History

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

This course introduces students to medieval history and the methods historians use to study and communicate about the past. Medieval history has traditionally centered on Western Europe, but this course also integrates new approaches to the Global Middle Ages, including attention to connectivity, comparative studies across contexts, and a survey of world literatures. Topics include Late Antique transformations to the Roman world, the Germanic migrations, and the rise of Christianity; the Islamic Conquests, the Carolingian Renaissance, and the Viking expansion; the Crusades, the Black Death, and the rise of early modern empires. Students will learn to read primary sources, assess scholarly arguments, and incorporate interdisciplinary approaches. This course will require visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Met Cloisters.

Discussion Section for Introduction to the Global Middle Ages course.  

Discussion Section for Introduction to the Global Middle Ages course.  

Discussion Section for Introduction to the Global Middle Ages course.  

Discussion Section for Introduction to the Global Middle Ages course.  

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.

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

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

This course provides an introduction to some of the major landmarks in European cultural and intellectual history, from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the 1970s. We will pay special attention to the relationship between texts (literature, anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, art, and film) and the various contexts in which they were produced. Among other themes, we will discuss the cultural impact of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialism, colonialism, modernism, the Russian Revolution, the two world wars, decolonization, feminism and gay liberation movements, structuralism and poststructuralism. In conjunction, we will examine how modern ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, imperialism, fascism, totalitarianism, neoliberalism) were developed and challenged over the course of the last two centuries. Participation in weekly discussion sections staffed by TAs is mandatory. The discussion sections are 50 minutes per session. Students must register for the general discussion (“DISC”) section, and will be assigned to a specific time and TA instructor once the course begins.

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.

World economy, Empire and War: 1900-1950 covers the dramatic upheavals in the world economy that brought nineteenth-century era of globalization to an end an initiated a new era of national economics and global geopolitics. The course will cover the age of imperialism, the crises of the interwar period, the arms race of the 1930s, World War II and the Cold War.

We are often led to believe that Ireland is a place defined by timeless tradition: ancient songs and stories, a rural way of life, persistent and mysterious religious antagonisms. The real history of modern Ireland, however, is defined by dramatic and restless change: political, social, economic, even environmental. This lecture course will introduce you to the broad sweep of modern Irish history, acquainting you with a rich historical literature and striking primary sources covering everything from the contentious and deadly politics of potato-farming to the secret lives of combatants in the Northern Ireland Troubles. It will view Ireland not as a place out of time but as somewhere from which we can gain a unique perspective on some of the historical forces that have shaped our world: empire, capitalism, religion, migration, and nationalism.

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

This class introduces students to the field of environmental history from a global perspective. Environmental history is the study of the relationship between nature and society over time. It deals with the material environment, cultural and scientific understandings of nature, and the politics of socio-economic use of natural resources. The class combines the study of classic texts that were foundational to the field with modern case studies from all over the world. It addresses questions of global relevance, such as: how did the environment shape human history? How did humans shape the natural environment? How are power relations of class, race and gender embedded in the environment we live in? The class welcomes students from the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. The goal of the course is to understand how the relationship between environment and society in history led to the current climate crisis.

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.

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.

Through assigned readings and a group research project, students will gain familiarity with a range of historical and social science problems at the intersection of ethnic/racial/sexual formations, technological networks, and health politics since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; benign neglect; urban renewal and gentrification; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; and environmental justice. There are no required qualifications for enrollment, although students will find the material more accessible if they have had previous coursework experience in United States history, pre-health professional (pre-med, pre-nursing, or pre-public health), African-American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, or American Studies.

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.

Using an intersectional framework, this course traces changing notions of gender and sexuality in the 20th century United States.  The course examines how womanhood and feminism were shaped by class, race, ethnicity, culture, sexuality and immigration status.  We will explore how the construction of American nationalism and imperialism, as well as the development of citizenship rights, social policy, and labor organizing, were deeply influenced by the politics of gender.  Special emphasis will be placed on organizing and women's activism.

How can history help us understand the current AI hype? And when would a history of AI begin? This course turns to the past to better understand the present. Rather than beginning with the dawn of digital computers, the course situates contemporary artificial intelligence within a longer tradition of attempts to build automata and calculating machines. The course interrogates three interrelated ideas that have been instrumental in the development of AI: Intelligence, Automation, and Fiction. The course will consider questions such as: How have ideas about what intelligence is and who possesses it been inscribed in the computing devices researchers design and build? How in turn have computational approaches shaped what does and does not count as intelligence? What can earlier efforts to automate labor tell us about contemporary conversations about the end of work? And what role has speculative fiction, the promissory, and fictive futurity played in the development of AI?

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.

Discussion Section for HIST BC2697 The Cold War in Latin America 

Discussion Section for HIST BC2697 The Cold War in Latin America 

Discussion Section for HIST BC2697 The Cold War in Latin America 

Discussion Section for HIST BC2697 The Cold War in Latin America 

This course will cover the seven-century long history of the Ottoman Empire, which spanned Europe, Asia, and Africa as well as the medieval, early modern, and modern period. The many levels of continuity and change will be the focus, as will issues of identities and mentalities, confessional diversity, cultural and linguistic pluralism, and imperial governance and political belonging of the empire within larger regional and global perspectives over the centuries. The course also seeks to cultivate appreciation of the human experience through the multifarious experiences culled from the Ottoman past.

This course explores Korea’s history from the late nineteenth century to the present with a particular focus on caste/class, gender, war and industrialization. Using primary and secondary texts as well as documentary film and literary ephemera, the seminar analyses such topics as the relationship between imperialism and rebellions in the nineteenth century; the uneven experience of Japanese colonial rule; Korea’s early feminist movement; how North Korea became a communist society; the deep scars of the Korean War; cultures of industrialism in South and North Korea; counter-cultural movements in 1970s, 1980s and 1990s South Korea; and contemporary challenges facing the peninsula. This course will give students a thorough grounding in modern Korean history and introduce them to major interpretative currents in the study of Korean history.

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 seminar course examines how people during the early Middle Ages defined their existence through negotiated boundaries of gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and other aspects of the human condition. Our work will curate the contributions of marginalized groups to decenter traditional narratives. Students will leave this course with a broad understanding of early medieval history, an appreciation of historical work done by people often omitted from our histories, and a mastery of historical and interdisciplinary tools for promoting our awareness and understanding of marginalized groups. Work will include two research papers, including one focused on a manuscript selected from the Columbia collections.

This seminar course explores the relationship between science, medicine, and the body in a historical context. We will look at this relationship from a global perspective, with particular attention to understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and embodiment. To ground ourselves in the historiography, we will begin by studying various methodologies and approaches to histories of science, medicine, and the body. In doing so, we will consider the following questions: What does it mean to do a history of the body? Is there a universal concept of “the body” to study? What gets included in the history of science? What constitutes medicine? And who gets to determine these definitions? We will then move to specific themes and topics, including the categorization of bodies, dissection, public health, the impacts of colonialism, the medical marketplace, patients and practitioners, healing spaces, and disability studies. The course closes be critically examining global health initiatives and the politics and intimacies of healthcare on a global scale.

This seminar will examine the social construction of criminality and the institutions that developed to impose and enforce the criminal law as reflections of Latin American 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.

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.

Nothing seems to hold our attention quite like Britain’s early-nineteenth century and the women who wrote about it. But why are so many of the stories most resonant with modern audiences love stories? How can we account for the tenacious staying power of the Regency romance? What is lost, and gained, in the reinterpretations (or reinventions) of these works, and what does it say about the legacy of Britain and its empire? These are some of the questions to be explored in this course, which will engage with the original texts and put those texts in conversation with recent adaptations.

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 explores the deep historical roots of climate-related migration. Before the categories of climate and environmental refugees emerged in recent decades, climate variability, environmental disasters, and ecological change have often shaped human mobility. Building on case studies from across the world and a timeline spanning from antiquity to the present, the class will examine the relationship between human migrations, environmental crises, economic transformations, and political conflicts. Since displacement disproportionately affects vulnerable communities that rely on less resilient environments, the class also sheds light on global inequality by looking at the politics of freedom of movement, nativism, and the connection between anti-immigration backlash.

Historians often approach the late 20th century through the lens of politics and economics, tracking the rise of conservatism, neoliberalism, and the dominance of global capitalism following the end of the Cold War. These narratives, however, leave little room for the arts during a time when American culture became a worldwide export and artists around the country produced inventive work that transformed the culture industry. How does our understanding of the late 20th century change when we focus on the arts? What do we learn from artists about those more familiar subjects of politics and economics. This seminar seeks to answer such questions, exploring cities that emerged as artistic hubs around the United States from 1968-2000. We will survey New York, California, the Sun Belt, and Pacific Northwest, examining subjects such as the rise of Wall Street and the art market; the national “culture war” between conservative politicians and artists; changes in the Hollywood studio system; the development of Silicon Valley, the internet, and tech-culture; the cultural hybridity of the Borderlands/la frontera; the utopian, free-market aspirations of Disney; and artistic responses to globalization. A goal of this class is to practice doing cultural history across artistic genres. Rather than focus on a single type of art, this course encompasses a variety of forms and media so that students can learn to make connections between different modes of cultural expression. We will pair these primary sources with works of historical scholarship so that we can contextualize the role of art in society and think about how it changes at the end of the 20th century. There are no prerequisites for this course, which will enrich majors in History and American Studies, as well as Ethnicity and Race Studies, AAADS, Urban Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Art History, Film and Media Studies, Drama and Theatre Arts, and Dance.

This course examines the struggle against South African apartheid with a particular focus on the global solidarity movement in the 20th century. The class will examine key turning points in the movement, its connection with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, gendered constructs of apartheid and feminist leadership in the movement, and the circulation of theories of racial capitalism. Students will understand how and why apartheid became a global concern. Students will work on a project using the primary source material available on the African Activist Archive Digital Project at Michigan State University.

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

What were the Crusades? This seemingly straightforward question is not so easily answered. In fact, there are few historical subjects that are at once so superficially recognizable and yet so inadequately understood. The Crusades have been called armed pilgrimages and penitential holy wars; but also framed as an apocalyptic movement; or a proto-colonial one. Against whom were the Crusades directed? Certainly, they often entailed assaults against Muslims in the Middle East. But they also touched off anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe and were declared and fought against pagans in Livonia; perceived heretics in the south of France; Mongols in Poland and Hungary; and Christian political enemies of the papacy in Italy and elsewhere. This course has three principal aims. The first is to interrogate the origin, evolution, and consequences of the crusading movement in western Europe. The second is to examine and understand the various impacts on, and experiences of, those who were the target of crusading—Muslims, pagans, heretics, political enemies, etc.—in both the Middle East and other regions. Finally, we will conclude by considering the long “afterlife” and complicated reception of the Crusades—both how their study has been institutionalized in scholarship and universities, as well as the various ways they have been remembered, romanticized, appropriated, popularized, and vilified in the West and the Islamic world from the Middle Ages until the present day.

This course examines how Africa’s climate has changed in the past and with what consequences for the people living on the continent. It looks at the scope, duration and intensity of past climate events and their impacts, while using these historical climate events to teach fundamental climate concepts.  Central to the course is the human experience of these events and the diversity of their responses. The major question underpinning this course is, therefore, how have people responded to past climate events, whether short-term, decadal or longer in scope? This question is predicated on the complexity of human society and moves away from the binary of collapse vs. resilience that dominates much thinking about the impact of climate changes on past societies. This framing recognizes the significance of climate for food production and collection, as well as trade and cosmologies. It does not take climate to be the determining factor in history. Rather it foregrounds the myriad ways people acted in the face of, for example, multi-decadal below average rainfall or long periods of more reliable precipitation.

This course explores the relationship between law and society in colonial India. It features cases relating to marriage and divorce, property and inheritance, sedition and criminal conspiracy woven through the lives of ordinary people in nineteenth and twentieth century India. Through a range of materials, we will explore how British colonial officials reformulated what “law” was and how it was to be interpreted. We will also explore how these interpretations were understood and challenged. We will encounter judges, lawyers, and notaries that mediated the relationship between law and society, courts, and litigants, while catching a fascinating glimpse of what arguments, evidence, and sentencing looked like in these courts. As we go through our readings and attend classes, we might ask: how does this perspective from India shape our understanding of the relationship between law and colonialism, and what are its contemporary implications?

A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors.

Approved application through the History Department is required to join this seminar.

A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors.

Approved application through the History Department is required to join this seminar.

A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors.

Approved application through the History Department is required to join this seminar.

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.

Few places in the world have witnessed the shift from a multiethnic territory to a nationally homogeneous nation-state as profoundly as the Polish lands. A crucial site of the collapse of Central and Eastern European empires, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansings, Nazi occupation, Soviet-style socialism, and accession to the European Union, Poland’s twentieth-century and contemporary culture has developed in the shadow of catastrophe and political and economic revolutions.

This seminar investigates shifting meanings of cultural difference and sameness from 1918 to the present, including Polish debates on multiculturalism spurred by the ongoing European refugee crisis. We will examine meanings attached to people, things, and landscapes - Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, German, Nazi or Soviet - through the lens of visual arts, everyday objects, scholarly discourses, and urban and rural topographies. While we will pay special attention to the historiography of twentieth-century Eastern Europe, the course relies on interdisciplinary approaches and welcomes students interested in the history of art and architecture, literature, social history, anthropology, cultural studies, and critical museology. 

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.

The quarter century during which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union witnessed some of the twentieth century's most dramatic events: history's fastest plunge into modernity, an apocalyptic world war, and the emergence of a socialist state as a competitive world power. This tutorial will offer students a deep dive not only into the historical depths of the Stalin era but into the gloriously complex historiographical debates that surround it. Some of the questions that will animate the readings, writings, and discussions that students will engage in are as follows: Did Stalin depart from or represent a continuation of the policies introduced by his predecessor Vladimir Lenin? Did he rule in a totalitarian fashion or in ways comparable to other twentieth century regimes? Were his policies destructive or possibly productive? And perhaps most boggling of all: why did no one resist Stalinist rule?

Science and technology have become increasingly central to the basic functioning of democratic societies The administrative state, both on the local and national level, is dependent on technological systems to ensure democratic rule and deliver services: from voting machines and welfare databases to passport scanners and the laboratory equipment necessary to set environmental standards. Just as necessary are the numerous experts – engineers, statisticians, epidemiologists, and environmental scientists – who either work for or advise the state in its dealings. How should we think about the technocratic nature of modern democracy? Is it an inevitable and necessary pre-condition for governing modern mass society? Or is it an alarming aspect, an undemocratic impulse, that undermines the promise of democratic rule?The course will examine the coproduction of science and politics. In the first part of the semester, students will gain conceptual tools with which to rethink the connection between science, technology, power, politics, policy, and democracy. They will consider the role of expertise in modern politics, as well as the construction of the public. In the second part of the semester we will consider in greater detail the way technocratic governance developed in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment.

This course will explore various topics in the History of U.S. foreign relations. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly writings, we will explore the history of the United States and the world with an eye toward the impact of American power on foreign peoples. 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.

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

This seminar deals with the presence of indigenous peoples in Latin American colonial societies and aims to analyze indigenous responses to conquest and colonization. How did indigenous people see themselves and interact with other groups? What roles did they play in shaping Latin American societies? What spaces were they able to create for themselves? These and similar questions will guide our discussion through the semester. Every week, we will read documents written by the indigenous people themselves, as well as academic studies of their cultures and societies. The course will offer a survey of the main indigenous groups; however, the case studies are by necessity just a selection. The seminar is conceived for students interested in race and ethnic relations and in the mechanisms of colonization and responses to it, as seen through the lenses of Latin America, between the 16th and the 18th centuries.

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

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 Master's 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.

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 colloquium aims to introduce graduate students to the diverse literature on religion and capitalism, with an emphasis on early modern Europe. Readings range from classical sociological literature and major historical monographs to more recent work in heterodox economics. Our discussions will address a number of persistent questions in the field, both methodological and empirical: (1) How have historians, sociologists, and philosophers characterized the relationship between God and Mammon, between religious and economic life? (2) What is the nature of this relationship (unidirectional causality, mutual constitution, supersession, etc.)? (3) How have explanatory possibilities been brought to bear in scholarship on different periods, and for different traditions (Christianity and Judaism, Catholicism and Protestantism, Jansenism and devout humanism, Calvinism and Anglicanism)? (4) How should one approach religious institutions in light of the massive wealth at their disposal? (5) To what extent have theological categories and economic axioms informed each other over time, and under what political and cultural conditions?

This course offers a sample of historical research on debates around African-American intelligence, mental health, family organization, and other social scientific controversies from the era of slavery to the late 20th century. The principal assignment is a lesson plan, instructions for which will be supplied on the CourseWorks site.

Please note that you may not take this course as an auditor or pass/fail without the permission of the instructor.

Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences guidelines may be found at http://gsas.columbia.edu/. Those for the history department may be found at http://history.columbia.edu/graduate/index.html.

This course, intended for graduate students, exposes students to some “classics” in 20th century U.S. historiography with newer scholarship that reconceptualizes the American past. Readings cover topics including labor, class and capitalism; political divides and comparative civil rights movements; race and migration; gender, sexuality, and reform; urbanization and suburbanization; health and environment; and relationships between human and non-human historical agents. Discussions of texts will build necessary skills in critical reading and understanding authors’ arguments, sources and methods, scope and style, and historiographical intervention. This course will require one oral presentation on a supplementary book; a historiographical essay on a 20th c. topic of the student’s choosing; and a professional assignment of writing either a lesson plan or lecture.

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. The course will familiarize students to  “frontier thesis” to the “spatial turn” and to the emergence of “Borderland Studies” before embarking on specific monographs highlighting borderlands scholarship in a global context. Formulations of power, race, gender, and 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 seminar explores key topics in the historiography of migration and empire. This includes slavery, abolition and indenture, quarantine and public health restrictions on migration, diaspora and displacements of the twentieth century, revolutionaries on the move, borders and border policing, the politics of guestworker programs, globalization, migration and development, among others. The course adopts a capacious understanding of Asia and Asian migrations, to facilitate thinking, reading, and writing across disciplinary boundaries. How did empires regulate migration? How were social and political identities shaped by imperial forces, and vice versa? What are the afterlives of the imperial regulation of migration? The final paper will be a literature review on a topic of your choosing. 

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 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.