History

Examines the major social, political, economic, and intellectual transformations from the 1860s until the present, including industrialization and urbanization, federal and state power, immigration, the welfare state, global relations, and social movements.

Discussion section for HIST UN1402 Intro to American History since 1865.

Discussion section for HIST UN1402 Intro to American History since 1865.

Discussion section for HIST UN1402 Intro to American History since 1865.

Discussion section for HIST UN1402 Intro to American History since 1865.

This course, designed for newcomers to American history, tells three interconnected stories. The first is about the European colonization of North America between the 1500s and the 1750s. The second is about the wars for empire and independence that reshaped the North American continent between 1754 and 1815. The third story is about the creation of the United States and its destruction and remaking during the US Civil War. At the end of the class, you will be able to tell these stories and talk about why they matter. Along the way, you will meet all kinds of people from North America's past: enslaved voyagers, visionary women, costumed parade-goers, and land-hungry presidents. You will get a sense of how they made early America such a wild and unusual place, and at the same time, how they shaped the United States that we live in today.

This course will explore the struggle to control the continent of North America from an Indigenous perspective. After a century of European colonization Native peoples east of the Mississippi River Valley formed a political confederation aimed at preserving Native sovereignty. This Native confederacy emerged as a dominant force during the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. At times Native political interests aligned with the French and British Empires, but remained in opposition to the expansion of Anglo-American colonial settlements into Indian country. This course is designed to engage literature and epistemology surrounding these New World conflicts as a means of the colonial and post-colonial past in North America.  We will explore the emergence of intersecting indigenous and European national identities tied to the social construction of space and race. In this course I will ask you to re-think American history by situating North America as a Native space, a place that was occupied and controlled by indigenous peoples.  You will be asked to imagine a North America that was indigenous and adaptive, and not necessarily destined to be absorbed by European settler colonies.  Accordingly, this course we will explore the intersections of European colonial settlement and Euro-American national expansion, alongside of the emergence of indigenous social formations that dominated the western interior until the middle of the 19th century.  This course is intended to be a broad history of Indigenous North America during a tumultuous period, but close attention will be given to use and analysis of primary source evidence.  Similarly, we will explore the necessity of using multiple genres of textual evidence – archival documents, oral history, material artifacts, etc., -- when studying indigenous history.

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

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

Between the 700s and 1000s, pirates known as Vikings raided much of Europe. Some were linked to merchant groups reaching into Central Asia, while others joined diaspora communities that sailed across the Atlantic. They made their worlds in many ways—through texts, images, artifacts, and behaviors. In this class, students will accomplish the same, guided by the principle that making is best studied by doing. This will be accomplished through a series of creative assignments accompanied by written discussions drawing on scholarship and historical materials. The course will culminate in a written proposal for a museum exhibit allowing students to explore chosen narratives or thematic interests. Through this work, students will learn how Viking-Age peoples made their world and consider how we recreate and represent that world today

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality in Europe, from the Renaissance to the present day. We will take a thematic approach, tracing the shifting operations, definitions, and understandings of both gender and sexuality within European culture and society. Topics include: Renaissance visual culture, the witchcraft trials, Enlightenment philosophy, European imperialism and colonialism, revolutions (both political and sexual), moral reform campaigns, the birth of sexology, queer and trans histories, sex work, and the politics of control. Central to this course is an examination of the ways gender and sexuality function at the intersections of class, race, nation, ethnicity, and religion, and how these intersections speak to dynamics of social, cultural, and political power. In our work throughout the semester, we will draw from a range of sources, including film, painting, photography, literature, and music. We will regularly engage with primary sources, which will allow students to learn the skills and techniques necessary for the work of historians. Throughout the course, students will examine how historians write, interpret, and construct histories of gender and sexuality, and question what place these histories have in our contemporary world.

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

Environmental history seeks to expand the customary framework of historical inquiry, challenging students to construct narratives of the past that incorporate not only human beings but also the natural world with which human life is intimately intertwined. As a result, environmental history places at center stage a wide range of previously overlooked historical actors such as plants, animals, and diseases. Moreover, by locating nature within human history, environmental history encourages its practitioners to rethink some of the fundamental categories through which our understanding of the natural world is expressed: wilderness and civilization, wild and tame, natural and artificial. For those interested in the study of ethnicity, environmental history casts into particularly sharp relief the ways in which the natural world can serve both to undermine and to reinforce the divisions within human societies. Although all human beings share profound biological similarities, they have nonetheless enjoyed unequal access to natural resources and to healthy environments—differences that have all-too-frequently been justified by depicting such conditions as “natural.”

Adopting a long-term perspective that centers on the dynamic interplay of economy, space, and political power, this course investigates how Ukraine's geography – its richness in natural resources and trade routes; its centrality as a crossroads between sea, settlement, and steppe, and between rival religious, imperial, and national projects; its vastness, which fostered divergent developmental trajectories and deep regional diversity; and its openness, which offered few natural barriers to contact and conquest – have shaped the country’s history from antiquity to the present.

This course covers all aspects of British history – political, imperial, economic, social and cultural – during the century of Britain’s greatest global power.  Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of liberalism as a political and economic system and as a means of governing personal and social life.  Students will read materials from the time, as well as scholarly articles, and will learn to work with some of the rich primary materials available on this period.

This lecture course comparatively and transnationally investigates the twentieth-century communism as a modern civilization with global outreach. It looks at the world spread of communism as an ideology, everyday experience, and form of statehood in the Soviet Union, Europe, Asia (Mao’s China), and post-colonial Africa. With the exception of North America and Australia, communist regimes were established on all continents of the world. The course will study this historical process from the October Revolution (1917) to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986), which marked the demise of communist state. The stress is not just on state-building processes or Cold War politics, but primarily on social, gender, cultural and economic policies that shaped lived experiences of communism. We will closely investigate what was particular about communism as civilization: sexuality, materiality, faith, selfhood, cultural identity, collective, or class and property politics. We will explore the ways in which “ordinary people” experienced communism through violence (anti-imperial and anti-fascist warfare; forced industrialization) and as subjects of social policies (gender equality, family programs, employment, urban planning). By close investigation of visual, material and political representations of life under communism, the course demonstrates the variety of human experience outside the “West” and capitalist modernity in an era of  anti-imperial politics, Cold War, and decolonization, as well as current environmental crisis.

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

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

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the American Civil War as an event in the making of the modern United States and, indeed, of the western world.  Indeed the American Civil War and Reconstruction introduced a whole series of dilemmas that are still with us.  What is the legacy of slavery in U.S. history and contemporary life?  What is the proper balance of power between the states and the central government? Who is entitled to citizenship in the United States?   What do freedom and equality mean in concrete terms?

This course surveys the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in all of its aspects.  It focuses on the causes of the war in the divergent development of northern and southern states; the prosecution of the war and all that it involved, including the process of slave emancipation; and the contentious process of reconstructing the re-united states in the aftermath of Union victory.  The course includes the military history of the conflict, but ranges far beyond it to take the measure of the social and political changes the war unleashed.  It focuses on the Confederacy as well as the Union, on women as well as men, and on enslaved black people as well as free white people.  It takes the measure of large scale historical change while trying to grasp the experience of those human beings who lived through it. 

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

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

Examines the gendered roles of women and men in Latin American society from the colonial period to the present. Explores a number of themes, including the intersection of social class, race, ethnicity, and gender; the nature of patriarchy; masculinity; gender and the state; and the gendered nature of political mobilization.

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

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

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

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

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

This course is an introduction to the medieval Middle East, starting from the Abbasid caliphate at its peak and ending with the establishment of the Timurid empire.  It explores political, social, and intellectual trends that configured the region’s later history, emphasizing both its complexity and interconnectedness. The course will feature not only on the Middle East and North Africa, but also other regions such as North India and Andalusia, considering the role of the Islamicate world in global history. Special attention will be given to political formations, intellectual and social diversity, and Islam as a cultural system. Students will be introduced to a large number of primary sources from different regions, languages, and religious communities, including objects, art, and music. Students will learn to analyze these materials and understand how history is written and made. This course does not presume any foreknowledge of the topic.

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

This lecture course explores the Indian Ocean worlds of the nineteenth century and twentieth century by tracing networks of trade, labor, capital, pilgrimage and science. It offers an overview of how these networks were forged and who formed them, mapping their ebbs and flows across Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Zanzibar, Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Indonesia, and Australia. It begins with a brief overview of the premodern Indian Ocean and the seaborne empires of sixteenth centuries and the first encounters with Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonization and then looks at a range of different topics from the spice trade and caravan routes in the age of sail to the abolition of slavery and establishment of indenture as steamships began to take over oceanic journeys. We look at the travels of botanical specimens scrounged from tropical forests in the nineteenth century to the surveying of the ocean floor in the twentieth. At the end of the lectures, which will also feature active learning components using primary sources, we will learn how to reframe regional histories through the lens of oceanic mobilities.

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

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

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 seminar prepares students to engage with material sciences used in historical studies. Students will examine how ice cores, tree rings, isotopes, bone morphology, genetic materials, and chemical compositions have all been used as keys into the human past, appraising successes and failures. Assignments will offer temporal depth and geographic breadth, ranging from the micro to the global. This course contributes to curricula for the Columbia Center for Science and Society, emphasizing connectivity, migration, and the environment to support the Climate Humanities minor while examining to how material studies are used in broader support of the Science and Society minor. Students from the sciences will meanwhile have an opportunity to develop skills in navigating and communicating within humanistic understandings of rigor. This course will culminate in students selecting a site, collection, or method to evaluate how studies have measured against apparent possibilities for scientific research and historical interpretation in that field.

In 1942, the American sociologist Robert Merton described modern science as an intellectual enterprise that can produce truthful and factual knowledge only if inspired by democratic values. Yet such concept contrasted starkly with the reality of science in the interwar period and World War II, at the peak of the clash between liberal democracies and fascist dictatorships. What was the role of science in the global conflict between liberalism and the fascist ‘New Order’? What did science and technology look like under fascism?

This class examines the relationship between science and fascism in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, and Salazar’s Portugal. During the Great War (1914-1918), science and technology were enlisted as critical assets for the war effort and the international scientific community was shattered across national lines. The Great War proved the importance of the scientific organization of society and state-controlled scientific advancement. Fascism developed this lesson in the interwar period to pursue its nationalist and imperialist goal: the creation of a new world order.

Thus, the seminar explores the entanglement between science, technology and fascism by examining a wide range of disciplines, such as physics, medicine, eugenics, statistics, demography, agronomy, and engineering. Focusing in particular on fascism’s central themes of race and empire, the course examines the relationship between state power and scientific expertise, the persecution of Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and scientists’ critical competition in World War II ahead of the creation of the atomic bomb, which ushered in the new era of the Cold War.

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 aim of the course is to introduce students to the highly heterogeneous ethnic and religious relations of Central and Eastern Europe and the interrelationship between them. By Central and Eastern Europe, I mean primarily the territory of the former Habsburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its neighbors. The end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century were, for all ethnic groups, a time of both the birth of modern nations and the general secularization. Religions and churches played different roles in the birth of each nationalism. During the semester, students will learn about the most important religions and denominations, their history, spread, structure, teachings, role in the organization of societies: Roman Catholic Church, Greek Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox Church; Protestantism (Calvinist, Lutheran, Unitarian Churches); Judaism and Neo-Protestant denominations. Students will learn how the role of Catholicism in Polish or Croatian nationalism, Greek Orthodoxy in Serbian nationalism, and the presence of several dominant denominations in the Hungarian, Romanian or Slovakian nations became decisive. Conflicts between denominations often expressed conflicts of an ethnic, social or political nature. The laws enacted by the state made several attempts to ensure the coexistence of the denominations. Until 1918, all this took place within the framework of the Habsburg Empire, hence the importance of the relationship of the Empire and the Churches (especially the Catholic Church) to the state, and the phenomenon of Josephinism.

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

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

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

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

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

This reading and writing-intensive course explores the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through prisms including those of race, labor, politics, gender and sexuality, the environment, the law, indigeneity and citizenship, and migration and mobility. What is the definition of a “borderland” and who or what creates one, physical or imagined? What makes the U.S.-Mexico borderlands a unique space, and how has it changed from the Spanish colonial period to the present day? By the end of the semester students will have enough experience in analyzing primary documents and secondary sources to produce their own original research papers related to some aspect and era of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history.

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.

Caribbean literature offers complicated and vivid portrayals of the Caribbean’s past, and grapples with difficult histories lived by its people that compromised colonial archives can only partially capture. Literary works far exceed the limited narratives of Caribbean history by imagining entire worlds that official documents could never contain, rich selves, cultures and communities built by many generations of Caribbean people. This course is aimed at bringing forth a broader understanding of Caribbean history by examining a body of creative works by feminist and womanist writers that continuously remain attuned to the complexities of the past, which are either underrepresented or absent in the record. Chosen literary texts will also be paired with historical works that will illuminate and contextualize the multiple themes with which these Caribbean authors frequently engage, including slavery, and colonialism, racism and colorism, migration and immigration, gender and sexuality, poverty and globalization. From these pairings, students will explore both the divergences and alignments in how writers and historians approach the work of retelling the past, and will acquire reading and writing skills that will foster thoughtful critical analysis of the ever-changing contours of the Caribbean’s history.

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.

In this seminar, we will read a selection of masterpieces in economics to explore how economic thought on capitalism has changed over time. Through weekly discussions, we will examine a number of must-read volumes that shape the field of economics and more broadly, the social sciences today. We will also develop a general understanding of the different epochs of economic thinking about the evolving capitalist system. We will analyze classics such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Capital, and John M. Keynes’ General Theory, as well as more recent classics that have deeply influenced social science thinking in the second half of the XX century. This seminar is intended both for students in history, the humanities and the social sciences who have an interest in understanding the evolution of the economics discipline in historical perspective, and for economics students who want to develop an historical understanding of their discipline.

This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to the present. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish thought, 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 movement (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, and Zionism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and American Jewish religious thought.

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

For many centuries, historians have adhered to an unwritten rule – history is made by using textual documents. But how can we uncover the histories of those not included in the textual sources, and how can we complement and enrich the textual archives? This course interrogates one answer to these questions – that of material culture, and narrate the history of Africa through things. Borrowing methods from a variety of disciplines, most notably women’s and gender studies, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, historians have begun to use artifacts and objects to uncover the untold historical narratives. The course refers to the entire African continent, challenging the common division between North Africa (which is usually more closely associated with the Middle East in modern scholarship) and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as many other divisions. In response to its decades-long marginalization in modern scholarship, Africa, in all its various subdivisions, is places at the center. As the course unfolds, the centrality of Africa in the international movement of things will become clear.

Lagos: The City Is…

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

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

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 explores the making and unmaking of citizenship, adopting regional and global histories from South Asia. Beginning with a brief overview of early twentieth century debates over imperial citizenship involving the Britain, its colonies, and North America and the making of a global color line in the years leading up to the formal end of empires, we look at how important political events (the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, the 1971 War of independence for Bangladesh among others) were important inflection points in the rethinking of the relationship between national identity, belonging and formal-legal citizenship and its impact on people’s understanding of citizenship. Our discussions of citizenship after empire will include readings on citizenship debates involving the former Portuguese and French possessions in India in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a discussion of the broader debates over citizenship and belonging involving the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will also look at how debates over indigeneity and authenticity mark citizenship debates in Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka as well as parts of Southeast Asia, and how this shapes global citizenship and refugee regimes. Returning to India, we consider how unmaking citizenship affects both people who stay behind and engage with state structures as well as those who are on the move, pursuing education or employment opportunities beyond it, shaped by uneven access to rights and shaping their social and political identities.

Russian ideas are familiar to the world through Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels. In this course, we will examine key texts in the intellectual tradition that forms the backdrop to these famous works. Emphasis is on close textual readings; but also on how Russian ideas have been read and interpreted across national and cultural boundaries, including in recent English-language works like Tom Stoppard’s play, Coast of Utopia. Thinkers include Schellingians and Hegelians, Slavophiles, Populists and Pan-Slavists, and Vladimir Soloviev.

Why did millions of Ukrainians starve under Stalin? In this seminar, we will engage with the contentious historiography of the famine of 1932-34 – a defining event of Soviet and Ukrainian history, and an essential touchstone for understanding the Russo-Ukrainian War today. Without losing sight of the famine’s human tragedy, we will focus especially on questions of causality, intent, and agency at multiple levels, from the Kremlin to the village. Drawing on studies of other famines within and outside the Soviet context (Russia, Kazakhstan, and China), participants will develop a robust comparative toolkit. The seminar aims to highlight historiographical advances, explore newly-available primary sources, and identify the remaining gaps in our understanding.

This seminar is devoted to examining the work of writers who address the nature and course of history in their imaginative and non-fiction work. This semester we will be exploring the work of Robert Musil, in particular his great unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, with its imaginative account of Vienna in the lead up to World War I and an exploration into the fundamental historical dynamics of Western modernity.

This course introduces you to the rich history of international political economy in the nineteenth century, a period often described as the ‘first age of globalization’. You will gain a foundational grounding in classic theories of free trade, protectionism, and autarchy, from well-known thinkers like Adam Smith and Friedrich List. You will also, however, have a change to engage with a range of heterodox and critical voices in Marxist and anti-colonial economics, and explore some of the real-world, on-the-ground situations where economic theories were inspired, implemented and contested.

This seminar will focus particularly on Pascal’s humanistic case for religious faith as a response to Montaigne’s skeptical portrayal of the self.  The aim is to understand all the implications of this encounter for the history of Western thought about human psychology, religion, and politics.

This course aims to familiarise students with the extraordinarily rich historiography on fascism. Its goal is to enable a more critical approach to the subject, to parse its conceptual and historical ambiguities and to engage with theoretical framings of the subject through an immersion in the main case studies. Focusing on the emergence of fascist regimes in interwar Italy and Germany, it will range across countries and time, distinguishing fascism from other forms of the authoritarian Right, exploring the extent to which the Second World War marked a watershed in fascism’s fortunes, and asking to what extent the term remains a useful one in the early twenty-first century. Course readings will include contemporary documents, classic articles and major monographs on the subject. Students will be expected to read widely.

This course examines how Americans have used culture as a means to respond to, interpret, and remember acute social crises over the last century. Why do some periods of social upheaval create breaks in cultural forms and practices while others encourage an impetus to defend cultural practices, thereby facilitating the “invention of tradition”?  How are the feelings released in such moments—whether trauma, outrage, rage, insecurity, or fear—turned into cultural artifacts?  What is at stake in how they get memorialized?  To answer these questions, this course examines responses to the lynching of black Americans, the Great Depression, World War II and the black freedom struggle during the postwar period.   We will examine a wide range of individually and collectively produced artifacts about these events, including photography, plays, songs, movies, comic books, novels, government sponsored programs, and world fairs.

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.

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

This course examines the history of science, technology and medicine in the modern Middle East. We will consider a number of themes from energy infrastructures and communication and transportation systems to modern medical, agricultural and environmental developments.

What does nationalism do to memory, and how do those memories get telegraphed, circulated and preserved? This research seminar brings together media history and memory studies towards an exploration of how Iran’s history has been written, remembered, and mediated inside and outside Iran over the course of the modern period. It investigates the kinds of knowledge production involved in maintaining or rejecting a national history, and the forms of visual media harnessed to deploy such historical narratives from both government and grassroots perspectives. This course will consider the different forms of media mobilized in public history, national and institutional histories, and personal histories, all of which speak to the preservation and suppression of the past. This course follows a general chronological timeline and examines how these different narratives often center Tehran while also looking towards alternate histories that offer regional or provincial perspectives, as well as texts speaking to global trends and theoretical interventions. By examining photography, archives, museums, architecture, and other forms of new media production alongside academic historical texts and personal memoirs, this course investigates at the various ways different historiographical trends have been broadcast and institutionalized with regards to Iran’s modern history.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This graduate seminar focuses on  the material and political orders from 1500-1800 in South Asia. We pair primary, historical texts (in translation) with recent monographs which demonstrate the intersections between narrative and polity within material and epistemic realms. Our guiding interests will be in understanding the intimate relationship between power, agency and materiality within specific political spaces. Eschewing the center/periphery models, we take globally connective approach incorporating Western Asian, North American and Northern European histories. Some key ideas for the seminar include, “oceanic” perspective of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, role of “agents” (travelers, merchants, bureaucrats etc.), theories of colonization and decolonization, gender and sexuality.
 

This course will situate the Jewish book within the context of the theoretical and historical literature on the history of the book: notions of orality and literacy, text and material platform, authors and readers, print and manuscript, language and gender, the book trade and its role in the circulation of people and ideas in the early age of print.

Intended for advanced graduate students, this course considers classic and recent works in materiality and material culture in the early modern period (ca. 1400-1700), especially as they are fruitful for the history of science and knowledge. Class sessions will include discussion, museum visits, and hands-on work in the Making and Knowing Lab. Topics to be considered: embodied knowledge, material complexes, materialized concepts and identities, agentive matter, human-environment relations, and material imaginaries.

The aim of the seminar is to introduce the images of the national past of the individual Central European nations (Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, and Croats). The course will deal with general theoretical questions of historical theory and historiography, and then examine how the identity-forming influence of national history manifested itself in each era from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. Remembering the past took on different forms in the era of 19th-century nationalism (during the Habsburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy), between the two world wars, and during the communist dictatorships that emerged in the region. The manifestations of memory politics in Central Europe (monuments, school education) will also be presented and analyzed.

This is an intense reading seminar in new directions in East European, Russian and Eurasian history from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. The seminar explores the “Other Europe” as a constellation of specific regions as much as key localities from which to view the world. The course is based on the premise that global history should be narrated beyond center-periphery frameworks, and from any place where people have reimagined their relationship to a shared global modernity. We will investigate topics ranging from multi-confessional and multi-ethnic land empires (German, Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, Soviet) and their post-imperial forms; globalization and isolation; nationalisms and internationalisms; modernization; communisms; borderlands; dictatorships; Orientalism outside of Western Europe; migration and expulsion across borders and the rise of so-called closed societies; interethnic and communal violence, genocide, and mass killing. Through the lens of cultural, intellectual, social, international, transnational, environmental, regional, urban, legal and gender history, and the history of science and technology, we will explore the region’s historic liminality (as a bridge between “East” and “West’) and its historic ties with Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and Southeast Asia.

This seminar traces major historical trends, transformations, events, and eras that have shaped labor and the lives of workers, mostly in the United States but also around the world. With some prefatory readings about the 18th and 19th centuries, this seminar will concentrate on the 20th and 21st centuries and examine different sectors of work and the varied laboring lives of individuals and communities. Topics covered include labor during Reconstruction; the racialization and feminization of labor; industrial factory work; agribusiness’s power and the food industry; union formation and campaigns; workplace traumas and tragedies; citizen-migrant tensions and solidarities; globalization and outsourcing; sex, tech, and gig work; and how cultural changes and political schisms affect attitudes in the working and middle classes.

This graduate seminar (cross-listed in the departments of History and Anthropology) explores a series of contemporary keywords in history, politics, and theory.  Through the close readings of primary sources as well as classic and more recent historical and theoretical texts, we will consider questions of war, violence, genocide, trauma, memory, liberalism and illiberalism, and fascism.  The course is designed to introduce graduate students to concepts and debates in History, Anthropology, and critical theory with a view of thinking about the present political moment.

This course investigates in-depth the significance of resistance among African-descended communities in the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone Atlantic Worlds from approximately 1700-2000. We will examine the genesis, forms, and limits of resistance within the context of key historical transformations such as slavery and abolition, labor and migration, and transatlantic political organizing. The class will explore the racial epistemologies, racialized labor regimes, and gendered discourses that sparked a continuum of cultural and political opposition to oppression among Black Atlantic communities. The course will also reflect on how resistance plays a central role in the formation of individual and collective identities among black historical actors.Resistance will be explored as a critical category of historical analysis, and a central factor in the making of the “Black Atlantic.”

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

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

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

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