Please note that courses with a gray background are not being offered this year.
HIST 104 SEM Race and a Global War: Africa during World War II
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 ]
Taught by: Benjamin Twagira
Catalog detailsHIST 109 TUT The Iranian Revolution
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 ]
Taught by: Magnús Bernhardsson
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 117 SEM Bombay/Mumbai: Making of a Modern Metropolis
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 ]
Taught by: Aparna Kapadia
Catalog detailsHIST 122 SEM The Black Death
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 ]
Taught by: Joel Pattison
Catalog detailsHIST 123 The Information State in Europe: from the Domesday Book to the Terror
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 124(F) SEM Horse, Tractor, Atom Bomb: The Eurasian Steppe from Prehistory to the Present
We tend to think about history in terms of nations, civilizations, and big events. What happens when we instead focus on a particular space--or an ecosystem? This seminar traverses the Eurasian Steppe: a grassland that stretches 5,000 miles from Hungary to China. From the Bronze Age to the Anthropocene, this territory has shaped our world. It was on the steppe that humans rode horses for the first time: a breakthrough that enabled Eurasia's great nomadic empires. For neighbors, the threat of invasion by the Scythians, Huns, or Mongols made the steppe a place of menace. In the imaginations of many Greeks and Romans (and later Russians and Chinese), the steppe was the dividing line between civilization and barbarism. In truth, it was often a site of cultural mixing--a premodern superhighway for the spread of religion, ideas, commodities, and disease. In modern times, governments have tried to tame the steppe and its nomadic peoples. From St. Petersburg, Moscow, Ulaanbaatar, Beijing, or Tokyo, they introduced new technologies: from the tractor to the border fence, and from the railroad to the atom bomb. In this class, we will grapple with the steppe's historical legacy, along with broader questions about place, borders, environment, technology, and cultural exchange. [ more ]
Taught by: Taylor Zajicek
Catalog detailsHIST 134 TUT The Great War
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 ]
Taught by: Alexandra Garbarini
Catalog detailsHIST 135 SEM The Coffeehouse from Arabia to the Enlightenment
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 ]
Taught by: Alexander Bevilacqua
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 143(F) SEM Soccer and History in Latin America: Making the Beautiful Game
This course examines the rise of soccer (fútbol/futebol) in modern Latin America, from a fringe game to the most popular sport in the region. Focusing especially on Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico, we will analyze the central role that soccer played as these countries faced profound questions about racial, gender, regional, and national identities. Using autobiographies, videos, and scholarly works from several disciplines, we will consider topics including: the role of race and gender constructions in the initial adoption of soccer; the transformation of this foreign game into a key marker of national identity; the relationship between soccer and political and economic "modernization"; the production of strong, at times violent identities at club, national, and regional levels; and the changes that mass consumerism and globalization have effected on the game and its meanings for Latin Americans. [ more ]
Taught by: Roger Kittleson
Catalog detailsHIST 144 SEM Brazil's Myth of Racial Democracy
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 ]
Taught by: Roger Kittleson
Catalog detailsHIST 152(S) SEM The Fourteenth Amendment and the Meanings of Equality
For more than 150 years, the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has served as the principal touchstone for legal debates over the meaning of equality and freedom in the United States. This course explores the origins of the 14th Amendment in the years immediately following the Civil War, and examines the evolution of that amendment's meaning in the century that followed. Central themes in this course include the contested interpretations of "birthright citizenship," "due process," "privileges and immunities," "equal protection," and "life, liberty or property"; the rise, fall, and rebirth of substantive due process; battles over incorporating the Bill of Rights into the 14th Amendment; and the changing promise and experience of citizenship. We will pay particular attention to how arguments about the 14th Amendment have shaped and been shaped by the changing meanings of racial and gender equality. [ more ]
Taught by: Sara Dubow
Catalog detailsHIST 155 TUT School Wars
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 156 SEM The Manifesto in U.S. Politics
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 ]
Taught by: Karen Merrill
Catalog detailsHIST 158(F) SEM North of Jim Crow, South of Freedom
This course analyzes the freedom struggle in the North during the twentieth century. Whereas black northerners drew from broader campaigns and traditions of black resistance, we will explore territorial distinctions in the region that otherwise have been flattened within the long history of civil rights discourse. To accomplish this aim, we will engage the following themes: black culture and radicalism; community formation and residential segregation; demographic and migratory transitions; deindustrialization and the war; gender and respectability politics; labor tensions and civil rights unionism; northern racial liberalism; and the influence of world affairs--all with an eye toward scrutinizing the freedom struggle in its northern variety. [ more ]
Taught by: Tyran Steward
Catalog detailsHIST 159(S) TUT Crossing the Color Line: A History of Passing
In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal emerged as a media spectacle and the subject of national scrutiny after her white parents stated publicly that Dolezal is a white woman passing as black. Their insistence that Dolezal is white came in the wake of her reports to local news media and police that she had been the victim of several hate crimes. To critics, Dolezal is a fraud who has committed cultural appropriation. Yet, for her supporters, Dolezal's racial identification as a black woman is authentic and indisputable, since race is not based on biology but rather is a social construction. For both groups as well as impartial observers, many wondered curiously why a white woman had chosen to pass as black, especially given that historically it has been African Americans who opted to become white. Inspired by the controversy surrounding Dolezal, this tutorial will explore the history of passing in the United States. Whereas our attention will primarily be focused on black-to-white passing, we will expand our understandings of passing by emphasizing the variety of ways that identities have been shaped through the crossing of boundaries--class, ethnic, gender, intellectual, political, religious, and sexual. To accomplish our goals, we will read and cross-examine fictional and nonfictional as well as primary and secondary historical accounts of boundary-crossers. We will also screen several films that engage the theme of passing. [ more ]
Taught by: Tyran Steward
Catalog detailsHIST 163 SEM Communications in Early America
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 ]
Taught by: Christine DeLucia
Catalog detailsHIST 166 TUT Cold War Films
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 ]
Taught by: Jessica Chapman
Catalog detailsHIST 170(S) SEM Chinatowns: Race, Culture, and Politics
In the late nineteenth century, in response to hostility and legal exclusion, Chinese migrants on the West and East Coast of the U.S. began to build self-reliant communities that became known, both to Chinese and non-Chinese residents alike, as Chinatowns. By the turn of the century, Chinatowns had sprung up in cities, from Chicago to Phoenix to San Diego. To some, Chinatown was a haven for Chinese migrants to socialize, worship, shop for familiar food, find jobs, and assimilate into the host country. Others have depicted Chinatown as a homogenously exotic and dangerous place that posed physical and moral threats to European American and other non-Chinese residents. What do the historical development and representations of Chinatowns tell us about U.S. history and the American imagination? What is the continued significance of Chinatown in the U.S.? This course will help students answer these questions through various primary and secondary sources--including novels, films, business advertisements, travel guides, and oral histories. With a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, we will explore themes including food and culture, labor migration, public health, gender and sexuality, segregation, displacement and gentrification, criminalization and immigrant detention, economic mobility, transnationalism and globalization, and political agency and alliance building. Students will leave this course with an understanding of the different theories, practices, and ethics involved in interpreting race, culture, and politics in American cities and ethnic neighborhoods. As a part of the final research project, students will have the opportunity to consult museum/archival collections on New York's Chinatown, learn from community members, and produce research that sheds light on some of the most critical issues that the neighborhood faces today. [ more ]
Taught by: Hongdeng Gao
Catalog detailsHIST 202 SEM Islam in Africa
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 ]
Taught by: Saadia Yacoob
Catalog detailsHIST 204(F) LEC Colonial Rule and Its Aftermaths in Africa
This course focuses on the history of Africa during the colonial and post-colonial periods, especially focusing on the period between 1885 and 2000. The first part of the course will explore the imposition of colonial rule and its attendant impacts on African societies. During this section, we will especially examine how Africans responded to colonialism, including the various resistance movements that arose at different moments to contest colonial rule. We will also explore the various transformations wrought by colonialism. The second part of the course will explore the African struggle to decolonize their societies and to fashion viable political systems. In addition to historical texts, the course will make use of cultural materials such as novels and films. [ more ]
Taught by: Benjamin Twagira
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 207(F) LEC The Modern Middle East
This survey course addresses the main economic, religious, political and cultural trends in the modern Middle East. Topics to be covered include the cultural diversity of the Middle East, relations with Great Powers, the impact of imperialism, the challenge of modernity, the creation of nation states and nationalist ideologies, the discovery of oil, radical religious groups, and war and peace. Throughout the course these significant changes will be evaluated in light of their impact on the lives of a variety of individuals in the region and especially how they have grappled differently with increasing Western political and economic domination. [ more ]
Taught by: Magnús Bernhardsson
Catalog detailsHIST 212 LEC De-Centering Imperial China, 960-1800
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 ]
Taught by: Anne Reinhardt
Catalog detailsHIST 213(S) LEC Modern China, 1600-Present
China's presence continues to grow in our world today, but contemporary China also evinces complex contradictions: a market economy promoted by a nominally Communist government, extremes of urban wealth and rural poverty, increasing participation in the international community and intensifying nationalist rhetoric. This course examines China's historical engagement with the modern world to offer perspective on its current conditions. We will begin with the Qing (1644-1911) conquest of China and consolidation of a multi-ethnic empire, and investigate China's encounters with Western and Japanese imperialism, the rise of Chinese nationalism, Republican and Communist revolutions, and the often turbulent history of the People's Republic. Throughout, we will examine themes of social, economic, intellectual, and cultural change through predominantly primary source reading and analysis. [ more ]
Taught by: Anne Reinhardt
Catalog detailsHIST 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 215(F) LEC Modern Japan: 1600-1950
This course introduces students to the historical trajectory of modern Japan from the mid 1600s through the 1950s. Students will trace major transformations in Japanese society, culture, and politics, while consistently examining how Japa's experiences intersect with broader global historical contexts. Using Japan as a lens through which to explore key topics in modern world history, this course encourages students to critically reflect upon familiar historical narratives and assumptions. Key themes include: European expansion into East Asia from the mid-16th to early 17th century, Dutch and Chinese influence on intellectual life during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868); the Meiji "Restoration" as situated within the context of 19th century Euro-American imperialism; constitutionalism as a global discourse and practice; imperial expansion; gender politics and state power; World War II and the US Occupation as pivotal moments in the intertwined histories of Japan and the United States. [ more ]
Taught by: Yehji Jeong
Catalog detailsHIST 216(S) SEM Remembering Nagasaki
On the morning of August 9, 1945, the B-29 military plane Bokscar dropped an atom bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing an estimated 74,000 people. The Fat Man plutonium bomb would be the second and last nuclear bomb used in a military conflict. The course will consider this monumental historical event against the backdrop of Nagasaki's fascinating history. For centuries, Nagasaki had been a place uniquely open to Western ideas, customs, and practices. During sakoku--Japan's more than two century long isolation from the international community--Nagasaki was the only Japanese port city to allow any form of Western trade. The course will look at this era, as well as the years when Nagasaki was a stronghold of Japanese Catholicism and a hub of Japan's persecuted "hidden Christians." The class will also give attention to the early Meiji period when Nagasaki, along with the rest of Japan, reopened its doors to international trade, introduced more liberal religious freedom policies, and initiated features of Western-styled modern industrialization--a time and place that inspired Puccini's famous opera, Madam Butterfly. A survey of this remarkable history--and the intersecting role of the United States in it--will shed light on both the manner in which the people of Nagasaki responded to the atom bomb and the narratives they constructed to interpret and remember it in the years that followed. [ more ]
Taught by: James Nolan
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 221 LEC South Asia: Colonialism to Independence, 1750-1947 CE
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 ]
Taught by: Aparna Kapadia
Catalog detailsHIST 222(F) LEC Greek History
This course covers the history of ancient Greece from the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean palace civilizations to the Roman conquest of the East Mediterranean (c. 2000-1 BC). We will study the development, expansion, and interactions of Greek society and its cultural expressions through a wide variety of textual sources and archaeological evidence across the Mediterranean basin and West Asia. How did the Greek world conceptualize and enact various modes of individual and collective status, construct political systems from one-man rule to popular democracy, and grapple with issues of memory and identity? How did the Greek world deal with victory and defeat, imperialism and subjugation, freedom and slavery, upheaval and decline? How should we approach the mythology about the origins of humanity, or the subsequent development of natural science and philosophy from Ionia to Athens and beyond? Why has this past continued to work as a mirror in subsequent periods, even up to our modern day? From the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces to the building of the Athenian acropolis, from autocratic warlords to the birth of democracy, from wandering merchants to Hellenistic kings, from Hesiod to Herodotus, Socrates, and Thucydides, this course will seek to reconstruct and understand the trajectory of ancient Greek society and culture from its early inception to its subjugation under Roman rule. All readings will be in translation. [ more ]
Taught by: Felipe Soza
Catalog detailsHIST 223 LEC Roman History
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 ]
Taught by: Felipe Soza
Catalog detailsHIST 224 LEC Introduction to Medieval Europe
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 ]
Taught by: Joel Pattison
Catalog detailsHIST 225(F) LEC Communal Europe: Solidarity and Power in the Medieval and Early Modern Age
Far from the spotlight shared by kings, popes, emperors, and explorers, the core unit of European life throughout the Middle Ages and early modernity was the community. This introductory course follows ideas of community across a millennium of European history as the continent's people interacted both locally and globally. Craft and prayer guilds, villages and towns, convents and monasteries, ships and militias, universities, parliaments and courts were all based on certain principles of horizontal and participatory power. At the root of brutal and protracted wars of dynastic rivalry were ordinary people bristling against the intervention of regional princes in their political and economic lives, for example. The fire of Reformation spread through radical pamphlets read aloud in pubs and town squares. Everyday interactions between neighbors were the baseline of European politics, for better or for worse. Our goal in this course, then, will be to examine central historical episodes and systems from the community up. In doing so, we will examine core concepts critically: did women -- or anyone -- benefit from a 'Renaissance' or realize they were living in 'modernity'? By semester's end, having navigated European lives from across the social hierarchy, students will become familiar with the major trajectories and interactions of officially-sanctioned violence, governance, systems of belief, and forms of solidarity in the millennium preceding the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century and its global echoes. [ more ]
Taught by: Ron Mordechai Makleff
Catalog detailsHIST 226 LEC Early Modern Europe
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 ]
Taught by: Alexander Bevilacqua
Catalog detailsHIST 228(S) LEC Europe in the Twentieth Century
From the vantage point of 1989, democracy's victory over fascism and communism in Europe in the twentieth century appeared decisive, even inexorable. From the present vantage point, however, the contingencies attending Europeans' commitment to democracy in the twentieth century have reemerged strongly, pointing toward a still uncertain future and a different reading of the past. This course offers a survey of twentieth-century European history with a focus on the political ideas and events, cultural movements, social relations, and intellectual developments that shaped peoples' experiences in and of Europe. Organized topically and thematically, the course considers imperialism and different mass political movements in the fin-de-siècle period; the Great War and its impact on European politics, society, and culture; the Russian Revolution and the ascendance of Stalinism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; interwar economic conditions; the coming to power of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany; World War II and the Holocaust; the war's aftermath and consolidation of Western European social democratic welfare states and Eastern European people's democracies; decolonization; the "economic miracle" of the 1950s; the uprisings of 1968; the development of the European Union; the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe; the break-up of Yugoslavia; recent debates about citizenship and European identity, migration and human rights, new Right political parties, and the recent war in Ukraine. Through a combination of mostly discussion and some lecture, the course seeks to introduce students to the major ideologies and institutions that shaped the lives of Europeans in the twentieth century, and to reflect on the role of ordinary people who devised, adapted, embraced, and sometimes resisted the dominant ideas and practices of their time. [ more ]
Taught by: Alexandra Garbarini
Catalog detailsHIST 230 LEC Modern European Jewish History, 1789-1948
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 ]
Taught by: Alexandra Garbarini
Catalog detailsHIST 233(S) LEC The Soviet Union and Its World
This survey explores the global history of the Soviet Union, a state that for more than 70 years ruled much of Europe and Asia. Yet the Soviet Union claimed to be more than just another country. Its founders aspired to embody--and spread--a universal ideology of world revolution and justice for all. Fueled by such ambitions, the party-state's influence eventually extended to every continent and from the ocean floor to outer space. This course considers the Soviet Union's paradoxical lives: as revolutionary experiment, authoritarian regime, Cold War superpower, and multinational empire. The approach is transnational. In addition to roving all 15 Soviet republics--from Armenia to Ukraine, to Uzbekistan--the course traces Moscow's global entanglements in culture, ecology, economics, and politics. It begins with the twilight years of the Russian Empire and continues until today. For the communist regime may have collapsed in 1991, but the Soviet world endures: in the memories of politicians, in the architecture of Berlin and Beijing, and in the ubiquity of the Russian language (by some counts, the second most used language on the Internet). Not least, world leaders still invoke the Soviet past--with all of its achievements and grudges--to justify their visions for the future. [ more ]
Taught by: Taylor Zajicek
Catalog detailsHIST 237 SEM The Life of Ancient Cities: Building, Belonging, Trading and Dying in Greece and Rome
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 ]
Taught by: Felipe Soza
Catalog detailsHIST 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 244(F) SEM Slavery and Colonization in the Caribbean Black Atlantic
Far from just being an attractive tourist destination for the developed world, the Caribbean has been the birthplace of what Haitian writer Michel Rolph Trouillot calls "the modern forms of economic and political governance." This course explores the history of the Caribbean from the first site of European encounter with the so-called "new world" to the eruption of the Haitian revolution in the late eighteenth century--the slave revolt that culminated in the construction of the first black nation-state. We begin with the convergence of empires that dominated the Caribbean, and the emergence of plantation economies that shaped both the linguistic and cultural diversity of the region and set the blueprint for its current economic systems. We consider the rise of modern notions of race and racism, as well as slave revolts and slave agency, the formation of religious syncretism and Afro-Caribbean culture, maroon populations, and the rise of piracy as a proto-type of democracy, among many other themes. Along the way, we theorize about the Caribbean region's centrality to the field of the Black Atlantic, the expansive field inaugurated by the luminary black theorist Paul Gilroy. [ more ]
Taught by: Rene Cordero
Catalog detailsHIST 245(S) SEM Revolution and Emancipation in the Caribbean Black Atlantic
Why did the Caribbean become the site of so much revolutionary upheaval? How did the multiracial societies of the Caribbean deal with the question of labor following the mass emancipation of the formerly enslaved during the rise of liberalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Starting with the Haitian revolution and ending with the Cuban revolution of 1959, we explore the global political implications and the seismic shifts in ideology and politics that unfolded in the Caribbean and reverberated across time and space. This course winds through the major questions and paradigm shifting events that have troubled the region and the scholarly debates the region has engendered, exploring how the Caribbean became the staging ground where modern ideas were put to the test. Among some of the themes explored in this course are the emergence of the U.S. as an imperial force, the complexities of race in the Caribbean, the Caribbean peasantry, labor recruitment, cultural attitudes, rhythmic and religious syncretism, and ecological change. Students will also theorize about the many definitions of the Caribbean, whether we can define the region as a geographical location, a shared cultural zone, a cradle of blackness, a dynamic racial melting pot, or some combination of all these. [ more ]
Taught by: Rene Cordero
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 254 LEC Sovereignty, Resistance, and Resilience: Native American Histories to 1865
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 ]
Taught by: Christine DeLucia
Catalog detailsHIST 255 SEM From Sand Creek to Standing Rock: Recent Native American Histories
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 258 LEC The Petroleum Age: A Global History
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 ]
Taught by: Karen Merrill
Catalog detailsHIST 263 SEM The United States and the World, 1898-2001
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 ]
Taught by: Jessica Chapman
Catalog detailsHIST 264(F) SEM Environmental History
This course is an introduction to Environmental History: the study of how people have shaped environments, how environments have shaped human histories, and how cultural change and material change are intertwined. As such, it challenges traditional divides between the humanities and the sciences. Taking U.S. environmental history as our focus, we will strive to understand the historical roots of contemporary environmental problems, such as species extinction, pollution, and climate change. We will take field trips to learn to read landscapes for their histories and to examine how past environments are represented in museum exhibits, digital projects, and physical landscapes. And we will develop original arguments and essays based on archival research. It is imperative that we understand this history if we are to make informed and ethical environmental decisions at the local, national, and global scale. [ more ]
Taught by: Laura Martin
Catalog detailsHIST 266 SEM The Roaring Twenties and the Rough Thirties
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 ]
Taught by: Tyran Steward
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 271 SEM Race and Inequality in the American City
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 ]
Taught by: Mason Williams
Catalog detailsHIST 272(S) LEC From Tocqueville to Trump: Leadership and the Making of American Democracy
America's founders didn't mean to create a democracy as we now understand the term. But since the Revolution, leaders have been fighting to make real for all Americans the promise of government of, by, and for the people. In this course, we will look at how leaders have marshaled ideas, social movements, and technological changes to expand the scope of American democracy--and the reasons they have sometimes failed. We will examine how founders such as Benjamin Franklin and James Madison envisioned the relation between the people and the government; how workers, African Americans, and women fought to participate in American politics; and how globalization, polarization, and inequality are straining American democracy and political leadership in the 21st century. We will examine leadership to better understand American democracy--and vice versa. We will ask: What explains why some leaders have succeeded where others have failed? Have some periods of American democratic politics been more amenable to particular kinds of leadership than others? What makes American political leadership distinctive in international comparison? Who, exactly, has been permitted to participate in American politics, and on what terms? How has the relation between the governors and the governed changed over time, and what factors and events have shaped those relations? How has America's democratic experiment compared with (and interacted with) democracy elsewhere in the world? Is America really a democracy at all? [ more ]
Taught by: Mason Williams
Catalog detailsHIST 273(F) LEC Going Nuclear: American Culture in the Atomic Age
This course will examine the historical development and use of the nuclear bomb. Among other features of the early atomic age, the course will look at the Manhattan Project, the delivery of the bombs for combat, the destructive effects of the bomb's initial use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ongoing testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands after WWII. The class will investigate the role of the nuclear arms race in the Cold War, the consequences of nuclear production on specific communities, and the implications of the atomic age on our critical understanding of technological innovation more generally. We will also consider the saliency of competing narratives interpreting America's decision (and continuing policies) to build, use, and stockpile nuclear weapons. Employing both sociological and historical perspectives, we will explore the interactions between science, politics, and culture in the nuclear age. [ more ]
Taught by: James Nolan
Catalog detailsHIST 276 SEM Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community Histories, Presents, and Futures
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 ]
Taught by: Christine DeLucia
Catalog detailsHIST 280 LEC Emancipation to BlackLivesMatter
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 ]
Taught by: Tyran Steward
Catalog detailsHIST 284(S) LEC Asian American History
This course offers an overview of Asian American history from the late seventeenth century to the present. It will cover the earliest Asian migration and settlement in the U.S., the rise of anti-Asian movements, the experiences of Asian Americans during World War II and the Cold War, the emergence of the Asian American movement in the 1960s, the post-1965 Asian immigration, and the War on Terror. We will investigate broader themes including labor, citizenship, political resistance, gender and sexuality, community formation, empire, and transnationalism. We will also consider key contemporary issues, including race and ethnic relations, anti-Asian harassment and violence, and the legacy of U.S. colonialism in Asia-Pacific. Along the way, we will engage classic and recent scholarship in the field, and form our own interpretations of the past based on a wide range of sources--including films, novels, newspapers, government documents, political cartoons, and more. Throughout, the course advances the argument that citizenship and belonging in the U.S. cannot be fully understood without accounting for the experiences of Asian Americans. [ more ]
Taught by: Hongdeng Gao
Catalog detailsHIST 285(F) LEC U.S. (Im)migration History: A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered
How do we reconcile the popular notion that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants with the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation's past? In this course, we will investigate how immigrants have come to be viewed as symbols of the United States' highest ideals and as existential threats to the nation's survival. We will also consider how immigrants themselves have shaped American institutions and ideas about political rights and citizenship. This course aims to go beyond traditional narratives of U.S. immigration, which have often focused on early 20th century migrants from Europe. By centering the experiences of African, Asian, and Latin American migrants and their descendants from the 19th century through the present, we will understand elements of American history--including settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, Asiatic Exclusion and U.S. imperialism--that the nation-of-immigrants paradigm leaves out and obscures. In addition to reading key academic works in the field, students will engage with a variety of primary sources, from newspaper articles and films, to memoirs, immigration files, and oral histories. Students will also get to develop a creative immigrant/family history project. Students will leave this course with a more nuanced understanding of current immigration politics--including the historical roots of immigration and border enforcement within and beyond U.S. territorial borders, and strategies of survival and resistance against xenophobia. [ more ]
Taught by: Hongdeng Gao
Catalog detailsHIST 286(F) SEM Latina/o History, 1848 to the Present
Latinx peoples and communities have a long history in the United States, histories that are too often erased or denigrated in contemporary, dominant discourses and in high school curricula. This course analyzes these histories, asking how and why such diverse groups of Latinx's have become part of the United States over such a long period of time. We uncover the origins of these communities in US conquest and imperialism, labor recruitment and globalizing economies, and human rights violations, as well as in US immigration, labor recruitment, and refugee policies. We consider the underlying tensions in US policies that often recruit Latinas and Latinos as low-wage workers, while nativist sentiments call for their exclusion. Within these contexts, Latinas/os/x's have developed survival and family reunification strategies for themselves, their families, and their communities. We begin in 1848, when the United States conquered half of Mexico's territory and moved the border, creating Mexican-American communities and the border region. At the end of the Cuban-Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States annexed Puerto Rico and has retained sovereignty to this day, declaring all Puerto Ricans to be U.S. citizens in 1917. We examine how these early conquests, continuing migrations, and early communities shaped the dominant US receptions of and varying contexts for Cuban, Dominican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and other Latinx migrations to and communities in the US. US im/migration and refugee policies have long defined who is eligible to enter and how, as well as who is deemed eligible for citizenship and belonging, often creating marginalization and undocumented people in their wake. [ more ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsHIST 292 SEM History of Sexuality
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 ]
Taught by: Saadia Yacoob
Catalog detailsHIST 301 SEM Approaching the Past: The Use and Abuse of History
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 ]
Taught by: Magnús Bernhardsson
Catalog detailsHIST 301 SEM Approaching the Past: Economic and Labor Histories in the Making of the U.S.
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 ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsHIST 301 SEM Approaching the Past: The Historian's Task
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 ]
Taught by: Alexander Bevilacqua
Catalog detailsHIST 301(F) SEM Approaching the Past: Transnational, Colonial, and Postcolonial Histories
This course examines the practice of history from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine the sources, methods, and theoretical assumptions that have shaped the historical craft in this period, as well as the deeper questions that all historians must confront, implicitly or explicitly: What is "history"? Who makes it and how? How do these questions figure into national, transnational, colonial and post-colonial histories? To address these issues, we will discuss the work of canonical and non-canonical historians from across the world, and from outside as well as inside the academy. The particular focus will be on the production of history from the rise of the nation-state through the spread of new imperialisms in the late nineteenth century and on to the emergence of the "Third World," decolonization, and the "new globalization" over the course of the twentieth century. In weekly meetings we will analyze texts and how their authors define historical subjects/actors and processes, as well as the meanings of history for different audiences and eras. [ more ]
Taught by: Roger Kittleson
Catalog detailsHIST 301(F) SEM Approaching the Past: Biographical Methods
This seminar grapples with the methodological, conceptual, theoretical, and ethical challenges of writing biography, and of using biography as an approach for understanding the past. We will ask how historians attempt to understand the past through the lives of individuals; and how historians attempt to understand the lives of individuals through a wide range of interpretive methods. As we explore the goals, challenges, and possibilities of the genre of biography as practiced by historians, we will consider questions about archival abundance and archival scarcity; about the contested meanings of "facts" and the function of imagination; and about the different scales and categories of analysis used by historians writing biographies. We will consider a variety of answers to these questions by reading theoretical work about history and biography, as well as by reading examples that represent a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. [ more ]
Taught by: Sara Dubow
Catalog detailsHIST 301(S) SEM Approaching the Past: Writing the Past
"History" refers to the aggregate of past events as well as to the branch of knowledge that seeks to understand those past events. Whereas history courses often take as their content the first of these two meanings of history, focusing on the politics, society, and culture of a particular place in a particular historical era, this course will examine history's often concealed "other" meaning: the practices of historians, their methods and assumptions. In so doing, this course aims to unsettle history majors' own assumptions about what history "is" and what historians "do". How do historians reconstruct the past, and how and why have their approaches to sources, theories, and narrative strategies changed over time? And on a deeper level, how have historians' suppositions changed--if they have changed--about the nature of historical truth, knowledge, and the value of history to the societies in which they wrote? Taking history-writing itself as our object of study, over the course of the semester we will read the work of twelve, quite different historians from the classical to the modern era. Each week in our seminar meetings, we will subject these texts to a careful reading in order to understand and assess these historians' theories and practices. [ more ]
Taught by: Alexandra Garbarini
Catalog detailsHIST 301(S) SEM Approaching the Past: Contemplating American Power
Historians have long debated how best to approach the study of U.S. "diplomatic history," which is now often subsumed under the more capacious descriptor "The United States and the World." In the 1960s, prevailing orthodox interpretations of American power--often patriotic and elitist--gave way to challenges from New Left revisionist historians who focused largely on economic motives for American imperialism. By the 1970s, however, the once dominant historical field of diplomatic history was beset by a sense of crisis; its practitioners consumed with anxiety over their marginalization in a discipline that embraced social and cultural theories that that seemed to render the narrow study of Western white men in power increasingly obsolete. For the past half-century, historians of American foreign relations have engaged in a sustained and ever-shifting debate, not only about the nature of American power, but over what can and should be included within the field's parameters. Today, annual meetings of the Society for American Foreign Relations--and its marquee journal, Diplomatic History--feature scholarship ranging from "traditional" approaches to those centered on gender, sexuality, race, cultural exchange, emotion, environmental studies, sports, music, and more. Yet, debates still rage about whether this broadening has enriched the study of American power, or diluted it to the point of meaninglessness while discouraging young scholars from pursuing critical research on high-level diplomacy. In this course, we will grapple with key historiographical schools and critical debates, and assess the current state-of-the-field of diplomatic history. [ more ]
Taught by: Jessica Chapman
Catalog detailsHIST 302(F) SEM Islamic Law: Past and Present
From fear of the Shari'a to its implementation in so called "Islamic countries," Islamic law is perhaps best associated with draconian punishments and the oppression of women. Islamic law is ever present in our public discourse today and yet little is known about it. This course is designed to give students a foundation in the substantive teachings of Islamic law. Islamic law stretches back over 1400 years and is grounded in the Quran, the life example of the Prophet Muhammad, and juridical discourse. Teetering between legal and ethical discourse, the Shari'a moves between what we normally consider law as well as ethics and etiquette. The course will explore four key aspects of the law: its historical development, its ethical and legal content, the law in practice, and the transformation of Islamic law through colonialism and into the contemporary. Specific areas we will cover include: ritual piety, family and personal status law, criminal law, and dietary rules. [ more ]
Taught by: Saadia Yacoob
Catalog detailsHIST 304(S) SEM Sacred Custodians: Environmental Conservation in Africa
In this seminar we will explore environmental conservation in Africa. In particular we will look at African ideas, ethics, and approaches to environmental conservation. Are there African ideas, ethics, and activities that are uniquely conservationist in nature? We will explore well-known African leaders to understand what spurred them to become conservationists, how they interpreted and communicated environmental crises. For example, Wangari Maathai is a world-renowned female scientist who established the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. This movement focuses on addressing the problem of de-forestation. Ken Saro-Wiwa was an activist in Nigeria who fought for and alongside local communities against multinational oil corporations. We will examine these and other African conservation practices alongside popular images of environmental crisis that place blame for environmental degradation on Africans. Students will be invited to critically study histories of environmental management on the continent and the emergence, development, and impact of the idea of conservation. We will unpack the rich histories of conservation efforts in Africa, such as resource extraction, game parks, desertification, wildlife and hunting, traditional practices, and climate change. [ more ]
Taught by: Benjamin Twagira
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 306 SEM Indigenous Narratives: From the Fourth World to the Global South
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 ]
Taught by: Amal Eqeiq
Catalog detailsHIST 307 SEM To Die For? Nationalism in the Middle East
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 ]
Taught by: Magnús Bernhardsson
Catalog detailsHIST 308 SEM The Nile
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 ]
Taught by: Magnús Bernhardsson
Catalog detailsHIST 309 SEM Fire and Ice: The History of Modern Iceland
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 ]
Taught by: Magnús Bernhardsson
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 311 Women Warriors, Colonial Soldiers, and Slave Armies: Soldiering and Warfare in African History
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 312 SEM The Mughal Empire: Power, Art, and Religion in India
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 313(F) SEM The People's Republic: China since 1949
This course provides a close examination of the six decades of the history of the People's Republic of China, from the 1949 Revolution to the present day. Through readings and discussion, we will explore the multiple political, economic, social, and cultural factors that contributed to the idealism of the "golden age" of Communist Party leadership (1949-65), the political violence of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the profound transformation of the Reform Era (1978-present) as well as the motors of change in China today. Course materials will include films, novels, and ethnographies, as well as secondary analyses. Please note that this is a discussion seminar and not a survey course. [ more ]
Taught by: Anne Reinhardt
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 316(F) SEM A History of Colonialism: Colonial Korea under Japanese Rule
Modern empires constructed their own modernity in relation to their colonies, while the modernity of colonies was shaped within the structure of imperial domination. As with many other colonized regions, Korea's modern history cannot be fully understood without grappling with the history of colonialism. Conventional historiography has long treated the Japanese Empire and its colonies as an exceptional case, characterized by a distinctive form of empire-colony relationship different from European imperialism. This course critically reconsiders the notion of Japanese exceptionalism and its implications by situating Korea's colonial experience within global imperial structures. This seminar investigates the formation and operation of modern empire and colonialism through the case of colonial Korea. Using a range of primary sources alongside secondary scholarship--including historical analyses, theoretical texts, and critical readings--students will develop a critical framework for interpreting empire and modernity. Topics include Japan's annexation of Korea and the diverse forms of Korean resistance. These cases provide a lens through which we will explore the relationship between colonialism, international law, and the global nation-state system. We will also examine how the emergence of nationalist discourse and the very idea of the nation were deeply entangled with the global order of imperialism. Through key concepts such as temporality, modernity, power, gender, and space, we will analyze the structural mechanisms and everyday operations of colonial rule. The course concludes with a study of wartime mobilization during the Asia-Pacific War, focusing on how race, sexuality, and imperial violence intersected in shaping colonial subjects and lived experiences during total war. [ more ]
Taught by: Yehji Jeong
Catalog detailsHIST 317(S) SEM History from the Periphery: Manchuria and the Modern World
Have you ever heard of "Manchuria"? Known today as the three northeastern provinces of the People's Republic of China, this region borders both Korea and Russia and lies just west of Mongolia. Often treated as a peripheral space from central governments of China, Korea, Russia, and even Japan, this region experienced a distinct historical trajectory distinct from those of national centers. How should we understand this peripheral history? How can a history written from the margins illuminate what remains obscured from the vantage point of the center? This course examines the dynamics of "centers" and "peripheries," focusing on how this relationship has been continually reshaped and reconceptualized through the historical experience of Manchuria. By approaching history from a transnational perspective, students will explore its layered complexities and consider how those complexities have been narrated and historicized. Further, by engaging with marginalized histories, students will gain deeper insights into core concepts that have shaped the modern world, such as the nation-state, empire, modernity, and nationalism, while questioning assumptions that often underlie them. Topics include: toponyms and power; the expansion of the Qing, Russian, and Japanese empires and their impact on the region's socio-economic transformations; the rise of global capitalism and railway imperialism; the limitations and contradictions of modern nation-states, multi-ethnic and global migration, the establishment of the client state of Manchukuo and its aftermath. [ more ]
Taught by: Yehji Jeong
Catalog detailsHIST 318 LEC Nationalism in East Asia
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 ]
Taught by: George Crane
Catalog detailsHIST 319(F) SEM Gender and the Family in Chinese History
Although sometimes claimed as part of a set of immutable "Asian values," the Chinese family has not remained fixed or stable over time. In this course, we will use the framework of "family" to gain insight into gender, generation, and sexuality in different historical periods. Beginning in the late imperial period (16th-18th Centuries), we will examine the religious, marital, sexual, and child-rearing practices associated with traditional ideals of family. We will also examine the wide variety of "heterodox" practices that existed alongside these ideals, debates over and critiques of gender, family, and sexuality in the twentieth century and in China today. [ more ]
Taught by: Anne Reinhardt
Catalog detailsHIST 320 Food in South Asian History: Society, Culture and Politics
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 325 LEC Faith and Profit in the Medieval Mediterranean
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 ]
Taught by: Joel Pattison
Catalog detailsHIST 326 SEM The Crusades: 1050-1550
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 ]
Taught by: Joel Pattison
Catalog detailsHIST 327 SEM The Byzantine Empire, 330-1453 CE
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 ]
Taught by: Joel Pattison
Catalog detailsHIST 328(F) SEM European Histories of Fascism
How and why did past societies become fascist? This course explores the ideologies and practices of fascist movements and regimes in Europe, focusing especially on the histories of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany in the 1920s-1940s. Our goal will be to develop a deeper understanding of how everyday people, institutions, and authorities variously embraced, adapted themselves to, coped with, and sometimes resisted the rise and rule of illiberal regimes. We will study a range of topics and debates, including ideological precursors and definitions of fascism; key figures who established themselves as leaders, organizers, and ideologues; fascist aesthetics; attitudes about gender and sexuality; the centrality of racism and antisemitism; the entanglement of imperialism with fascism; and fascism's legacies after 1945 in Europe. In conjunction with this year's "On the Log" initiative, we will place at the center of our discussions the local and community, which featured prominently in fascism's history as political constructs, social contexts, and bearers of emotional-psychological meaning. [ more ]
Taught by: Alexandra Garbarini
Catalog detailsHIST 329(S) SEM Shockwaves of Contact: Europe's Global 1520s
Between 1517 and 1533, the turmoil within Europe was matched only by its rapidly shifting place in the world. Christendom was definitively split between Catholicism and a variety of Protestant sects even as Franciscans were busily spreading the gospel to indigenous peoples across the globe. Spain toppled the Aztec and Inka empires and Portugal established one in the Americas as the Songhai Empire in modern-day Mali reached cultural heights, the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificentrepeatedly threatened to conquer central Europe and the Mughal Empire of South Asia soaked up European wealth. Peasants and townspeople rose up against European aristocracies as far-flung as Castille and Swabia just as the 'new monarchies' of France, Iberia, and England were establishing the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state. Magellan first circumnavigated the globe just as European intellectuals were beginning to grapple with the absence of the Americas from their cosmography--all while the printing press was first emerging as a mass media. In particular, the prolonged encounter of conquistadors and missionaries with the Americas was deeply destabilizing for European religious and intellectual perceptions of the world order, fueling the kind of disillusionment and confusion that helped spread the Protestant Reformation and the intellectual ferment it bred. This course emphasizes the intellectual and cultural go-betweens of this moment of monumental shifts and contradictions: translators, diplomats, notaries, printers, and spies. Other topicswill include sea monsters, the Lost Indian theory, the Inka knot-based record-keeping system of the khipu, inter-continental diplomacy, the retinues of Cortès and Columbus, the libraries of Timbuktu, and the Florentine Codex; we will visit Special Collections for inspiration on two occasions. [ more ]
Taught by: Ron Mordechai Makleff
Catalog detailsHIST 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 333(S) SEM Empires at War: Colonialism and Armed Conflict since 1800
In the 19th and 20th centuries, a vast and unprecedented amount of the world was conquered or claimed by an overseas empire. Though the largest empires, those of Britain and France, belonged to Europeans, these were soon rivaled by the militarized expansion of powers like Japan and the United States. As they expanded and collapsed, the new imperialists of the 19th and 20th centuries engaged in near-constant warfare, from campaigns of conquest and counterinsurgency to punitive raids, blockades, and "humanitarian" interventions. This course explores how modern empires waged war, as well as the varied strategies used to resist imperial forces, from guerilla warfare to mass uprisings. Resistance, however, is only part of the story, and students will also analyze the complex histories of colonized peoples who served in the militaries of a colonizing power. Key questions addressed in the course include the following: what legal frameworks and ideologies emerged to justify colonial conquests? How was colonial violence mediatized and perceived by interested publics in an increasingly globalized world? What consequences did so-called "small wars" have for local populations and their environments, as well as the broader international order? How was colonial warfare tied to global conflicts, most notably World Wars I and II? Finally, what characterized the armed conflicts of decolonization, and what legacies did these struggles leave for today's world? [ more ]
Taught by: Charles Begue Fawell
Catalog detailsHIST 334(S) SEM The Environmental History of the Russian and Soviet Empires
The Soviet Union, like the Russian Empire before it, straddled one-sixth of the planet's landmass. Both powers drew on this territory's vast resources--organic, mineral, animal, and human--to dominate their neighbors and exert power on the world stage. In so doing, they dramatically reconfigured local ecosystems, from Central Asian deserts to Pacific Islands. This seminar traces the interplay between empire and environment across three eras: Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet. Its approach is comparative, framing developments in Northern Eurasia alongside those in China, Europe, and the US. The course asks: How have modern states transformed land, water, and air? In turn, how has the natural world shaped diverse political projects? And what legacies have these encounters left for today? Topics include settler colonialism, energy transitions, "natural" disasters, warfare, environmentalism, scientific diplomacy, climate change, and the comparative ecological footprints of capitalism and communism. While the methodology is historical, students will engage materials from across disciplines with an eye towards today's political and ecological dilemmas. [ more ]
Taught by: Taylor Zajicek
Catalog detailsHIST 336(F) SEM The Black Sea: A Case Study in Transnational and Comparative History
Few places on Earth better illustrate geography's influence on foreign affairs than the Black Sea region. The sea is enormous, but it is connected to the world ocean only by the narrow Turkish Straits. This hydrological bottleneck has made the sea one of global history's most strategic and contested territories. This class traces the Black Sea's history across many centuries--from Greek colonization in the eight-century BCE to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In many narratives, the Black Sea is a fault line between dueling binaries: Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, communism and capitalism, NATO and the USSR, and now, the West and Putinist Russia. This course explores these tensions, but it also studies the Black Sea as a zone of exchange. The sea's powers--Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Soviet, Turkish, Caucasian, and Balkan--managed to cooperate and learn from one another too. Indeed, the Black Sea eventually became a laboratory for many of modernity's biggest experiments. Topics include warfare, revolution, migration, ethnic cleansing, decolonization, nationalism, communism, and international environmental governance. Seminar participants will get acquainted with an often-overlooked region, while workshopping useful methods in transnational, comparative, and longue durée history. [ more ]
Taught by: Taylor Zajicek
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 341 SEM The European Enlightenment
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 ]
Taught by: Alexander Bevilacqua
Catalog detailsHIST 342(F) SEM Borders and Frontiers in Latin America and the Caribbean
When we think about the politics of borders and migration, we usually imagine the contentious U.S.-Mexico border. Seldom do we care to think about the numerous borders across Latin America and the Caribbean that are currently at the heart of our present refugee and migrant crises. While not relegating the U.S-Mexico border to secondary importance, this course will use our understanding of the U.S.-Mexico frontier to understand the history of borders and frontiers in Latin America and the Caribbean and how they were pivotal to Latin American racial and state formations and nation-building processes. Students will discover how borders and frontiers, as both a geographical demarcation and an imaginative conceptualization of difference, created overlapping and competing visions of race, racism, identity, belonging, and social marginalization. Beginning with the tumultuous Latin American independence movements of the nineteenth century and ending with Latin America in the twenty-first century, we will analyze the different creation of borders and frontiers in the Americas to make sense of today's migration and border control crises. [ more ]
Taught by: Rene Cordero
Catalog detailsHIST 343(S) SEM The Global 1960s in Latin America and the Caribbean
During the 1960s young people took the world by storm, and in Latin America they barraged the public sphere with unmatched intensity. An emerging historical field of study, the "Global 1960s" merges the geopolitical concerns of the Latin American Cold War with the broad cultural transgressions that fueled youth and student movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. The course begins by examining the influence of the Mexican Revolution on 1960s student movements and ends by considering the cultural and political legacies that the Global 60s bequeathed to our neoliberal contemporary world. In this course, students explore the rise of university politics and student movements, mass media and the theatre of politics, the emergence of revolutionary and armed struggles, the cultural transgressions of youth that introduced libertarian notions of sex, gender, and race, and the fundamental debate between the collective good vs individual liberty that continue to inform our conversations in the present, among other themes. [ more ]
Taught by: Rene Cordero
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 347 SEM Democracy and Dictatorship in Latin America
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 ]
Taught by: Roger Kittleson
Catalog detailsHIST 352(F, S) SEM American Maritime History: A History of American Coastal and Ocean-Going Communities
This course explores the people who lived along America's coasts, who sailed its waters, and whose labors on land and sea shaped their community's lives and livelihoods. We cover centuries (seventeenth-twentieth) and oceans as we delve into these experiences, and in doing so discuss issues ranging from colonization, dispossession, and war, to food, healing, and sexuality. We will also consider the strategies scholars use to explore these experiences, including those whose lives left scant "traditional" primary sources behind. The water creates a unique space for the formation of new communities and identities, while also acting as an important, and often exploited, resource. We will sample from different fields of inquiry including labor, environmental, cultural, and political history to gain a deeper understanding of diverse people's complex interactions with the oceans and seas. [ more ]
Taught by: Sofia Zepeda
Catalog detailsHIST 355(S) SEM From Globalization to Fast Fashion: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Issues
This course examines the historical origins of globalization and fast fashion in the US garment industry, asking how we got here and what the implications are of fast fashion as a contemporary issue. Historically, New York City was the center of the US garment industry, home to the designing, merchandising, and the making of clothing. Yet as US garment manufacturers sought to increase profits by lowering their labor costs, they separated "fashion" from "production," with New York City remaining a fashion center and with sewing relocated to other locations via globalization. Having long relied on women and immigrant workers, the US garment industry turned extensively and repeatedly to Latinas as workers in the U.S. and in their countries of origin, with lasting impacts on Latina workers and their communities. The course begins with a foundation in the history and structure of the garment industry, focusing on New York City and early globalization to Puerto Rico, as well as other Caribbean countries. Continuing to consider both "clothing capitalists" and Latina workers, we then turn to Los Angeles and to maquiladoras along the US-Mexico border, as well as in Central American countries. The emergence of "fast fashion" built on the historical structure and trends in the garment industry, arguably accelerating and intensifying the impacts on workers and their communities, as well as on the environment and wages globally. These are some of the contemporary issues we will explore, along with the various local and transnational responses to globalization and fast fashion, historically and in the contemporary era. [ more ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsHIST 356(F) SEM New York City Politics: The Urban Crisis to the Pandemic
This course examines New York City's political history from the 1970s to the present-a period during which the city underwent staggering economic and social changes. In the mid-1970s, New York was a poster child of urban crisis, plagued by arson and housing abandonment, crime, the loss of residents and jobs, and failing public services. By the early 21st century, the city had largely met these challenges and was once again one of the most diverse and economically vital places on earth-but also one marked by profound inequality. This course will examine how New Yorkers have contested core issues of capitalism and democracy-how those contests have played out as the city itself has changed and how they have shaped contemporary New York. Broad themes will include the city's role as a showcase for neoliberalism, neoconservatism, technocratic centrism, and progressivism; the politics of race, immigration, and belonging; the relation of city, state, and national governments; and the sources of contemporary forms of inequality. Specific topics will include policing, school reform, and gentrification. As the primary assignment in the course, students will design, research, and write a 20-page paper on a topic of their choice. [ more ]
Taught by: Mason Williams
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 361 SEM The Atlantic World: Connections, Crossings, and Confluences
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 ]
Taught by: Christine DeLucia
Catalog detailsHIST 364 SEM Asia and Asian Americans During the Cold War
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 366(F) SEM What They Saw in America
This course traces the travels and writings of important observers of the United States, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G.K. Chesterton, Sayyid Qutb, and Wang Huning. The course will consider their respective journeys: Where did they go? With whom did they talk? What did they see? The historical scope and varying national origins of the observers provide a unique and useful outsider's view of America--one that sheds light on persisting qualities of American national character and gives insight into the nature and substance of international attitudes toward the United States over time. The course will analyze the common themes found in the visitors' respective writings about America and will pay particular attention to their insights on religion, democracy, agrarianism, capitalism, and race. [ more ]
Taught by: James Nolan
Catalog detailsHIST 367(S) SEM Black History is Labor History
This seminar explores labor history in relation to black people, spanning the colonial period to the early twenty-first century. It racializes the history of work by tracing the long story of black labor in the U.S. from the plantation to the plant. Whereas the bulk of the course will analyze black labor and labor movements in the twentieth century, specifically focusing on the push for economic inclusion and mobility amid employment, societal and union-related racial discrimination, we will examine what involuntary black labor meant in the context of slavery and the construction of a capitalist economy. Likewise, we will devote attention to black workers with regard to such topics as antiunionism, deindustrialization, economic inequality, Fordism, informal economies, Jim and Jane Crow, labor radicalism and violence, New Deal and welfare, the rise of civil rights unionism, and slavery and capitalism, among other themes. [ more ]
Taught by: Tyran Steward
Catalog detailsHIST 372(F) SEM The North American West: Histories and Meanings
This course will explore the various and contested histories of the geographical region in North America that Americans often call "the West." With porous boundaries; changing empires and national borders; an extraordinarily diverse mix of peoples; and most importantly, continuous Indigenous presence to the present day, this region poses foundational questions about the construction of American history. What if, from the vantage point of the 1780s, we look not at the founding of the United States in the East but at the elaboration of the Spanish mission system in California and other parts of the Southwest? What if, instead of understanding "the West" as a place that people migrated "to" from "the East," we think about "the West" as a place diversely inhabited for thousands of years that experienced very sudden and violent forms of military conquest and settler colonialism, as well as waves of migration from many different compass points around the globe? And where do Americans narratives of western "individualism" fit into the histories of massive federal interventions in "the West"? We will take up these and many other questions as we examine topics from the era before Europeans arrived in North America to the present day. [ more ]
Taught by: Karen Merrill
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 376(S) SEM Sex, Gender, and the Law in U.S. History
This course explores that ways in which the law has defined and regulated gender and sexuality in the United States, and the ways that individuals have experienced and responded to those definitions and regulations. We will evaluate how the law has dictated different roles for men and women, how sexual acts have been designated as legal or illegal, and the ways that race, class, and nationality have complicated the definition and regulation of gender and sexuality. This course examines how assumptions about gender and sexuality have informed the creation and development of American law and the changing meanings of citizenship; considers how laws regulating sex and gender have yielded varied effects for men and women across race and class divides, challenging some differences while naturalizing others; and assesses the power and shortcomings of appeals to formal legal equality waged by diverse groups and individuals. Throughout the course, we will consider the various methodologies and approaches of the interdisciplinary field of legal history. Topics to be covered will include the Constitution, slavery, marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance, immigration, sexual violence, reproduction, abortion, privacy, suffrage, jury duty, work, and military service. [ more ]
Taught by: Sara Dubow
Catalog detailsHIST 377(F) SEM A Global History of Mass Dictatorship
What if the majority supports dictatorship? Is it dictatorship or democracy? How far is the contemporary American democracy from Alexis Tocqueville's observation of America as the 'tyranny through masses'? What's the dividing line between democracy and dictatorship? How could the communist regime use the metaphor of 'people's democracy' to justify the proletarian dictatorship? How distant is Mao Zedong's 'dictatorship by the masses' from the plebiscitary democracy? How different is the French Jacobin's 'Sovereign dictatorship' from the Fascist's 'new politics' based on popular sovereignty? How different is Jacobin's 'totalitarian democracy (Jacob Talmon)' from the Cold War paradigm of totalitarianism? 'Mass dictatorship' as a historical oxymoron is a hypothetical answer to those questions. This course is designed to encourage students to respond independently to those questions. Putting comparatively diverse dictatorships, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, Maoism, developmental dictatorships, and (neo-)populisms in a global historical perspective, this seminar course would raise doubt about the conventional binary of democracy and dictatorship and problematize the Western democracy. This course is motivated by "how to democratize contemporary democracy." As a participatory observer of the American presidential election 2024, we will investigate a global history of mass dictatorship with a critical gaze. [ more ]
Taught by: Jie Hyun Lim
Catalog detailsHIST 383 SEM Religion and American Capitalism
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 384(F) SEM Comparative History of Science and Medicine in Asian/Pacific America, 1800-Present
How have scientific knowledge and medicine been tools of exclusion, violence, and imperial control against Asian Americans, as well as indigenous peoples, Black, Latinx, and white migrants, and their descendants? How have these groups negotiated and resisted encounters with such knowledge from the 19th century to the present? This seminar explores these questions by examining a series of case studies--including American colonial medicine and science in the Philippines and Hawai'i, Cold War migration of Chinese scientists and South Asian doctors to the U.S., and the politics of HIV/AIDS, psychiatry, and culturally competent care in Black, Asian, and Cuban migrant communities. Together, we will survey the literature in history, English, Global Health, Sociology, and other fields and consider how the Asian/Pacific American experience in science and medicine has been integral to, as well as informed by, the experiences of other groups in the transpacific world. Students will leave this course with interdisciplinary tools for understanding present-day health inequities in underserved Asian/Pacific American communities and other marginalized groups. [ more ]
Taught by: Hongdeng Gao
Catalog detailsHIST 385 SEM Latinx Activism: From the Local to the Transnational
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 ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 388 SEM Decolonization and the Cold War
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 ]
Taught by: Jessica Chapman
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 395(S) SEM Victimhood Nationalism in Global History & Memory
As globalism of the 21st century has shifted its focus from imagination to memory, the global memory culture focusing on victims has dawned on us as an undeniable reality with the entangled memories of: Apartheid, American slavery, and white settler genocides of the indigenous peoples; German empire's colonial genocide of the Nama and Herero in Namibia and the Nazi Holocaust; the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust; Vietnam War and Algerian war; Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; Japanese military "comfort women" and gendered violence during the Yugoslav Wars; forced sexual labor in the Nazi concentration camps and sexual slavery of the Islamic State; political genocide of Stalinism and the Latin American military dictatorships; civilian massacres of developmental dictatorships in the global Cold War era. Global memory formation intensified the victimhood competition among national memories. Victimhood nationalism epitomizes nationalism's metamorphosis under the globalization of memory in the 21st century. This course will trace the mnemo-history of victimhood nationalism, focusing on the entangled memories of Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea in the global memory formation. Other case studies, including former Yugoslavia, post-9/11 America, will also be discussed. [ more ]
Taught by: Jie Hyun Lim
Catalog detailsHIST 402 SEM Displacement: Global Histories of Refugees and Forced Migration
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 ]
Taught by: Magnús Bernhardsson
Catalog detailsHIST 404(F) SEM History of Uganda: A Research Seminar
In his travelogue published in 1908, Winston Churchill nicknamed Uganda "The Pearl of Africa," a moniker that has stuck to this day; ordinary Ugandans and visitors alike cite this flattering title in spite of its colonial roots. In this seminar we will explore the history of the Ugandan nation. Not only will we examine the histories of colonialism and the colonial origins of the Ugandan nation, but also the various heritages that different societies brought to the entity that we call "Uganda" today. The topics to be covered include resistance to colonial rule, the environment, nationalism and decolonization, histories of religion, health and healing, women and gender, minorities, the military, urbanization, and independence. Importantly, we will also explore the methods and sources for studying Uganda. Through field trips to archival repositories, students will gain an understanding of the types of sources that exist on Uganda and their limitations. In order to foster an Interdisciplinary approach, students will be exposed to a variety of primary and secondary sources. Students will develop an original research topic which culminate in a 25-page paper based on a primary source of their choice. Students are encouraged to write their main paper on any time period and geographic region of Uganda. [ more ]
Taught by: Benjamin Twagira
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 413 SEM The Big Ideas: Intended and Unintended Consequence of Human Ambition
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 ]
Taught by: Magnús Bernhardsson
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 415(S) SEM Post War Japan
The Japanese empire collapsed following the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Emperor Hirohito's radio announcement of Japan's defeat was swiftly followed by the U.S. occupation, marking the beginning of a profoundly transformed political and social order. Japan's contemporary identity remains deeply shaped by collective memories of empire, war, and defeat. This course explores the historical trajectories of Japan and its surrounding region since 1945, with particular attention to the global Cold War order, U.S. militarism, and neo-colonial structures. Through engagement with a range of primary sources, critical literature, and theoretical writings, students will examine postwar Japan's experiences within the broader context of global historical structures. Topics include: the U.S. occupation and the Tokyo Trial; U.S. military bases in Okinawa; lingering remnants of empire; women's rights and U.S hegemony; social movements and political violence in the 1960s; economic growth and the post-Bubble era; war memories; and the nuclear bomb and Fukushima. [ more ]
Taught by: Yehji Jeong
Catalog detailsHIST 417 SEM The Treaty System and Treaty Ports of China, 1840-1945
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 ]
Taught by: Anne Reinhardt
Catalog detailsHIST 423(S) SEM Ships, Trains, Planes, and People: A Global History of Mobility (18th century--present)
From the Amistad to the airplanes of September 11th, vessels make history. However, we often overlook how much they contain history, too. Engines of modernity and sites of emancipation for some, vessels in transit have served as tools of terror and laboratories of power for others. Allowing ships, trains, and planes to guide us through modern history, this course poses two overarching questions: how have vessels shaped the behavior and outlooks of modern humans, and how have people in transit learned to navigate a dangerous world? To answer these questions, we begin with sailing ships of the 18th century, before working our way to 19th-century steamships and railways, and eventually to 20th-century aviation and beyond. Our readings put interdisciplinary scholars of mobility into dialogue with a diverse set of historical testimonies: from enslaved people crossing the Middle Passage and colonial subjects riding the rails of 19th-century India, to Charles Darwin on the Beagle and Le Corbusier viewing the world from the window of an airplane. Our goal is to understand vessels in transit as more than machines that move us from point A to point B. Instead, students will consider how society organizes itself in transit; how being in motion shapes our perception of the world; and how political struggles determine who has the right to move and who owns the means of mobility. To that end, our focus is not limited only to vehicles but extends also to the pathways that channel mobility, to "organic" modes of transit like plodding feet and hooves, and to the energy infrastructures that make motion possible. [ more ]
Taught by: Charles Begue Fawell
Catalog detailsHIST 424(S) SEM Words that Fly: Pamphlets from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Many courses are devoted to the 'great books', but didcontemporaries really read them? Because pamphlets tended to be more pervasive, persuasive, and expressly political texts, their study enriches our understanding of popular literacy and radical movements. After their emergence as a mass media during the European Reformation, pamphlets served revolutionary subversives in France, England, and Germany, and have been adopted by social reformers, religious radicals, satirists, sectarians, royalists, utopians, and cranks on every continent. The first half of the course will focus on the period from the launch of the Reformation to the Age of Revolutions, the pamphlet's early modern heyday as an immediate, cheap medium for the spread of ideas illuminates the German term for the pamphlet: Flugschriften, or words that fly. While much short-form political writing has since moved online, pamphlets once constituted a central forum for political discourse and remain a useful tool for spreading ideas. Thus, during the second half of this research seminar, we will use several meetings in the Chapin Library's Special Collections to read pamphlets, examine ephemeral print culture, and hatch student-led research projects based in our discussion of the pamphlet as both genre and form. This final project might take the shape of a pamphlet, zine, broadside, or other print object; an annotation apparatus for a pamphlet or other ephemeral print object; or a more traditional research paper on pamphlets found in Special Collections or elsewhere. Research findings and projects will be presented during a symposium at the end of the semester. Topics will include witchcraft, the German Peasants' War, press freedom, the English Civil War, cannibalism, slavery, the French Revolution, communism, pacificism, black liberation, and feminism. [ more ]
Taught by: Ron Mordechai Makleff
Catalog detailsHIST 433(F) SEM Colonialism and the Jews
Where are Jews in colonial history? Where is colonialism in Jewish history? In many ways, these questions haunt contemporary Jewish and often world politics. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, the relationship between Jews and colonialism has been present in debates about Zionism, the history of capitalism, Jewish-Muslim relations, the wider Middle East, the future of European identity, the aims and roots of American empire, and the intersections of race and religion in colonial domination. And yet, typically, the subject of Jews and colonialism is more polemicized or avoided than probed. This course will seek to address this lacunae by introducing students to new historical scholarship that has begun tracing these questions. Students will consider the ways in which imperial legal forms, economic structures, and cultural and intellectual underpinnings shaped Jewish lives from the British antipodes to French North Africa, and throughout the Russian and Ottoman Empires, as well as in metropolitan Europe. Among other issues, we will ask: How did Jews become defined and define themselves in the colonial venture? In their various roles in colonial empires, are Jews best understood as subjects or agents of empire or are there more fruitful ways to conceptualize their engagement? What was the impact of anti-colonial struggles on modern Jewish politics and historical development? The course will approach this topic thematically rather than as a comprehensive survey. By introducing students to some of the key debates in this emerging field, we will consider what it takes to construct a successful historical argument and how to engage critically with works in an emerging field. As part of the "on the log" initiative, the students will also have the opportunity to engage directly with scholars in the field who have focused on aspects of this topic in their own research. A semester-long writing project will expand students capacities to pose thoughtful historical questions; conduct research and gather compelling evidence; read deeply and critically; carefully assess evidence; and write inquiry-based essays. [ more ]
Taught by: Maud Mandel
Catalog detailsHIST 434 SEM Humanitarianism and Jewish History
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 ]
Taught by: Alexandra Garbarini
Catalog detailsHIST 452 Before and After Roe v. Wade: The History of Reproductive Politics in the United States
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 ]
Taught by: TBA
Catalog detailsHIST 454 SEM Land, Memory, Materiality: Histories and Futures of Indigenous North American Arts
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 ]
Taught by: Christine DeLucia
Catalog detailsHIST 455 SEM Material Cultures in North American History
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 ]
Taught by: Christine DeLucia
Catalog detailsHIST 462 SEM For the Soul of Mankind: The Cold War and American Foreign Relations
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 ]
Taught by: Jessica Chapman
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 469(S) SEM Comparative Histories: From Latin American to Latina/o/x Experiences
This course explores comparative histories as a tool for thinking comparatively and thematically, as well as for uncovering a wide range of sources, methodologies, and approaches. More specifically, how do scholars use comparative approaches to grapple with the complex variety of national origins and historical experiences that constitute Latina/o/x communities in the United States? "Hispanic" and "Latino" are umbrella terms that can mask national histories and widely varying histories and experiences of coming to and living within the United States, especially when dominant discourses tend towards homogenizing and stereotyping all Latinos as recent immigrants, as "illegals," and as "criminals." In contrast, Latina/o/x history and the interdisciplinary field of Latinx Studies have emerged as comparative fields of study, exploring rather than erasing differences that include: countries of origin; ways of becoming part of the U.S. through conquest, labor recruitment, and migration seeking survival or a better life; regions of settlement; reception and experiences in the US; among many others. At the same time, comparative approaches and analyses can highlight major themes and questions that unearth underlying dynamics that shape what might appear as disparate experiences. In this writing intensive seminar, we explore comparative histories and approaches, as students define topics that are informed by the comparative approaches and major themes identified throughout the course, even as their own research papers may or may not be comparative, considering the shortness of a semester! [ more ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsHIST 470 SEM Latinx Migrations: Stories and Histories
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 ]
Taught by: Carmen Whalen
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 478 SEM Cold War Landscapes
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 ]
Taught by: Karen Merrill
Catalog detailsHIST 480 TUT Media and Society in Africa
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 ]
Taught by: Benjamin Twagira
Catalog detailsHIST 481 TUT History of Taiwan
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 ]
Taught by: Anne Reinhardt
Catalog detailsHIST 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 486(S) TUT Race and A Global War: Africa During World War II
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 ]
Taught by: Benjamin Twagira
Catalog detailsHIST 487(F) TUT FIRE! A SOCIAL HISTORY
This tutorial offers a social history of fire in a national, international, and transnational framework. The aim of this course isn't to historicize fire, itself. Rather, "fire" is treated as a subtext to other historical developments and events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have been factually and figuratively shaped by it. In this regard, we will grasp fire not only as combustion or conflagration but also through its nuanced meanings and their implications for how we think historically about issues related to capitalism, class, climate and environment, labor, gender, immigration, internationalism, policing, politics, race, radicalism, and sex. In essence, bodies might be on fire, burning with sexual desire; buildings might be on fire, engulfed in an intense conflagration; cities might be on fire, ignited by gunfire and urban unrests; workers might be fired or even fired up in a working-class movement, the latter incited by the push for labor democracy; or there might be fire weather, sparked by drier conditions and sweltering temperatures reflecting climate change. Thus, we will examine "fire" in a variety of historical contexts, from actual accounts of disastrous fire incidents due to environmental or industrial mishaps to stories of passion or protest inflaming individuals and groups to studies of rebellions and riots that produce fiery conditions. Lastly, we will analyze society's historical fascination with "fire" events, both real and imagined, and the way they have prompted efforts to rebuild, reform, and reimagine. To accomplish our goals, we will engage primary and secondary sources in addition to screening films that focus on histories directly or indirectly related to fire. [ more ]
Taught by: Tyran Steward
Catalog detailsHIST 488(F) TUT Sites of Memory and American Wars
This tutorial 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. Given the enormous national conversation and reconsideration of many of these sites over the last decade, we will ask such questions as: How and why has the memorialization of U.S. wars changed since the country's founding? 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 society's views of wars and soldiers and about the United States? Throughout, we will pay attention to how these sites reflect historical understandings of the time and have also served as focal points of social and political protests. [ more ]
Taught by: Karen Merrill
Catalog detailsHIST 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 ]
HIST 490(F) TUT Memory, History, and the Holocaust
This tutorial explores postwar reckonings with the Holocaust. The extermination of European Jews committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, with the complicity of large segments of European societies, has come to be a moral and cultural touchstone for people across the globe. Europeans, in particular, have struggled with its legacy and with the responsibilities engendered by their complicity in that genocide. Engaging with a wide range of sources that span the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to the present day, we will discuss historical, legal, moral, political, and cultural issues and debates that have emerged out of the confrontation with the genocide of European Jews. By the end of the course, students will have grappled with the controversies that have arisen among scholars, artists, governments, and lay people about the meaning of the Holocaust for the postwar world. In a world in which extraordinary acts of violence continue to be perpetrated and many nations' pasts are marked by episodes of extreme criminality and/or trauma, exploring the manner by which one such episode has been remembered, avenged, and adjudicated also has relevance for considering other societies' efforts to confront their own traumatic pasts. [ more ]
Taught by: Alexandra Garbarini
Catalog detailsHIST 491 TUT The Suburbs
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 ]
Taught by: Karen Merrill
Catalog detailsHIST 492 TUT Making Race in Early Modern Europe
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 ]
Taught by: Alexander Bevilacqua
Catalog detailsHIST 493(F) HON Senior Thesis: Research Seminar
This seminar is intended solely for writers of senior theses during their first semester. Although each student's major work for the year will be the writing of a thesis in consultation with an individual advisor, students are also required to meet in the context of the thesis seminar in order to present and critique each other's proposals and drafts and to discuss common problems in the research and design of a long analytical essay. For students proceeding to HIST 494, performance in the fall semester will be factored into the thesis grade calculated at the end of the year. The quality of a student's performance in the seminar segment of History 493, as well as their performance in all aspects of the May colloquium at which theses are presented and critiqued, figure in the overall grade the student earns for History 493-494 and the departmental decision to award Honors or Highest Honors at Commencement. [ more ]
Taught by: Sara Dubow
Catalog detailsHIST 494(S) HON Senior Thesis: Writing Seminar
This seminar is a continuation of HIST 493, and is required of all senior thesis writers. Students will meet to discuss draft thesis chapters and to prepare for the thesis colloquium in May at which theses will be presented. Performance in the year-long seminar and in all aspects of the thesis colloquium will be figured into the overall thesis grade the student is given for HIST 493 and HIST 494 as well as the departmental decision to award Honors or Highest Honors [ more ]
Taught by: Jessica Chapman
Catalog detailsHIST 495 TUT The Medieval World System: Globalization before 1500
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 ]
Taught by: Joel Pattison
Catalog detailsHIST 497(F) IND Independent Study: History
History independent study. [ more ]
Taught by: Jessica Chapman
Catalog detailsHIST 498(S) IND Independent Study: History
History independent study. [ more ]
Taught by: Jessica Chapman
Catalog details