ÈËÆÞÓÕ»ó

HIST 205 - The Twentieth-Century Middle East through Music

This course is a survey of the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa region, using the lens of music to approach that history, from the early twentieth century to the present. The course will focus on the Arabic-speaking countries of the region, particularly the Maghrib (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Egypt, and the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Jordan). Taking a critical cultural approach, we will learn how music can be a window into a broader understanding of political and social histories, and how musical traditions have shaped and been shaped by their historical contexts. Special attention will be given to race, gender, class, religion, colonialism, nationalism and state building, Orientalism, and the politics of knowledge production in the region's history.

HIST 207 - Gender in the Middle East

This course will explore the topic of gender, as well as women, sexuality, and the family, in the Middle East and North Africa region, spanning a chronology from the height of the Ottoman Empire (sixteenth andÌýseventeenthÌýcenturies) to the late twentiethÌýand early twenty-firstÌýcenturies. We will explore a wide variety of scholarship, including feminist literature, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and discuss current and developing trends in Middle East studies that have sought to apply these lenses to Arab and Islamic societies. Questions we will explore include: How has gender defined the social and political subject? How have Western feminist lenses influenced or distorted depictions of Muslim women? How were gendered categories transformed under colonialism and globalization, and what did precolonial conceptions of gender and sex look like? Topics will include precolonial gender and sexual categories in Islamic societies;Ìýwomen in the Ottoman Empire;Ìýthe making of gendered nationalist subjects in Egypt, Palestine, and North Africa; Orientalist fetishization;Ìýand feminist political movements, among others.

HIST 210 - Educating Americans in the Long Nineteenth Century

What does it mean to be educated? Is education a system of social control or a pathway to liberation? Should schooling cultivate collective values and traditions, nurture democratic citizens, or encourage economic productivity? What is the relationship between "education" and "school"? In this course, we will investigate how Americans from the revolution to the end of the nineteenth century grappled with these questions. We will examine a variety of educational institutions (such as chartered academies, female seminaries, Native American boarding schools, and freedpeople's schools), but we will give special attention to the rise of public education (the common school system), considering both why some Americans in the early republic thought that mandatory public schooling was essential and why others resisted it. We will also study the myriad ways that Americans were educated outside formal schooling, including apprenticeship and the "binding out" of children, the lyceum and Chautauqua movements, libraries and reading societies, Sunday schools, settlement houses, and clandestine education under slavery. Along the way, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which educational practices and philosophies in the United States either exacerbated or mitigated social inequalities along the lines of gender, race, and class. By closely considering how education worked (and didn't) in the nineteenth century, we will aim to develop greater insights into what we want from education-on an individual and societal level-in the twenty-first century.

HIST 215 - Environmental History of US Empire

This course offers an introduction to the key questions, methods, and sources in the field of environmental history. We will ground our study of environmental history in place-based case studies drawn from across areas over which the United States has claimed sovereignty, throughout North America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Arctic. Drawing examples from across what has sometimes been called "the Greater United States," the course explores how nature, people, and environmental change transcend and trouble the boundaries of the nation-state. By thinking transnationally and comparatively beyond the traditional bounds of U.S. environmental history and the continental United States, we will consider the environmental and social impacts of the far reach of U.S. empire and colonialism. Over the course of the semester, we will focus on themes such as conservation, extraction, science, and migration as we consider the history of how various agents of U.S. empire and communities living in U.S. territories and colonies have thought about and interacted with nature and state power at large and small scales.

HIST 223 - Early Modern China and the World: 1300-1900

This course surveys the history of China from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, tracing the rise and fall of the Ming dynasty, the Manchu conquest, and the disintegration of the Qing empire. This course will not only "discover history in China," but also situate China in a global context by discussing the flow of peoples, goods, and ideas into and out of China. After the Silk Road connecting the Eurasian continent declined with the end of the Pax Mongolica, China continued to be an engine of the Afro-Eurasia network and began to interact with the Americas. However, since the Great Divergence in the 1750s, China has scrambled to join a new international order. By analyzing the exchanges between China and other regions, students will understand how the concept of China was in flux and the dynamic role of China in the early modern world.

HIST 224 - Modern China through Global Perspectives

This course investigates the history of modern China, from the last century of the Qing dynasty to the post-Mao reform era, through the eyes of missionaries, diplomats, adventurers, scholars, tourists, etc. In these two centuries, China was transformed from an empire to a modern state. At the same time, it had to face a new international orderÌýand resituate its relationship with the rest of the world. In the era of revolutions and reforms, China was more than once at the crossroads, asking which direction it should take. It chose its paths to address not only domestic needs, but also the vicissitudes of international environments. In this course, we will examine travel diaries, missionary reports, maps, political treaties, literary compositions, and other documents produced by people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Through "foreign" eyes, we will explore a series of the "old" (e.g., demographical pressure and ethnic conflicts) and "new"Ìý(e.g., high mobility of goods, capital, and people;Ìýurban-rural disparity;Ìýand environmental deterioration) questions that China has encountered and how it has responded to them. By focusing on non-Chinese sojourners and observers, we will think about how China becomes China and the role of China in the global era from an alternative perspective.

HIST 225 - The History of Slavery and Human Trade in East Asia Since 1200

This course examines the history of slavery and human trade in East Asia from 1200 up to now. We will explore questions such as: Was East Asia a slaveholding region? How did people in East Asia enter and exit from slavery? How were the human markets in East Asia operated locally and globally? How were family practices, such as adoption, marriage, and concubinage, entangled with slavery? How did Confucianism, the dominant ideology in premodern East Asia, conceptualize and legitimize the relationship between slaves and masters? What are modern forms of coerced labor in China, Japan, and Korea? How could the East Asian histories of slavery and human trade contribute to international efforts in combating unfree labor and human trafficking worldwide? At the end of our class, we will reflect on globalized concepts-such as freedom, coerced labor, and property rights-and their applications from non-Western perspectives.

HIST 231 - Crime and Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

How are societal norms defined and transgressions proven and sanctioned? Why are some wrongdoers forgiven for violating the law and reintegrated into the community, while others are deemed "criminals" who merit stern (even capital) punishment? How can the study of criminal justice and the law help us better understand medieval and early modern European societies and cultures? Through an analysis of law codes, court records, and other historical sources, this course will trace the development of criminal law and justice in premodern Europe. In particular, we will examine how medieval practices such as trial by ordeal, feuds, and the payment of blood prices (weregelds) gave way to more "rational" processes, such as trial by jury, inquisitorial procedure, and the use of judicial torture. We will also discuss the importance of religious attitudes and community norms in shaping the practical application of criminal justice in this period, as well as Enlightenment efforts to standardize criminal justice, abolish torture, and eliminate capital punishment.

HIST 242 - The Love and Destruction of Nature: Romanticism in the Time of Settler Colonialism

This course studies the history of the idea of nature in American thought, from the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century to the development of environmentalist thought and organizations in the twentieth century. The course will contextualize that history in two ways: in relationship to the formation of the United States through settler colonialism and the death and displacement of Indigenous peoples, land, and culture; and in relationship to the capitalist exploitation of nature that has fundamentally reshaped the ecological communities that live in and across U.S. political space. The course will ask what it means-politically, ethically, and philosophically-to love nature in the wake of environmental and cultural destruction.

HIST 251 - Slander, Censorship, and Surveillance in Modern European History

This course seeks to historicize and interrogate the limits on, and protections for, free speech in modern Europe. We will explore topics including libel laws, censorship and public morality, the development of ideas about natural rights, and the influence of changing technologies on practices and beliefs surrounding the liberty of expression. The class will focus on France and Britain between 1644 (the publication of Milton's crucial text, Areopagitica) and 2016, when the EU adopted a code of conduct for regulating online hate speech.

HIST 253 - History of Reading from Gutenberg to Chat GPT

"How shall you begin to read a book?" asked a nineteenth-century book on self-improvement, before laying out specific instructions to guide young boys in the proper reading of authoritative texts. This question reveals that a practice we often take for granted - reading itself - is actually the product of social and historical circumstances. Reading practices have been shaped by technologies and by social conditions that regulated access to education and to literature based on gender, class, and race; reading can also be political, as texts can facilitate the dissemination of controversial ideas and potentially spark revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) change. As a result, thinking critically about the practice of reading generates important methodological questions for historians, who are reliant on the texts produced in the past. How do our practices of reading differ from those of our historical subjects?Ìý How can we know who could read, what they read, or how they read? This course will allow students to learn about and reflect on what it means to think historically and make historical claims, and will serve as a thematic and methodological introduction to the histories of reading in western Europe from the printing press to the digital era. A portion of class time will be dedicated to a reading "lab," in which we will experiment with reading and writing using the technologies of our historical subjects, and work closely with materials in ÈËÆÞÓÕ»ó's Special Collections.

HIST 256 - Migration Histories in the British Imperial World

The British Empire was built on migrations both forced and free, and in this course we will examine particular migration stories in wider imperial and global contexts. Some of the migrants that we will examine include settler colonists, enslaved persons, transported radicals, colonial officers, missionaries, and indentured and migrant laborers. The course will present a broad chronological survey of the British imperial world since 1700, paying attention to political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics. The final project for this course will be a digital exhibition to which students will contribute content and explanatory material.

HIST 260 - The American Revolution in History and Memory

What was the American Revolution? Depending on where you stand, it was a family dispute, a regime change, a white settler rebellion, a Black Declaration of Independence, a genocidal war, a struggle for national liberation, the birth of individual liberty, the end of an empire, the beginning of an empire, the transformation of an empire. It sought to bring people together in "a more perfect union"; it severed long-standing social and political relationships. It enshrined ideals of inalienable individual rights and democratic governance; it left many people in slavery, exile, and want. In the 250 years since the Revolution took place, a staggering array of people have sought to claim its legacies: Unionists and Confederates, Simón Bolívar and Ho Chi Minh, Fox news commentators and Lin-Manuel Miranda, MAGA supporters and No Kings protesters. How could one historical event mean so many things to so many people? What did the Revolution mean to those who experienced it? And why should we care? In this course, we will study the American Revolution and its legacies and try to understand whether and how it matters now.

HIST 271 - U.S. Politics and Culture, 1964-2004

Like most of U.S. history, the 40 years between the 1964 presidential election and Illinois state senator Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention were times of change and conflict. We will explore this time period using secondary works and primary documents. The last baby boomers were born in 1964; Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z were still to come. U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was underway; after September 11, 2001, a war on terror would be waged. Women's labor force participation (including that of married women and married mothers) was on the rise. Americans grappled with grassroots protests and political partisanship, persistent economic inequality, divisive foreign policies, and the so-called culture wars. In 1964, network TV and national and local radio and newspapers provided entertainment and news; by 2004, digital technologies would democratize and fragment access to information. We will examine all these changes, and more.

HIST 272 - Gender and the American Family

Historians can chart the numbers: from the changing demographics of birth and marriage rates to the rise in divorces and the number of households headed by single parents (usually mothers), families in the United States have changed dramatically in the past century. This course will explore the changing forms and meanings of "family." We will examine changing family and household structures and look at how gender roles are built into and reproduced through social, legal, and political discourses. Topics include the shifting meanings of marriage and singlehood and the social value placed on children. Policy makers and social scientists privileged some families over others, and we will consider how constructions of race and ethnicity determined welfare benefits. We will also consider adoption practices and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

HIST 273 - U.S. Politics & Culture: The 1990s

This course will examine the recent history of partisan and popular politics, social movements, and transformation in U.S. political culture during the long 1990s.ÌýKey world events (the end of the Cold War U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, eastern Europe and Africa) shifted global alliances and inspired protests, while communication technologies (video via satellite, the Internet) made the world seem smaller.ÌýIn domestic politics feminist, LGBT, civil rights, and environmental activists forged new ideologies and strategies while conservatives waged culture wars on political ground.ÌýWe will pay particular attention to the two terms of Democratic President Bill Clinton and his Republican predecessors. Topics include responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis, enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), the reception of the televised Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, and the racial politics of the 1992 LA uprising.

HIST 281 - Young Lives: Youth and Childhood in Latin American History

People often remark, "children are the future,"Ìýbut they are also the past. This course examines the history of youth in Latin America from the colonial era to the present. We will center children and adolescents as historical protagonists, as participants in the shaping of Latin America. To do so, we will analyze how the meanings of childhood and youth have been constructed, contested, and transformed across different historical moments and geographical contexts throughout the region.ÌýBeginning with Indigenous and colonial conceptions of childhood and the impact of colonialism on young people's lives, we will then trace the evolving experiences and roles of Latin American youth through independence movements, nation-building projects, modernization, revolution, dictatorship, and democratization. We will examine how children and youth navigated and challenged structures of power related to class, race, gender, and citizenship, while also considering how they created their own cultures, identities, and forms of expression.ÌýEngaging primary sources by and about Latin American youth and secondary scholarship, students will develop analytical skills to interpret how young people both experienced and shaped Latin American history. This seminar emphasizes discussion, critical reading, and historical interpretation, preparing students to understand youth not merely as subjects of history, but as historical actors in their own right.

HIST 298 - Music and the Cold War United States

SeeÌýMUS 238Ìýfor description.

HIST 303 - The History of the Sahara

This course will examine the history of the Sahara, a region that is often treated as a "blank space" or only peripherally included in histories of the Middle East/North Africa and Africa. Beginning in the early Islamic period and the heyday of the trans-Saharan trade (eighth to seventeenth centuries), we will trace the region's history up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the formation of nation-states and (often contentious) political borders. Employing textual primary sources, literary and cultural representations, ethnographies, and music, we will outline a history that counters the myth of a "blank space" and instead reveals a vibrant and diverse region characterized by long histories of exchange and mobility. While being attentive to themes of race, religion, colonialism, state formation, trade, and environment, we will also problematize the depiction of the Sahara as a natural "borderland" between an imagined North and sub-Saharan Africa, instead bringing the histories of these two areas together.

HIST 310 - Water and the American West

This course uses the environmental and political history of America's rivers, streams, reservoirs, and aquifers to introduce students to important issues in water history and contemporary water policy. We will begin by exploring a series of different frameworks for understanding the complex relationships between water, labor, land, and political power as those relationships have changed over time. As we build a deeper and more critical understanding of water as a natural, cultural, and political entity in American history, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which history has helped to shape the way we allocate and regulate water across a geographically and politically diverse continent. Armed with the dual weapons of history and basic legal doctrine, we will then begin to tackle some of the key issues in twentieth-century American water policy, starting with the Columbia and Colorado River basins. Looking toward the future, we will also explore the problems and potential solutions on the cutting edge of water politics both in the Colorado River basin and elsewhere, including groundwater policy, water marketing, and an extended discussion of the potential water implications of global warming.

HIST 311 - Environmental Justice Histories of Latin America

Latin America has historically been a center of global extraction, but it is also a region with a long history of contesting colonialism and inequality. This course examines histories of environmental injustice and movements for social and environmental justice in modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Blending multiple theoretical and disciplinary traditions, the course will expose students to a growing body of scholarship that analyzes how cultural, political, and economic factors have shaped natural and social landscapes in the region. We will explore the historical processes which have shaped environmental injustices and how people have contested them through topics ranging from mining, food, conservation, climate, and energy. Discussions, readings, and writing assignments will assess and reflect on how interdisciplinary sources, methods, and archives can inform reading and writing about environmental justice issues and their relevance, in combination with critical theory and political mobilization, to building more just futures during the Anthropocene and the contemporary global climate crisis.

HIST 314 - Nature Knows No Borders: Environmental History of the U.S. - Mexico Borderlands

The United States and Mexico are "neighbors by nature," inescapably linked by environmental factors such as pollution, water resources, and human and wildlife migration. Although the international boundary line is itself an artificial construct, since its demarcation in the nineteenth century and especially through its ongoing fortification, the border has had an outsized impact on the ecosystems and human communities it transects. The international boundary has increasingly become a site of intensive policing and environmental control, yet people and nature have long managed to evade state and corporate power on both sides of the line. In this course, we will explore the dynamic and contested social and natural landscapes of northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest from pre-contact to the early twenty-first century, focusing on political, social, and environmental change after the U.S. - Mexico War (1846 - 1848). We will examine how the natural landscape has shaped cooperation and conflict in the border region through thematic case studies of issues such as parklands and conservation, boundary disputes, extraction, citizenship, and migration. The course will take a transnational and decolonial approach to understanding the history of the region, introducing students to distinct environmental historiographies the U.S. West and Mexico. By the end of the course, students will have a nuanced understanding of the historical roots of contemporary environmental and social issues in the U.S. - Mexico border region.

HIST 315 - Defining and Defying Difference: Race, Ethnicity, and Empire

From the origins of the British Empire in the sixteenth century, the encounter between Britons and colonial subjects demanded explanations of human difference. In this course, we will consider race and ethnicity as contingent and contested categories shaped by political and economic circumstances. Topics will include the international slave trade and abolition, caste and community in South Asia, color and class in the twentieth-century Caribbean, and immigration and multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Britain. Throughout we will pay attention to gender.

HIST 317 - The American Earth: U.S. Environmental History in the Twentieth Century

This course will address the concurrent histories of American environmental politics and the changing environment itself in twentieth-century U.S. history. We will approach the American continent both as a unique constellation of material and geographical spaces and as a changing and historically contingent cultural construct dependent on ideas about power, labor, identity, and morality. Topics will include nature and American nationalism, cultural constructions of nature, the American environmental movement, science and environmental management, and climatic change and sustainability in modern environmental politics.

HIST 321 - The History of Sexuality and Society in East Asia Since 1200

Under the global #MeToo movement, people in East Asia also speak out their stories of sexual harassment. However, East Asian countries have their unique battlegrounds where perceptions of good/bad sexual behaviors have been deeply rooted in history. This course provides an opportunity for students to understand complicated sexual politics in China, Japan, and beyond. It surveys various sexual practices and their intersections with law, labor, leisure, reproduction, money, health, science, and warfare from 1200 to the present. We will explore questions such as: Who can have sex and who cannot? What did legal and illicit sex look like in the premodern period? Did people in this most populous region practice birth control? How did East Asian people receive Western sexology? Why are "comfort women '' still controversial in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China nowadays? Following a chronological order, the course will finally turn towards a futurist perspective: how to make gendered and intimate relationships better in the East Asian world.

HIST 325 - History of Technologies in Imperial and Modern China: 1500-2000

In this course, we will explore the development of technologies from imperial China through the end of the twentieth century. Rather than a chronological overview, we will discuss one thematic topic each week by reading translated primary sources together with secondary literature. These topics include but are not limited to cartography, hydraulic engineering, printing, communication technologies, and medicine. The focus is on China, but its neighbors, Japan and Korea, and China's encounter with the West will also be discussed. How technologies evolved in a non-Western society and how Indigenous technological traditions struggled for "modernity" in the twentieth century constitute the two themes of this course. By examining the trajectory of technological development in China, we will probe two broad questions: how to approach technology as a social construct rather than as a value-free existence, and how technology in turn plays a crucial role in the making of an interconnected modern world.

HIST 328 - Traveling Along the Silk Roads: East Asia and Beyond

In this course, we explore the Silk Roads as a network of routes connecting East Asia with other parts of the world. In recent decades, scholars have extensively debated the colonial origins and limitations of this term, but they agree that it remains useful for conceptualizing the transregional movement of goods, ideas, and peoples. In this class, we will use this term as a heuristic device rather than a descriptive concept to examine how the world was connected before the modern period and how the regional and global networks that formed continue to shape modern and contemporary politics and culture. We will place particular focus on pilgrimage and trade, which fostered an environment conducive to the development of distinct identities and cultures among peoples and regions. Alongside primary sources such as travel accounts, inscriptions, literary works, images, and artifacts, we will also read significant scholarly literature in this field.

HIST 334 - Race and the Politics of Decolonization

This course examines how the struggle for decolonization in the British Empire was shaped by the politics of race. How did colonial subjects imagine freedom, and how were those visions of freedom constrained by the racial hierarchies of empire? How did they look to other movements within and without the British imperial world to theorize what political, economic, and intellectual decolonization might be? Topics will include intellectual critiques of empires, transcolonial movements, the transfer of power, the postcolonial nation-state, and the Commonwealth. We will pay attention to gender throughout and consider the legacy of the formal era of decolonization in the present day.

HIST 338 - Crisis & Catastrophe in Modern Europe

Between 1720 and 1870, a series of natural and manmade crises forced Europeans to question the purpose of violence in a supposedly "improving" society and the role of rational individuals in a world sometimes beyond their control. This course will consider the political, religious, intellectual, and cultural ramifications of disaster and crisis, including financial collapse, revolution, war, earthquakes, disease, and famine. These crises disrupted the political and intellectual worlds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, threatening and transforming their ideas about risk, progress, religion, and political authority, and restructuring the relationships between man and the natural world.

HIST 343 - The Human Condition

See POL 390Ìýfor description.

HIST 345 - Whole Earths, Globalizations, and World Pictures

Hear the word "Earth" and the image likely to flash through the mind is the descendant of a photo commonly known as "Blue Marble" (1972), which reveals the disk of our terraqueous planet suspended alone in the void. It is reputed to be the most widely disseminated photograph in human history, and together with other views of the Earth from beyond has prompted a revolution in the global imagination. The aim of this seminar is to assess the plausibility of that claimÌýby situating these images in their diverse historical contexts. These contexts include the history of humankind's imaginative self-projection in to the beyond from ancient times to our day; how the "whole earth" image has been mobilized by environmental campaigns, political movements, and commercial enterprises; howe the view of Earth has figured in economics ("globalization theory"), aesthetics (earth art, architecture, mapping and visualization techniques), philosophy (especially in the phenomenological tradition), and the natural sciences (the Gaia hypothesis, the Biosphere projects, earth systems science); and how this pictorial imaginary has become integrated into the unthought ways we inhabit our natural and human-built worlds-what has happened once its ubiquity meant that we ceased, in a fashion, to see it. Arrangements will be made to enable students to explore new media and research tools for analysis and presentation, should they wish to do so.

HIST 353 - The French Revolution, 1775 - 1800

Within a generally chronological framework, this course will focus on the social and cultural history of the French Revolution. Particular attention will be given to the ideological origins of the Revolution, the question of class, the popular movement, revolutionary culture, gender and citizenship, the role of terror, and the nature of counterrevolution. Another focus of the course will be the historiography of the French Revolution. Works from both traditional historiography and contemporary revisionist historiography will be included on the syllabus.

HIST 355 - Heretics, Witches, and Inquisitors: Deviance, Orthodoxy, and the Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

This course will examine the evolution and operation of one of medieval and early modern Europe's most infamous religious and legal institutions-the Inquisitions of Heretical Depravity. Initially established in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to affirm the Roman Church's spiritual authority and to repress religious heterodoxy, Inquisitions could be found across much of Catholic Europe by the early sixteenth century. This course will examine several of the most prominent examples: the Inquisition of medieval Languedoc, the Roman and Venetian Inquisitions, and the Spanish Inquisition, to compare how they functioned as hybrid legal and religious institutions in distinct historical contexts. We will also explore the complex interplay between inquisitors, secular authorities, and the populace by looking at their treatment of a specific heretical crime-witchcraft-during the early modern period.

HIST 357 - Marriage and Family in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

"The family is the true source and origin of all commonwealths,"Ìýthe sixteenth-century French theorist Jean Bodin famously observed. This, in turn, made marriage the "primary foundation"Ìýof society and states, as another jurist put it. Yet despite their fundamental importance, premodern European marriage and family were fraught with tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions. Was marriage primarily a sacrament regulated by the Church or a civil contract governed by secular authorities? Did it result from the choices of individuals or agreements made by parents and kin? Were families defined by conjugal households (husbands, wives, and children) or shared descent from a common (usually male) ancestor? Were marital unions indissoluble or could spouses be separated, and if so under what circumstances? How did Christian European conceptions of marriage operate in colonial and imperial settings? Drawing on a range of religious, legal, literary, political, and other sources, this course will examine how Europeans continuously debated, contested, negotiated, and transformed the meanings of marriage and family across the medieval and early modern periods. In the process, we will consider related topics such as: the gendered nature of domestic authority and its limits; alternative visions of familial life (religious vocations, same-sex relationships), the construction of legitimacy and illegitimacy; the uses of marriage and family as political, social, and imperial metaphors; and changing ideas about the emotional and affective bonds between spouses as well as parents and children.

HIST 364 - Slavery, Freedom, Anarchy: The Politics of Abolition

This course studies the resistance to slavery in the nineteenth-century United States, tracing the practical and theoretical politics of abolition. How could enslaved people become free, and what would freedom entail? The course will trace various and tangled answers to these questions, from direct resistance to slavery through rebellion and flight, to attempts to win political power and reshape the national state, to nonresistance and the rejection of state power. For some abolitionists, slavery remained the central and primary problem, while for others, the problem of slavery generated criticism of other forms of social and political hierarchy. The course will examine the variety of abolitionist thought and its intersection with feminism, anarchism, and labor radicalism.

HIST 369 - Race and the Law in American History

Ranging from the colonial period to the recent past, this course examines the role of the law and the courts in the construction of racial categories and the production of racial inequality in the United States. We will read scholarship from history and other fields concerning the relationship between law and social practice and the possibilities and limitations of law as a means for resisting racism and securing equality. While we will engage a range of primary source material, we will devote particular attention to landmark Supreme Court decisions concerning civil rights, segregation, and immigration and naturalization. Other topics include regional variations in racialization in the United States, race making beyond the Black-white binary, and historical methodology applied to the realm of law.

HIST 370 - The Tragedies of American Diplomacy: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1893

Building from the framework laid out in William Appleman Williams' hallmark essay, "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy," this course will explore the history of American foreign policy since Frederick Jackson Turner declared the end of the American Frontier in 1893. Beginning with Turner's "Frontier Thesis" and John Hay's famous "Open Door Note," we will investigate how the flexible, economically oriented policies of the late nineteenth century became the sacred political ideologies at the heart of twentieth-century American imperialism. Topics will include the Spanish-American War, policies leading up to each of the two world wars, the advent of and decision to drop the atomic bomb, the Marshall Plan, and a variety of political, economic, and military issues associated with the Cold War, including its origins, its institutions, its many phases, and its ultimate end.

HIST 371 - Sports in Modern America

This course explores the history of sports in modern American culture and life, beginning in the nineteenth century but focusing predominantly on the twentieth century. From the "sport" and spectacle of waterfall jumping in nineteenth-century New England to the Cold War Olympic doping challenges of the 1950s and '60s to the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s, students will explore the structures and meaning of individual sports, as well as sports as a broader category of social engagement, as the nature of sports in America has changed over time. Beyond the history of sports themselves, students will also consider how sports have both reflected and influenced the constructed categories and lived experience of race, gender, class, ability, and identity among a variety of American publics, leveraging sports as a lens for approaching other dominant cultural, social, and political themes in American history.

HIST 374 - Gender and Sex

Examination of the changing ideas about gender and sex roles in the context of key transformations from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries in America. These include the second industrial revolution, which enabled women and men to live on their own outside of household economies; the emergence of modern consumer culture; service in same-sex militaries during two world wars; the rise of social scientific and psychological experts who named and quantified "deviant" and "normal" sexual practice; and the so-called sexual revolutions of the 1960s and beyond.

HIST 375 - Hannah Arendt and Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is habitually invoked as one of the century's most important works of nonfiction. The aim of this class is to provide entry to Arendt's thought and to the history and theory of totalitarianism by way of a close reading of her seminal work and some of its historical and philosophical intertexts. Arendt's work addresses topics like the rise of anti-Semitism and race thinking in nineteenth-century Europe, mass politics, propaganda, mob-elite alliances, the concentration camp, and terror as a mode of government. We will also consider texts from some of the leading thinkers of Arendt's time attracted to authoritarianism, such as Carl Schmitt, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jünger, and the Italian futurists. Last, we will consider the reception and extension of Arendt's work in postwar arguments about Zionism, Nazi criminality, and the Cold War. Throughout, we will ask if Arendt's work can help us understand contemporary movements in the United States and Europe that explicitly or implicitly seek a renovation of totalitarian rule.

HIST 380 - Policing Life: The Criminalization of Dissent in the Americas

This course interrogates the long and contested history of state-sanctioned violence directed at racialized populations, ethnic and gender minorities, Indigenous communities, and organized social movements. ÌýRather than treating policing as a uniquely national or local phenomenon, this course adopts a deliberate comparative and transnational framework. Drawing on historical scholarship from across the Americas, students will examine how policing has functioned not merely as a mechanism of crime control but as an instrument of political domination, racial ordering, and moral discipline. By situating police bodies across history as institutions embedded within broader structures of inequality, the course asks students to consider how law enforcement has historically determined who belongs, who dissents, and whose life is deemed worth protecting.

HIST 385 - Catholicism in the Early Modern Spanish World

This course examines the central role of the Catholic church, and of Catholic belief and practice, in the Spanish world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We start with the transformation of Iberia from a center of religious pluralism to the bastion of Catholic orthodoxy with the expulsion of Jews and Moslems and extreme hostility to Protestantism.ÌýThe first half of the course looks at the role of the Church and the Inquisition in society; popular religion; and personal spirituality.ÌýWe then turn to examine the role of the ChurchÌý in intellectual debates surrounding the colonization of the Americas; Indigenous religion, campaigns and infrastructure of conversion and religious syncretism; and the role of the Church in creole culture.Ìý

HIST 388 - Race and Ethnicity in the Andes

This course explores the ethnic and racial organization of Andean society from Inca times to the present, and Andean discourses on race. Beginning with the ethnic pluralism of the Inca Andes, we turn to the creation of the colonial categories of "Indian" and "Spanish" and the imposition of two racialized legal republics from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. We then examine the development of "creole republics" that instituted unified republics with deeply racialized hierarchies; the indigenista critiques of that ordering in the twentieth century; and the emergence of Indigenous and ethnic politics over the past few decades. While attention will be paid to Afro and Asian Andeans, the course focuses on the categories of Indigenous and European. The central focus is on Peru, although ethnicity and race in Ecuador and Bolivia will also be considered.

HIST 390 - Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865-1965

See MUS 360Ìýfor description.

HIST 391 - The Greek World from 776 to 404 BCE

SeeÌýANME 371Ìýfor description.

HIST 393 - The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic

See ANME 373Ìýfor description.

HIST 397 - Women in the Ancient World

See ANME 377Ìýfor description.

HIST 398 - Visions of Modernity: Science, Media and Magic in Europe, 1770-1910

SeeÌýGER 348Ìýfor description.

HIST 411 - Junior Seminar

Post-Imperial Histories
How does the imperial past shape the present? In the twentieth century, the British Empire transformed from the largest empire the world had seen to a collection of loosely affiliated nation-states. In this course, we will examine how historians have studied the afterlife of empire in the twentieth century. Course readings will address formal decolonization, the developmentalist state, public institutions, the Commonwealth, humanitarian initiatives and non-governmental organizations, immigration, racial formation, gender, and culture. From this shared foundation, students will be able to pursue independent research projects on topics of their own choosing.

Experiment and Enlightenment: History of Science, 1660-1860
This course examines the development and diffusion of scientific practices and ideas in Europe in the 200 years between the founding of the Royal Society of London, a society dedicated to the pursuit of natural knowledge, and the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. During this time, individuals throughout Europe debated how best to understand the natural world and how to verify and confirm that knowledge: should it be observed or manipulated through experimentation? How would a "fact" be proven? Who constituted a legitimate authority? And were there limits to what man could, and should, know about the natural world? This class will examine these changing practices of experimentation and modes of communication among natural historians in Europe and the reception and circulation of scientific ideas, including in art and literature. Particular attention will be paid to the material objects that made natural inquiry both possible and increasingly popular, including scientific instruments, botanical specimens collected on imperial voyages, and museums dedicated to natural history. Students will develop, research, write, and present a substantial research paper using primary and secondary sources.

HIST 421 - Topics in Historiography

The "New" Labor Historiography of Latin America
This course studies the largely Anglophone "new" Latin American labor historiography of the 1980s and 1990s, with its emphasis on lived experience and the actions and beliefs of workers. Primarily responding to earlier structuralist and institutionalist literature, this new historiography continued to emphasize material relations and the oppression of labor by state-capital alliances. However, it challenged historical meta-narratives and ideological orthodoxy, and instead embraced anthropological and sociological methods -Ìýabove all, interviews and oral history -Ìýto tell histories of 20th-century industrial labor in Latin America. Through a series of monographs and supplementary readings, we will study both the social history of 20th-century Latin American industrial workers, and the methodological and ethico-political project of this historiography.

HIST 470 - Thesis

HIST 481 - Individual Study

Individual study in fields either more specialized than the regular courses or not covered by them. Individual reading also may be done in connection with a regular course for one or two units additional to the course.