Courses

Last offered Spring 2023

This course highlights African experiences of World War II. Although most histories have excluded Africa's role in the war, the continent and its people were at the center of major developments during in this global conflict. In fact, many Africans remember the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 as the start of the war. African servicemen fought alongside the Allied and Axis forces on major warfronts in Europe, Africa and Asia. African communities and individuals also established war charity campaigns to collect funds, which they sent to war ravaged societies in Europe. Indeed, African economies, despite their colonial statuses, kept European imperial nations afloat in their most hour of need. At the same time, African colonial subjects faced severe food shortages, the loss of working-age men to labor and military recruiters, and dramatically increased taxes. We will examine the impact of these and other wartime pressures on different African communities. How did African societies meet such challenges and how did they view the war? In this course we will examine the roles that women played during the war, and the various other ways that African communities met wartime demands. Other topics we will explore include the role of African women; colonial propaganda; political protest against the war; race and racial thought in the wartime era; war crimes; African American support for the liberation of Ethiopia; and the war's impact on decolonization across the continent. We will further study how Africans and outsiders have differently conceptualized the continent's role in the war by analyzing a variety of sources, including scholarly writings, archival materials, films, former soldiers' biographies, and propaganda posters. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2023

The Iranian Revolution was a major turning point in world history that resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This tutorial will evaluate the causes and impact of the revolution and how this seminal event continues to have widespread repercussions around the globe. The first weeks will explore the history of pre-revolutionary Iran with special attention to religious and intellectual trends such as the ideas of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Jalal al-e Ahmad, and Ali Shariati. We will then evaluate the revolution itself including the US hostage crisis, the downfall of the Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi Shah, and how Khomeini´s vision of society became paramount. Finally, we will explore the aftermath of the revolution including Iran´s geopolitics, the nature of the theocratic system in Iran as well as how the revolution impacted every day lives of Iranians in Iran and abroad particularly how they reflect on the revolution in memoirs, films, and literature. [ more ]

HIST 111 SEM Movers and Shakers in the Middle East

Last offered Fall 2017

This course examines the careers, ideas, and impact of leading politicians, religious leaders, intellectuals, and artists in the Middle East in the twentieth century. Utilizing biographical studies and the general literature on the political and cultural history of the period, this course will analyze how these individuals achieved prominence in Middle Eastern society and how they addressed the pertinent problems of their day, such as war and peace, relations with Western powers, the role of religion in society, and the status of women. A range of significant individuals will be studied, including Gamal Abd al-Nasser, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Ayatollah Khomeini, Muhammad Mussadiq, Umm Khulthum, Sayyid Qutb, Anwar Sadat, Naghuib Mahfouz, and Huda Shaarawi. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2023

Bombay or Mumbai is India's foremost urban center and is well known today as a truly global city. It is the heart of India's commercial life comparable in vibrancy and multiculturalism with the world's emerging cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo. What are the historical elements that contributed to the making of India's most modern and global metropolis? What are the antecedents of the modernity, the vibrant culture, dark underbelly and economic diversity that characterize Bombay today? What does the history of Bombay tell us about modernity in India and the emerging countries of the third world in general? This seminar will help students to answer these questions through historical materials on Bombay as well a wide range of multimedia sources including cinema, photography and literature. With a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, we will explore themes like the commercial culture of a colonial port city, the modern public sphere, theatre and film, labor migration, public health and prostitution to understand what went into the making of this modern metropolis. The primary objective of this course is to introduce students to a wide range of historical sources and ways of interpreting them. The other objective is facilitating their understanding of the history of colonial and modern India through the history of its most important city. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

In what ways does a pandemic change society? Historians and scientists still debate the development and impact of the second plague pandemic, also known as the Black Death, which decimated the people of Asia, Africa, and Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. For many medieval people, the plague was experienced as a terrifying judgment of God upon the world. In this class, we will see how the plague exposed and exacerbated divisions within society, encouraging new political movements, economic changes, and new forms of expression in art and literature. We will read multiple first-hand accounts of the plague, with an eye to seeing how medieval people tried to understand the calamity through science and religion, and how modern scholars have interpreted the evidence of both written records and archaeology and related sciences. The Black Death is the first global pandemic that produced an extensive written record, and the sources offer us a detailed look at how multiple complex societies handled the crisis. [ more ]

Last offered NA

Officials have long sought to rule through the collection and mobilization of information. What technologies, institutions, and strategies have administrators used -- with varying degrees of success -- to make information into knowledge and knowledge into power? How did cities, churches, and states see and know the world? And how did publishers, preachers, peasants, and philosophers resist these attempts to make society 'legible'? In this course we will interrogate some key instances of writing-power, focusing mostly on medieval and early modern Europe; but also looking at key institutions from Antiquity such as the Library of Alexandria and episodes from Europe's overseas empires like the Inka khipu record-keeping system of knotted strings outlawed by imperial Spain. After discussing some theoretical perspectives on knowledge and power from anthropology and post-colonial studies, we will read extensively in primary sources and recent historical scholarship to ask where and when an 'information state emerged in Europe. Chronologically, we begin with the documentation of newly-conquered Norman England in the Domesday Book completed in 1086 and end with the reams of paperwork captured by the eighteenth-century neologism 'bureaucracy': rule by the desk. To be explored in part through the holdings of Special Collections, topics will include the Inquisition, censorship, illicit publishing, pamphlets, paperwork, authentication, forgery, paratext, metadata, and information overload. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

In November 2018, world leaders gathered in France to commemorate the centennial of the end of the First World War. Yet the armistice that brought hostilities on the Western front to a close on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, did not have the same significance for Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where revolutions and civil wars continued to be fought well into 1923. Ultimately, the Great War toppled four empires (German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman) and forcibly displaced and killed millions of civilians (including Armenians and Jews), creating new countries and colonies throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This tutorial will explore the global history of the First World War, a history that is indispensable for understanding the world of today. We will consider a broad range of topics and sources in our examination of the political, social, cultural, economic, and military histories of the Great War and its aftermath. For three-quarters of the semester, the tutorial follows a traditional format in which weekly tutorial meetings center on the writing of a paper and the partner's critique. The last segment of the course is structured around a research paper assignment, introducing students to archival research and longer-format writing. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

Invented in sixteenth-century Arabia, the coffeehouse soon made its way to Egypt and Istanbul and then to Western Europe. This institution offered a social space where men (and women) could congregate to discuss politics and ideas. Everywhere, it was an object of suspicion, yet its onward march proved unstoppable, and it even became one of the central spaces of the European Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century movement that laid the foundations of modern Western secular thought. In this course, we will reconstruct the progress of the coffeehouse in order to understand what made it so special. Through its prism we will explore a crucial period in the history of Europe and the Middle East, and investigate how intercultural interactions and intellectual exchange shaped the modern world at a time of religious and political polarization. [ more ]

HIST 136 SEM Before the Deluge: Paris and Berlin in the Interwar Years

Last offered Fall 2012

Paris and Berlin were the two poles of Europe in the 1920s, rival capital cities of two historically hostile nations that had only just put an end to the carnage of World War I. Paris was the grande dame; Berlin the upstart. In the 1920s, these two pulsating metropolises became the sites of political and cultural movements that would leave a lasting imprint on European society until the present day. This course focuses on the politics, society, and culture of these two cities in their heyday in the 1920s. We will also consider their fate in the 1930s, first as depression set in, and then as the Nazis came to power. Devoting half the semester to Paris and the other half to Berlin, we will examine a range of parallel topics in both contexts, including the impact of World War I, the growing popularity of right-wing political movements and the increase in political violence, shifting gender norms and sexual mores, and new developments in the realms of art, film, theatre, cabaret, and literature. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

The notion that race worked differently in Brazil took root in the early twentieth century and grew into a myth that the country was home to a unique "racial democracy." This course will examine the creation and surprisingly long life of this idea among not only Brazilians but also observers and visitors from the U.S., Europe, and Africa. We will look at how "racial democracy" became central to constructions of Brazilian national identity, how the country's governments tried to coopt Black cultural forms like samba and Carnaval into official culture, and how thinkers around the world used Brazil to define their understanding of race making in their own regions. The special focus, though, will be on how Afro Brazilians challenged the myth politically, intellectually, and artistically from the 1920s to the 1990s. Our texts will include the fiction, memoirs, manifestos, and scholarship of individuals like Abdias do Nascimento, Carolina Maria de Jesús, and Sueli Carneiro, as well as the activism of Black and feminist groups. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

Throughout the 20th century, parents, students, teachers, and policymakers have fought bitterly about the purpose of and practices in public schools. Public schools have been the site of a series of intense conflicts over the meanings of democracy and equality; the relationship between the individual, the family, and the state; and about completing claims to recognize the rights of teachers, children, and parents. Organized both chronologically and thematically, this course examines a series of "school wars" in the 20th century, focusing especially on battles over religion, race, and sex. Topics will include evolution/creationism, segregation and desegregation, bilingual education, sex education, free speech, and school prayer. This course asks how, why, and with what consequences schools have been an arena of cultural conflict in the United States? How do these debates help us understand the contested relationship between the rights of children and students, the rights of parents and families, the rights of communities and states, and the obligations of the federal government? How can historical analysis shed light on our present-day "school wars"? Many of these conflicts wind up in court, and we will be looking at some key Supreme Court decisions, but we will also draw upon memoirs, social histories, oral histories, popular culture, and other archival and documentary sources that focus on the experience of teachers and students. Tutorials meet in pairs. Every week, each student will either write an essay (1000-1250 words) that responds to and analyzes the readings OR a short essay (no more than 500 words) that responds to their partner's paper and raises further questions for discussion. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2023

Is there a style or tradition of writing political manifestos in the United States? Given the nation's origins in revolution, the answer would seem on the surface to be a definitive "yes." But some observers are skeptical; one writer has gone so far as to say the term "manifesto" connotes "a radicalism that American writers generally lack." This course will investigate that claim. How would we choose to define the very term, "manifesto?" Why have so many radical American writings been embraced as having the characteristics of a manifesto? We'll look at these questions through close readings and analyses of manifestos across three different historical junctures in the U.S. -- the Revolutionary era, the 1830s and 1840s, and the 1960s and early 1970s -- focusing in particular on struggles over racial equality and women's rights. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

How did the multiplicity of people who shaped "early" North America communicate with each other, across profound linguistic, cultural, social, political, and spiritual differences? What strategies did they use to forge meaning and connections in times of tremendous transformation, while maintaining vital continuities with what came before? This course examines histories of communication in North America and the technologies that communities have developed to record, remember, advocate, persuade, resist, and express expectations for the future. Using a continental and transoceanic lens of "Vast Early America," we will take up Indigenous oral traditions, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, wampum belts, and winter counts as expressions of ethics, identity, relationality, and diplomacy among sovereign Native/Indigenous nations. We will reflect on artistic and natural science paintings, engravings, and visual culture that circulated widely; and diaries and journals as forms of personal as well as collective memory. We will work with political orations, newspapers, pamphlets, and other forms of print culture that galvanized public opinion in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions; memorials and monuments that communities have created to honor ancestors and significant events; material culture such as baskets and weavings that signified through their imagery and physical forms; and social critique and visions of justice in the verse and prose of Phillis Wheatley Peters and William Apess. These materials take us into the complexities of individuals' and communities' interactions and relations of power. They also illuminate spaces of potential or realized solidarity, alliance, and co-building of new worlds. Throughout we will work together to understand different methodologies, theories, practices, and ethics involved in approaching the past. We will at every turn be attuned to the ongoing significances of these experiences among communities in the twenty-first century. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

This history tutorial utilizes popular film as a vehicle to explore American Cold War culture. The Cold War was an intense period of political, ideological, cultural, and military struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that took place after the Second World War. For every nuclear test, arms sale, or military operation, there was a propaganda ploy, rhetorical barb, or diplomatic ultimatum to match. Amidst this hostile competition between two incompatible ways of life--communism and capitalism; totalitarianism and democracy--an atmosphere marked by panic, secrecy, insecurity, paranoia, surveillance, and conformity pervaded American life. Given the vast cultural influence of movies, film during this era served as a vital ideological battleground. Moreover, cinema offers us a window into the cultural landscape of Cold War America, for film reflects, interprets, and shapes national identity in complex ways. The films examined in this course (for the most part, Hollywood productions from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s) serve as unique historical documents and as cultural texts illuminating the ways filmmakers and audiences negotiated the challenges presented by the Cold War struggle. The films assigned for this course focus on a range of topics, including anticommunism, competing visions of Americanism, religion, the Hollywood Ten, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, the nuclear arms race, brainwashing, gender, race relations, and the eventual unravelling of the Cold War consensus. The historical analysis of film requires not only a close reading of the movies themselves, but also a clear understanding of the historical context in which they appeared. The readings paired with each film will help to clarify this context and offer interpretations of the films with which we will engage. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2023

Islam in Africa is often relegated to the peripheries in the study of Islam, a religion most associated with Arabs and the Middle East. On the flip side, Islam is also portrayed as foreign to African belief systems and institutions. The relationship between Islam and Africa, however, begins with the very advent of Islam when early Arab Muslim communities took refuge in the Abyssinian empire in East Africa. This course explores the history of Islam and Muslim societies on the African continent by focusing on the localized practices of Islam while also connecting it to Islam as a global phenomenon. The course will begin with a historical focus on the spread of Islam in Africa from East Africa and North Africa in the seventh century all the way to the spread of Islam through Sufi brotherhoods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The course will also take an anthropological approach, exploring the diverse practices of Islam in African Muslim communities and the social and cultural impact of Islam on African societies. Among the topics the course will cover include African Muslim intellectual traditions, local healing practices, religious festivals, early modern African Muslim abolitionist movements, and the historical interactions between African and Asian Muslim communities in the Indian ocean world. [ more ]

HIST 205 LEC The Making of Modern Africa

Last offered Fall 2021

This course traces the incorporation of Africa into an expanding global world from the middle of the 19th century to the present and examines the impact of this integration on the history of African cultures and modern nation states. It is designed to provide you with an introductory understanding of the economic, social, and political forces that have shaped Africa in recent times and continue to affect the lives of individual people across the continent. Over the course of the semester you will be introduced to major historical themes in African History from the past 150 years, including the abolition of the slave trade and its effects, African states in the 19th century, the growing integration of different regions into shifting global and economic systems, European colonization, and African resistance to imperial conquest. We will also explore the emergence of the nationalist and anti-colonial movements, and Africa's post-colonial experiences of self-governance. Within these broad historical processes, the class will cover additional key themes such as religious change and the role of Western missionaries; changing gender roles; environmental exploitation and change; the emergence of the developmental state; urbanization; military dictatorships, and war and violence in the late 20th century. We will also cover some of the issues surrounding the study of African History as a discipline. This is a challenging task as no single course can cover more than a silver of the complexity and variety of the continent. This is why we approach the study of Modern African History through a comparative prism. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

The history of China from 960-1800 can be told as the story of a continuous, enduring culture and polity. This long period was nevertheless one in which the definition and contours of "China" were constantly contested. In this survey course, we will examine the political forms, institutions, and developments in culture, society, and economy that are characteristic of the Song (960-1279), Yuan (1279-1368), Ming (1368-1644), and early Qing (1644-1800) Dynasties alongside the Inner, Central, East, and Southeast Asian polities and cultures which interacted with, accommodated and repeatedly conquered centers of Chinese power over this time (Tanguts, Khitans, Mongols, and Jurchens/Manchus, among others). Gaining a historical perspective on power relationships within this diverse region will help us to understand the different ways in which Asia participated in changing world systems throughout this period. This course combines brief lectures with discussion of predominantly primary source readings. [ more ]

HIST 214 LEC Foundations of China

Last offered Fall 2021

This course examines the foundational period of Chinese civilization, from the earliest evidence of human activity in the geographical region we now call China, through the end of the Han dynasty in the early third-century CE. This is the period that saw the creation and spread of the Chinese script (a writing system that would be the dominant one in East Asia for thousands of years), the teachings of Confucius (whose ideas continue to play a role in the lives of billions of people today), the construction of the Great Wall (which is not, as it turns out, visible from space), and the creation of the imperial bureaucratic system (that was, in essence, the progenitor of the modern bureaucratic state). We will proceed chronologically but focus on a set of thematic topics, including language and writing, religion and philosophy, art and architecture, politics and economics, and science and technology. While this course is entitled "Foundations of China," we will take a critical perspective on narratives, both Chinese and Western, that see Chinese history as an unbroken history of a single "civilization." [ more ]

HIST 218 LEC From Crises to Cool: Modern Japan, 1850s-Present

Last offered Fall 2021

Stunning revolutions, the construction and collapse of an empire, the waging of wars, devastating defeat and occupation by a foreign power, and postwar economic ups and downs have marked Japan's modern experience. This course will explore how various Japanese people from factory workers and farmers to politicians and intellectuals have understood, shaped, and lived the upheavals from the 1850s through the present day. And it will examine how the country of Japan as well as individual Japanese people have defined the identities and meanings of "modern Japan." We will ask why a modernizing revolution emerged out of the ashes of the early modern order; what democracy and its failures wrought; how world war was experienced and what legacies it left in its wake; and how postwar Japan has struggled with the successes and costs of affluence. Materials will include anthropological studies, government documents, intellectual treatises, fiction, films, and oral histories. [ more ]

HIST 220 LEC History and Society in India and South Asia: c. 2000 to 1700s CE

Last offered Spring 2022

This course is an introduction to the history of India and South Asia from prehistoric times to the emergence of early modernity. During these centuries, the subcontinent emerged as one of the most diverse and complex regions of the world, as it continues to be even today. The course will cover the period between the rise of the urban Indus Valley civilization to the end of the Mughal Empire and will address topics such the as the origins and development of the caste system and 'Hinduism', society and culture in the great epics like the Ramayana, the beginnings of Jain and Buddhist thought, politics and patronage under Islamic polities, the formation of Mughal imperial authority through art, architecture and literature, among others. Through the study of social processes, the course will focus on the diversity and connectedness that have defined the subcontinent throughout its history. It will also consider the role of history in the region and how a number of events from the past continue to inform its present. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

What did colonialism look like in India, Britain's most valuable and populous possession for over two hundred years? How did the British establish their rule over the vast subcontinent? And how did the people who lived there experience and finally overthrow colonial rule? This course focuses on the history of South Asia with the aim of providing an overview of the political and social landscape of the region from c. 1750 to 1947. This period spans the decline of the Mughal Empire through British colonial rule, South Asians' struggle for independence, and the Partition of India. We will explore a range of themes including the rise of colonialism, nationalism, religion, caste, gender relations, and the emergence of modern social and political institutions on the subcontinent. In addition to reading key texts and historical primary sources on the specific themes, we will also work with a variety of multimedia sources including films, short stories and podcasts. One objective of this course is to introduce students to the different political and social processes that led to the creation of India and Pakistan; another is to teach students to think critically about the significance of history and history writing in the making of the subcontinent. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

The history of ancient Rome can be seen as an account of formative events, practices, and thought in the history of western culture; it also is the history of the most far-reaching experience of diverse cultures, beliefs, and practices known in the Western tradition until modern times. By studying Roman history from Rome's emergence in central Italy in the 7th century BCE through the reign of the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century CE, we will see the complex and fascinating results of an ambitious, self-confident nation's evolution, transformation, and expansion throughout the Mediterranean world. We will consider questions such as, How did a republic with an aversion to autocratic rule and devotion to libertas understand its existence as an imperial power as well as its own elite's dominant rule over Romans and non-Romans alike? How and why did the Roman republic and its deeply entrenched republican ideology give way to the effective rule by one man, Augustus, and the increasingly monarchical rule of the emperors who followed? Did Roman political life in the later republic cause the violence that left it in crisis, or did the persistance of violence in Roman life account for the nature of Roman politics? Who were the non-elites of Rome, Italy, and the Roman empire that often get left in the shadows in our ancient sources? Who were the important writers, politicians, poets, philosophers, and innovators whose works constitute a rich cultural heritage worthy of both appreciation and critique? Throughout the course there will be an emphasis on the problems of historical and cultural interpretation, on how the Roman experience is relevant to our own, and, importantly, on the pleasures of historical investigation. Readings for this course will include a variety of original sources, a range of scholarly essays on specific topics, and a textbook that will provide our chronological framework. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

This course traces the development of European societies from the collapse of the Western Roman imperial order in the fifth century CE to the rise and consolidation of powerful monarchies by the fifteenth century: a foundational period in European history. Along the way, we will confront many of the paradoxes that make medieval history so compelling. How did political fragmentation coexist with the spread of an increasingly uniform, Latin Christian culture? How was that same Christian culture mobilized to support both hierarchy and popular resistance to hierarchy, both early capitalism and voluntary poverty? As we encounter the medieval world through the men and women who lived in it, we will read the writings of saints and heretics, poets and lawyers, merchants and mystics. Though Western Europe will be our focus, we will also examine how Western European Christians defined themselves, in part, through their relationships with their neighbors in the Islamic and Byzantine worlds, and with internal religious minorities, such as the Jews. By the end of the course, students will appreciate how the socio-economic and intellectual legacy of the Middle Ages profoundly shaped the subsequent history not only of Europe, but the world. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

The three hundred years from the late Middle Ages to the French Revolution were Europe's formative centuries: they saw the Renaissance and the Reformation, the outbreak of the Wars of Religion, the colonization of the Americas and intensification of trade in Asia, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Through these historical experiences, European culture developed an identity distinct from its Christian one, as well as peculiar political and economic forms that ended up shaping the modern world. This course will examine such topics as the revival of classical letters, the formation of the modern state, urban and courtly culture, and religion and unbelief. Although the "early modern" era is profoundly different from our own, it remains crucial to any interpretation of the world in which we live today. Readings will emphasize primary sources and include such authors as Petrarch, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Mary Montagu, and Voltaire. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

What does it mean to be Jewish? The question of Jewish identity emerged anew at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe and has dominated Jewish history throughout the modern period. Although Jewish emancipation and citizenship followed different paths in different parts of Europe, in general Jews were confronted by unprecedented opportunities for integration into non-Jewish society and unprecedented challenges to Jewish communal life. Focusing primarily on France and Germany, and to a lesser extent on the Polish lands, this course will introduce students to the major social, cultural, religious, and political transformations that shaped the lives of European Jews from the outbreak of the French Revolution to the aftermath of World War II. We will explore such topics as emancipation, Jewish diversity, the reform of Judaism, competing political ideologies, Jewish-gentile relations, the rise of modern antisemitism, gender roles in Jewish society, interwar Jewish culture, Jewish responses to Nazism and the Holocaust, and the situation of Jews in the immediate post-WWII period. In addition to broad historical treatments, course materials will include exposure to different kinds of primary sources, from philosophical and political treatises, to memoirs, diaries, and fiction. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

In this course we explore ancient urbanism, investigating Greco-Roman cities from the early archaic period through late antiquity. By analyzing a variety of primary sources -- literature, visual art, inscriptions, papyri, building remains -- dating from 750 B.C. to 300 A.D. and ranging geographically from Spain to central Asia, we will think critically about problems such as communal belonging, spatial interaction, social exclusion, monuments, memories, and identities in urban contexts. Athens and Rome will beckon along the way, but numerous places around the Mediterranean basin and beyond will feature prominently, including Pompeii in southern Italy, Olynthus in Macedonia, Cyrene in North Africa, Ephesus and Priene in western Asia Minor, Alexandria and Berenike in Egypt, and Dura Europos and Ai Khanoum in Central Asia. Every week, we will tackle a core question associated with life in the ancient city: the challenges of urban design, the tensions associated with civic membership, the consolidation of political institutions, the conflicts brought about by trade and migration, the role of religion, the effects of war, the universal reality of social exclusion, cultural expressions of life and death, and the impact of sudden natural catastrophes, among others. [ more ]

HIST 242 LEC Latin America From Conquest to Independence

Last offered Fall 2019

This course will examine the processes commonly referred to as the creation of "Latin America" and will do so from numerous perspectives. Starting with the construction of indigenous societies, from small and decentralized groupings to huge imperial polities-, before 1492, to the invasion of Europeans from that date forward, we will take up the question of the Iberian "conquest," looking at the often violent encounters that made up that event and analyzing its success, limits, and results. We will then study the imposition of Iberian rule from the point of view of would-be colonizers and the peoples they treated as objects of colonization, stressing the multiple and conflicting character of European, indigenous, and African perspectives. Thus looking at the Americas from both the outside-in and inside-out, we will focus on the unequal relations of power that came to define cultural, political, and economic life in the colonies, always with an eye on the gendered and racialized nature of those relations. We will also not only compare very different regions of the Iberian Americas but also see how the grand shifts of history intervened in--and perhaps consisted of--the most normal elements of daily life in northern Mexico, the central Andes, coastal Brazil, and other parts of colonial Latin America. Visual as well as more traditional written primary materials, along with secondary texts and films, will serve as the basis for our discussions throughout the semester. [ more ]

HIST 243 LEC Modern Latin America, 1822 to the Present

Last offered Fall 2016

This course will examine salient issues in the history of the independent nations of Latin America. The first two sections of the course will focus on the turbulent formation of nation-states over the course of the "long nineteenth century," from the crises of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in the late eighteenth century to the heyday of liberal political economies at the turn of the twentieth century. In this regard the course will analyze the social and economic changes of the period up to World War I and the possibilities they offered for both political order and disorder. Key topics addressed will include caudillismo, the role of the Church in politics, economic dependency and development, and the place of indigenous and African Latin-American peoples in new nations, and industrialization and urbanization. The latter two sections will examine the trend toward state-led national development in the twentieth century, considering the diverse forms it took and conflicts it generated in different nations and periods. Here we will take up questions the emergence of workers' and women's movements and the rise of mass politics; militarism, democracy, and authoritarian governments; the influence of the U.S. in the region; and the life and possibly death of revolutionary options. Within this chronological framework of national and regional political economy, we will consider the ways that various Latin American social actors shaped their own lives and collective histories, sometimes challenging and sometimes accommodating the ideals of national elites. General regional trends will be illustrated by selected national cases, including Mexico, Brazil, Agentina, Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. [ more ]

HIST 252 LEC North American Histories to 1865

Last offered Spring 2017

This course surveys North American histories from ancient Indigenous pasts to the U.S. Civil War. Beginning with the diverse Native societies that have long lived and interacted in specific Indigenous homelands, it then traces Indigenous encounters with a range of expansionist European colonial projects, and the dynamic, contested quality of these relationships and resistances. The course delves into the origins, evolution, and violences of the transatlantic slave trade, and the ways that peoples of African descent created new lives and identities in the Caribbean and North America. The transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are examined in detail, including political, economic, cultural, and religious transformations and upheavals that fostered new senses of individual and collective identities. Connecting the pivotal Seven Years War and American Revolution, the course traces out the legacies of these contestations for multiple empires, nations, and communities. The last section of the course examines the antebellum era, multiple struggles for rights, land, and autonomy, and the coming of the U.S. Civil War as well as its ongoing legacies. The course introduces students to a wide range of historical methodologies and critical approaches to the past, and moves from large-scale vantages to on-the-ground accounts of how specific people experienced historical changes. The course conveys a sense of how key debates and struggles from the past have shaped North American presents and futures, and how scholars and communities have grappled with these topics. It also provides opportunities for engaging original archival and material culture collections at Williams College. [ more ]

HIST 253 LEC Modern U.S. History

Last offered Spring 2019

This course surveys themes and issues that inform the historical landscape of the United States after the Civil War and Reconstruction, from the late 1800s to the present. With special attention to freedom and fragmentation, the course examines the dilemmas inherent to American democracy, including: westward expansion and Indian affairs; immigration and nationalism; progressivism and domestic policy; the expanding role of the United States in the world; race, gender, and rights; and the shifting terrains of liberalism and conservatism. The course also tunes into the connections between current affairs and the American past. Course materials include a range of primary sources (letters, political speeches, autobiography, film, oral histories, fiction, and photography) and historical interpretations. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2023

This course surveys Native American/Indigenous North American histories from beginnings through the mid-nineteenth century, tracing the complex ways that sovereign tribal nations and communities have shaped Turtle Island/North America. Equally important, it reckons with the ongoing effects of these pasts in the twenty-first century, and communities' own forms of interpretation, critique, action, and pursuits of justice. It also introduces foundational methodologies in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and strategies for pursuing decolonizing scholarship and action. Emphasis is on primary and secondary works produced by Indigenous authors/creators. Starting with the diversity of Indigenous societies that have inhabited and cared for lands and waters since "time out of mind," it foregrounds the complexity of Native peoples, nations, and worldviews situated in particular homelands, as well as accounts of origins and migrations. It addresses how societies confronted devastating epidemics resulting from the "Columbian Exchange," and contended with Euro-colonial processes of colonization, extraction, and enslavement. Indigenous nations' multifaceted efforts to maintain sovereignty and homelands through pervasive violence, attempted genocide, and dispossession are addressed, as well as forms of relations and kinship with African-American and Afro-Indigenous people. It concludes with how different communities negotiated the tumultuous eras of the American Revolution, forced removal in the 1830s, and Civil War, and created pathways for endurance, self-determination, and security in its aftermath. The course centers on Indigenous actors--intellectuals, diplomats, legal strategists, knowledge keepers, spiritual leaders, artists, and many others--and consistently connects historical events with present-day matters of land, historical memory, education, caretaking, and activism. Additionally, it provides an opportunity to engage with original materials in the Williams College Archives/Special Collections and Art Museum. While the scope of the course is continental and transoceanic, it devotes significant attention to the Native Northeast and the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican homelands in which Williams College is located. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

This course surveys Native American/Indigenous histories from the era of the U.S. Civil War to the present as well as future, centering community voices, scholarship, and interpretations. Beginning with Sand Creek and the violences experienced by Native communities in 1864, it traces how diverse Native nations navigated the tumultuous times that followed, up to recent protective actions at Standing Rock and Mauna Kea in the 21st century. Topics include treaty-making and diplomacy; creation and contestation of reservation systems; connections with African-American families and communities; residential school experiences of Native youth and families; Indigenous visual and performative artistic traditions and transformations, both in North America and abroad; urban relocation policy and experiences; Red Power activism and Indigenous internationalism; treaty rights activism and federal recognition debates; environmental interventions and food sovereignty movements; and critiques of settler colonialism. The course stresses the resilience of sovereign Indigenous nations into the present, and introduces students to a wide range of methodological approaches from Native American and Indigenous Studies and history. It blends big-picture vantages on these topics with microhistorical accounts of particular individuals, communities, and events, and offers a continental view of historical changes coupled with attention to the specific area of the Native Northeast--Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican homelands--in which Williams College is situated. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2023

We live in a world transformed by petroleum. All around us today--in global carbon emissions, transportation, the clothes we wear, everyday objects we touch, microplastics in our water--oil is there, even if we can't always see it. At the same time, the industry fuels massive flows of global capital, and provokes critical political shifts, conflicts, and resistance movements around the world. How did oil's ubiquity happen in just over 150 years? This course will chart a global, modern history by keeping this energy source always in our sight, paying particular attention to its role in the political economy, its ecological impacts, the cultural changes it has set in motion, and its place in people's material lives. Throughout the semester, we will also foreground some of the foundational skills needed to create an historical account, which will culminate in students' completing a 5-minute video or podcast on a relevant topic of their choice. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

This survey course examines the United States and the World from 1898-2001. Students will be introduced to key diplomatic developments from the Spanish-American War to the War on Terror with attention to ideological, political, cultural, military, and economic forces. Topics will include American imperialism and anti-imperialism, the emergence of U.S. cultural and economic hegemony in the interwar years, WWII and the origins of the Cold War, the Soviet-American rivalry in Europe and on the periphery, nuclear policy, the Vietnam War, late-Cold War diplomatic reconfigurations, the rise of political Islam, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, and the events surrounding 9/11. By engaging with a range of primary and secondary source readings, students will examine how Americans historically have made sense of their nation's role in the world, and how historians explain important aspects of U.S. foreign policy. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

This course will probe the domestic history of the U.S. from 1919 to 1939 and the cultural, economic, political, and social changes accompanying America's evolution into a modern society. Themes include: developments in work, leisure, and consumption; impact of depression on the organization of the public and private sectors; persistence of traditional values such as individualism and the success ethos in shaping responses to change; and the evolving diversity of America and the American experience. [ more ]

HIST 270 LEC Sport and the Global Color Line

Last offered Fall 2021

Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans have broken racial barriers, confronted racial stereotypes, and garnered unprecedented success within popular culture, most notably sport. In this course, students will explore the relationship of the black athlete to the color line. We will complicate the historical view of sport as a site of professional advancement and race reform by demonstrating how societal racial practices were reconstructed within athletics. In essence, this course will emphasize the role sport performed in structuring racial exclusion as athletic arenas--like movie theaters, railroads, schools, and other public sites--shaped what Historian Grace Elizabeth Hale has termed the "culture of segregation." Though our primary focus will be on the experiences African Americans encountered, we will also probe the color line beyond its typical black-white binary. Thus, we will examine the achievements and altercations that other ethnic and racial groups realized in their transnational push for equality and inclusion. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

This course examines the causes and consequences of racialized inequality in American cities. It begins by surveying the historical roots of urban inequality and compounded deprivation, with particular attention to segregation, economic discrimination, and political marginalization. It then looks closely at the politics and history of policing and criminal justice, education, and housing. Students will leave this course with a deeper understanding of contemporary urban problems, a knowledge of the political structures within which those problems are embedded, and a better sense of the challenges and opportunities leaders face in contemporary urban America. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

The ancestral and continuing homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community (SMC) are where Williams College is located, a fact that the institution formally recognized in Fall 2021 through a land acknowledgment. This was one step toward building more meaningful relations between the College and the sovereign tribal nation, which has been displaced through violent, painful processes directly shaped by the Williams family, while also maintaining enduring relations with these homelands. This course addresses needs to continue work of learning and repair by "educating beyond the land acknowledgment." It centers SMC experiences, knowledge, and goals, and provides space for students to work on projects directly meaningful for the community, including the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) that is based locally through an official partnership with the college. It will have strong collaborative and experiential components, plus ethical commitments to highlighting the tribal nation's active forms of stewardship, knowledge-keeping, and intellectual as well as political sovereignty. The exact shape of the syllabus and projects will be determined in close conversation and collaboration with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. Depending on goals/interests, potential areas of focus might include SMC homelands; archaeological research and its importance for place-stewardship; political sovereignty, governance, and leadership; histories and impacts of European colonialism among SMC people; SMC traditions of diplomacy and peacemaking; strategic uses of archives and documents in protecting community wellbeing and resisting dispossession; the "Many Trails" of forced removal westward; establishment of the SMC in Menominee homelands; 20th and 21st-century experiences, knowledge-keeping, and continuing connections with eastern homelands; repatriation of ancestors and belongings; language revitalization, Land Back, education, and economic sovereignty; and other topics. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2023

This introductory course surveys the cultural, political, and social history of African Americans from Reconstruction to the present. It offers a balance between a "top-down" and "bottom-up" approach and focuses primarily on African Americans' quest for citizenship, equality, justice, and opportunity. In addition to examining major historical developments and popular figures within the modern black past, we will explore the lesser-known histories of everyday people who helped shaped the black freedom struggle. In so doing, we will interrogate conventional narratives of progressive movements since emancipation. Some of the main topics include: the transition from slavery to freedom; the rise of Jim Crow and the politics of racial uplift; the Great Migration and the emergence of the New Negro; the Great Depression and the New Deal; World War II and the struggle for economic and racial inclusion; the postwar period and the intersecting movements of Civil Rights and Black Power; and the impacts of deindustrialization and mass incarceration on the black community. We will end with a discussion of the Obama years and Black Lives Matter. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

Is sexuality an immutable aspect of who we are or is it socially constructed? How have people understood sex and sexuality throughout history? Why does religion have any say in the sexual lives of individuals and society? What are sexual transgressions and why are they punished? Is sex a commodity that can be exchanged for money? Is sex political? This course will explore these questions through a historical approach, focusing in particular on the shifting understanding of sex and sexuality across historical time and different geographical regions. In investigating the category of sexuality, this course will push us to consider three key questions: 1) Is sexuality a useful category for historical analysis, 2) how have our assumptions regarding sexuality and sexual ethics taken shape and changed over time and 3) how do social, cultural, political, and economic conditions affect changing meanings of sexuality. Historical studies will be read in conjunction with different theoretical frameworks about sexuality. Reading historical accounts of sexuality alongside theoretical pieces will allow us to consider how historians construct an argument and the influence of theoretical frameworks in shaping scholarship. Some of the theorists we will read in the course include: Michel Foucault, David Halperin, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Valerie Traub, and Carla Freccero. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2023

Is history, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder? What is history and who gets to decide? How and where is history consumed and by whom? This course examines the use and abuse of history from the early twentieth century to the present especially how history has been impacted by the digital sphere (tv, films, social media), the rise of nationalism and the processes of globalization. First, students will grapple with what constitute notions of truth, objectivity and facts and how terminology has changed over the last 100 years. Next, we will evaluate various influential methodological trends that have impacted how history has been written and consider what was said and left unsaid, which perspectives were privileged and whose voices were marginalized. Finally, we will analyze the state of history today and how it appears in people's daily lives and especially how history is used and abused in public discourse on various media platforms. How is historical memory formed today? [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

This course examines the sources, methods, and theoretical assumptions that have shaped historical practice from the late nineteenth century to the present. We will grapple with foundational questions including: What is "history"? Who makes it, who writes it, and how? From whose perspective and to what end? Focusing on U.S. economic and labor histories, we will examine when and where these histories intersect, as well as where and why they might diverge. To what extent are historical narratives shaped by the time period in which they are written, revealing their embeddedness in the dominant discourses of the era? Or to what extent might historical approaches provide alternatives? We will also consider what the implications of U.S. economic and labor histories are in terms of relationships to the state via policymaking, politics, and activism. Anchoring our own historical analysis in the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, we will then focus on the era between World War II and the present. In our seminar meetings, we will analyze historical writings and debates, considering how their authors define historical themes, subjects/actors, and processes, as well as the meanings of history for different audiences and eras. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

What is the historian's task? In this seminar we will consider a variety of answers to this question by looking at how historians have practiced their craft from antiquity to the present. In the first half of the course, we will read historians from across the globe to see how the study of the past has differed across human societies from antiquity until the nineteenth century. What do their approaches have in common, and what distinguishes them? In the second half of the course we will investigate the modern historical tradition from the early twentieth century to the present, including the Annales school, economic and environmental history, microhistory, and subaltern studies. Throughout, we will discuss what lessons we can draw for our own practice as historians. Authors to be read include Herodotus, al-Mas'udi, Ranke, Bloch, Guha, Gordon-Reed among others. [ more ]

HIST 305 SEM A History of Health and Healing in Africa

Last offered Spring 2022

This class will explore the history of health and healing in Africa, with emphasis on the colonial and post-colonial eras. During the semester we will explore diverse medical and social interventions in African health over the past 150 years. How have African societies understood healthy communities and public health? We will examine this question through the study of spirit possession and other African healing practices but also how they have intersected with different biomedical practices and public health programs. We will also study the patterns and social impacts of new diseases in the twentieth century, as well as transformations in the understanding and treatment of diseases long present on the continent. In particular we will explore shifting understandings of the causes, treatment, and social implications of sleeping sickness, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. The development of colonial rule, shifting environmental conditions, changing diets, and urbanization all impacted the disease landscape, as well as the way African societies have understood public health. Indeed, the themes of health, medicine and disease provide a useful lens for understanding important social transformations across the continent. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

In the late 20th century, world literature has witnessed a "boom" in indigenous literature. Many critics and historians describe this global re-emergence of the subaltern and the indigenous in terms of literary justice fostered by post-colonial studies and the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, by the UN General Assembly on December 18, 1992. In this course, we will investigate this "indigenous boom" by reading novels and short stories from the Americas, the Middle East and North Africa from the 1970s to the present. Through these trans-regional and trans-historical peregrinations, our principal goal will be to examine and compare narratives about conquest, settler colonialism, colonial nationalism, indigeneity, sovereignty, indigenous epistemology and philosophy. At the same time, we will consider the following questions: How did pioneering indigenous women writers, such as the Laguna Pueblo Leslie Marmon Silko in the US and the Mayan playwrights of La Fomma in Chiapas, Mexico lead the feminist front of the indigenous literary renaissance? How did Palestinian folktales, Amazigh poetics in the Maghreb, and Mayan dream narratives in Mexico and Guatemala produce narratives of decolonial history? What does the aesthetics of magical realism in Arabic, Quechua and Spanish, respectively, as evident in the works of the Kurdish writer Salim Barakat (Syria) and the mestizo writer José María Arguedas (Peru) tell us about the intersection of race, ethnicity, and indigenous epistemology? What is the connection between the recent "boom" of English translations of Indigenous texts and neoliberalism, multiculturalism and neo-colonialism? Ultimately, our goal is to trace how these texts contributed to global indigenous literature and the trans-historical and trans-geographical connections between them. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

In 1932, or twelve years into his rule and twelve years after the establishment of Iraq, King Faysal I lamented that there were "no Iraqi people but only unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie." This course will consider how true the King's statement still holds by evaluating the various attempts at state and nation building in the modern Middle East. Some of the more prominent questions that this course will examine include: What is a nation? What are the essential characteristics of a nation? Who are a people? Why are people ready to die for the nation? And who is included and excluded in the nationalist narrative? After assessing some of the more influential theories of nationalism, we will explore the historical experience of nationalism and national identity in Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Palestine, Iran, and Iraq. What has been at the basis of nationhood? How did European concepts of nation translate into the Middle Eastern context? What was the role of religion in these modern societies? How do traditional notions of gender effect concepts of citizenship? We will also explore some of the unresolved issues facing the various nations of the Middle East, such as unfulfilled nationalist aspirations, disputes over land and borders, and challenges to sovereignty. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2023

For millennia, the Nile River has sustained civilizations in eastern and northern Africa. It was on the banks of this river that the great Egyptian empires were founded that led to the building of some of humanity's most astounding structures and artworks. While the Nile seems eternal and almost beyond time and place, now in the 21st century, the Nile River is at a historical turning point. The water level and quality is dwindling while at the same time the number of people who rely on the river is ever increasing. This alarming nexus of demography, climate change, and economic development has led to increasingly urgent questions of the Nile´s future. Is the Nile dying? How has the river, and people´s relationship with it, changed over the last century? This course will consider the history of the Nile and and its built and natural environment. After a brief overview of the role of the river in ancient Egypt, we will explore the modern political and cultural history of the Nile. By following an imaginary droplet flowing from tributaries until it makes its way into the Mediterranean Sea, we will learn about the diverse peoples and cultures along the way. We will evaluate the numerous attempts to manage and control the Nile, including the building of big dams, and the continuous efforts to utilize the river for economic development such as agriculture and the tourism industry. At the end of the semester we will consider the relationship of the major urban centers with the Nile and whether the tensions among Nile riparian states will lead to "water wars" in East Africa and the Middle East. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

How have a few wretched souls been able to survive on a frozen tundra in the middle of the north Atlantic for over 1100 years? This course will explore the curious history of Iceland, a small and unimportant country, that despite, or because of its geographic isolation and lack of any valuable natural resources, has been able to develop a distinct national and cultural identity. What lessons can be drawn from the historical experiences of Icelanders? The course will start with the paradigmatic sagas (Egil´s and Njal´s Saga) that have played an out-sized role in the development of Icelandic culture. Then we will assess the nation´s independence, the impact of the world wars, the building of the modern welfare state, and how the country has fared through economic peaks and valleys. At the end of the semester, students will be able to understand the significance of the following phrases: "Fögur er hlíðin," "Deyr fé, deyr frændr," "Þetta reddast," "dugleg/ur," and "Áfram Ísland." This comprehension is, of course, very practical since 320,000 people understand the Icelandic language. [ more ]

HIST 310 LEC Iraq and Iran in the Twentieth Century

Last offered Spring 2017

Despite being neighbors, the historical experience of Iran and Iraq has been drastically different. In this course we will begin by exploring the creation of Iraq in 1921 and the Pahlavi government in Iran. We will evaluate the revolutions of 1958 and 1978-9 and compare the lives and careers of Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini. The tragic Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 will also be discussed. Finally, the political future of these countries will be assessed. [ more ]

Last offered NA

Soldiering is one of the oldest professions in African history. Throughout the continent's long history, ordinary soldiers have risen to become kings, queens, presidents, and held other positions of significance. Soldiers in African history have hailed from diverse backgrounds, ranging from the enslaved to those from the nobility. Notable soldiers in African history have been both men and women. Certainly, in Africa as in other world regions there is a tendency to associate the military profession with men. Yet, there have been famous female military warriors in African history, some of the most famous ones being Queen Nzinga in the seventeenth century; the all-female military units in the kingdom of Dahomey, known for their rigor and being effective fighters; and, more recently, Alice Lakwena who commanded a rebellion that nearly brought down the Ugandan government in the late twentieth century. Some of the other themes which we will explore include how warfare was organized from the precolonial era to more recent times; the impact of changing technologies on warfare and the everyday life of armed soldiers; colonial conquest and the soldiers who fought for Europeans and those who resisted; recruitment criteria during the colonial period, and colonial military identities; service in the military as labor and rebellions and mutinies over pay and work conditions; the army and nationalism. Throughout the course we will challenge the enduring Western image and stereotype of Africa as a violent place by focusing on a) the changing conditions that have pushed individuals and communities to go to war, and b) by examining how Africans have initiated and resolved conflict. Students will analyze a variety of resources including soldiers' biographies, films, oral traditions, and archival sources that will help them to come up with their own arguments about the role of the soldiers and the military in Africa. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

Established in the early 1500s, the Mughal Empire was one of the grandest and the longest to rule the Indian subcontinent for over three hundred years. Commanding unprecedented resources and administering a population of 100 to 150 million at its zenith--much larger than any European empire in the early modern world--the Mughals established a centralized administration, with a vast complex of personnel, money, and information networks. Mughal emperors were also political and cultural innovators of global repute. Moreover, while the Mughal dynasty was brought to an end with British colonial rule over India in 1857, the Mughal administrative structures and cultural influences continued to have a lasting impact on the British and later Indian states that followed. Centered around the intersection of the themes of power, patronage of art and architecture and religion, this course will ask: What factors contributed to the durability of the Mughal Empire for three centuries? How did global trade and innovations in taxation contribute to its wealth and stability? How did this dynasty of Muslim monarchs rule over diverse, and largely non-Muslim populations? How did they combine Persian cultural elements with regional ones to establish an empire that was truly Indian in nature? How were the Mughals viewed in their contemporary world of gunpowder empires like the Safavids of Persia and the Ottomans of Turkey? Readings will include the best of the recent scholarship on this vastly influential empire and a rich collection of primary sources, including emperor's memoirs, accounts of European travelers, and racy biographies, which will allow students make their own analysis. They will also have the opportunity to interpret paintings (some of which are held in the WCMA collections) and architecture. They will also discuss how the Mughals are remembered in South Asian film and music. [ more ]

HIST 314 SEM Emperors of Heaven and Earth: Mughal Power and Art in India, 1525-1707

Last offered Fall 2019

The Mughal dynasty ruled over most of northern India from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The Mughal Empire was the grandest and longest to rule the Indian subcontinent--much larger than any European empire in the early modern world--and it continued to have a lasting impact on South Asia. Mughals established a centralized administration with a vast complex of personnel, money and information networks. Styling themselves as 'Emperors of Heaven and Earth', the Mughal kings were also globally viewed as political innovators and unprecedented patrons of art. Their visual practices were as much a part of their imperial ideologies as their administrative and military measures. This co-taught course combines the disciplines of Art History and History to explore the intricate workings of Mughal politics and ideologies. The first of its kind to bring an interdisciplinary approach to teaching South Asia at Williams, the course asks: How did the Mughals sustain their empire for three centuries? How did they use art and politics to rule over diverse and largely non-Muslim populations? How did these Muslim imperial patrons merge Persian and Central Asian cultural values with preexisting Indian forms of administrative and artistic expression? How does Mughal culture continue to shape the South Asian imagination today? Readings will include a variety of visual and literary texts. We will delve deep into the world of biographies, travel accounts, poetry, architecture and a plethora of artworks. Students will take a hands-on approach to Mughal painting through several visits to the WCMA and a dedicated Object Lab. The primary aim of this co-taught course is to introduce students to a multifaceted picture of one of the greatest empires in pre-colonial world history. Another goal is to familiarize them with a wide range of visual and written primary sources and develop a vocabulary for 'reading' these. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

Nationalism is a major political issue in contemporary East Asia. From anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, to tensions on the Korea peninsula, to competitive elections in Taiwan, to controversies in Japan about how history is portrayed in high school textbooks, national identity is hotly debated and politically mobilized all across the region. This course begins with an examination of the general phenomena of nationalism and national identity and their historical development in East Asia. It then considers how nationalism is manifest in the contemporary politics and foreign relations of China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and Taiwan. [ more ]

Last offered NA

What can a 15th-century sultan's recipe book tell us about power and pleasure in medieval India? How did the search for South Asian spices reshape global trade routes and colonial empires? Why has food become a battleground for identity politics in contemporary South Asia? This course explores the rich and complex history of South Asian cuisine as a window into broader historical forces. We will journey through centuries of evolution--from medieval and early modern foodways to the vibrant fusion cuisines of today's diaspora communities. Through a combination of academic research, hands-on cooking laboratories, and digital humanities approaches, students will examine how food in South Asia has shaped and been shaped by religion, gender, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. By engaging with diverse sources including historical cookbooks, literary representations, material culture, and oral histories, we will discover how the everyday act of eating connects to profound questions about identity, power, and cultural exchange in one of the world's most diverse regions. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2023

In many historical societies, there have been tensions between the demands of economic and religious life. What can I sell, what should I do with money, and how shall I interact with strangers? What is the relationship between religious ideals and the habits of everyday life? These questions can become especially acute when representatives of two or more competing belief systems interact with each other. The medieval Mediterranean provides numerous rich examples of societies and individuals facing these questions. In this class, we will look at how medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims resolved these and other dilemmas in the market societies surrounding the Mediterranean basin, as they created their own forms of religious law and economic philosophy. In the process, we will gain a more profound understanding of the roots of modern debates about capitalism, property, and economic justice. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

The Crusades present a number of fascinating interpretive challenges for the historian. Were they a project of elites, or a genuine popular movement? Did they bring Latin Christians into closer dialogue with religious others, or did they foster greater intolerance and oppression? How did Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians respond to the Crusades? In this class, we will explore the Crusades as they were experienced by both the participants and their victims, in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. We will discuss the intellectual and political origins of the crusading movement, review the course of the expeditions to the Holy Land and elsewhere, and see how the idea of Crusade was used and abused by popes, kings and queens, poets, and intellectuals, for their own purposes for centuries. By the end of the class, students will have a sense of how the experience of crusading shaped not only internal European politics, but also relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

To study the Byzantine empire is to expand and challenge our understanding of Europe's historical development from late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. The Byzantine state was much more than the surviving Roman empire, but rather fostered a new kind of civilization: Roman and Greek, Christian, yet deeply connected to pagan Antiquity, a multi-ethnic empire that also acted like a nation-state. Its capital was the largest city in Europe for nearly a millennium and it transmitted its unique form of Christianity to much of Eastern Europe and western Asia, yet it was often dismissed, in the minds of western European observers, as an embarrassing, decadent appendix to triumphalist Western history-- its archives plundered, its treasures looted, a historical orphan among the nationalist historiographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even its true name ("Rome/Romania") dismissed. In this class, we will examine the life and times of this medieval civilization, as we hear from its emperors, generals, monks, princesses and historians, who carried the ancient Roman empire into the fifteenth century, and whose legacy still inspires politicians, scholars, and artists today. [ more ]

HIST 330 SEM Reformations: Faith, Politics, and the World

Last offered Spring 2020

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was one of the major transformations in the history of Christianity, a faith whose 2.2 billion adherents make it the largest religion in the world today. Martin Luther and his followers sparked a schism that changed what it meant to be a Christian, and, by various reckonings, helped to create the state as we know it, the modern self, capitalism and even, as an unintended consequence, secularism. As inhabitants of a post-Protestant society, we have much to learn about the world in which we live from studying the Reformation and its legacies. While considering classic interpretations, this seminar will also probe recent research on the plural Reformations: not just Protestant but also Catholic, and not solely the elite movement of Luther and John Calvin but also the Reformation of women and peasants. What was at stake in these sweeping transformations of what it meant to be a Christian? We will consider theological debates about human agency, the changing relationship of religion and the state, female mysticism, religious warfare, iconoclasm, the arrival of Protestantism in New England, and toleration. We will work intensively in Chapin Library, examining books of hours, Bibles, missals, psalters, and primers. The seminar will also visit WCMA and the Hancock Shaker Village. Authors to be read include Luther, Calvin, Teresa of Ávila, Jean Bodin, Ignatius of Loyola, and John Winthrop. Note: due to the constraints of rare-book research, enrollment is capped at 12. [ more ]

HIST 331 SEM European Intellectual History from Aquinas to Kant

Last offered Fall 2019

The scholars and philosophers of early modern Europe set the agenda for much of modern thought concerning epistemology, morality, religion, and politics. Many of their debates still inform our intellectual world: How do we know what we know? Is human nature intrinsically selfish? What is the nature of God, and of His revelation? Should we prefer individual freedom or political stability? Our seminar will retrace the long and winding path from the intellectual culture of late medieval Europe to that of the Enlightenment. We will try to understand how a Christian culture of manuscript books, whose inquiries were conducted in Latin, transformed into a secular culture of public debate in new printed publications such as journals and newspapers in vernacular languages (English, French, German, etc.). In the process, we will encounter the foundational movements that structured European thought and the making of knowledge in these centuries: scholasticism, humanism, the new philosophy and the Enlightenment. Ultimately, we will recover the arguments of major thinkers and consider what they can teach us today. Authors to be read include Petrarch, Christine de Pizan, Thomas More, Descartes, Leibniz, Montesquieu and Rousseau. [ more ]

HIST 338 LEC The History of the Holocaust

Last offered Fall 2019

In twenty-first century United States, the murder of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany remains a central event in our political, moral, and cultural universe. Nevertheless, the Holocaust still confounds historians¿ efforts to understand both the motivations of the perpetrators and the suffering of the victims. In this course, we will study the origins and unfolding of Nazi Germany¿s genocidal policies, taking into consideration the perspectives of those who carried out mass murder as well as the experiences and responses of Jews and other victim groups to persecution. We will also examine the Holocaust within the larger context of the history of World War II in Europe and historians¿ debates about Germany¿s exterminatory war aims. Course materials will include diaries, speeches, bureaucratic documents, memoirs, films, and historical scholarship. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

What was the Enlightenment? More often invoked than understood, the European Enlightenment can seem like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Although a product of pre-revolutionary Europe's old monarchical regime, it has become a symbol of modernity. Though secular, its exponents thought natural science compatible with the existence of God and with (certain forms of) religion. Even as the world became increasingly interconnected, Enlightenment thinkers posited that European culture was different than--and superior to--any other. And, in the bitterest irony of all, Enlightenment writers produced powerful new theories of natural rights during the high-water mark of the Atlantic slave trade. Despite or because of these complexities, the Enlightenment remains a crucial chapter in the intellectual history of Europe, and an unavoidable legacy for anyone interested in secular traditions of Western thought. Combining methods from intellectual history, the history of knowledge, and the history of the book, this seminar will take the Enlightenment's measure. Our fundamental commitment will be to reading primary sources, and whenever possible to studying original printed editions in Williams College's Chapin Library. We will consider both the material form that authors and printers gave both massive tomes and slender pamphlets, and the new publics that spaces such as coffeehouses, print shops, and salons generated. A special focus will be Chapin's newly acquired copy of the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, the first modern encyclopedia and a triumph of intellectual collaboration as well as of printing. Throughout, we will ask: what were the Enlightenment's achievements and its limits? Sources to be read include Spinoza, Leibniz, Bayle, Madame du Châtelet, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Cugoano. [ more ]

HIST 346 LEC Modern Brazil

Last offered Fall 2021

Brazil has been the "country of the future" longer than it has been an independent nation. Soon after Europeans descended on its shores, Brazil was hailed as a land of resources so rich and diverse that they would inevitably produce great wealth and global power for its inhabitants. Although this has often contributed to an exaggerated patriotism, it has also fostered ambiguity-for if the label suggests Brazil's potential, it also underlines the country's failure to live up to that promise. This course will examine Brazil's modern history by taking up major themes from Independence to the present. Beginning with a "bloodless" independence that sparked massive civil wars, we will analyze the hierarchies that have characterized Brazilian society. The course will give particular attention to themes of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship; national culture and modernity; and democracy and authoritarianism in social and political relations. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2023

The scarcity of stable and democratic governments in Latin America has frustrated observers across the region and beyond for almost 200 years. This course will examine the historical creation of both democratic and anti-democratic regimes in different national cases, seeking to identify the conditions that have fostered the apparent persistence of dictatorial tendencies as well as diverse forms of pro-democratic and social justice activism. Our main cases will be Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and the countries of Central America, but we will address the region as a whole. In this regard we will look at the social and economic forces as well as the political actors and ideologies that have contributed to distinct, if often parallel, outcomes. At the same time, we will also question the criteria we use to label regimes "democratic" or "dictatorial"--and the implications of our choice of criteria. [ more ]

HIST 360 SEM Mapping North America: Critical Cartographies

Last offered Fall 2020

This course examines histories of mapping: what maps show, and what places the practices of cartography have tended to erase, distort, or conceal. Focusing on North America, it examines how Native Americans, African-Americans, and Euro-colonial peoples strongly contested the meanings and representations of "place." Course topics include Indigenous mapping traditions and concepts of homelands spaces; European navigational strategies and colonialism; urban planning; and scientific as well as military depictions of particular lands and waters, especially west of the Mississippi River. The course teaches strategies for employing maps as primary sources, and ways of understanding the historical and ideological circumstances of their production and circulation. It will offer opportunities to critically engage cartographic materials in Williams College's archival and museum collections, and to develop independent research projects. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

This course considers the Atlantic World as both a real place and a concept: an ocean surrounded and shaped by diverse people and communities, and an imagined space of shared and competing affiliations. Moving from "time out of mind" to the early nineteenth century, it examines ecological, cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual transits as well as exchanges among Indigenous/Native American, African and African American, Asian and Asian American, and Euro-colonial people. It introduces conceptual dimensions of this Atlantic paradigm and case studies that illuminate its human subtleties, with the goal of examining "early American" histories through transnational and transoceanic lenses. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to these intertwined histories, and reckons with how the very construction of "history" has, at different turns, affected what is shared, known, valued, and commemorated--or overwritten, denied, or seemingly silenced. Attentive to the structures of power that inflect every part of Atlantic histories, it offers specific ethical frameworks for approaching these topics. Blending methods grounded in oral traditions and histories, place-based knowledge systems, documentary/written archives, songs, archaeology, material culture, and other forms of expression and representation, it invites class members to revisit the nature and meanings of these connected spaces. The course consistently connects historical experiences with the twenty-first century, and how communities today are grappling with the afterlives and ongoing effects of these Atlantic pasts through calls to action for reparations, repatriation and rematriation, Land Back, climate justice, and other forms of accountability. The course also provides an opportunity to engage with original materials pertaining to Atlantic World histories in the Williams College Archives/Special Collections and Art Museum. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

This course traces how American geopolitical interests and involvement in Asia during the Cold War affected Asian Americans. It examines the history of the Cold War as a period of U.S. imperial expansion as well as a time when various actors and organizations, especially those of Asian descent, harnessed the East-West rivalry to advance their own agendas. We will consider how diverse diplomatic strategies including militarization, educational exchange, and immigration reform shaped East, South, and Southeast Asian migrations to and settlement in the United States and the social and material lives of these diverse communities. Case studies include transnational adoptees from Korea, Hmong and Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. and across Guam and Israel-Palestine, Black, Latinx, and Asian American activists who traveled to Vietnam, educated Indian and Pakistani immigrants, and American-born individuals of Japanese ancestry in Japan. We will also explore how individuals of Asian descent leveraged Cold War geopolitics and forged cross-ethnic, cross-class alliances to advocate for social change both at home and abroad. [ more ]

HIST 373 LEC Sites of Memory and American Wars

Last offered Spring 2019

This course will examine the ways that U.S. military ventures have been memorialized through a variety of physical sites, including landscapes, monuments and statues, museums, and other depictions. We will ask such questions as: How and why have the memorializations of wars in America changed over time? Who determines what is preserved and what stories are told? What is the relationship between individual experiences, collective memories, and national narratives? What do sites of memory tell us about history, about society's views of wars and of soldiers, and about America? We will look at these questions both throughout U.S. history and through case studies, including the American Civil War, the wars against indigenous nations, World Wars I and II, and Vietnam. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

Was Jesus a revolutionary socialist or a savvy salesman? Does capitalism bring prosperity to the virtuous or lead us to worship Mammon? Shall the meek inherit the earth or should the hand of the diligent rule? Is it holy to be poor or is prosperity our moral duty? These questions have long preoccupied religious believers, and their changing answers have transformed the history of American capitalism. This course invites students to study that history, from the early 19th century to the present. It will cover such topics as: utopian communes; the political economy of slavery; working-class religion and labor organizing; Christian and Jewish socialism; big business and the Prosperity Gospel; 'New Age' spirituality and the counterculture; liberation theology and racial capitalism; and conservative Christianity in the age of Wal-Mart and Chick-Fil-A. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

Latinas/os/x's have long sought inclusion in the U.S. polity and society, while the meanings of inclusion and the means to achieve it have shifted historically. For Latinxs, activism is often shaped by the specific dynamics of each group's migration to the United States and by their arrival into a particular context. Home country politics and transnational connections can remain important. Yet local activism to meet immediate needs and to address critical issues becomes important as well. Working within existing structures, Latinx communities have at times questioned and challenged those existing structures, as activists have addressed a wide variety of often intersecting issues. This course roots itself in the historical progression of Puerto Rican and Mexican-American activism, before turning to the social and political movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, as shaped by Puerto Ricans, Chicanos/as, Cubans, and Dominicans. The 1980s witnessed increased immigration from several Central and South American countries, arriving in the context of reactions to those political and social movements, as well as increased U.S. intervention in their countries of origin--a context that again shaped both local and transnational activism. Students' final projects will be anchored within this historical framing and within the lens of local and transnational activism, while moving forward in time to consider more contemporary dimensions of Latinx activism. [ more ]

HIST 386 SEM Latinas in the Global Economy: Work, Migration, and Households

Last offered Spring 2019

An increasingly global economy, from 1945 to the present, has affected Latinas in their home countries and in the United States. The garment industry, one of the first industries to go global, has relied extensively on Latina workers in their home countries and in the United States. Domestic work, a traditional field of women's work, also crosses borders. Challenging the myth that labor migration is a male phenomenon and that women simply follow the men, this course explores how the global economy makes Latinas labor migrants. What impact has the global economy and economic development had on Latinas' work and their households in their home countries? How have economic changes and government policies shaped Latinas' migrations and their incorporation in the changing U.S. economy? How have Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Dominican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan women confronted the challenges created by a globalizing economy and balanced demands to meet their households' needs? [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

The second half of the twentieth century came to be defined by two distinct, yet overlapping and intertwined phenomena: the Cold War and decolonization. In the two decades that followed the end of WWII, forty new nation-states were born amidst the bipolar struggle for global supremacy between the Soviet Union and the United States. Those new nations were swept up in the Cold War competition in ways that profoundly influenced their paths to independence and their postcolonial orders, but they often had transformative effects on the Soviet-American rivalry as well. In this course, students will focus on two related questions: How did decolonization influence the Cold War and the international behavior and priorities of the two superpowers? And what impact did the Cold War exert on the developing states and societies of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America? Course materials will consist of scholarly texts, primary sources, and films. [ more ]

HIST 389 SEM The Vietnam Wars

Last offered Spring 2021

This course explores Vietnam's twentieth century wars, including an anti-colonial war against France (1946-1954), a massive Cold War conflict involving the United States (1965-1973), and postcolonial confrontations with China and Cambodia in the late-1970s. Course materials will focus primarily on Vietnam's domestic politics and its relations with other countries. Lectures, readings, films, and discussions will explore the process by which Vietnam's anti-colonial struggle became one of the central conflicts of the Cold War, and examine the ramifications of that fact for all parties involved. The impact of these wars can hardly be overstated, as they affected the trajectory of French decolonization, altered America's domestic politics and foreign policy, invigorated anti-colonial movements across the Third World, and left Vietnam isolated in the international community. Students will read a number of scholarly texts, primary sources, memoirs, and novels to explore everything from high-level international diplomacy to personal experiences of conflict and dramatic social change wrought by decolonization and decades of warfare. [ more ]

HIST 391 SEM When India was the World: Trade, Travel and History in the Indian Ocean

Last offered Spring 2021

What do Ibrahim Ben Yiju, a Jewish merchant from 11th century Yemen, Ibn Batutah, a Muslim scholar from 15th century Morocco and Captain Kidd, a 17th century English pirate have in common? All three men travelled and lived in the Indian Ocean region! This course explores the history of one of the world's oldest maritime highways that has connected the diverse cultures of Asia, Africa and Europe for millennia, thus making it a vital element in the birth of globalization. Moving away from conventional land-centric histories, we will focus instead on understanding the human past through oceanic interactions. South Asian ports and port cities remained the fulcrum of the Indian Ocean world throughout its history; traders, travellers, nobles, scholars, pilgrims and pirates from all over the world travelled to the Indian coast in search of adventure, spices, knowledge and wealth. Thus we will primarily focus on India's role in the Indian Ocean roughly from the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE through the expansion of various European communities in the region and the subsequent rise of the global economy and colonialism in the nineteenth century. Rather than following a strict temporal chronology we will concentrate on themes such as travel and adventure; trade and exchange; trust and friendship; religion and society; pilgrimage; piracy; the culture of port cities; and food across time. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

The Middle Eastern refugee has become a central figure in debates on migration, asylum, and the right to belong in Europe, Asia, and North America. Often stereotyped as threatening, alien, and rootless, these migrants are generally depicted as lacking histories and by extension not worthy of consideration or empathy. This course invites students to understand some of the most tragic humanitarian crises of our time and the massive involuntary displacements provoked by war, violence, and/or climate change. Taking a global perspective, this seminar examines the history of displacement, refugees, migration, diaspora in a focusing on the nineteenth century through the present. With special attention to the historical experience of various peoples of the Middle East, the course will start with theoretical approaches to the study of migration and then delve into case studies, A range of different moments of displacement will be analyzed such as the experiences of Armenians, Jews, Palestinians, Syrian, Iraqis, and Kurds. By examining the human geography and politics of forced displacement and migration, this course will address a number of important academic and political questions: what makes a history written by, about, and for displaced people powerful? How can writing from the perspectives of refugees challenge core debates about identity, the nation and borders? How does the focus on displacement help in understanding the nature of war and conflict? [ more ]

HIST 409 SEM Crescent, Cross, and Star. Religion and Politics in the Middle East

Last offered Fall 2019

Is religion the most powerful force in the Middle East? Is religion becoming more prominent in the political sphere and what impact will that have on religious minorities and the status of women in the Middle East? Using a case study and historical approach, this course will consider the development of religiously inspired political ideologies in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th century. We will explore the experience of Iran, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan and evaluate role of religious actors, institutions, and ideologies in constructing national identities, policymaking, state-building, regime change, conflict, and war. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

What have been the most consequential ideas of the last 100 years? This course will explore some of the more audacious and ambitious plans to alter natural and urban environments in the late 19th century to the early part of the 21st, specifically those that sought to improve the human condition through science, engineering, and technology. By building big bold things, politicians around the globe sought to bring prosperity to their nation and embark on a path of modernity and independence. Through an intellectual, political and environmental history of major construction projects such as the building of the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam, extensive river valley developments in Iran, Turkey and Iraq, and utopian and futuristic city planning in western Asia, students will consider how, with the benefit of hindsight, to best evaluate the feasibility of such bold schemes. Who has benefitted and who has not, what have been some of the unanticipated consequences, what was sacrificed or neglected, and what do these projects tell us about the larger processes of global capitalism, decolonization, and climate change? [ more ]

HIST 414 SEM Merchant Cultures and Capitalist Classes in China and India

Last offered Spring 2015

As the expression "Chindia" in the title of a recent book suggests, contemporary commentators find it difficult to resist conflating the rise of China and India as economic powers in the early 21st century. There are, however, both significant parallels between the two national histories and important distinctions that shape their contemporary viewpoints and futures. This seminar will examine various historical dimensions of entrepreneurial activity in China and India from the early modern period through the twentieth century. It will focus on topics such as indigenous forms of merchant organization, the impact of nineteenth-century imperialism, the adoption of Western business forms and methods, and the relationship of entrepreneurial elites to the modern state. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2023

China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not colonized by a single Western power; instead several Western powers (and later Japan) exercised domination over China through a system of "unequal treaties" that granted them special privileges within Chinese territory. The years (1842-1943) in which these treaties were in effect is often called "The Century of Humiliation" by contemporary Chinese nationalists: a period of weakness that the rising Chinese nation still strives to overcome. The system imposed by these nineteenth century treaties, however, was a complex amalgam of legal, commercial, and residence privileges for foreigners in China that played a significant role in shaping the modern nation. One the most recognizable features of this system was the treaty port--an urban center designated as open to foreign residence, trade, and shipping. Extending from an initial five open ports to nearly fifty by the turn of the century, these ports became commercial and industrial centers that connected China to the global economy and created novel spaces of culture, labor, society, and politics. In this research seminar, we will use of several recent online collections of English-language primary source material to investigate the role of the treaty system and the treaty ports in modern Chinese history. The seminar will begin with an exploration of the historiography of the treaty system and "foreign presence" and culminate in an original research paper on a related topic of each student's choice. Throughout, we will work on general and specific research methods. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

In the twentieth century, Jewish history and humanitarian history became deeply intertwined. As the victims of persecution and expulsion, mass violence and genocide, Jews repeatedly figured as the recipients of aid and humanitarian intervention. At the same time, Jewish political figures, legal thinkers, intellectuals and scholars, social activists, and aid workers played central roles in the establishment of humanitarian organizations and in debates about the moral, political, and legal frameworks that have shaped approaches to humanitarianism across the decades since World War I. This research seminar is designed to open up big questions about the history of humanitarianism and to carve out space for students to conduct research on a particular place, time, and aspect of that larger history in conversation with other students working on related topics. In the first half of the semester, in discussions of common readings, we will examine various works of scholarship that connect to the history of humanitarianism from the nineteenth century to the present. Beginning in the first half of the semester and with greater intensity in the second half of the semester, you will conduct independent archival research on some aspect of the history of humanitarianism using the digitized archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, culminating in a twenty-plus-page paper. In the final weeks of the semester, the seminar will continue to meet weekly as a research colloquium, to provide a forum for you to present your research and drafts in progress and to give feedback on fellow students' work. In this seminar, we are not merely studying history; you are actually doing history. Over the semester, you will learn how to pose historical questions; to engage critically with readings beyond summarizing them; to synthesize an enormous amount of source material; and to learn how to write more clearly. The goal is for each student to produce a polished research paper based on engagement with archival sources and relevant secondary literature that will serve as a capstone to your coursework at Williams or as a potential jumping-off point for future research projects, including a senior thesis in History or Jewish Studies. [ more ]

Last offered NA

Debates about abortion, adoption, and birth control; and debates over who should be allowed to procreate and parent have generated major social, legal, and political conflicts in the United States. This course examines the history of those debates and conflicts, as well as their impact on the lives of individuals and on political culture. We will explore how legislative bodies, courts, medical experts, religious authorities, activists, and individuals have participated in those debates, and will pay particular attention to how class, race, religion, age, and sexuality have affected the experience of reproduction. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2023

This course engages Indigenous North American traditions of creative expression, remembrance, and representation in historical, contemporary, and future-facing ways. Drawing upon diverse Native American and First Nations theories and practices, it ranges widely across the continent to consider Indigenous arts and material culture within specific cultural, socioeconomic, and political contexts. Part of the course is grounded in the Native Northeast, including the Indigenous homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community in which the Graduate Art Program and Williams College are situated. Other units will focus on continuities and transformations in artistic and maker-traditions within and across specific Indigenous nations and communities. The course is especially interested in connections between past and present, and the innovative ways Indigenous artists, makers, and knowledge-keepers have reckoned with what has come before, while also mapping meaningful future pathways. Topics will include repatriation and community-led restorative efforts to bring home ancestors and important heritage items "collected" over the centuries following 1492; concepts and practices of cultural, intellectual, visual, and political sovereignty; decolonizing museums; the complex dynamics of collaboration; Indigenous, African-American, and Afro-Indigenous artistic connections and solidarities; and Indigenous challenges to Eurocentric and settler colonial approaches to preservation, interpretation, and classification. Seminar members will develop familiarity with methods and ethics grounded in Native American and Indigenous Studies, and with new scholarship by leading and emerging critics and creators. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2023

Material culture studies consider the dynamic relationships that people develop with the physical world. Tangible items like clothing, furniture, tools, and the built environment are all shaped by communities' identities, aspirations, resources, struggles, and forms of power. This course approaches North American histories through the lens of materiality, and examines how interdisciplinary methodologies can illuminate multiple or alternate understandings of the past--and its continuing impacts in the twenty-first century. While many historians emphasize written archives and documents as primary sources, scholars and practitioners of material culture studies center everyday as well as exceptional material items that communities have produced and interacted with over many generations. Equally important are the afterlives of these items. At different turns, and across time, social groups have cherished certain belongings; contested, rejected, or remade them; ascribed and activated meanings that may be very different from what the original makers conceived. These continuing transits compel reckoning with major issues of justice, rights, restitution, and sovereignty. The course traces key theories, ethics, and practices of caretaking, preservation, repatriation, curation, creative re-making, and digitization. Members will participate in a series of visits to area museums, collections, and meaningful places to deepen skills of critical analysis. The scope of the course is North American and at times transoceanic. It also includes substantial focus on our location in the Northeast and local formations of materiality and memory, as well as topics in Native American and Indigenous Studies, settler colonialism, and decolonizing approaches. Class members will build familiarity with appropriate techniques for approaching and handling different forms of material culture. They will also cultivate skills for developing and carrying out an original research project; and explore diverse modes of analysis and expression for representing the stories of materials and the communities who engage with them. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2023

The United States emerged from the Second World War with unprecedented power and influence; for the first time it was poised to take on a level of global leadership that it had long shirked. Yet the U.S. faced an uncertain world, marked by the ascendance of the communist-led Soviet Union as a rival superpower, the impending decolonization of European empires, the emergence of a nuclear arms race, and a host of changes to domestic American life. What ensued was a 45-year Cold War--a battle for the soul of mankind--marked by American officials' relentless determination to combat the threat of communism at home and abroad. This course explores a range of scholarly approaches to that conflict, focusing on high-level diplomacy, hot wars, propaganda, the cultural cold war, and more. In addition to reading and discussing works that exemplify key approaches to studying America's Cold War, students will develop an original research topic and research and write a 20- to 25- page paper, based in primary sources, on a Cold War-related topic of their choosing. [ more ]

HIST 464 SEM The United States and the Vietnam War

Last offered Spring 2016

U.S. involvement in Vietnam affected nearly every aspect of American life, including the country's overall foreign policy, its military strategy, the relationship between various branches of government, the nation's political trajectory, the role of media in society, youth culture, race relations, and more. This seminar explores America's war in Vietnam and its dramatic ramifications at home and abroad. We will evaluate the Vietnam War era as a turning point in U.S. history--and in the role of the U.S. in the world--by reading and discussing a number of scholarly works on domestic and international aspects of the conflict. Students will develop an original research topic and research and write a 20- to 25- page paper, based in primary sources, on one aspect of America's Vietnam War. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

Latinx migration histories are often told with sweeping data and within broad historical contexts. While these are important, the voices of the people leaving their home countries and coming to the United States can be lost or buried. During the 1970s, the emerging subfield of social history asserted the need to craft histories that took into consideration the everyday lives of everyday people. Oral history emerged a key tool in capturing the personal stories too often missed in historical archives. At the same time, Puerto Rican Studies, Chicano Studies, and later, Latinx Studies emerged to tell the histories of groups too often omitted from or misrepresented in the scholarship. These fields relied on traditions of testimonios or storytelling. This course focuses on Latinx oral histories, autobiographies, memoirs, testimonios, and other first-person narratives to explore how people are impacted by and experience those broad historical contexts, as well as how the decisions they make and the actions they take shape those broad historical contexts. As Latinx Studies is a field that has been at the forefront of exploring intersectionality, we also analyze how attention to first person narratives and lived experiences reveal the complexities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class, as well as other visible and invisible markers of difference. Examining first person narratives in the context of specific Latinx groups in particular historical, geographical, and social contexts, we interrogate the methodological and interpretive challenges of working with oral histories and other first-person primary sources. Course topics include the gendered dimensions of migration, geopolitics and stories of exile, and the connections between lived experiences and political activism, particularly the feminist activism of the late 1960s and 1970s-- all while students develop and share their own research topics. [ more ]

HIST 471 SEM Comparative Latina/o Migrations

Last offered Spring 2019

Since the 1970s, policymakers, scholars, the media, and popular discourses have used the umbrella terms "Hispanic" and "Latina/o" to refer to Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and more recent immigrants from Central and South American countries. As a form of racial/ethnic categorization, however, these umbrella terms can mask widely divergent migration histories and experiences in the United States. In this course, we develop theoretical perspectives and comparative analyses to untangle a complicated web of similarities and differences among Latino groups. How important were their time of arrival and region of settlement? How do we explain differences in socioeconomic status? How fruitful and appropriate are comparative analyses with other racial/ethnic groups, such as African Americans or European immigrants? Along the way, we explore the emergence of Latina/o Studies as an interdisciplinary and comparative field of study, as well as methods used in Latino and Latina history, specifically oral histories, government documents, newspapers, and interdisciplinary approaches. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union set in motion dramatic changes to the natural and built environments of many nations between 1945 and 1991. Nuclear test and missile launch sites, naval installations, military production operations, and border securitizations are just a few of the most obvious ways in which the stand-off between the two countries altered rural and urban landscapes around the world. But one can also see the Cold War as setting in motion less immediately direct but nonetheless profound changes to the way that many people saw and planned for the environments around them, as evidenced, for instance, by the rise of American suburbs, the reconstruction of postwar Europe, and agricultural and industrial initiatives in nations across the globe. We will begin this seminar by exploring several distinct "Cold War landscapes" in the United States and North America. We will then move on to briefly examining other areas around the world. Our approach to our topics will be interdisciplinary throughout the semester, with the additional goal of helping students frame and complete their final projects. Students are encouraged to write their research papers on any geographical area of the world that interests them. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2022

The Media have long played important roles in African societies. As early as the second half of the 19th century, African intellectuals were using print technology to address the people. As radio technology was in its infancy during the first half of the twentieth century, Africans were gathering around re-diffusion stations and later around single receivers to listen to news and entertainment programing. In this tutorial, we will examine these histories of media and media technologies on the continent. Ultimately, we will explore the roles that media played in serving particular community needs and how communities also adapted new media technologies to fit local conditions. Media content has historically been determined based on standards beyond viewers', readers' and listeners' control. We will examine the influences that editors and political leaders on the continent have exerted on content as well as what forces they responded to. We will also further explore the media's role in major events on the continent, from governmental changes to the ending of apartheid in South Africa and the role that media have played in areas of conflict. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

Almost all discussions of contemporary Taiwan reference the fierce debate over its sovereignty and international status: is the island of Taiwan an independent nation, or an "inalienable part" of the much larger and more powerful People's Republic of China? Part of the argument for Taiwan's separate nationhood derives from its claim to a unique history different from that of the P.R.C.. In this tutorial course, we will look closely at the distinctive aspects of Taiwan's history that underlie this claim, including its aboriginal populations, maritime history, experience of Japanese colonialism, settlement by mainland Chinese after World War II, role in the Cold War, and the development of a Taiwanese ethnic and political identity in the postwar period. We will also examine contemporary arguments for Taiwan as part of China. The goal of the course is neither to debate nor resolve the "Taiwan question", but to explore the history and historical arguments that inform it. [ more ]

HIST 482 TUT Race and American Foreign Relations

Last offered Fall 2020

From its origins, American society has been suffused with notions of white superiority and racial hierarchies that have underpinned the nation's foreign policy. Ideologies of race factored heavily into the nineteenth century process by which the United States expanded its territorial control across the North American continent and established an empire of its own. Racialized thinking persisted at the heart of U.S. foreign relations in the twentieth century, influencing everything from the administration of empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific and commercial expansion into central America to the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan, the diplomatic path to war in Vietnam, and more. The defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War II posed serious challenges to the premises of white supremacy, while ushering in a Cold War that would become inextricably bound with the process of decolonization. American diplomats were forced to recon with the challenges domestic racism posed to their foreign policy goals, while black internationalists became increasingly involved with global struggles for liberation and equality. While the global color line grew more hotly contested, white supremacist thinking proved as enduring as it was mutable. This upper division tutorial surveys leading scholarship on a range of topics that centers race as a category for understanding American foreign relations. [ more ]

HIST 483 TUT Sport and Diplomacy

Last offered Spring 2021

Sport has emerged in recent years as a hot topic of study among diplomatic historians. Once considered a marginal topic, sport is now seen as a critical window into the world of international relations. Recent works address not only official state policies pertaining to international sport, but also issues of nationalism, imperialism, racial ideologies, transnational migration, public diplomacy, culture in foreign relations, and the role of sport governing bodies in the international system. In this tutorial, students will read key essays and monographs that contribute to this emerging literature, alongside state-of-the field essays that explore the methodological and thematic approaches that historians have used to grapple with the complex interactions between countries, peoples, and cultures that occur within the realm of sport. [ more ]

HIST 489 TUT Appropriating History. Who Owns the Past?

Last offered Fall 2020

Who owns the past? How have modern states appropriated history? The political use of history is a critical ingredient in any nationalist discourse. In such narratives, the selective utilization of archaeology and ancient history often serves important functions in articulating a conscious and deliberate national history. Thus, in nationalist renderings, archaeological sites and artifacts are not merely relics of the past; they can also be potent and conspicuous symbols of national identity for the modern nation-state. In the Middle East, with its rich archaeological heritage, the relationship among politics, nationalism, and archeology has been particularly strong and interesting. This tutorial addresses the powerful nexus between history and nationalism with a special emphasis on the Middle East. It will explore the battle over who controls history and the "stuff" of history such as antiquities, land, heritage sites, and museum exhibitions and how that control has expressed itself in several Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran. Furthermore, it will discuss how archaeology entered the political discourse, the ethics of repatriation and appropriation, and archaeology's role in contested terrains and political disputes. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2025

The suburbs transformed the United States. At the broadest level, they profoundly altered spatial residential geography (especially in terms of race), consumer expectations and behavior, governmental policies, cultural norms and assumptions, societal connections, and Americans' relationship to nature. More specifically, the different waves of post-World War II suburban development have both reflected large-scale shifts in how power and money have operated in the American political economy; and set in motion deep-seated changes in electoral politics, in Americans' understandings of how their income should be used, and in how the built landscape should be re-imagined. This tutorial will explore the rich historical literature that has emerged over the last twenty years to provide students with a history of the suburbs, to see the suburbs as more than simply collections of houses that drew individual homeowners who wanted to leave urban areas. We will focus most of our attention on the period from 1945 through the 1980s. Some of the questions we will consider will include: how did the first wave of suburban development bring together postwar racial and Cold War ideologies? Is it possible, as one historian has argued, that suburbs actually created the environmental movement of the 1960s? And how have historians understood the role that suburbs played in America's conservative political turn, leading to the election of Ronald Reagan? [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2024

In modern scholarship, racism has most often been portrayed as a child of the European Enlightenment, a set of ideas about embodied human difference and its heritability that arose after the abandonment of the Biblical account of human creation and the rise of a new natural science. This tutorial asks: what racial ideas and practices preceded the Enlightenment? Beginning in the late Middle Ages, Europeans participated in enormous economic and cultural transformations, including increased global mobility and the establishment of new, transoceanic empires. Intensified interactions with people in the Americas, Africa, and Asia shaped European understandings of human difference, as did the burgeoning Atlantic economy and its cruelties. In this tutorial, we will place the emergence of modern racism in a long-term perspective, reconstructing the deep history out of which Enlightenment racial theory emerged. Proceeding both chronologically and thematically, we will consider how the major global transformations of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries shaped European racial understandings with enduring consequence. In the process, we will develop a conceptual vocabulary to describe in a historically sensitive manner how embodied human difference has been interpreted differently across space and time. Throughout, we will read a variety of historical primary sources in conjunction with recent scholarship. Ultimately, our historical study will afford a comparative perspective on contemporary views of races and racism. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2024

In recent years, scholars have turned increasing attention to global history in the pre-modern period. This tutorial takes as its focus the global Middle Ages: roughly speaking, the period between 500 and 1500 CE. This was a period that saw mass-produced consumer goods cross from China to India, East Africa, and the Middle East, inspiring admiration and imitation in multiple different markets. It saw games, music, and forms of literature become popular across continents, and saw religious communities forge networks spanning thousands of kilometers. To study the global Middle Ages is to place exchange and networks, both commercial and cultural, at the heart of our analysis. We will read and analyze many accounts by medieval travelers, merchants, and pilgrims who crossed Afro-Eurasia, alongside works by modern historians and archaeologists who have pieced together the patterns of movement and exchange that tied together the diverse societies of pre-modern Afro-Eurasia. [ more ]