History

Themes include Native and colonial cultures and politics, the evolution of American political and economic institutions, relationships between religious and social movements, and connecting ideologies of race and gender with larger processes such as enslavement, dispossession, and industrialization.

This is the discussion section for HIST BC1401 Introduction to American History to1865. You must be registered for both courses in the same semester.

This is the discussion section for HIST BC1401 Introduction to American History to1865. You must be registered for both courses in the same semester.

This is the discussion section for HIST BC1401 Introduction to American History to1865. You must be registered for both courses in the same semester.

This course is an introduction to the history of the Native peoples of North America.  Instruction will focus on the idea that indigenous people in North America possess a shared history in terms of being forced to respond to European colonization, and the emergence of the modern nation-state.  Native peoples, however, possess their own distinct histories and culture.  In this sense their histories are uniquely multi-faceted rather than the experience of a singular racial group.  Accordingly, this course will offer a wide-ranging survey of cultural encounters between the Native peoples of North America, European empires, colonies, and emergent modern nation-states taking into account the many different indigenous responses to colonization and settler colonialism.  This course will also move beyond the usual stories of Native-White relations that center either on narratives of conquest and assimilation, or stories of cultural persistence.  We will take on these issues, but we will also explore the significance of Native peoples to the historical development of modern North America.  This will necessarily entail an examination of race formation, and a study of the evolution of social structures and categories such as nation, tribe, citizenship, and sovereignty.

This lecture course reconstructs the global spread and development of ideas and practices of self-determination in the twentieth century. Starting on the eve of World War I and concluding in the wake of the Soviet Union’s downfall, we will examine how successive episodes of imperial crisis and collapse reshaped how, where, and by whom the right to self-determination historically came to be claimed, contested, and exercised. Taking the Wilsonian and Leninist interpretations of self-determination as its point of departure, our inquiry will expand to encompass primary texts spanning major currents of liberal, nationalist, pan-nationalist, internationalist, socialist, communist, anarchist, fascist, federalist, and feminist thought. Recurring regions of emphasis include the North Atlantic world, East Asia, East-Central Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, and the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, British, and French Empires, while key institutions include the Communist International, the League of Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the United Nations. Our study of self-determination features central topics such as the comparative histories of empires and nation-states, the relationship between nationalism and internationalism, concepts of racial hierarchy and supremacy, diasporas and transnational networks, world war, decolonization, global governance, international development, imperial reform, and the fate of neoliberalism since the 1990s.

Required discussion section for “Self-Determination and the Making of the Twentieth-Century World” lecture (HIST UN2257)

Examines the shaping of European cultural identity through encounters with non-European cultures from 1500 to the post-colonial era. Novels, paintings, and films will be among the sources used to examine such topics as exoticism in the Enlightenment, slavery and European capitalism, Orientalism in art, ethnographic writings on the primitive, and tourism.

Examines the shaping of European cultural identity through encounters with non-European cultures from 1500 to the post-colonial era. Novels, paintings, and films will be among the sources used to examine such topics as exoticism in the Enlightenment, slavery and European capitalism, Orientalism in art, ethnographic writings on the primitive, and tourism.

This course surveys the main currents of British history from 1900 to the present, with particular attention to the changing place of Britain in the world and the changing shape of society and politics.  Throughout this course, we will ask:  Where is power located in Britain and its empire?  What held Britain and the empire together, and what tore them apart?  What was life like for Britons – young and old, men and women, rich and poor, Black and white – across the course of this century? When and how did social change happen?  How did people respond?

We will tackle these questions by looking closely at some key periods of political conflict and resolution, by reading key texts from the time, and – for the latter part of the course – by viewing films and speeches.  The course requirements include section participation, including regular posts (20%), a take-home midterm (20%), two short research assignments (20% each) and a take-home final (20%).  You must complete all assignments and exams to pass the course.  The research assignments are devised to help familiarize you with historians’ practice, so that you can search for answers to historical questions on your own.  The assignments are integrated into section discussion: due dates are (as a result) not flexible and section attendance is required.  The films are an essential part of the course and will be discussed in section.  

Readings for this courseare drawn mostly from the rich primary materials available.  They are supplemented by select articles chosen to bring out some of the key issues historians find significant about particular periods or events.  My lectures constitute the main “textbook” for the course, but I am also recommending that you read selected chapters from a textbook that is available online:  Stephanie Barczewski et al, Britain since 1688: https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/books/9781315748610.  

Most material is available online, but five books (asterisked below) will need to be ordered or bought from Book Culture (or, if you are not in the New York area, online).  A timeline, a list of interesting web links, and a list of great British films can be found on the Courseworks page.

Course objectives

The course aims to provide students with (a) a good foundational knowledge of the course of British history and culture from 1900 to the present; (b) an understanding of how historians do research and basic research skills; (c) the ability to analyze historical materials (speeches, novels, memoirs, government documents, films), placing them in context and deploying them to make analytical arguments about the past.

This course surveys the main currents of British history from 1900 to the present, with particular attention to the changing place of Britain in the world and the changing shape of society and politics.  Throughout this course, we will ask:  Where is power located in Britain and its empire?  What held Britain and the empire together, and what tore them apart?  What was life like for Britons – young and old, men and women, rich and poor, Black and white – across the course of this century? When and how did social change happen?  How did people respond?

We will tackle these questions by looking closely at some key periods of political conflict and resolution, by reading key texts from the time, and – for the latter part of the course – by viewing films and speeches.  The course requirements include section participation, including regular posts (20%), a take-home midterm (20%), two short research assignments (20% each) and a take-home final (20%).  You must complete all assignments and exams to pass the course.  The research assignments are devised to help familiarize you with historians’ practice, so that you can search for answers to historical questions on your own.  The assignments are integrated into section discussion: due dates are (as a result) not flexible and section attendance is required.  The films are an essential part of the course and will be discussed in section.  

Readings for this courseare drawn mostly from the rich primary materials available.  They are supplemented by select articles chosen to bring out some of the key issues historians find significant about particular periods or events.  My lectures constitute the main “textbook” for the course, but I am also recommending that you read selected chapters from a textbook that is available online:  Stephanie Barczewski et al, Britain since 1688: https://www-taylorfrancis-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/books/9781315748610.  

Most material is available online, but five books (asterisked below) will need to be ordered or bought from Book Culture (or, if you are not in the New York area, online).  A timeline, a list of interesting web links, and a list of great British films can be found on the Courseworks page.

Course objectives

The course aims to provide students with (a) a good foundational knowledge of the course of British history and culture from 1900 to the present; (b) an understanding of how historians do research and basic research skills; (c) the ability to analyze historical materials (speeches, novels, memoirs, government documents, films), placing them in context and deploying them to make analytical arguments about the past.

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.

Spatial history of New York City in the 19th century. Students explore key topics in New York City spatial history in lectures, and learn historical-GIS skills in a co-requisite lab (instead of a discussion section). They will use newly constructed GIS data from the Mapping Historical New York project, and conduct spatial history assignments.

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.

This is the co-requisite lab for HIST BC2405 Spatial history of New York City in the 19th century. Students explore key topics in New York City spatial history in lectures, and learn historical-GIS skills in this lab. They will use newly constructed GIS data from the Mapping Historical New York project, and conduct spatial history assignments.

This course offers a survey of the poltiical history of contemporary Africa, with a focus on the states and societies south of the Sahara. The emphasis is on struggle and conflict—extending to war—and peace.

Discussion course for lecture UN2438 description below:

This course offers a survey of the political history of contemporary Africa, with a focus on the states and societies south of the Sahara.  The emphasis is on struggle and conflict - extending to war - and peace.

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

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

This course explores the social, cultural, and political history of lesbians, gay men, and other socially constituted sexual and gender minorities, primarily in the twentieth century. Since the production and regulation of queer life has always been intimately linked to the production and policing of “normal” sexuality and gender, we will also pay attention to the shifting boundaries of normative sexuality, especially heterosexuality, as well as other developments in American history that shaped gay life, such as the Second World War, Cold War, urbanization, and the minority rights revolution. Themes include the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as categories of experience and identity; the changing relationship between homosexuality and transgenderism; the development of diverse lesbian and gay subcultures and their representation in popular culture; the sources of antigay hostility; religion and sexual science; generational change and everyday life; AIDS; and gay, antigay, feminist, and queer movements.

This course explores the social, cultural, and political history of lesbians, gay men, and other socially constituted sexual and gender minorities, primarily in the twentieth century. Since the production and regulation of queer life has always been intimately linked to the production and policing of “normal” sexuality and gender, we will also pay attention to the shifting boundaries of normative sexuality, especially heterosexuality, as well as other developments in American history that shaped gay life, such as the Second World War, Cold War, urbanization, and the minority rights revolution. Themes include the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as categories of experience and identity; the changing relationship between homosexuality and transgenderism; the development of diverse lesbian and gay subcultures and their representation in popular culture; the sources of antigay hostility; religion and sexual science; generational change and everyday life; AIDS; and gay, antigay, feminist, and queer movements.

This course aims to give a portrait of the development of Latin America from the first contact with the Europeans to the creation of independent states. We will focus on society and interaction among the various ethnic and socio-economic groups at the level of daily life. For each class, students will have to read sections of a core text as well as a primary source, or document, from the period; before the end of every class there will be 15 minutes to discuss the document together. In addition, students will enroll in discussion sections held by TAs.

This course aims to give a portrait of the development of Latin America from the first contact with the Europeans to the creation of independent states. We will focus on society and interaction among the various ethnic and socio-economic groups at the level of daily life. For each class, students will have to read sections of a core text as well as a primary source, or document, from the period; before the end of every class there will be 15 minutes to discuss the document together. In addition, students will enroll in discussion sections held by TAs.

This lecture offers a comprehensive view of the Cold War in Latin America and zooms in on those places and moments when it turned hot. It understands the Cold War as a complex and multi-layered conflict, which not only pitted two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—against one another, but also two ideologies—capitalism and socialism—whose appeal cut across societies. In Latin America, the idea of socialist revolution attracted a diverse set of actors (workers, students, intellectuals, politicians, etc.) and posed a significant challenge to both capitalism and United States hegemony. We will probe what the Cold War meant to people across the region, paying particular attention to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary events in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, all the while examining the diplomatic and cultural battles for the hearts and minds of Latin Americans.

This lecture offers a comprehensive view of the Cold War in Latin America and zooms in on those places and moments when it turned hot. It understands the Cold War as a complex and multi-layered conflict, which not only pitted two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—against one another, but also two ideologies—capitalism and socialism—whose appeal cut across societies. In Latin America, the idea of socialist revolution attracted a diverse set of actors (workers, students, intellectuals, politicians, etc.) and posed a significant challenge to both capitalism and United States hegemony. We will probe what the Cold War meant to people across the region, paying particular attention to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary events in Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, all the while examining the diplomatic and cultural battles for the hearts and minds of Latin Americans.

Required discussion section for “The Cold War in Latin America” lecture (HIST UN2671)

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

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

During the 2020 US presidential election and the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, science and “scientific truths” were fiercely contested. This course provides a historical perspective on the issues at stake. The course begins with an historical account of how areas of natural knowledge, such as astrology, alchemy, and “natural magic,” which were central components of an educated person’s view of the world in early modern Europe, became marginalized, while a new philosophy of nature (what we would now call empirical science) came to dominate the discourse of rationality. Historical developments examined in this course out of which this new understanding of nature emerged include the rise of the centralized state, religious reform, and European expansion. The course uses this historical account to show how science and pseudoscience developed in tandem in the period from 1400 to 1800. This historical account equips students to examine contemporary issues of expertise, the social construction of science, pluralism in science, certainty and uncertainty in science, as well as critical engagement with contemporary technologies.

During the 2020 US presidential election and the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, science and “scientific truths” were fiercely contested. This course provides a historical perspective on the issues at stake. The course begins with an historical account of how areas of natural knowledge, such as astrology, alchemy, and “natural magic,” which were central components of an educated person’s view of the world in early modern Europe, became marginalized, while a new philosophy of nature (what we would now call empirical science) came to dominate the discourse of rationality. Historical developments examined in this course out of which this new understanding of nature emerged include the rise of the centralized state, religious reform, and European expansion. The course uses this historical account to show how science and pseudoscience developed in tandem in the period from 1400 to 1800. This historical account equips students to examine contemporary issues of expertise, the social construction of science, pluralism in science, certainty and uncertainty in science, as well as critical engagement with contemporary technologies.

Required discussion section for HIST UN2978 lecture.

This course surveys some of the major historiographical debates surrounding the Second World War. It aims to provide student with an international perspective of the conflict that challenges conventional understandings of the war. In particular, we will examine the ideological, imperial, and strategic dimensions of the war in a global context. Students will also design, research, and write a substantial essay of 15-18 pages in length that makes use of both primary and secondary sources.

This course considers how identity increased, limited, controlled, or otherwise shaped the mobility of individuals and groups in the Roman world, including women, slaves, freedpeople, and diaspora communities. We will identify the structures that produced differences in mobility and consider how such groups understood and represented themselves in a variety of media as possessing a specific, shared identity and community. The course will draw on a range of primary sources, including inscriptions and literary texts (both poetry and prose), and cover the period from the second century BCE to the third century CE.

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 approach the concept of personhood as a lens through which to study topics such as the valorization of interiority, humanist scholarly practices, the rising professional status of artists, the spirituality of Christian mysticism, 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 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.

Over the last hundred years there have been four periods of revolutionary upheaval on the territory of today’s Ukraine: the events of 1917-20, Stalin’s “second” revolution of 1933-34, the “nationalist revolution” of the 1940s, and the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013-14. These historical flashpoints play an important role in current memory wars. The course provides a guide to the most controversial issues and the conflicting ways in which each revolutionary cycle has been interpreted. It also indicates neglected episodes and suggests how new approaches can bridge narrative divides.

Drawing borders—around spaces, peoples, populations, property, and states—has been a major part of the creation of the modern world. Borders continue to be flashpoints of international conflict and sites of state violence. This class examines how borders have been constructed and produced at different historical moments, through imperial and international regimes, and in different places around the world. We’ll look at maps, surveys, censuses, plebiscites, passports, and international commissions to consider what borders are and the ways in which they can be manifested and shaped. We’ll reflect on how state officials and soldiers, as well as anthropologists, social scientists, and historians, have created borders in space and around aspects of social life. Borders are produced politically, but they are also literally made by particular technologies and made real through everyday acts and experiences. What techniques are involved in drawing borders, and how have these techniques shaped borders themselves? To put it crudely, how have decisions made in drawing a border affected what is later done at that border? Borders are more than lines on a map or territorial expressions: they bound the contours of political communities, they mark points of surveillance, and they help to create subjects and identities. Ultimately, this class aims to give students the historical skills to think about how borders and spaces are produced materially and politically, how knowledge about space is created and constructed, and how populations and resources are entangled within border regimes, through a range of concrete case studies. The use of these studies will open up further topics related to borders in fields such as legal history, the history of science, settler colonialism, and nationalism.

The development of the modern culture of consumption, with particular attention to the formation of the woman consumer. Topics include commerce and the urban landscape, changing attitudes toward shopping and spending, feminine fashion and conspicuous consumption, and the birth of advertising. Examination of novels, fashion magazines, and advertising images.

The United States was founded on Indigenous land and in conversation with Indigenous nations who shared possession to most of the territory claimed by the republic. The expansion of the U.S. beyond the original thirteen states happened in dialogue, and often in open conflict with the Native peoples of North America.  This course will examine the creation and expansion of the American nation-state from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous history. Most histories of the Republic equate the founding of the U.S. with the severance of colonial ties to Great Britain and the proceed to characterize America as a post-colonial society. We will study the U.S. as the first New World colonial power, a settler society whose very existence is deeply intertwined with the Indigenous history of North America.

An introduction to the history of state and corporate surveillance, opposition to it, and approaches to studying it, from the 1600s until the present. Topics include the creation of the early modern information state, the development of state statistics and policing, imperial forms of surveillance, surveillance in totalitarian regimes from Nazi Germany through the present, growth of electronic surveillance in the cold war especially in war zones, the transfer of military technologies to internal security and border control, surveillance of civil rights and anti-war movements, recent controversies around the NSA and GCQH, and the development of large scale state sanctioned hacking.

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 Kings College, with the institution of slavery.

This course examines the transformation of rural and urban landscapes in the U.S. in the critical era of industrial consolidation, 1880-1940. We investigate the creation of an infrastructure for agriculture that transformed natural environments; the changing vernacular architecture of domestic and industrial workplaces; the development of central downtowns as sites of office buildings, department stores, and civic centers; the spatial instantiation of the Jim Crow segregationist regime in the North as well as the South; the relation between real estate and finance that fueled the Great Depression; and the development of New Deal policies that underwrote public works—including highways-- and public housing, while also subsidizing home ownership, agribusiness, and segregation (the historical context for debates over the “Green New Deal.”.  Reading assignments combine social history and vernacular architectural studies with primary sources that include urban planning and government documents, personal narratives, and both historical and contemporary photographs, maps, and city plans.

This course examines the transformation of rural and urban landscapes in the U.S. in the critical era of industrial consolidation, 1880-1940. We investigate the creation of an infrastructure for agriculture that transformed natural environments; the changing vernacular architecture of domestic and industrial workplaces; the development of central downtowns as sites of office buildings, department stores, and civic centers; the spatial instantiation of the Jim Crow segregationist regime in the North as well as the South; the relation between real estate and finance that fueled the Great Depression; and the development of New Deal policies that underwrote public works—including highways-- and public housing, while also subsidizing home ownership, agribusiness, and segregation (the historical context for debates over the “Green New Deal.”.  Reading assignments combine social history and vernacular architectural studies with primary sources that include urban planning and government documents, personal narratives, and both historical and contemporary photographs, maps, and city plans.

This course examines 20th-century American political movements of the Left and Right. We will cover Socialism and the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century; the Communist Party and right-wing populists of the 1930s; the civil rights movement, black power, and white resistance, 1950s-1960s; the rise of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s; the Women's liberation movement and the Christian right of the 1970s; and finally, free-market conservatism, neoliberalism, white nationalism and the Trump era. We will explore the organizational, ideological and social history of these political mobilizations. The class explores grass-roots social movements and their relationship to “mainstream” and electoral politics. We will pay special attention to the ways that ideas and mobilizations that are sometimes deemed extreme have in fact helped to shape the broader political spectrum. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the present political dilemmas of our country in light of the history that we study.

This course examines 20th-century American political movements of the Left and Right. We will cover Socialism and the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century; the Communist Party and right-wing populists of the 1930s; the civil rights movement, black power, and white resistance, 1950s-1960s; the rise of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s; the Women's liberation movement and the Christian right of the 1970s; and finally, free-market conservatism, neoliberalism, white nationalism and the Trump era. We will explore the organizational, ideological and social history of these political mobilizations. The class explores grass-roots social movements and their relationship to “mainstream” and electoral politics. We will pay special attention to the ways that ideas and mobilizations that are sometimes deemed extreme have in fact helped to shape the broader political spectrum. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the present political dilemmas of our country in light of the history that we study.

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

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

The seminar will examine several “Islamic” cities in depth, focusing on critical moments in their histories. The students will acquire a solid knowledge of these centers. They will study their dynamic and complex histories in an episodic manner, deconstructing their images frozen in a particular moment. We will begin by recent critical theories on the “Islamic” city, the latter concept developed as a rigid formula during the colonial era and reiterated since. As we resituate our case studies in their shifting historic contexts, we will gain insights into the complexity of their formations. More specifically, for example, Damascus will not be constrained to its canonical early medieval period, but will be investigated with reference to its Greco-Roman history, the Ottoman interventions in the pre-modern period, the nineteenth-century reforms, and the French planning experiments under the Mandate. Istanbul will not be limited to its sixteenth-century glamor, but will be scrutinized in terms of its turbulent passage from Byzantine to Ottoman rule, and as a pioneering experiment in nineteenth-century modernization reforms. Situating urban forms, “the tangible substance, the stuff” of cities at the center of our discussions, we will look into the political, social, cultural, and economic factors that framed their development, as well as the subsequent effects the cities made on these realms. The interdisciplinary approach will capitalize on the rich literature in the field and engage in analyses using textual and visual materials in complementary ways. The students will learn how to triangulate their discussions by using arguments and data (including visual documents) from different academic fields. 

The weekly meetings will include presentations by the instructor and the students, followed by class discussions.

B. R. Ambedkar is arguably one of Columbia University’s most illustrious alumni, and a democratic thinker and constitutional lawyer who had enormous impact in shaping India, the world’s largest democracy. As is well known, Ambedkar came to Columbia University in July 1913 to start a doctoral program in Political Science. He graduated in 1915 with a Masters degree, and got his doctorate from Columbia in 1927 after having studied with some of the great figures of interwar American thought including Edwin Seligman, James Shotwell, Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey.

This course follows the model of the Columbia University and Slavery course and draws extensively on the relevant holdings and resources of Columbia’s RBML, [Rare Books and Manuscript Library] Burke Library (Union Theological Seminar), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture among others to explore a set of relatively understudied links between Ambedkar, Columbia University, and the intellectual history of the interwar period. Themes include: the development of the disciplines at Columbia University and their relationship to new paradigms of social scientific study; the role of historical comparison between caste and race in producing new models of scholarship and political solidarity; links between figures such as Ambedkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, W. E. B. Du Bois and others who were shaped by the distinctive public and political culture of New York City, and more.

This is a hybrid course which aims to create a finding aid for B. R. Ambedkar that traverses RBML private papers. Students will engage in a number of activities towards that purpose. They will attend multiple instructional sessions at the RBML to train students in using archives; they will make public presentations on their topics, which will be archived in video form; and stuents will produce digital essays on a variety of themes and topics related to the course. Students will work collaboratively in small groups and undertake focused archival research.  This seminar inaugurates an on-going, multiyear effort to grapple with globalizing the reach and relevance of B. R. Ambedkar and to share our findings with the Columbia community and beyond.  Working independently, students will define and pursue individual research projects.  Working together, the class will create digital visualizations of these projects.

This seminar investigates the experiences of slavery and freedom among African-descended people living and laboring in the various parts of the Atlantic World. The course will trace critical aspects of these two major, interconnected historical phenomena with an eye to how specific cases either manifested or troubled broader trends across various slaveholding societies. The first half of the course addresses the history of slavery and the second half pertains to experiences in emancipation. However, since the abolition of slavery occurs at different moments in various areas of the Atlantic World, the course will adhere to a more thematic and less chronological structure, in its examination of the multiple avenues to freedom available in various regions. Weekly units will approach major themes relevant to both slavery and emancipation, such as racial epistemologies among slaveowners/employers, labor regimes in slave and free societies, cultural innovations among slave and freed communities, gendered discourses and sexual relations within slave and free communities, and slaves’ and free people’s resistance to domination. The goal of this course is to broaden students’ comprehension of the history of slavery and freedom, and to promote an understanding of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Americas as creating both continuities and ruptures in the structure and practices of the various societies concerned.

What was daily life like for the “average” European in pre-industrial society?  This course examines the material circumstances of life and death in Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. It also asks the question of whether and how we can enter into the inner life of people of the past. How did people experience their material conditions? How did they experience the life of the mind and of the emotions? What are the methods used by historians to gain knowledge about the material conditions and lived experience of the past?

This course takes students on an intellectual tour of fourteen vibrant cities in Central and Eastern Europe on the cusp of World War I, acquainting them with pioneering works of historical scholarship on the nations, empires, peoples, cultures, ideas, and economies that have spanned the borderlands between the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas. Through oral presentations, book reviews, and a culminating historiographic essay project, students will gain a confident grasp of important genres and media of scholarly communication while closely familiarizing themselves with some of the most influential currents of research and writing on the borderlands of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires in their final decades. Readings are organized geographically by city but pursue broad, recurring themes such as space, labor, revolution, modernity, industrialization, nationalism, empire, sexuality, deviance, social control, and migration. The course provides a supportive learning environment for advanced undergraduates considering the continuation of their historical pursuits at the graduate level as well as for graduate students preparing for general examinations and strengthening their mastery of academic writing.

This seminar examines the social construction of criminality and the institutions that developed to impose and enforce the criminal law as reflections of Latin American urban society throughout the region’s history, with a particular emphasis on the rise of police forces as the principal means of day-to-day urban governance. Topics include policing and urban slavery; policing the urban “underworld”; the changing cultural importance of police in urban popular culture; the growth of scientific policing methods, along with modern criminology and eugenics; policing and the enforcement of gender norms in urban public spaces; the role of urban policing in the rise of military governments in the twentieth century; organized crime; transitional justice and the contemporary question of the rule of law; and the transnational movement of ideas about and innovations in policing practice. In our readings and class discussions over the course of the semester, we will trace how professionalized, modern police forces took shape in cities across the region over time. This course actually begins, however, in the colonial period before there was anything that we would recognize as a modern, uniformed, state-run police force. We will thus have a broad perspective from which to analyze critically the role of police in the development of Latin American urban societies—in other words, to see the police in the contemporary era as contingent on complex historical processes, which we will seek to understand.

Nationalism is one of the most persistent, powerful and elusive forces in modern world history. This course examines it through a particularly compelling and accessible case study: Ireland. As both a subject of, and a partner in, British colonialism, Ireland straddled both the imperial and anti-imperial dimensions of nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalism. Ireland reveals nationalism’s complexities and ambiguities in an era in which large multinational empires, not nation-states, were frequently seen as fundamental units of political organization.

Through its relationship to the Catholic church, through the global Irish diaspora (especially, though not exclusively, in the US) and through its correspondence and cooperation with other struggles for ‘nationality’ in nineteenth-century Europe, modern Irish nationalism became a transnational phenomenon. As such, it can show us some of the ways in which growing global communication and interconnection can produce and reinforce national sentiment rather than undermining it.

Over a period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, we will trace the diverse and often conflicting modes of nationalist politics and ideology in Ireland, encompassing controversies over sovereignty, empire, democracy, religion, trade, property, political violence and culture. In so doing, we will not only learn about the role of nationalism in Irish history, but seek to understand its broad conceptual relevance in modern politics.

This course surveys the historical debates surrounding the question of American empire. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly writings, we will explore the rise of the United States to the status of a major world power over the 19th and 20th centuries. Students will also use the semester to design, research, and write a substantial essay that draws on both primary and secondary sources on a topic chosen in consultation with the professor.

Through a series of thematically-arranged secondary and primary source readings and research writing assignments, students in this seminar course will explore the public health, medical, political, and social histories of HIV and AIDS in Black American communities. The course’s chronological focus begins roughly two decades before the first recognition of the syndrome, in June 1981, to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

GUIDELINES & REQUIREMENTS

• Undergraduate and masters students are welcome in this course by application. Due to the higher level of course material, students should have a background in African-American history or public health history.
• Students may not enroll this course on a pass/fail basis or as an auditor without instructor permission
• Please consult the “Class Performance Guidelines” document for details.
• Students may not enroll this course on a pass/fail basis or as an auditor without instructor permission.
• Student assessment will be based on various criteria: Class discussion participation (35%), Presentation of the readings (15%), Writing assignments (50%)

Policy on Academic Integrity
Please note that all students are bound to the guidelines set forth in the College’s statement on Academic Integrity (http://www.college.columbia.edu/academics/academicintegrity)

PREPARATION & READING
All students should ensure that they are able to access class files, syllabus, and discussion boards through the Courseworks site and the relevant Google Drive folders.

Titles within this syllabus marked by * are available online through JSTOR, ProQuest, Project MUSE, or other online portals. Please consult a librarian if you cannot access the title. Titles marked by † may be found in a Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13LMoXGRI6qJIXyMx75f-UXYIoJcWubZV?usp=sharing) to which I will give each of you access permission. If you do not have permission, you may request access via the above link.

Please note that most or all weeks have a set of thought and discussion questions. This is not an assignment; rather, I have offered these as study guides which you should consider before reading the assigned material.

READING
Titles marked by * are available online through CLIO, JSTOR, ProQuest, Project MUSE, or other online portals. Please consult a librarian if you cannot access the title.

Titles marked by † may be found in a Google Drive folder labeled “Health history readings” (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13LMoXGRI6qJIXyMx75f-UXYIoJcWubZV?usp=sharing). Please note that I use this Drive for other courses as well, so most of the readings here will not be used in our course (but feel free, of course, to read them if you like).

You may obtain copies of the below books at Book Culture (112th Street), online, or in the Columbia/Barnard Library system.

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.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, millions of Jews uprooted themselves from their places of birth and settled in new homes around the world.  This mass migration not only transformed the cultural and demographic centers of world Jewry, but also fundamentally changed the way in which state’s organized their immigration regimes.  In this course, we shall analyze the historiography in migration studies, state formation and Jewish history to make sense of the different factors shaping Jewish immigrants’ experiences in different parts of the world.

This course will offer an examination of the birth and development of the Franciscan Order between 1200-1350. The topics will include Francis of Assisi, the foundation of the three orders of Franciscans, education, poverty, preaching, theology internal strife, antifraternalism, and relations with secular governments and papacy.

This seminar will introduce advanced history students to key themes in modern Arabic thought from the eighteenth century to present. Examining the history of ideas against their institutional, political, and metatextual backgrounds, it also considers the role these played in constructing new narratives and imaginaries.

For thousands of years people have been getting ready for the end of the world, giving rise to millenarian movements that have sometimes changed history. More than once, large numbers of people have experienced events such as the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, colonial conquest, and “strategic” bombing that seemed very much like the end of their world. And over the last seventy-five years, governments and international organizations have made major investments in predicting and preparing for catastrophic threats. Efforts to manage or mitigate these dangers have had world-changing consequences, including “preventative” wars, and new forms of global governance. The very idea of the end of the world, in other words, has a long history, with a demonstrable impact, which provides instructive lessons as we contemplate things to come.

This course will explore this history, beginning with eschatology and millenarian movements. In part two, students will learn how different conceptual frameworks can be applied to assessing and managing risk, and understanding how people perceive or misperceive danger. They will learn how they can be applied to identify the most important challenges, drawing insights from different disciplinary approaches. The third and main part of the course will consist of comparative and connected analyses of the age-old apocalyptic threats -- war, pestilence, and famine -- in their modern forms, i.e. nuclear armageddon, pandemics, and ecological collapse. By examining them together, we can compare the magnitude and probability of each danger, and also explore their interconnections. We will see, for instance, how nuclear testing helped give rise to the environmental movement, and how modeling the aftereffects of nuclear exchanges helped advance understanding of climate change. Similarly, scenario exercises have shaped threat perceptions and disaster-preparedness for pandemics and bio-warfare as much as they did for nuclear war and terrorism.  

Readings and discussions will explore how planetary threats are interconnected, and not just in the techniques used to predict and plan for them. Applying nuclear power to the problem of global warming, for instance, could undermine longstanding efforts to stop nuclear proliferation. Climate change and mass migration, on the other hand, create new pandemic threats, as a more crowded and interconnected world becomes a single ecosystem. Yet billions spent on building up defenses have created more capacity and opportunity for bio-terrorism. Who would actually use a nuclear or biological weapon? Perhaps a millenarian group hoping to ride death, the fourth horse of the apocalypse, straight to heaven.

This seminar explores a tradition of historical writing (historiography) that constructs “Africa and France,” or “France and Africa,” or “FrançAfrique” as an historical object and as an object of knowledge. That body of writing accounts in various and sometimes contadictory ways for the peculiar, intense, and historically conflictual relationship that exists between France and the sub-Saharan nation-states that are its former African colonies.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The goal of this seminar is to discuss the relationship between economics and politics in eighteenth-century debates about political economy. The focus is on primary texts (Mandeville, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Say). We will also introduce students to some of the most influential historiography, with a discussion of the principal concepts used in eighteenth-century intellectual history, such as republicanism, civic humanism, neo-Stoicism, neo-Epicureanism, the Montesquieu-Steuart doctrine, and doux commerce.

This course introduces students to the burgeoning literature on international ideas, relations, politics and movements between the wars, especially in Europe.  We will explore three questions in particular.  First, how has the current turn to international/global history altered our understanding of the key aspects of Europe’s ‘twenty-year crisis’ – especially post-World War I stabilization, the management of the slump, imperial contestation, and the challenge posed by revisionist states?  Second, what was the nature of the “Geneva project,” and what was its significance?  Finally, what other visions of internationalism and geopolitics emerged in the interwar era, and to what effect?  Can we now bring international history and European history together?

Students will be expected to do all common readings and participate in class discussion and to prepare discussion questions and help guide discussion twice during the term.  Written assignments will be structured to allow students to evaluate this new scholarship in light of their own research.

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

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

This course introduces graduate students to advanced scholarship in early American history, focusing on the historical development of North America c. 1607-1850 CE. While the course will take recent monographs as its starting point, students will also put these new books in conversation with older works of historical scholarship, developing their understanding of important issues and ongoing debates in the field. Graduate students working in related fields (e.g., Atlantic history, early American literature, early modern history) are welcome to join.

The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 heralded heated debates that centered on the question of the representation of the other, more specifically, European constructions of the “Orient.” Extending over many academic disciplines and covering ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic realms, Said’s book led to the emergence of a wide literature. As testified by scores of recent books and articles, the discussions continue to maintain their fervor. Nevertheless, one perspective remains neglected: the ways in which the othered subjects evaluated the European discourse. Our seminar will address this lacuna and study how “Orientals” read the Orientalist discourse. Examining the work of Middle Eastern authors (and in a few cases, artists), we will gain insights into their reactions, anger, and appropriations, as well as the broader parameters of their own intellectual searches and struggles. Capitalizing on original texts (made accessible in English in my Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient, 2021), we will listen to late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican intellectuals, who produced a significant discourse of their own. In accord with the European texts, these come from different disciplines and range from philosophical essays to journalistic editorials, academic articles on art and architectural history, and literary works (novels, short stories, poems). We will expand the Ottoman/Turkish perspective by including voices from other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, while also considering European critical writing. The chronological bracket is from the 1870s to the 1930s, corresponding to the peak of Orientalism.

This colloquium is intended to introduce Ph.D. students from History and related fields to contemporary Africanist historiography. The genealogies of the field are multiple and distinct. However, rather than trace those genealogies from their distinctive points of origin, the course examines some of the key characteristics and problematics of Africanist historical production over the last generation. Signal elements of Africanist historiography that we will explore include: the tension between historical analysis and work produced in the frame of other social sciences, particularly ethnography, and/or work that engages with the colonial library; the variable weight accorded Africa’s deeper or ‘pre-colonial’ past in contemporary historical analysis (i.e., the balance between historicity and historicism); the privileged place of methodologies, particularly in oral history, within the historiography; the changing relationship between word, text, and object as sources of knowledge about the recent African past; the circumscription of the religious within the rational.

The colloquium offers an historiographic review that will allow us to gain our bearings in Africanist historical production, and it is intended to enable future critical reading of Africanist work and awareness of the strengths and limitations of the field. 

This colloquium is intended to introduce Ph.D. students from History and related fields to contemporary Africanist historiography. The genealogies of the field are multiple and distinct. However, rather than trace those genealogies from their distinctive points of origin, the course examines some of the key characteristics and problematics of Africanist historical production over the last generation. Signal elements of Africanist historiography that we will explore include: the tension between historical analysis and work produced in the frame of other social sciences, particularly ethnography, and/or work that engages with the colonial library; the variable weight accorded Africa’s deeper or ‘pre-colonial’ past in contemporary historical analysis (i.e., the balance between historicity and historicism); the privileged place of methodologies, particularly in oral history, within the historiography; the changing relationship between word, text, and object as sources of knowledge about the recent African past; the circumscription of the religious within the rational.

The colloquium offers an historiographic review that will allow us to gain our bearings in Africanist historical production, and it is intended to enable future critical reading of Africanist work and awareness of the strengths and limitations of the field. 

This course is designed to introduce all first-year graduate students in History to major books and problems of the discipline. It aims to familiarize them with historical writings on periods and places outside their own prospective specialties. This course is open to Ph.D. students in the department of History ONLY.

The course aims to introduce graduate students to key topics in religious history between medieval Europe and early Latin America (12th to 16th centuries), such as conversion, sacraments, preaching, sainthood, materiality, heresy, and mendicant orders. Students will: learn about the religious practices and institutions in both areas; develop an understanding of religious history as a particular field within history; explore the ways in which comparative history provides tools to study the rise and spread of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. Each week students will analyze primary sources as well as modern texts, give presentations and write short reports on the readings. The final project is a paper on a particular topic of the course subject chosen in consultation with the instructors.

The workshop provides a forum for advanced PhD students (usually in the 3rd or 4th year) to draft and refine the dissertation prospectus in preparation for the defense, as well as to discuss grant proposals. Emphasis on clear formulation of a research project, sources and historiography, the mechanics of research, and strategies of grant-writing. The class meets weekly and is usually offered in both fall and spring semesters.

Consistent attendance and participation are mandatory.

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