and deeds, legal responsa, and personal letters). We will read examples of these documents alongside contemporary Jewish legal and literary works, Islamic literature, and recent work in medieval Islamic social history. Taking a comparative approach to this material, we will work to understand how the authors of these documents understood marriage, divorce, and parenthood, and how these relationships positioned individuals economically and socially within the broader communities in which they lived. In the process, you will learn how to use documents and literary sources as evidence for social history, as well as learn a great deal about Jews' everyday life in medieval Egypt.

The seminar will focus on traditional Jewish life, in the Eastern European towns known as shtetlekh, from the early modern period until late 19th century. Through study of various primary sources, mainly memoirs, autobiographies, stories and poetry, we will portray the everyday life, especially childhood and adolescence, and the confrontation between tradition and modernity. Field(s): JEW

This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to 1939. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish life, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include:  the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, Zionism, Jewish socialism, and Autonomism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and Ultra-Orthodoxy. Field(s): JWS

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 aims to give the students a basic knowledge of Nahuatl, the main indigenous language of central Mexico, still in use nowadays. During the classes we will explore the principal structures as for grammar and usage, focusing on classical Nahuatl, the version of the language employed during colonial times to produce documents and communicate. A vast and varied literature of mundane documents and ecclesiastically sponsored texts exists; we are going to concentrate on the type of everyday Nahuatl which goes well into the eighteenth century and includes all the Spanish contact phenomena that are still in the language today. The objective goes beyond pure language learning, using the language as a way to reach a better understanding of indigenous society and history. Following an agreement with the universities of Yale and Chicago, the seminar will offer the possibility to join an intensive training in contemporary Nahuatl in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, during the summer, with Professor Jonathan Amith (FLAS scholarships are available). In addition, pending an agreement with the University of Zacatecas, Mexico, there will be the possibility to work with an indigenous speaker for one week during the seminar. Group(s): A, D Field(s): LA Listed formerly as "Nahuatl Language and Culture"  

This course seeks to analyze the period of military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), supported by many civilians as well. Different conjunctures will be studied, since the years before the coup of 1964 until the process of democratization. The course aims to understand a paradox: the dictatorship was established in the name of democracy, allegedly threatened. The main hypothesis is that the paradox was due to the character of the conservative modernization of society imposed by the military regime and its civilian allies. The dictatorship had ambiguities and distinct phases, involving a complex set of political and military forces. The involvement with the modernization also implied the use of illegitimate brute force against its enemies, which allows to characterize the regime as a dictatorship, in spite of its democratic façade. Special attention will be given to the opponents of the order. The relationship between the dominant and the dominated, even in authoritarian regimes, must be understood not only based on confrontation and repression, but also on negotiation and concessions to the opponents, without which it is impossible to build a base of legitimacy. The topics will be examined in the light of concepts such as conservative modernization (Barrington Moore Jr.), legitimate domination (Weber), hegemony (Gramsci), among others. The course also introduces students to critical interpretations of society and politics produced by Brazilian and Brazilianist historians and social scientists. Field(s): LA

This course seeks to elucidate the elective affinities between culture and politics in the activities of artists and intellectuals, especially those who opposed the military dictatorship in Brazil. The problem of the identity of the Brazilian people was essential for them. They sought alleged popular roots and wanted to overcome underdevelopment. At the time there was a revolutionary romanticism which involved the utopia of integrating intellectuals with the common man of the people, which could give life to an alternative project of society that was eventually defeated by the military dictatorship (1964-1985). Many artists and intellectuals engaged in the opposition to the regime, in spite of its efforts of modernization, which gave them good job opportunities, in a complex process that involved both dissent and integration to the established order. The lectures will analyze different conjunctures, from the years before the coup of 1964 until the end of the democratization process that was completed with the free elections of 1989. Particularly the decades of 1960 and 1970 were some of the most creative periods of Brazilian culture, including the Cinema Novo, the Teatro de Arena, the Bossa Nova and the Tropicalism. The topics will be examined in the light of concepts such as structures of feeling (Raymond Williams), field (Bourdieu), engagement (Sartre), commodity fetishism and reification (Karl Marx, G. Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, F. Jameson), society of the spectacle (Guy Debord), culture industry (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer), revolutionary romanticism (Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre), among others. The course also introduces students to critical interpretations of society and culture produced by Brazilian and Brazilianist historians and social scientists.

In this colloquium we will examine what the Cold War meant in a Latin American context and how historians today are interpreting it. We will primarily be focusing on new conceptual frameworks and historiographical trends that have emerged in the last decade as a result of archival openings, oral histories and the publication of memoirs. Although it would be helpful to have a background in US-Latin American relations and/or Latin American history it is not a prerequisite of the course. Because the colloquium is largely structured chronologically, students will gain an understanding of events, turning points, and developments in Latin America throughout the twentieth century that will allow them to understand the region's past. It worth underlining that this is not a course about US interventions in the region, although the United States often contributed to the way in which the Cold War in Latin America unfolded. Instead, we will be focusing squarely on Latin American perspectives and looking at what the Cold War meant to those inside the region. Specifically, we will be addressing the role of ideology and ideological struggles in twentieth-century Latin America; how these ideas responded to the challenges of modernity and development; why Marxism was popular in the region and how it was interpreted; the extent to which it influenced nationalists and revolutionaries; and who opposed it, why, and how. Throughout the semester we will be focusing in on international and intra-regional dimensions to the conflict as well as transnational stories of exile and movements. Students will therefore also be exploring how events in one part of Latin America impacted upon people in other areas of region either directly or indirectly. In this respect, we will be paying particular attention to the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, the Cuban Revolution's impact on revolutionary and counter- evolutionary trends in Latin America in the 1960s, the significance of the Brazilian coup of 1964 and the subsequent influence that Brazil's military regime had in shaping politics the Southern Cone. The colloquium is also designed to allow students to examine how Latin American populations, parties, leaders and exiles interacted with their contemporaries in other parts of the world and to draw comparisons. Field(s): LA

An exploration of Cuba's late colonial period, wars of independence, republican/neocolonial period, 1933 and 1959 revolutions, and eras under the governments of Fidel and Raúl Castro, including recent history.  Topics considered will include: Cuban sovereignty; the agricultural basis of the Cuban economy under colonialism and neocolonialism; enslaved labor and abolition; social and political struggles, both nonviolent and armed; the development of Cuban nationalisms, with an emphasis on the roles of race, diaspora, and exile in this process; Cuban-U.S. relations over many decades; and Cuba's role as a global actor, particularly after the 1959 revolution. Field(s): LA

This undergraduate seminar deals with the presence of indigenous peoples in Latin American colonial societies and aims to analyze indigenous responses to conquest and colonization. How did indigenous people see themselves and interact with other groups? What roles did they play in shaping Latin American societies? What spaces were they able to create for themselves? These and similar questions will guide our discussion through the semester. The course will offer a survey of all the main indigenous groups; however, the case studies are by necessity just a selection, and quite a few come from Mexico, reflecting the state of the scholarship in the field.

This course focuses on the cases of Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay to explore the complex relationships between social conflict, youth counterculture, and leftist radicalism which characterized the 1960s all over the region.  In-depth reading and discussion of a number of relevant primary sources and available scholarship in English will build a foundation for thinking through these issues.  In the first part of the class, we will analyze the political mobilization and cultural modernization in the framework of the conflicts that shaped the Cold War in the subcontinent.  After this general introduction, we will focus on 1968 to examine the impact of countercultural ideas and practices on different political traditions, particularly student and leftist politics.  Next we will analyze the rise and fall of the New Left, which challenged the ideological commitment, political strategies, and conservative cultural politics of the traditional left. Discussion will incorporate conventional views and recent academic debates on this shift in the region, which also addressing the spiraling of state repression that forced both old and new groups to reconsider strategies in the three countries under examination.  Finally, students will be encouraged to assess how all of these events and themes echoed in social memory through cultural representations and their increasing power to either legitimize or discredit political positions. Field(s): LA

Focusing on the cases of  Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, this course examines the birth and development of the movements that protested human rights violations by right-wing authoritarian regimes in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the first part of the class, we will explore some of the basic concerns that historians, political theorists, and social scientists have raised about authoritarian regimes in late twentieth-century South America. We will aim at concocting a working definition of authoritarianism, discussing the emergence of a new authoritarian model in the Southern Cone and examining the specific challenges confronted by the human rights movements. After this brief survey, the class will focus on the different ways of dealing with the repressive, legal, and political legacies of these regimes. We will analyze the first efforts at denunciation launched by political exiles and transnational human rights groups, as well as the formation of groups of victims' relatives that aimed at exposing ongoing abuses in their countries. We will also study the role of human rights claims during the transitional periods and the ways in which the post-transitional democratic governments faced these calls for accountability. The course will make a basic distinction between concrete legal actions taken to punish those accused of human rights violations, where the state was called to play a decisive role, and more disorganized efforts to know what happened and spread this knowledge to the society at large. We will explore this distinction, discussing how different actors posed their claims and constructed narratives to account for human rights violations and past political violence. This exploration will include the existing literature on justice and truth telling in the politics of transition, as well as scholarship on social memory and historical commemorations. Field(s): LA

The idea of utopia can be traced across many different periods and places. This seminar explores (imagined or reasoned) conceptions of the perfect society in literary, intellectual, and political texts. The ambiguous character of the utopian ideal holds out the promise of human perfection but also encodes a precariousness that speaks to some inevitable future disorder. Reading across a variety of genres and times, examining this interplay between visions of collective redemption and human suffering allows us to consider the ways in which authors have recorded the ideals and fears of their own political or social orders. It thus examines the very idea, whether historical or "mythical", of human progression or retrogression (understood as the "fall") to examine conceptions of time, history and humanity across numerous discursive traditions. The course will pay special attention to a number of themes and ideals. Among these are: the idea of a "golden age," as exemplified in some of the earliest cosmological and other writings and found in number of "visions of paradise"; the rise of millenarianist movements, ideas of eschatology and apocalypse; the ideal republic, whether as a proper political order or as exemplified through a new epistemic community, or "republic of letters"; the "perfect state," ranging from revolutionary, democratic, anarchist and socialist ones; and, finally, ending finally with modernist visions of dystopia which many of these same ideals would come to inspire. We will read a selection of texts ranging from Hesiod's Works and Days, Plato's Republic, works by Augustine and Farabi, and Thomas More's Utopia to Voltaire's Candide and Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto.

Where the establishment of sustainable democracies is concerned, the Middle East has perhaps the poorest record of all regions of the world since World War II. This is in spite of the fact that two of the first constitutions in the non-Western world were established in this region, in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and in Iran in 1906. Notwithstanding these and other subsequent democratic and constitutional experiments, Middle Eastern countries have been ruled over the past century by some of the world's last absolute monarchies, as well as a variety of other autocratic, military-dominated and dictatorial regimes. This course, intended primarily for advanced undergraduates, explores this paradox. It will examine the evolution of constitutional thought and practice, and how it was embodied in parliamentary and other democratic systems in the Middle East. It will examine not only the two Ottoman constitutional periods of 1876-78 and 1908-18, and that of Iran from 1905 onwards, but also the various precursors to these experiments, and some of their 20th century sequels in the Arab countries, Turkey and Iran. This will involve detailed study of the actual course of several Middle Eastern countries' democratic experiments, of the obstacles they faced, and of their outcomes. Students are expected to take away a sense of the complexities of the problems faced by would-be Middle Eastern democrats and constitutionalists, and of some of the reasons why the Middle East has appeared to be an exception to a global trend towards democratization in the post-Cold War era.

This course will examine some of the problems inherent in Western historical writing on non-European cultures, as well as broad questions of what itmeans to write history across cultures. The course will touch on therelationship between knowledge and power, given that much of the knowledge we will be considering was produced at a time of the expansion of Western power over the rest of the world. By comparing some of the "others" which European historians constructed in the different non-western societies they depicted, and the ways other societies dealt with alterity and self, we may be able to derive a better sense of how the Western sense of self was constructed. Group(s): C Field(s): ME

This undergraduate seminar course will introduce students to major trends in modern Arabic intellectual history. Drawing on a range of intellectual movements from the 18th century to the present, we will cover such themes as: the history of readers and the role of publics and 'counter-publics' in the Middle east; encounters with Europe, Orientalism and its critics; the impact of liberalism, positivism and colonialism, and, finally, the rise of new discourses around law, science, socialism and religious reform.  We will end by paying special attention to contemporary religious movements, from the Salafiyya reformers to the Muslim Brotherhood and contemporary expressions of the new 'global Islam'. This is a general introductory course: no knowledge of Arabic or previous experience in modern Middle East history is necessary. Students who can work with Arabic of other language sources, however, are encouraged to do so, particularly for their final assignment. Field(s): ME

Unlike European history, which divides into generally agreed upon eras and is structured around a clear narrative of religious and political events from Roman times down to the present, the broad sweep of Islamic and Middle Eastern history appears in quite different lights depending on who is wielding the broom. Theories of Islamic history can embody or conceal political, ethnic, or religious agendas; and no consensus has gained headway among the many writers who have given thought to the issue. The study of theories of Islamic history, therefore, provides a good opportunity for history majors to explore and critique broad conceptual approaches. A seminar devoted to such explorations should be a valuable capstone experience for studnets with a special interest in Islam and the Middle East. One or two works will be read by the entire class each week, and two students will be assigned to lead the discussions of the week's readings. Grades for the course will be based half on class participation and half on a 15-page term paper devoted to a topic approved by the instructor. Field(s): ME

In this seminar we will put the histories of the modern Balkans and Middle East in conversation by seeing them through the lens of the "post-Ottoman world." Moving beyond the national histories of countries such as Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, we will examine the common dilemmas and divergent paths of a variety of groups, institutions, and individual figures throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Field(s): ME

This seminar focuses on how the discovery and exploitation of petroleum at the turn of the 20th century has shaped the formation and consolidation of Arab states of the Persian Gulf, permanently changing the geo-political and social landscape of the Arabian Peninsula. We will study economic, social, and political formations across the Gulf on the eve of the discovery of oil and the attendant transformations that accompanied its exploitation. We will also pay close attention to the role that imperial rivalries and foreign oil companies played in shaping the Gulf states, their economies, systems of rule, foreign relations, borders, and built environment. We also study the populist, anti-imperialist movements of the mid-twentieth century in the context of the "Arab Cold War". Saudi Arabia has received more academic attention than the other Gulf states and thus takes up a larger part of the course, but we will also cover Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Oman. We will read historical, anthropological, literary and political economy studies and oil firm histories, drawing on works on Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and the US, to follow transformations in political, social and economic life in this understudied region that has played a central role in world politics and economy since the 1900s. Field(s): ME

An exploration of the historiography of contemporary (post-1960) Africa, this course asks what African history is, what is unique about it, and what is at stake in its production. Field(s): AFR

This course charts the history of health and healing from, as far as is possible, a perspective interior to Africa. It explores changing practices and understandings of disease, etiology, healing and well-being from pre-colonial times through into the post-colonial. A major theme running throughout the course is the relationship between medicine, the body, power and social groups. This is balanced by an examination of the creative ways in which Africans have struggled to compose healthy communities, albeit with varied success, whether in the fifteenth century or the twenty-first. Field(s): AFR

In this course we will explore in a critical manner the concept of poverty in Africa. The emphasis is on historicizing categories such as poverty and wealth, debt and charity and on the ways in which people in Africa have understood such categories. As such the course takes a longue durée approach spanning over a millennium of history, ending with contemporary understandings of poverty. Field(s): AFR

This is an advanced undergraduate seminar course that will retrace the history of the making of the Subaltern Studies problematic, considered a major intervention in both Indian nationalist history and the wider discipline of history itself, with a focus on the relationship between method, archives, and the craft of history writing. Group(s): A, C Fields: *SA

This course explores five hundred years of the history of Islam and Muslims in India. It is concerned with understanding the many faces of Islam and the many ways of being Muslim in India and how these have changed over time. On one level we will study the connection between Islam and political power in South Asia: the course explores the ruling ideologies of the Mughal Emperors, the different ways in which Muslims responded to the rise of British power on the subcontinent, and the various responses Muslims articulated in response to the introduction of democracy in India. These questions naturally ensure that the course is also concerned the question of how different Muslims interacted with members of other religious groups in India. We will interrogate moments of coexistence and conflict between religious communities to try to understand their origins and nature. At another level, the course is concerned with the changing shape of Muslim lives over the same period. It explores everyday practices of Muslim belief as well as notions of gender, family and personhood, and explores the interplay of these with political, economic and cultural changes over five centuries of history.

The wars in Vietnam and Indochina as seen in historical scholarship, contemporary media, popular culture and personal recollection. The seminar will consider American, Vietnamese, and international perspectives on the war, paying particular attention to Vietnam as the "first television war" and the importance of media images in shaping popular opinion about the conflict. Group(s): B, C, D

Introduces the cultural, political, social, and economic history of the Japanese archipelago from earliest times through the 16th century C.E.  A variety of primary source materials in translation and a sampling of English-language secondary sources.  Loosely organized around particular places or spaces of premodern Japan, and emphatically not a comprehensive survey. Field(s): EA*

This course raises the issues of the theory and practice of history as a discipline.  Considers different approaches to the study of history and offers an introduction to research and the use of archival collections. Special emphasis on conceptualization of research topics, situating projects historiographically, locating and assessing published and archival sources. Field(s): METHODS

A global examination of the coming, course, and consequences of World War II from the differing viewpoints of the major belligerents and those affected by them.  Emphasis is not only on critical analysis but also on the craft of history-writing. Group(s): B, C, D Field(s): INTL

This seminar seeks to analyze the ways by which medicine and culture combine to shape our values and traditions. To this end, it will examine notable literary, medical, and social texts from classical antiquity to the present. A, B, D

An introduction to the historical origins of forecasting, projections, long-range planning, and future scenarios. Topics include apocalyptic ideas and movements, utopias and dystopias, and changing conceptions of time, progress, and decline. A key theme is how relations of power, including understandings of history, have been shaped by expectations of the future. Group(s): ABCD

This course will consider the evolution of human-animal relations on a global basis over the entire course of human history.  Student papers will engage specific topics from different times and places. Field(s): INTL

Many people in our time think some of the highest ethical purposes today were achieved in the struggle to establish the International Criminal Court in 2002, and continue to be at stake in the institution's first steps. Why do people think so, and of what use are the tools of history (assisted by theory) to put this belief in perspective? Answering this question is the main purpose of this course, which presupposes covering the court's origins and several dimensions of its doctrines and workings during its short existence. A main theme is the politics of law, and whether Judith Shklar's brilliant account of legalism is defensible. Field(s): INTL

This course will address critical turning points in the world history of wheeled transport, starting with the time, place, and rationale for the first appearance of wheels; moving onto the diffusion of wheeled transport to other parts of the world; and thence to the emergence of modern wheeled transport out of technological innovations that became evident in eastern Europe in late medieval times. Student papers may be devoted either to these early historical developments, or to episodes in motor-driven vehicular history from more recent times. Field(s): INTL

This course examines the history of the body in the Atlantic world with a focus on race and gender in North America and the Caribbean. It is designed primarily for students with some background in history, as we will examine a number of primary sources. We will analyze these sources in the context of secondary readings on health and disease, class and labor, transgression and punishment, and the relationship between people and their environment. Through all of these readings we will consider the ways in which race, gender, and bodily difference are constructed over time and space, and reflect on how these categories of difference and power were(and are)culturally specific and subject to change.

This graduate seminar examines the History of Soft Power and how it has been used in diplomacy and foreign relations from the Napoleonic Wars down to the Global War on Terrorism. Focusing on Europe and the U.S., the weekly classes bring together readings from history, international relations, and communications studies to probe how states have deployed "soft" or "normative power" in foreign relations. After four to five class sessions dedicated to clarifying related concepts (power and soft power, norms, hegemony, empire, propaganda, strategic communication, public diplomacy and the relationship between domestic and foreign policy and the capacity to act as a global model) subsequent classes address case studies including Napoleon's Propaganda Wars, imperial European Civilizing Missions, The US vs. USSR, Wilson versus Lenin, The Axis Powers in the Muslim World, Vatican Diplomacy, The Marshall Plan, U.S. Public Diplomacy in the wake of 9/11, The European Union's Norms Empire