History
The Department of History offers a wide range of courses dealing with most of the world’s major civilizations. Historians utilize a variety of theoretical approaches, research methods and sources to study the process of change over time and examine all aspects of human experience in the past. History intersects with, and draws upon, other disciplines including sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, arts and literature. Students considering a history major are encouraged to pursue the study of a foreign language beyond the intermediate level and to study away for one or two semesters.
The History department offers the courses summarized below. (More detailed descriptions are available online and can be accessed from the department’s home page.)
100-level introductory surveys and topical courses are suitable for majors and non-majors. Survey courses offer students a broad overview of a continent, region, country, or people over several generations. Through lectures, discussions, reading, and writing, students learn to consider continuity and change over time by assessing and interpreting evidence. Whereas survey courses adopt a panoramic perspective, topical courses — labeled “Historical Themes” and some Montserrat courses — zoom in for a closer view. Instead of a single large textbook, students might read parts of several monographs and sources from the actual time period. Short writing assignments are augmented by considerable oral work, with discussions generally predominating over lectures.
200-level intermediate courses are suitable for majors and in many, but not all cases, non-majors. They place greater emphasis on concepts such as colonialism, nationalism, feminism, and post-modernism, or on the role of ideology, gender, race, ethnicity and class in history. They may also incorporate approaches that are more global, transnational, and comparative. Readings emphasize monographs, journal articles and primary sources. Some lectures, discussions, student-led oral presentations and debates consider questions of historical interpretation, theory and methodology. Writing assignments are fewer in number but of greater length and complexity than those at the introductory level.
300 and 400-level advanced courses are open to third- and fourth-year history majors who have taken HIST 200 The Historian's Craft. Non-majors with appropriate background may also enroll with the permission of the instructor. Admission to all 400-level courses is by permission only. 300-level courses delve deeply into a topic or area of history that students may have encountered previously in an introductory or intermediate course. Enrollment is limited to 16 students, in order to facilitate student engagement with the topic and active participation in class discussions, group research projects, and presentations of their research. Students have more opportunity for independence and initiative in shaping their papers and projects, including both historiographical papers and longer research papers that may employ primary sources. Courses at the 400 level include seminars (limited to 12 students), tutorials, and thesis preparation. Students are expected to produce a substantial paper as a final project and some form of oral presentation of the project at the end of the term. Success in 400-level courses relies on the student’s ability to take initiative in the research process by consulting regularly and meeting with the professor or thesis advisor, through compilation of a bibliography, and being fully active in discussions and debates.
Honors Program
The Department of History offers the opportunity for fourth-year students to be nominated for the History Honors Program. Students aspiring to graduate with Honors in History are required to take a minimum of two advanced courses (at the 300 or 400 level) — one of which must be a 400-level seminar — and, in addition, to work closely with a member of the history faculty on a research thesis during their senior year. The program offers the intellectual rewards of independent research and original writing, and provides recognition for outstanding achievement by students in the major.
Advanced Placement Credit
Holy Cross awards credit for Advanced Placement exams taken through the College Board Advanced Placement Program and the International Baccalaureate Program and will accept some Advanced Level General Certificate of Education (A-Level) exams. One unit of credit is awarded for an Advanced Placement score of 4 or 5 in any discipline recognized by the College. One unit of credit is awarded for a score of 6 or 7 on a Higher Level International Baccalaureate Examination in a liberal arts subject. One unit of credit is awarded for a score of A/A* or B on an A Level exam in a liberal arts subject. The College does not award credit for the IB Standard Exam or the A-Level Exam. AP, IB, and A-Level credit may be used to satisfy deficiencies and common area requirements. Each academic department has its own policy regarding the use of AP or IB credit for placement in courses and progress in the major. The Department Chair must also review the A-Level score to determine placement in courses and progress in the major. See departmental descriptions for further information.
Sahar Bazzaz, Ph.D., Professor
Rosa E. Carrasquillo, Ph.D., Helen M. Whall Chair in Race, Gender and Social Justice
Edward T. O'Donnell, Ph.D., Professor
Stephanie E. Yuhl, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society
Mary A. Conley, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Sarah Griswold, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Cynthia V. Hooper, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Gwenn A. Miller, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Munyaradzi Bryn Munochiveyi, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Chair
Justin Poché, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Ke Ren, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Sanjog Rupakheti, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Michael R. West, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Hannah Abrahamson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Joanna Linzer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Liat N. Spiro, Ph.D., Alexander F. Carson Faculty Fellow in the History of the United States
Kristofer Ray, Ph.D, Visiting Associate Professor
Christopher Conz, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor
Academic Plans within History
Other Academic Plans Accepting/Requiring History Coursework
- Africana Studies Concentration
- Asian Studies Major
- Asian Studies Minor
- Environmental Studies Major
- Environmental Studies Minor
- Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies Concentration
- German Major
- German Minor
- International Studies Major
- Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies Concentration
- Peace and Conflict Studies Concentration
- Russian Major
- Russian Minor
HIST 101 — Themes Course count: 1
An introduction to history as a mode of intellectual inquiry, this is an intensive reading, writing, and discussion course. Seeks to develop a critical awareness of history through an in-depth study of selected topics and themes. Emphasis is on student participation and the development of critical thinking. Readings involve some textual analysis and there are frequent short papers. Enrollment preference is given to first-year students. Only one Themes course may be applied toward the minimum of 10 courses needed for the major. One unit.
Enrollment limited to 1st year students only
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
HIST 101C — Themes CBL Course count: 0
GPA units: 0
HIST 111 — The Rise of the Christian West to A.D. 1000 Course count: 1
Western history from the later Roman period to the formation of Europe in the 11th century. Covers political, religious, economic, social, artistic and legal developments in the fusion of Roman and Christian civilization, the disintegration of the Western Roman empire in the face of barbarian invasions, relations with the Byzantine Eastern Empire, the impact of Islam, rural and urban life, the Carolingian revival, and the impact of new peoples on the European scene. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
4th year HIST majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 112 — Emerging Europe 1000-1500 Course count: 1
The emergence of Europe in the 11th century to the era of the Renaissance. Covers political, religious, economic, social, artistic and legal developments in the formation of European states and territorial monarchy, European frontier expansion, urban growth, the evolution of Romanesque and Gothic styles, and the conflict of church and state. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
4th year HIST majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 113 — Renaissance to Napoleon Course count: 1
Social, cultural, religious, economic, and political developments in Europe from the Renaissance to the fall of Napoleon. Special emphasis on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the evolution of monarchical power, the rise of European overseas empires, slavery, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Fulfills one of pre-modern/pre-industrial requirements for the major.
4th year HIST majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 114 — Napoleon to the European Union Course count: 1
European history from the end of the French Revolution to the aftermath of the collapse of communism in Europe: industrialization, the rise of liberalism and nationalism, the revolutions of 1848, the creation of national states in Italy and Germany, evolution of a consumer culture, European imperialism in Asia and Africa, art and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, World War I, the rise of Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism, world War II, the history of the cold War, Western European integration, the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the formation and growth of the European Union.
4th year History majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 119 — The Global Environment: Past and Present Course count: 1
Environmental concernsclimate change, as well as sustainability, pollution, invasive species, and moreare among the most pressing challenges facing society today. But todays environmental dynamics have deep historical roots and resonances. This class introduces students to the methodology of environmental history through exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world over the past five hundred years. Key topics include the relationship between colonialism and the environment, the history of (un)sustainability, the historical origins of contemporary climate change, and the emergence of environmentalism as a social and political movement.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 122 — Food, Power, & Environment Course count: 1
The story of the American food system Is fundamentally an environmental one. Over the past several centuries food production has evolved from a process that was bound by seasonal, regional, and other ecological limitations, to a highly industrialized and astoundingly productive system that defies these earlier limitations. For most Americans, food exists in the abstract. We find it at restaurants and in grocery stores with little sense of how it came from the earth and to our tables. Indeed, we expect to eat whatever we might desire regardless of what time of the year, which is an astoundingly new reality in the grand scope of human history!
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 126 — Colonial Latin America Course count: 1
Provides an introduction to Latin American history from pre-Columbian to the late 18th century, emphasizing native cultures, the conquest of the New World, the creation of colonial societies in the Americas, race, gender and class relations, the functioning of the imperial system, the formation of peasant communities, and the wars of independence. Fulfills one non-Western and one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
4th year HIST majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 127 — Modern Latin America Course count: 1
Surveys the history of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America, focusing on six countries. Topics include the formation of nation-states, the role of the military, the challenges of development and modernization, the Catholic church and liberation theology, social and political movements for reform or revolution, slavery, race relations, the social history of workers and peasants, and inter-American relations. Fulfills one non-Western requirement for the major.
4th year History majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 134 — Spirit Worlds: Early America Course count: 1
Early America was more than a world of Puritan, Quaker, Anglican, and Catholic (etc.) colonists pursuing a divine mandate to convert and prosper, only to explain their failures as the work of heathens. Indigenous cosmologies would certainly clash and intermingle with missionaries and settlers who sought to impose a Christian moral geography on the American landscape. Yet for all communities-colonizers and colonized-religion and spirituality were as messy as they are today. Theirs was a world of visions, wonders, witches, fits, trances, signs, apostates, and apostles. Babies popped up in their cribs and offered sage wisdom! Comets portended all sorts of things. And God(s) did not exactly smile on the rich...or the poor...or the virtuous. Most significantly, religious beliefs and practices played a central role in the creation of gender, racial, and class categories in the modernizing world. They infused these social hierarchies with a sense of timelessness, naturalness, and moral urgency that belied their inherently constructed and power-laden nature. But if those in power-the chosen, as often understood-sought to make these boundaries real in religious spaces and discourses, spirits and their real-life prophets could challenge these boundaries, both legitimizing and creating space for protest and liberation.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Fall
HIST 137 — American Slavery, American Freedom Course count: 1
Examines the intertwined origins and development of American slavery and American freedom, racial ideology and democracy, and the combustible interaction that created the central contradiction of antebellum America: a republican nation professing equality that was also an enormous slave holding society. Also examines the ways in which historians work and make arguments, and students will be asked to critically examine both primary and secondary documents.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 155 — World War II in East Asia Course count: 1
The regional and global wars in the 1930s and 1940s were in many ways crucial in the making of modem East Asia. The history and popular memory of these conflicts have continued to inform national self-understandings in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the relationships between these regions and the rest of the world, including the United States. This course provides a comprehensive examination of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45 and the Asia-Pacific War of 1941-45, focusing not only on political and military history, but also cultural developments and social changes in China, Japan, and the Japanese empire throughout Asia, as well as connections to the United States and the world during the global Second World War. Themes include imperialism and revolution, diplomacy and politics, refugees and environment, resistance and collaboration, labor and economy, race and gender, literature and arts, as well as postwar history and memory.
4th year HIST majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 187 — Christianity and Colonialism Course count: 1
It will come as no surprise that Christians and their leaders often saw the hand of God in the colonial conquests of territories and people. To many, this was a fulfilment of the scriptural mandate from Jesus, Go into to all the world, and preach the gospel to the whole of creation (Mark 16:15). By the 16th century all the world known to Christian Europeans had greatly expanded through exploration, trade and colonization in the Americas, Africa and Asia; and with it grew the moral compunction of Christians to labor for the conversion of souls and the social uplift of peoples. Yet while the Church and colonial States were often aligned in their aims, less often in methods, they also clashed with great regularity over matters sacred and secular, moral and economic, theological and political. How did missionaries and colonial officials come to understand indigenous societies in differing ways? How could Christian scripture be both a justification for colonial domination and racial hierarchy, yet also become a vehicle to liberation for enslaved, oppressed or colonized peoples? Despite its European flavor, did colonial Christianity also become a site of indigenous assertion or maintenance of power, or the production of new hybrid communities, identities and categories of thought? Rather than attempting to be comprehensive, this course seeks instead to give students a deeper understanding of a number of key convergences and divergences between Colonialism and Christianity over the past five centuries. It will explore select historical case studies, taken mainly from South Asia and Latin America but also East Asia, Britains North American colonies and Africa. Course readings will focus on historical primary source documents, with supplementary secondary source scholarship. This will be woven together by lectures and reinforced by lively in-class discussions. Assessment will include two papers focusing on making historical arguments from primary source material, as well as midterm and final examinations.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 192 — East Asia History in Print and Visual Culture Course count: 1
Countries across East Asia have a long tradition in the production and dissemination of printed and visual materials, be it manuscripts and illustrations, or comics and film. This course will examine the technical and social aspects of print and visual culture in China and Japan and how changes in technology, politics, and social values were reflected in how these objects were produced, how they were thought of, and what kinds of content they contained. The course will also explore how writers, illustrators, comic artists, and filmmakers combed historical experiences to make their own analyses of contemporary conditions. In so doing, it will engage students in both how to apply methods of historical inquiry to the analysis of material and visual sources, and how to think about non-textual sources historically.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 196 — African Colonial Lives Course count: 1
This course analyzes the colonial experience of African people in sub-Saharan Africa, from the late 19th century and throughout the twentieth century. European colonialism in Africa transformed customs, traditions, and social organizations, introduced new boundaries between peoples and erased others through the institutionalization of racism and the creation of new ethnicities. The history, theory, and practice of colonialism (and neocolonialism) are presented in this course through historical documents, scholarly writing, literature, and film. The course also explores the long-term economic, psychological, and cultural effects and legacies of colonialism on the colonized.
4th year History majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 197 — Early Africa to 1800 Course count: 1
Early African farmers and hunters, men and women, kings and queens, commoners and slaves long stood at the center - not the margins -- of global change. From the rise of agriculture to the culmination of the slave trades, Africans actively borrowed ideas, technologies, and foods, guns, and other goods from Asian and European(strangers). But they profoundly influenced these strangers as well, contributing their innovative ideas,technologies, cultural expressions, and wealth. Through close study of oral traditions, epics, archaeological data,food, autobiography, and film, we will investigate early Africans' global connections. Environment plays an important role in our study; we explore the ways that Africans creatively adapted to, manipulated, and altered the continent's diverse environments, and how choices shaped the kinds of societies in which they lived. By immersing ourselves in Africa's early history, we will also begin to understand and to critique how and why contemporary western media has come to portray Africans as (marginal) to global change. This course begins its study of global connections when the climatic changes that contributed to the rise of agriculture (after 20000 BCE), and it concludes in the late-eighteenth century, following the period of Africa's most intensive exports of slaves.
4th year History majors are not eligible to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 198 — Modern Africa Since 1800 Course count: 1
A survey of Africa's complex colonial past, examining dominant ideas about colonial Africa and Africans' experiences during colonialism, including important historical debates on Africa's colonial past and the legacy of colonialism; pre-colonial Africa's place in the global world; resistance and response to the imposition and entrenchment of colonialism; and the nature of colonial rule as revealed in economic (under) development, ethnicity and conflict, and the environment.
Anti-requisite: Students who previously enrolled in HIST 196 and MONT 100C "Encountering Difference - Africa and the Other" CANNOT enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 199-F01 — Jesuits in the World Course count: 1
Did you ever wonder how the College of the Holy Cross fits into a nearly 500-year history of the Jesuits? The Society of Jesus burst onto the global stage in 1540, becoming arguably the worlds first multinational organization. Jesuits and the World takes a deep dive into the origins of the Jesuitsexploring their founders, spirituality, and evolving missionwhile tracing how they shaped and were shaped by the cultures, politics, and societies they encountered. The course begins with the foundation of the order by Ignatius of Loyola and its early missions of education and evangelization, examining how the Jesuits built vast global networks that connected Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Along the way, it will explore their bold missionary efforts, their deep engagement with the intellectual currents of the day, and their sometimes-controversial roles in colonial enterprises and imperial politics. We will ask why the order was suppressed by the Church in 1773, and then restored in 1814, and how the Jesuits then contributed to Catholicism in the modern world. The latter part of the course turns to the Jesuits responses to a 20th century marked by World Wars, the Cold War, how they influenced the Church reforms of Vatican II, and their participation in movements for social justice, particularly in Latin American liberation theology and decolonization efforts. Students will engage directly with primary sourcesincluding Ignatius Autobiography, missionary letters, papal documents, and theological writingsalongside a rich selection of historical scholarship. Whether a student is a history major or simply curious about how a single religious order could leave such a profound mark on the world, this course offers an opportunity to explore the past while grappling with questions that remain deeply relevant today.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 199-F02 — Spies and Lies Course count: 1
While recorded incidents of spying date back to at least the 14th century BCE, this course will focus on the politics and power of information, espionage, and state-sponsored deception in the modern era, looking specifically at the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union/Russia from 1945 until today. We will examine cases of espionage and their impact on the evolution of ideas of national security; changing practices of propaganda and information warfare; the figure of the spy in both East and West; and U.S. legal debates over issues ranging from surveillance to citizen rights over the course of the Cold War and beyond. In evaluating how covert actions have shaped international politics and the ways in which those actions have or have not been effective, we will also consider how post-1945 democracies have struggled to defend themselves, while also struggling to remain true to values of openness, free speech, and transparency.This course will function largely as a seminar, combining lecture with discussion. It will draw on a variety of sources including memoirs, declassified government documents, films, and media records, as well as historical and social science analysis. This course will not be organized as a comprehensive study of military or CIA/KGB practice. Instead, we will explore select political and cultural moments (and the way those moments were portrayed on both sides of the Iron Curtain) that should allow us to debate questions of strategy, ideology, and ethics still relevant today.The class will involve regular in-class reading quizzes, two small-scale guided research projects, and a small-group podcast debate. All years and majors are welcome, with priority given to incoming first-year students.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 199-S04 — Global History: From Cosmic Origins to Columbian Exchange Course count: 1
This course traces the interconnected forces that have shaped the modern world from the birth of the universe to the dawn of European colonial expansion in the fifteenth century. Beginning with cosmic and planetary origins we will explore how geological forces and biological evolution shaped early societies. We will move beyond a simple timeline to examine dynamic interplay of cultures across continents and investigate how empires rose and fell, how religions spread and transformed, and how technological innovations shaped societies. The course will particularly examine how environmental factors, political structures, and social hierarchies fostered cooperation and conflict, creating lasting differences between societies. From the rise of agriculture to the development of complex civilizations, from the spread of Christianity to the rise of Islam, and from the Mongol conquests to the Black Death, we will explore the pivotal moments in global history. We will study how Silk Roads, Indian Ocean trade, and trans-Saharan networks facilitated the movement of goods, beliefs, and people, fostering both shared experiences and unique regional developments. Crucially, we will also analyze how seemingly small events and individual choices had far-reaching consequences, revealing history as a complex tapestry of interconnected forces. By examining the long-term patterns of global connections and divergences this course offers a deeper understanding of the origins of our contemporary world.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 200 — The Historian's Craft Course count: 1
An introduction to historical methods and to historiography--that is, how history is written and interpreted, and how the discipline or a topic within it has evolved. Students examine how historians formulate questions or lines of inquiry, how to locate and read primary sources, how to use secondary sources, how to develop research topics that are incisive and focused, and how to organize and present one's research in oral and written form. Required of all history majors. One unit.
Enrollment is limited to 2nd year HIST Majors only.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Fall, Spring
HIST 202 — Amer in the Age of Revolutions Course count: 1
The American Revolution and independence in the context of Anglo-American ideas and institutions. Special emphasis: imperial reorganization after the Seven Years' War; colonial resistance and loyalty; revolutionary ideology; social and political consequences of the Revolution; Confederation and Constitution; political parties under Washington, Adams, and Jefferson; and impact of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars on the U.S. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major. One unit.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 203 — Slavery, Industry, Empire 1815-60 Course count: 1
This course analyzes developments in economy, polity, and society in the United States from 1815 to 1860. In the early republic and antebellum periods, the United States formed part and parcel of the Age of Revolutions across the Atlantic worldthe Haitian Revolution and French Revolution, slave revolts and gradual emancipation in the British Caribbean colonies, and the Revolutions of 1848 throughout continental Europe. We will address crucial junctures and core themes such as the expansion of slavery westward into the Deep South, struggles over the Second Bank of the United States, the removal of Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples across the Mississippi, transport and communication revolutions, industrialization and the advent of wage labor, the U.S.-Mexican War, realignments in party politics, Irish and German immigration, and the coming of the Civil War.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 204 — Civil War and Reconstruction Course count: 1
American life and politics from the Civil War to the end of Reconstruction. Emphasizes Lincoln's leadership and vision, the proximate causes and military progress of the civil War, "Reconstruction" of the former Confederate states, and the evolution of the 14th and 15th Amendments as protectors of civil rights.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 205 — United States in the 20th Century 1 Course count: 1
Examines the major political, economic, social and cultural forces that contributed to the modernizing of America. Special emphasis on: industrialization and Empire; the impact of racial, gender, class and ethnic struggles for justice with a democratic republic; "Americanism"; the expanding role of the government in the lives of its citizens; labor and capitalism; popular and consumer culture; war and homefront.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 206 — US in 20C II 1945-Present Course count: 1
Examines the major political, economic, social and cultural forces of the post-WWII era. Special topics include: Reorganizing the post-war world; McCarthyism; consumer and youth culture; the Civil Rights Movement; the New Left and the Vietnam War; the women's movements; Watergate and the resurgent Right; and post-Cold War America.
Prerequisite: Students who have taken HIST 101-Themes "US Social Movements" and "American Social Movements" are unable to enroll in this course. Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 209 — Hamilton's America Course count: 1
From the growth of a globally connected system of trade and the entrenchment of plantation slavery, to the inklings of revolution and the genesis of a wholly new form of government, Alexander Hamiltons America was a contested time and place. It was certainly much messier than John Trumbulls iconic painting that hangs in the Capitol rotunda, The Declaration of Independence, would have us believe. In this class, we will explore songs from the smash hit musical, Hamilton, as a way to help understand the tumultuous emergence of the United States and consider the role of the arts in representing history.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 210 — Early American Lives Course count: 1
This course will explore the history of Early America through biography. We will look at the lives of a range of individuals from Columbus to Betsy Ross, and from Thomas Jefferson to Sacagawea, as we cover themes such as exploration, colonization, Native American responses, the rise of race slavery, the American Revolution, the formation of American democratic thought, and Euro-American expansion. The course will focus on social developments, conflicting political and economic visions, and tensions between ideals and realities. We will begin in the pre-Columbian era and end in the early national period with the expedition of Lewis and Clark into the American West.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Fall
HIST 212 — Hist of Capitalism: US & World Course count: 1
This course will explore the history of capitalism from the Atlantic plantation economy of the early modern period to the global supply chains, distribution networks, and financial circuits of today. With an eye toward the shifting sources of power for groups and individuals in the United States, we will focus on regimes of free and unfree labor; developments in banking, insurance, and finance; shifting legal interpretations of contract and corporation; the concentration of capital and mass production; the rise and fall of organized labor; transformations in modes of consumption and retail; the making and unmaking of the welfare state; and the dynamics of race and space in American capitalism. We will examine the works of major economic thinkers alongside fundamental changes within the local, state, regional, national, and transnational institutions shaping American capitalism.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 223 — Radicalism in America Course count: 1
Americans recognize that we live in a profoundly different nation than that which was created out of the American Revolution. Citizenship, itself, has changed. Civil society has been expanded such that we feel quite confident in our belief that the United States today is a fairer and more just nation in relation to the status of women, African Americans, and working people. We might account for these changes in various ways--the genius of the Founding Fathers, the general prosperity of the nation, even the feeling that "things" just always get better over time. This course is based on the idea that these changes have been the result of human effort, and that the efforts of American radicals have been essential to the rise of the American democracy. It examines the thought and action of radicals of various stripe and means, from Tom Paine to Martin King, from the brutal war on American slavery attempted by Nat Turner and John Brown, to the more genteel fight against patriarchy waged by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and look closely at the various efforts of Wobblies, Syndicalists, and Reds to advance the cause of industrial democracy.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 224 — Catholicism In The United States Course count: 1
A historical examination of the development of the Catholic Church and its people in the U.S. Particular attention devoted to issues of church and society as they have developed since the 19th century.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies, Studies in Religion
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 225 — Th Civil Rights Movement Course count: 1
Provides an in-depth study of the civil rights movement from its origins in Jim Crow America to its stirrings in the 1950s, through to the heights of its successes in the mid-1960s and its dissolution thereafter. Assesses its legacy and consequence in the 1970s and afterward. Special attention is paid to the way in which the movement worked within and challenged consensus notions about progress and "the Negro's place" in America and also to the movement as an ideological problem for Americans and activists like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others. Also examines the ways in which historians work and make arguments, and students are asked to critically examine both primary and secondary documents. One unit.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 226 — Irish American Experience Course count: 1
Examines the historical experience of the Irish, one of the largest ethnic groups in America. The Irish in America have left an indelible mark on the nation's economy, politics, and culture, while at the same time they have been shaped by their adoptive country. Among the topics addressed: colonial era immigration, the Famine, changes in ethnic identity, class conflict and the labor movement, the Catholic Church, machine politics and political affiliations, culture and the arts, nationalism and the fight for Irish freedom, upward mobility and the quest for respectability, relations with other ethnic and racial groups.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 229 — The Asian American Experience Course count: 1
This course presents a survey of Asian American history from the mid-19th century to the present, a period marked by multiple waves of immigration, imperialism, world wars, and social revolutions across the pacific. The course aims to place contemporary issues of Asian American identity, cultural belonging, politics, and social justice in historical and transnational perspective. Major themes will include the experience of immigration and the formation of enclaves, the legacy of settler colonialism and imperialism, racism and relations with ethnic groups, labor and social mobility, negotiations over identity and cultural production, the role of Asian Americans in social movements and political activism, as well as the influence of global politics and transpacific networks.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 232 — Medieval Lives Course count: 1
Course explores personal expressions of the intersection of faith and action. These works deal with the most basic questions of morality and ethics, and expand our understanding of the variety of rhetorical methods by which to communicate such issues. The readings include works of writers from many walks of life: saints such as Augustine and Joan; sinners like Abelard and Heloise, a king of Reconquest Spain; and a variety of folk in between: a Frankish noblewoman worried about her son, an Arab gentleman observing the crusaders' conquest of his country, a monk recalling his childhood, a young woman escaping an arranged marriage for a life of contemplation and prayer.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Fall
HIST 236 — Renaissance Europe Course count: 1
Surveys the significant intellectual, cultural, social, and political developments across Europe, beginning with the social and economic structures of family life during the early Italian Renaissance, continuing with the political and artistic expressions of the Italian city-states, and tracing the spread of Renaissance influences to northern Europe through the early 16th century. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Fall
HIST 237 — The Reformation Course count: 1
This course will treat the transformation of Christianity in Europe from c. 1500 to 1650, when unified body of believers loyal to the Roman Church split into several different religious communities. We cover the transformation of Catholic traditions of the medieval period under the influence of print culture and ever-stronger calls for institutional change. We will then tum to Martin Luther's protests against the Church's indulgences that eventually fractured the Holy Roman Empire. Next, we will consider religious violence during the Reformation, and, concomitantly, how such disputes over belief changed views on political authority in Europe. Subsequently, we will take a short tour of Europe, treating the differing Reform contexts in France, England, and the Netherlands, while also discussing the distinctive ways that women shaped this movement. Finally, we will cover the Counter-Reformation, discovering how-through focused reform initiatives- the majority of Europe actually remained Catholic during this period.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 241 — French Rebels & Revolutionaries Course count: 1
From the Revolution of 1789, which gave birth to the nation, to human rights and to citizenship, to the creation of the European Union in the 1990s, France has been at the center of European culture. Paris was rebuilt in the late 19th century as "the capital of Europe," a center of artistic modernism as well as an expanding global empire. During three wars with Germany between 1870 and 1945, the French suffered the devastating effects of total war on their own soil. France played a crucial role in the creation of the European Union but was forced to adapt to becoming a diminishing power in the world since World War II. One unit.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 242 — British Soc & Empire 1763-1901 Course count: 1
By the end of the Seven Years War (1756-1763), Britain had emerged as a genuine world power, with holdings larger and richer than any other in the Western world. During the next 150 years, Britain would eclipse its European rivals in industry, trade, and sea power. At the height of its power in the late 19th century, Britain controlled one quarter of the world's population and one-fifth of its land surface. This course surveys the history of Britain and its empire from the late 18th century to the turn of the 20th century. This course rethinks certain familiar topics in British history by considering the intersections between home and empire and by highlighting how imperial considerations influenced Britain's social formation. Topics include the slave trade and slavery, rise of capitalism, industrialization and consumer culture, political reform movements (e.g., anti-slavery, Chartism, and Irish Hone Rule), imperialism, religion, and British identity.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 243 — Britain & Empire since 1901 Course count: 1
In this course, we will focus our attention on the social, economic, cultural and political transformations within Britain and its empire over the course of the twentieth century. This course recognizes that the experience of empire is not merely about the impact of the British overseas, but rather also about the relationship, often unequal and hierarchical, between Britain and its colonies. This course rethinks certain familiar topics in British history by considering the intersections between home and empire and by highlighting how imperial considerations influenced Britain's social formation. The aim in this course will be to foreground the ways in which imperialism was constitutive of much of the domestic history of Britain from 1901 to 2019, even after Britain lost most of its colonies. During the course we will focus on Britain's declining role as a world and imperial power and interrogate the meaning of Britain's national and imperial identities, particularly in the wake of Brexit referendum and Brexit. A good deal of attention will be devoted to a discussion of the two World Wars with analysis of their economic, social, and ideological repercussions within Britain and its empire.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 244 — Medicine, Health, and Empire Course count: 1
The coronavirus pandemic has brought heightened awareness of the close links between medicine and political and economic interests. As we will discover, such a relationship has a long legacy. From the early days of European colonial expansion, matters of health and sickness were central concerns of agents of empire. As a result, medicine was often mobilized to promote the physical and psychological well-being of Europeans in colonial settings, thereby assisting in the proliferation of European influence and territorial predominance. Medicine was intimately entwined with imperialism.In this course, we will explore the interrelations of medicine and empire across a range of contexts including the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Our investigation will focus on the following overarching themes: 1) doctors as agents of imperial influence and medicine as an instrument of empire, facilitating imperial expansion through the treatment of soldiers, administrators, settlers, and local populations; 2) medicines role in the pathologization of the colonial subject and in the construction of difference between Europeans and the colonized other; 3) the involvement of public health policies in the management, control, and surveillance of colonial subjects; and 4) the ways in which nineteenth and twentieth century medical research was shaped by colonialism and empire. Further, this course will examine the role of imperialism and modern technologies in the spread of sickness and ill health, challenging triumphalist narratives of globalization and modernity. It will also address local or indigenous responses to colonial medical and public health practices. This course focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but will also examine earlier periods and draw parallels to our contemporary moment.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually Fall
HIST 245 — Imperial Russia/East & West Course count: 1
At its height, the empire of tsarist Russia stretched across one-sixth of the globe, running from Germany to the Pacific Ocean and bordering regions as disparate as Sweden, China, and Iran. Ever preoccupied with their country's amorphous position between Europe and Asia, Russians have struggled for centuries to define how their vast homeland should modernize and what models of development it should follow. This course examines debates about Russian identity and the relationship of Imperial Russia to "East" and "West" that raged from the time of Peter the Great in 1682 to the outbreak of World War One in 1914. Important issues over the course of the semester include serfdom and emancipation; terrorism and the ethics of resistance against authoritarian power; conflicts over the relative merits of capitalism, liberalism, and socialism; strategies for managing a multi-ethnic empire; and theories of revolutionary vs. evolutionary change. Readings draw on works of Russian literature as well as a variety of other political and cultural sources.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Spring
HIST 247 — Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East Course count: 1
Middle Eastern women and sexual minorities are often imagined in the West as oppressed, voiceless and subdued by religion, traditional patriarchal society and the authoritarian state. This course will challenge these notions, focusing instead on the lived experiences of men and women in the Middle East and North Africa, examining the historical construction of complex and intersecting identities and peoples understanding of gender and sexual difference. Additionally, we will also interrogate what is politically at stake by framing our understanding of the region in gendered terms or by claiming Muslim women are inherently oppressed and therefore need our intervention on their behalf. Among the themes this course explores are the changing Islamic understandings of sexuality and gender roles, the ways in which both colonial modernity and the emerging nation-state profoundly transformed gender relations, as well as new Islamic sensibilities and their implications for the constructions of gender.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Fall
HIST 252 — Sinners or Saints?: Women and Gender in the Middle Ages Course count: 1
In this course we are embarking on a study of sex and gender constructs in European societies between 500 and 1500 CE. We will also be stretching back to classical antiquity in order to uncover the origin of Western ideologies about the female, forward to the contemporary world, as we seek to understand how medieval legacies have shaped current concepts about gender roles. Our challenge will be not only to interpret ideologies about premodern women, however. We will also attempt to uncover their daily experiences by reading a multitude of primary sources. These works and genres run the gamut from legal code to love poem and many of them preserve women's own voices. We will also evaluate expert secondary sources that engage creatively with history. During such examination, we will look through many disciplinary lenses: those worn by medical researchers, demographers, and lawyers as well as archaeologists, literary theorists and scholars of religion. The semester will conclude with the completion of individual research projects that address a specific aspect of womens medieval experience, work that takes care to acknowledge that these women lived multifaceted lives that can still impact us today.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 253 — Soviet Experiment Course count: 1
This course traces the cataclysmic history of the USSR from its unpredictable beginnings amid the chaos of the First World War, to its consolidation as a giant Communist power, to its surprise disintegration in 1991. It explores the project of socialist revolution and the violent efforts of leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin to transform an agrarian Russian Imperial Empire into an industrialized Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, abolish private property, and create an egalitarian, atheist, non-capitalist state. We look at the hopes and fears the Revolution inspired, the mechanisms of power in Soviet dictatorship, the practice of repression, and the struggles of everyday life. We pay particular attention to the Soviet experience of the monumental Second World War against Nazi Germany and to the wars aftermath, including the onset of superpower struggle with the US. Attentive to the politics of memory, we consider how WWII and the Cold War are remembered in Vladimir Putins Russia of today.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 254 — The Soviet Union After Stalin Course count: 1
This course examines the Soviet dictatorship from the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 to the sudden, surprise dissolution of the USSR in 1991. While it delves into some of the "high politics" of the era - a narrative shaped by major figures such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Mikhail Gorbachev - it also explores social and cultural tensions. What led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? What did Soviet citizens think about the world in which they lived and the relationship of their world to that of the West? How did the USSR experience the 1960s? Topics include destalinization, the Space Race, Soviet and U.S. competition in the Third World, resistance movements in Eastern Europe, the roles of science, surveillance, and secrecy in Soviet culture, the rise of the black market, problems of bureaucratic corruption and socialist legality, the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, and the peaceful revolutions of 1989. Above all, this class considers why Soviet leaders failed in various post-1953 attempts to reform their country's political and economic system. What can the fate of the Soviet Union teach us about ideology and dictatorship, and what kind of legacy has the Soviet era has left on Russia today?
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 255 — Eur:Mass Polit/Tot War 1890-1945 Course count: 1
From the high point of European global power and cultural influence, Europe moved into an era of world war, popular millenarian ideologies, dictatorships, and unprecedented mass murder. This course examines the origins, evolution, and impact of the modern European ideological dictatorships, from the cultural ferment and socioeconomic change that characterized the pre-1914 "belle époque" through the two world wars. Topics include: modern art; liberalism and its discontents; the origins and nature of World War I; the Russian revolutions; the Versailles peace settlement; the struggling interwar democracies; the economic crises; communism and fascism; the Italian, German, and Soviet dictatorships; the Spanish Civil War; and the origins of World War II.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 256 — Europe & Superpowers:1939-1991 Course count: 1
Postwar Europe was shaped in part by four major influences: the clash between Western liberalism and Soviet communism; the withdrawal from overseas empires; the effort to come to terms with the legacy of world war; and the creation of integrative European institutions. Concentrating on Europe, this course examines reciprocal influences between the Europeans and the two peripheral superpowers (USA and USSR) of the Atlantic community. Topics include: World War II, the Holocaust, science and government, the Cold War, the division of Europe, the revival and reinforcement of western European democracy, de-Nazification, Christian democracy, the economic miracle, European integration, the strains of decolonization, the rise of Khrushchev, the Berlin crises, De Gaulle and his vision, protest and social change in the sixties, the Prague Spring, Ostpolitik and détente, the oil shocks, the Cold War refreeze, the Eastern European dissidents, the environmental movement, Gorbachev's reforms, and the collapse of communism. One unit.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 257 — Witchcraft and Persecution in Europe (c. 1300-1700) Course count: 1
This course will explore the history of witchcraft in premodern Europe. We will begin by tracing the specific development of supernatural beliefs in early and high medieval Europe (from c. 500-1200), showing how both black and white magic were part of everyday life for everyone, from peasant to royal. We will then investigate how later medieval society (from 1200-1400) became increasingly invested in paradigms of investigation and persecution, specifically in regard to heretics: religious deviants. We will see that Church and civil authorities first focused on heresy, but then turned to the punishment of maleficia: evil acts of magic perpetrated by reprobate individuals. We will further study the growing belief, (from 1400-1500) that these individualsusually womenwere witches (malificarum) in league with the devil and each other with the aim of destroying Christendom. Building on our study of later medieval trends, the heart of the class will be an examination of the Witch-Panic of the Early Modern period, c. 1500-1650. This was the era of large-scale persecutions and executions that left around 50,000 dead. But where did such a Craze come from? and what impact did Witch-Hunting have on a European society already in flux? This course will attempt to answer those questions not only through readings and lectures, but through your own research projects culminating in a mini conference. We will conclude our study with the decline of witch-belief in the West (from 1650 on) still bearing in mind the persistence of persecution in society today.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 258 — Nature, Culture, and Power in Global History, 1500-1850 Course count: 1
From the Scientific Revolution to the origins of industry based on fossil fuel, the early modern period has long been understood as a time of transformation in humans relationship to the natural world. Yet such changes were not limited to Europe alone, but involved every part of the world. This course explores the global history of how people have understood, interacted with, and reshaped nature from the beginning of European colonialism in the Americas around 1500 up to the mid-nineteenth century. Key topics include the role of European colonialism and interactions with indigenous people in the development of science and environmental thought, global systems of categorizing and cataloguing nature, and changing approaches towards natural resources at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually Fall
HIST 260 — Wicked Women and Proud Patriarchs: Gender & Sexuality in Colonial Latin America Course count: 1
Understandings of gender and sexuality shaped social relations and the nature of colonial society in Latin America. In 1521, an Indigenous woman named Malintzin served as an interpreter for Hernán Cortés and helped topple the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. Over the following century, Black and mixed-race women in Guatemala were hauled before the Inquisition to confess to using sexualized magic to ensnare or harm lovers. Enslaved African women in Peru struggled for emancipation, gaining freedom by degrees by navigating legal and extralegal systems. These case studies allow us to analyze what gender, sex, and sexuality meant across time and space in colonial Latin America. This course encompasses Spanish and Portuguese settlements throughout the Americas from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, beginning with the century prior to European conquest efforts and ending with the close of the colonial period. We will examine gender roles among Indigenous communities in the pre-Columbian era, the sexual politics of conquest and colonization, the gendered dimensions of the transatlantic slave trade, and the nuances of daily life in colonial settlements. Over the course of the semester, we will address how gender and sexuality intersect with other markers that shaped peoples lives: race, ethnicity, class, and status as free versus enslaved. Students will engage with a wide variety of sources including Indigenous codices, European conquerors chronicles, Inquisition records, love letters, and slave ship registers. I have invited specialists in the field to join the class via Zoom on select days to discuss their research and its relationship to course themes. Students will grapple with a series of questions: How did people think about gender roles, sex, and social relations? How can we use gender and sexuality as lenses for examining the lives of marginalized historical figures? Which gender and sexual norms are particular to specific places, times, and groups of people? Which ones carry over into the present?
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Fall
HIST 261 — Germany in Age of Nationalism Course count: 1
Late to unify, late to industrialize, and late to acquire democratic institutions, Germany had to cope with all three processes at once, with tragic consequences for human rights and international order. This course analyzes the development of German nation-building from the time of Metternich, through the age of Bismarck and the Kaisers, to the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. We explore the trends and circumstances in German and European history that came together to produce Nazism. But we also explore the presence of diversity, the alternative pathways, and the democratic potential in pre-Nazi German history. Topics include religious tension and prejudice (Catholics, Protestants, and Jews), Prusso-Austrian duality, the German confederation, the revolution of 1848, German national liberalism, Bismarck's unification and its legacy, imperial Germany under the Kaisers, German socialism, World War I, the revolution of 1918, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazis.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 262 — Germany:Dictatorship/Democracy Course count: 1
In Western Germany after World War II, a people that once had followed Hitler now produced perhaps the most stable democracy in Europe. At the same time, eastern Germans lived under a communist dictatorship that lasted more than three times as long as Hitler's. What is the place of the two postwar Germanies in the broader context of German and European history? To what degree were the two German states a product of their shared past, and to what degree were they products of the Cold War? What are the implications for reunified Germany? This course explores these questions by examining the history of democracy, dictatorship, political ideology, and social change in modern Germany. Topics include: Marx as a German; liberalism, socialism, communism, and political Catholicism in pre-Nazi Germany; popular attitudes toward Nazism; the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust; the Allied occupation; de-Nazification, the Cold War, and the partition of Germany; Christian Democracy and Social Democracy; the Adenauer era, the Berlin crises, and the economic miracle; German-German relations and the Ostpolitik of Chancellor Willy Brandt; protest politics, Euromissiles, and the Green movement; the development and collapse of East Germany; and Germany since reunification.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 263 — Work, Culture, and Power in U.S. History Course count: 1
This course examines the history of labor and working people in the United States from the colonial period to the present. It explores the diversity of work and working-class experiences, the history of labor movements, labor conflicts, and the larger processes of social, economic, and political change that have affected work and workers. While work and organized labor receive central attention, the course gives equal consideration to the comparative dimensions of class and cultural identity, race and gender, immigration and ethnicity, family and community. How, for example, do race and gender inequalities shape the labor market, peoples access to particular types of work, how much they get paid, and their experience in both the workplace and the labor movement? In exploring these questions, we will examine theories that try to understand why, how, and to what extent inequalities persist or change over time. We will also work to improve our skills in critical reading and writing. Lectures, readings, videos, and discussion explore the actions, opinions, identities, and experiences of diverse people.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 264 — Sports, Society, and History Course count: 1
Few human activities have produced as much excitement as sports. We play, coach, cheer, officiate, and teach our children to play. These are a few ways that people across the world have participated in sports. Yet we seldom think about the historical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the sports that we love. Students will study sports in the past and present to explore how they shape, and are shaped by race, gender, class, migration, nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism. Focusing on all genders in sports, this class will include material about the Olympics, soccer, basketball, football, baseball, ice hockey, surfing, and more. Although emphasis will be placed on North America, course materials will also take us to Africa, South America, Europe, and Oceania. Materials will include students first-hand experiences, scholarly writing, music, films, podcasts, sports writing, and a trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Students will conclude the course by researching a relevant topic of their choice and sharing that research in a final presentation that incorporates primary and secondary sources.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 271 — The Indians' New World: Native American History 1 Course count: 1
This course is a survey of Native American history from the pre-Columbian era through the mid-19th century. Many people have much to "unlearn" about Native American history before true learning can take place. What assumptions do many Americans have about Native history? Where to Native Americans appear in our national and local narratives, where are they absent, and why? What was life like in North America 500 years ago? How did Native Americans react and relate to various forms of European settler colonialism? We cannot make broad generalizations about Indian experiences; how do particularities of sex, age, and geographical location demonstrate diverse experiences among Native Americans? These are some of the questions we will consider as we explore themes such as trade, work, war, disease, gender and religion, in early North America. The course begins by looking at theories of origin and life in North America before 1492. It ends with forced "removals" of the mid-19th century.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 272 — Native American History II Course count: 1
A survey of Native American history from the 19th-century Plains Wars to the present. Because of the complexity, diversity, historical depth, and geographic scope of North American Indian societies, this course seeks to provide a general framework, complemented by several case studies, through an approach that is both chronological and thematic. Among the topics addressed are the development and implementation of U.S. federal policies toward Indian peoples; Indian resistance and activism; definitions and practices of sovereignty; and cultural attitudes toward Indians in American society. Considers Native Americans not as victims, but as historical, political, economic, and cultural actors who resourcefully adjusted, resisted, and accommodated to the changing realities of life in North America and continue to do so in the 21st century.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 273 — Witchcraft, Magic, and Ritual in the Premodern World Course count: 1
People have developed myriad rituals and practices to understand the world around them and to exercise a degree of control over their individual circumstances. Practices that transgressed social, religious, and gendered norms were routinely designated witchcraft or magic. This course explores the social, cultural, and legal history of witchcraft, magic, and ritual in the premodern world, specifically the medieval and early modern periods. The class will focus on five geographical and chronological case studies: medieval Europe, early modern Europe, the Caribbean, British North America, and Latin America. Students will examine the gendered and racialized dimensions of magic, its practitioners, and its prosecution.We will start the semester by examining the practice and prosecution of witchcraft and other forms of magic in medieval Europe. The following section will address the witch-panic and large-scale persecutions that gripped early modern Europe. As we shift our focus to the Caribbean and the Americas, we will address how notions of witchcraft and magic evolved as European colonialism and the Transatlantic slave trade brought European, Indigenous, and African peoples into sustained contact. Our analysis of British North America will expand outwards from Salem whereas our discussions of Latin America will highlight varied forms of magic and the diverse array of peoples who practiced it. Colonial civil and religious authorities criminalized African and Indigenous rituals by defining them as witchcraft, magic, idolatry, or other sins against the faith. Individuals accused of practicing vodou (voodoo), brujería, obeah, or other forms of magic faced courts in Europe, the Caribbean, and the mainland Americas. For some people, these practices were part of the fabric of everyday life. For others, witchcraft, magic, and ritual were intentional forms of resistance to colonial power structures.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually Fall
HIST 275 — U.S. Mexican Border Course count: 1
This course examines the history and culture of the region encompassing the modern American southwest and Mexican north from Spanish imperialism to modern immigration debates. Particular attention is paid to the interaction of Native, Latinx, and Anglo American societies in creating unique borderlands society through the present day. This history offers important insight into processes of religious conflict, political revolution, economic dependency and globalization through Latin American and U.S. history.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 276 — Historically Speaking Course count: 1
This course examines the history of several pivotal late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century events through the lens of rhetoric and various modes of public oral communication (such as major speeches, interviews rap, spoken performance, etc.). Case studies include the Modern Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements, the HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 pandemics, and the Wars on Drugs/Crime/Terror and extend over several decades in order to provide students with rich opportunities to examine evolving historical contexts and rhetorical choices. In addition to learning historical content, students will develop their speech-writing and oral presentation and critical oral feedback skills. By semesters end, students will have a greater ability to unpack critically the strategies and meanings of major public speaking moments as well as an increased comfort with how to prepare and present their own ideas in oral form.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 277 — Afro-Latin America Course count: 1
This course examines the African Diaspora in Latin America from the aftermath of slavery to the present. We will study the struggles of Afro-Latin America in establishing citizenship and a dignified existence, emphasizing topics such as: liberation movements; gender and racial politics; art; African religions in the Americas; national policies of whitening; and Afro-centric ideologies of the Caribbean. The course extensively uses music as both art and historical text.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 278 — Raza e Identidad Course count: 1
Este curso examina los orígenes y el desarrollo de las identidades raciales y nacionales en el Caribe, enfocando en el caso de la República Dominicana, pero partiendo desde un marco trasnacional e histórico. Estudiaremos muchos de los fenómenos socio-históricos que han formado el país: el colonialismo español, la revolución haitiana, el imperio azucarero estadounidense, y la Alianza para el Progreso entre otros. También, prestaremos atención a las migraciones entre países caribeños y cómo influencian las identidades raciales y nacionales.
Prerequisite: One 300 level Spanish course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Spring
HIST 279 — America's Colony: Puerto Rico since 1898 Course count: 1
This course analyzes the history of Puerto Ricans from the moment their island became a US territory in 1898 to the present. It analyzes the political status of the island and the cultural, economic and social world of Puerto Ricans both in the island and the mainland United States. The course also highlights how Puerto Ricans have shaped and/or undermined US colonialism.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
HIST 280 — Modern India Course count: 1
This course takes us on an intellectual journey through India's past and present. The course begins with important vignettes of Indian society, culture, and politics prior to the arrival of the British. We will examine how and why various facets of Indian society, namely: economic, legal, religious, and gender relations underwent radical transformation during the British rule. In the second segment of the course, we will study the causes and consequences of the Indian struggle for Independence that ended the British rule, but also led to a violent partition of India in 1947. The third segment of the course will look at some key individuals who sought to implement differing visions of India in the post-colonial era. By following the stories of the historical actors, events, and ideas we will seek to understand how colonial legacy, caste and gender relations, political corruption, and religious fundamentalism have shaped the contemporary Indian society.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
HIST 281 — Imperial China Course count: 1
This course presents an overview of Chinese history from the Neolithic period to around 1800. Themes include the emergence of Confucian thought as well as other philosophies and religions; the establishment of bureaucratic empires and evolving state-society relations; war, diplomacy, and trade between various Chinese states and their Inner Asian and East Asian neighbors as well as Western nations; the features of an elaborate literary and artistic tradition; shifts in gender relations; and the internal rebellions and early reform efforts as the last Chinese empire drew to its close.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 282 — Modern China Course count: 1
This course presents a survey of Chinese history from 1800 to the present, a period marked by multiple reforms, rebellions, revolutions, and wars as China transformed from an empire to a modern nation-state in search of a coherent identity and a new global role. Major themes will include shifting state-society relations; cultural and intellectual movements; responses to imperialism and modes of nationalism; war and revolution; industrialization and urbanization; changing gender relations; evolving ethnic tensions; scientific culture and environmental challenges; as well as the legacy of history, reform, and revolution in the contemporary era.
Enrollment limited to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 285 — The Last Age of Samurai Rule: Japanese History, 1550-1868 Course count: 1
In 1750, the worlds biggest city was neither London nor New York, but Edothe metropolis known today as Tokyo. At a time when war plagued societies across the globe, Japan enjoyed two and a half centuries of peace under the Tokugawa shoguns. This class explores the remarkable social, cultural, and political developments in the Japanese archipelago between the end of the Warring States period and Japans emergence as a modern nation. Key topics include Japans connections with the outside world; relations between samurai, commoner and outcaste social groups; the development of the arts, industry, religion, and literature; and the question of whether Tokugawa Japan was an environmentally sustainable society.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Spring
HIST 286 — Modern Japan Course count: 1
This class traverses the stunning transformations of Japanese society between 1850 and the present day. The course begins with the birth of the modern Japanese nation-state amidst internal revolution and international pressure from the great powers of the day. In the years that followed, Japan quickly emerged as the worlds first non-Western society to undergo a modern industrial revolution and as an expansionist empire on the world stage. Japan imposed a massive empire in Asia only to lose it in infamy in the Second World War. In the post-World War II decades, Japan rivaled the US as an economic and technological power, yet still grapples today with the environmental, social, and cultural legacies of its rapid transformations. Through the twists and turns of Japanese history, this course interrogates broad questions about global struggles with empire and colonialism, economic change, and social conflict.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 291 — Making Modrn MidEast 19th Century Course count: 1
The nineteenth century was a time of profound change in the region we today call the Middle East. Over the course of the 1800s, European powers began to encroach on the Ottoman and Qajar empires, exerting informal imperial influence as well as actively seizing and administering Ottoman and Qajar territories. During this period, the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, and a semi-independent Egypt carried out a series of reforms in a bid to push back against European interference in their domestic affairs and ensure their territorial integrity. This course explores the transformations that colonial intrusions and local reforms engendered and their consequences for the peoples of the region in the build up to the First World War. In doing so, it aims to challenge overarching teleological, Orientalist, and historicist perspectives on the region as well as long-standing narratives about Ottoman decline, Oriental despotism, and eternal and inherent sectarianism in the Middle East. The three main themes of this course are imperialism, anti-imperialism, and reform.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually Fall
HIST 292 — Making of the Mod Mid East II Course count: 1
This course examines the cultural and political history of the Middle East (Egypt, the Levant, Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and the Gulf States) from World War II until the recent Arab Uprisings. Through literature and film, the course highlights the major trends and themes in the history of the region including the effects of European imperialism and the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, the birth of the oil economy, the rise of political Islam, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the U.S. led invasions of Iraq, and most recently, the Arab Uprisings and the rise of ISIS.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 293 — Ottoman Empire 1/1300-1600 Course count: 1
In the mid-16th century, all of Europe feared the power of the "Grand Turk," whose empire stretched from Baghdad to Budapest and from the Adriatic to the ports of the Red Sea. Its population was made up of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Kurds, Serbs and Bosnians, to name a few. This course surveys the emergence of this demographically diverse and geographically vast Ottoman state from a small frontier principality into a world empire in its social, political and cultural contexts. Fulfills one non-Western requirement and one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Fall
HIST 296 — South Africa & Apartheid Course count: 1
South Africa's past is a painful history of deep racial discrimination, racialized violence, and segregation. But it is also a history of human resilience and the struggle for equality. This resilience is exemplified by the participation of women and men from diverse racial and social backgrounds, who struggled to end the racist policies of apartheid in South Africa. A course such as this one therefore draws students to debate some of the most important philosophies of an engaged Jesuit education, including a deep commitment to the well-being of the human community and the pursuit of a more just society. In dealing with the many controversies that mark South African history, students will develop their abilities to think critically and logically via weekly journal responses to course readings.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 297 — History of Disease and Healing Course count: 1
Experiences of disease and healing, as Covid-19 has shown, are inseparable from social, political, economic, and environmental circumstances. Taking a global historical approach, this course examines diverse human diseases (malaria, pellagra, influenza, HIV/AIDS) and one livestock disease (rinderpest) to better understand these circumstances. Two general inquiries will guide our studies: 1) How have varied social groups such as rich and poor and men and women experienced disease and healing across time and space? 2) How have research, policies, and treatments been produced and circulated? We will explore different places and time periods, from malaria in the earliest human communities to rinderpest in 1890s Africa to the global AIDS pandemic. Materials include historical scholarship, medical and scientific reports, literature, and film.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 298 — Asian Revolutions Course count: 1
This course will engage the numerous revolutions that proliferated throughout the 20th century in the region we identify as Asia. Engaging with recent scholarly work that addresses the global nature of revolutions in Asia, it aims to break down and interrogate organizing principles of nation and region. Students will be challenged to situate the lives and careers of Asian revolutionaries into a transnational context in which they were active participants and shapers of revolution, both as practice and concept. Themes include empire, colonialism, revolution, war, and memory.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 299-F04 — Race, Religion and Education in Colonial India Course count: 1
This course offers an introduction to the history of South Asia under European colonialism, while also aiming to improve the students reading, thinking and writing skills. Combining these elements will serve to introduce you to a rich and complex period in history, the South Asian region of the world, the theme of colonialism and its long-term impacts, and the disciplinary tools of history, while using that material as the arena in which to offer close instruction in how to read critically and efficiently, think deeply and analytically, and write clearly, intelligently, persuasively and succinctly. Regardless of your chosen major and subsequent career, you will gain invaluable skills for life. The colonial period in India spans over 450 years and involved numerous European powers not only the British which may be a surprise to many students. It began with the arrival of Vasco Da Gama on the southwest coast in 1498 and did not conclude until the final Portuguese withdrawal from Goa in 1961. The British were of course the most famous and impactful colonial power to come to India, arriving as traders in 1601, becoming a territorial power after 1757 and expanding directly or indirectly to control most of the subcontinent by the late 19th century. The British finally departed in 1947 after a protracted anti-colonial nationalist struggle that spanned both world wars, resulting in a bloody Partition from which the independent nations of India and Pakistan were born. The Dutch, the French and even the Danish also had colonial holdings in South Asia which were not insignificant. The varied texture of this history will likely be fascinating new knowledge for students, and fodder for deep reflection and writing. The course will not attempt to be a comprehensive survey of the entire colonial period in India. Rather we will use three themes race, religion and education to inquire what exactly colonialism was, what forms it took, how South Asian society was changed by it, and to what extent that change was a process of imposition, organic development through interaction, and good or nefarious intentions. Going beyond the what of history the dates, events, names and facts students will develop their own voice to speak critically and analytically, to be interpreters of history, explainers of what is significant and why.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-F05 — Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Native American History through Treaties Course count: 1
Treaties enabled European colonists to establish a foothold in North America and charted the territorial expansion of the United States. Indian people were often deceived by treaties and quickly came to understand that words, translated and recorded on paper, had the power to take away their lands and their rights. They referred to written treaties as that pen and ink witchcraft, which they can make speak things we never intended, or had any idea of, even an hundred years hence. But the hundreds of treaty councils generated unique records of cultural encounter. Each treaty had its own story and cast of characters. Indian treaties melded Native American and European traditions of conducting diplomacy and were stages for human dramas and power struggles. Congress declared an end to Indian treaties in 1871, but far from being dusty documents or ancient history, Indian treaties remain the law of the land and continue to have life and power today. Working with the records of key treaties, this seminar will examine the protocols of Indian diplomacy, the maneuverings and agendas of the different participants, as well as the outcomes and legacies of Indian treaties.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-F06 — Europe's Long 20th Century Course count: 1
This course, "Europe's Long Twentieth Century," considers European history from the First World War to more recent challenges to European democracy, unity, stability, and human rights. We will explore the collapse of empires, the rise of fascism and Nazism, the ideological battles of the Cold War, anti-colonial movements and decolonization, broad social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the collapse of communism, and the complex process of European integration. Through analysis of primary sources, historiography, literature, and film, we will trace the continent's journey from the shattered peace of 1914 to the evolving political and social landscape of the 21st century that has challenged the assumed certainty of a unified liberal-democratic Europe.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-F09 — Revolution and State Building in North America, 1750-1815 Course count: 1
This course will offer an intensive, heavily discussion-oriented survey of thegeopolitical crises confronting all North Americans in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The central focus will be the encounters between Indigenous polities and Europeans in the trans-Appalachian west, although the class will weave into that narrative the issues that are traditionally associated with the American Revolutionparadoxical notions of liberty; the process of resistance, secession, and armed confrontation in the thirteen seaboard colonies; the problem of slavery; and the complexities associated with American state building.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-F10 — Energy and the Environment in Global History: Fossil Fuels and Beyond Course count: 1
This is a class about power: power in the sense of energy (from the sun, wind, plants, animals, nuclear technology, and especially fossil fuels) and how control of energy has linked to political and social power across time. The field of energy history connects history and the environment, exploring human societies through the lens of efforts to secure, maintain, and expand the energy supply.This course introduces this method of looking at history. Touching briefly on the deep history of humans and energy, the main focus will be the past two and a half centuries: the industrial revolution and the rise of coal; modern entanglements with oil and other forms of power; climate change and other environmental effects of changing energy regimes. Beyond power plants and coal mines, this inquiry also engages subjects like the relationships between humans and animals, the role of technology in the past, and the history of food. At the end of the semester, wewill use the lens of energy history to consider recent efforts to spark an energy transition back to renewable sources.Throughout, the focus will be direct engagement with questions of the connections between energy and power, people, and the natural world.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-F11 — Local History in Action: Worcester Stories Course count: 1
Are you a detective? Designer? Researcher? Storyteller? In History Lab, students will get a chance to wear each of these hats as they become immersed in big questions about historical thinking and the practice of history how we know what we know about the past and how we might best communicate that knowledge to various publics. In the readings portion of our seminar, we will examine methods and controversies of public history work, that is, historical interpretation conducted outside of traditional academic settings, such as museums, historic sites, and in popular forms, such as documentary films, monuments, and memorials. This is an especially hot and often controversial field in US history during the countrys 250th anniversary year (2026). We will also familiarize ourselves with readings on the rich industrial and immigrant history of Worcester from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries as we examine the Whittall Mills historic site at the base of Holy Cross campus with an eye toward producing a public history digital project.This team-taught seminar functions as a hands-on history lab where students will apply their public history insights to research the history of the Whittall Mills complex, a once-prominent global carpet manufacturing enterprise, located on Brussels Street at the foot of Holy Cross campus (across from Wendys). The Whittall Mills (1881-1956) neighborhood developed into a quasi-company town of British immigrants whose history speaks to the rise of industrial capitalism globally as well as US debates around notions of American identity and nationalism from the late 19th century through the Second World War. This is at once a local and global story that reaches from South Worcester across the Atlantic and threads in many vital themes of labor, immigration, empire, technology, urban growth, ethnicity, nationalism, cultural orientalism, and consumerism.Over the course of the semester, student teams will work collaboratively as historians to ask questions and build knowledge about this historic site (purchased by Holy Cross in 2024), and to design and produce a final product that captures the history they want to tell in the most effective digital medium. In the process, students will gain experience in research, teamwork, curation, and working with digital humanities resources. Together, students will work in traditional archives (census, city directories, newspapers, etc) and in digital humanities tools (such as timeline, website design, and storymapping software) to produce a final public history project of this neighborhood.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-F13 — Family in Russia: Medieval to Modern Course count: 1
This class will look at conflict and change in Russian society through the lens of the family. In particular, we will examine attitudes towards and practices of marriage, moments of generational conflict, and tensions between family or community expectations and individual desires. Rather than dividing Russian history between the time before the Revolution of 1917 and the time after, this course will analyze select episodes illuminating to notions of gender and generational relations, beginning in the medieval era and ending in the post-Soviet world of today. This chronological sweep will allow us to consider, at various moments, the roles and responsibilities of men and women; ideas of masculinity and femininity (and how the values of Russian society compared to those of other European and Asian countries); and attitudes towards the correct balance between individual rights and community obligations (and whether such values differed inside the Russian, and later the Soviet, Empire in relation to status, ethnicity, or class).Topics to look at will include the "Rules for Russian Households" popularized during the time of Ivan the Terrible, the image and impact of Catherine the Great, the 1861 abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire amid an era of so-called "Great Reform," student-led terrorism and generational conflict in the 1880s, the fall of the Romanov Dynasty, the re-ordering of family and alleged "emancipation" of women following the Bolshevik/Communist Revolution of 1917, the position of women on the periphery of the USSR, in spaces such as Central Asia, the role of Soviet men and women during and after World War Two, the Soviet 1960s, the moral panic surrounding sex, violence, and money in Russia during post-Soviet times, and the politicization of family values in Russia today.Readings will include memoirs, works of literature (several novellas or plays), and a variety of primary texts, as well as contemporary media articles and scholarly analysis. No prerequisites or prior knowledge of Russia is required.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-F15 — An Introduction to the History of the 1960s in America Course count: 1
What made the 1960s in America this distinct, colorful, tumultuous entity, the Sixties?In answering that question, a starting point is prosperity: the engine of the American economic system running at full tilt, workers and bosses producing at exceptional levels, unionized workers and bosses and government together achieving a distribution of that bounty that made the lives of average Americans more secure and more optimistic than in the past. Relative prosperity brought optimism, a desire for more goods, larger cars, better and truer (Groovey!) entertainment etc. Freedom from the dire constraints of economic insecurity brought a desire for more freedom, a truism in the decade for haves, but, in many ways, just as true for striving have-nots.Sixties America will explore the decade through the experience of well know historical figures and everyday Americans, asking What were the 60s like for the people? How did some Americans embrace this new freedom, while others chafed under its challenges? What anxieties developed, alongside the finding of new ways to express ones freedom?At the center of the course will be study of social movements: the Civil Rights Movement, the Youth/Anti-Vietnam War Movement, the Womens Movement, and the Movement for Gay Liberation. What animated Americans to make and join these efforts? What were their aims? How did resistance to them affect their trajectories, their means and ends? Why, by the end of the decade, did some Americans believe efforts at reform must be replaced by more militant solutions?Heres a specific question we will explore: Why did more Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy in 1968 than did in the immediate aftermath of November 22, 1963? A second focus of the course is on culture, for our purposes meaning the eras expanding fields in music, movies and sports. Specific attention will be given to iconic figures like Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, events like the 1968 Olympics and Woodstock, and to films including Guess Whos Coming to Dinner, Easy Rider and others.What made the 1960s the Sixties? If you are interested in the course you neednt worry about whether you are able now to answer that big, big question. The sole prerequisite is that you come with curiosity and energy to begin the historical inquiry.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-S16 — Mongols and More - At the Borders in China's Past Course count: 1
This course will examine the long history of interactions between successive Chinese states and various non-Chinese peoples on the borderlands and frontiers of Inner, Central East, and Southeast Asia. Beginning with the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BCE), we will survey how ethnic and cultural differences were conceptualized and discussed in received Chinese historical texts and how non-Chinese peoples were integrated/excluded into an expanding Zhou state. From there, we will survey the expansion of subsequent dynasties westward and the cultural, political, and social exchanges that occurred between Chinese, Iranian, and other peoples, as well as the persistent wars Chinese states fought with nomadic peoples from the north, and the coming of Buddhism into the Chinese heartland from Central Asia. We will then investigate the rise of the Mongols, their conquest and rule over China and much of Central and West Asia, and end by looking at the Manchu and the establishment of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). In this long survey, we will pay close attention to how ethnic, cultural, and religious difference were perceived by successive generations of observers, and how interactions between Chinese and non-Chinese border peoples came to shape ever changing definitions of both Chinese identity and Chinese-ness. In so doing, we will read from an extensive number of translated primary sources, such as The Secret History of the Mongols. Further, to provide students an introductory historiographical background of how academics have attended these questions, we will read from a wide range of secondary literature, both old and new. Our class will be discussion-based with the occasional lecture. Assignments will include maps, short papers, source analyses, and a final project.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Spring
HIST 299-S17 — Comparative Invasions of America: French, English, Spanish, 1500-1638 Course count: 1
This class will offer interdisciplinary perspectives on how initial encounters between Europeans and Indigenous polities in North America entailed a clash between Western and non-Western traditions. While historical in focus, topics of interest to non-majors will include distinctive political, spiritual, and legal customs, art, the environment and resource extraction, disease, diplomacy, war, slavery, and competing ideas of land use. Regions will include the Saint Lawrence River Valley, Roanoke Island and Jamestown, and the Native South (modern US South). Comparative Invasions will also introduce the concept of settler colonialism, properly contextualized so that students can understand complexity and contingency in initial encounters. Because 16th and 17th Century Indigenous polities were oral (non-literate), two lines of inquiry structure the recovery of Native voices. The first introduces students to Indigenous Ways of Knowing, with particular emphasis upon lifeways, inter-Indigenous diplomacy and trade, reciprocal obligations to other-than-human persons, matrilineality, and the critical importance of the Algonquian (Anishnaabe) concept of mino-bimaadiziwiin. Building upon that foundation, the second line of inquiry stresses archeological, anthropological, and other interdisciplinary methodologies. This combination will allow students carefully to deconstruct the European records that overwhelmingly serve as contemporary source material. The class will be heavily discussion-oriented, with some lectures to provide general structure. Assignments will include a series of short essays and a research paper.
GPA units: 1
HIST 299-S18 — Colonialism and Resistance in the Middle East Course count: 1
This course explores themes of imperialism and anticolonial resistance through the lens of the history of the land of Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries and the "Palestinian-Israeli conflict." It deals with such topics as: life in Ottoman Palestine in the nineteenth century; the birth of the Zionist movement and Zionist settlement in Palestine; the British Mandate for Palestine; the creation of the state of Israel/the nakba; the emergence of a Palestinian national movement; the wars of 1956 and 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; Palestinian resistance movements; the intifadas; the pitfalls of the "peace process"; and the history of proposed solutions to "the Question of Palestine." This course aims to shed light on the origins of present-day violence and movements for justice and peace in the region and asks students to critically analyze the historical impediments to the creation of a Palestinian state.
GPA units: 1
HIST 299-S26 — Putin's World Course count: 1
Writing about Russian President Vladimir Putin has become a cottage industry around the world, as scholars and journalists alike debate his motivations, his background, his political strengths and weaknesses, his health, his wealth, and his so-called end-game. In part, this fascination with Putin, in power for more than 20 years, has to do with the fact that Russias post-Soviet (and, eventually, post-Putin) future remains so uncertain. In part, it has also to do with the fact that, under Putin, a so-called New Cold War has come to replace the old one prompting people to wonder what was at stake in the first superpower rivalry, and what remains at stake today. Putins successes raise many questions about the changing role of the U.S. in the world and the very future of liberal democracy. Meanwhile, Kremlin officials around Putin are busy re-writing histories of their countrys past re-framing the Soviet experience, the Second World War, and the U.S.-Russia relationship in order to cultivate a sense of national pride. Russia, under Putin, is a place that highlights the quandaries of the modern age: the power of modern media to shape values, the seeming success of so-called democratic authoritarianism in a multi-polar world, the difficulty of investigating, never mind uprooting, patterns of corruption, the efforts of ordinary people to find happiness and contentment even amid widespread injustice, and the various ways individuals engage with the broader systems of power and policing that surround them. We will examine these issues by looking at a variety of political, economic, and cultural sources, including novels and numerous films. Through an investigation of the collapse of Communism beginning in 1991, we will try to answer how the Putin era relates to the Soviet past and to pinpoint the differences between Russia and the U.S. today, when the citizens of both countries seem much more similar than they once did, even amid deepening national rivalry.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 299-X01 — Global Environmental History Course count: 1
This course explores interactions between humans and the non-human world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with emphasis on the Global South. Case studies will be drawn from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. In these cases, students will study historical themes in agriculture, health, urbanization, industrialization, hydro-development, climate change, and human struggles for environmental justice. Course materials will include scholarly writing, literature, and film.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 305 — America's First Global Age Course count: 1
There is great talk about "globalization" and "global economies" during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, people living in America were touched by global economic processes as early as the time of Columbus. This course explores North America's first global age beginning in the 1400s and extending through the 1860s. It examines this history thematically by focusing on various kinds of trades and industries such as gold, fish, timber, tobacco, silver, sugar, alcohol, fur, coffee, tea, and cotton. In addition to economic processes, the course addresses the social, cultural, and political implications of these global trade connections for Americans of African, European, and Native descent. Fulfills one pre-modern/pre-industrial requirement for the major.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or permission of the Instructor. Students who have taken MONT 102G in Fall 2016, or MONT 103G in Spring 2017 are unable to enroll in this course.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 310 — Global Modernities: Polities of Difference Course count: 1
Modernity, modern, and modernization are often used interchangeably to refer to distinct concepts in history including a global capitalist system, European imperialism and Eurocentricism, the division of the world population into racial and gender categories, and a hegemonic conceptualization of a linear, progressive time. Modernitys uses and abuses are a highly contested terrain not only among historians today, but among peoples who experienced, resisted, and fractured the forces of modernization. Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to both the events and their theories as the muddle of modernity. This course delves into this muddle by studying moments in history in which Europeans Others fractured modernity in multiple ways: through narratives, representations, images of dislocation and splintering, and individual and collective resistance (i.e., liberation, anticolonial, Marxist, feminist, decolonial movements). Thus, the course privileges Indigenous, African, Asian voices, knowledges, and cosmologies that point to powerful polities of difference.
Prerequisite: Enrollment is limited to 3rd and 4th year HIST Majors only.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 314 — Music/Sport/Cultural Encounter Course count: 1
From aristocratic flute recitals to playoff games and rock festivals, human cultural expression takes place in social and political settings. Audiences are an intrinsic part of culture: Jackie Robinson integrated the stands, not just the playing field; some of George Harrison's fans learned Eastern Zen practice; Soviet teenagers sang "Jesus Christ Superstar." Inherently sensual, music and sports lend themselves viscerally to political, racial, ethnic, economic, and gendered contestation. We will explore case studies in this history: Bach, religion, and enlightened despotism; Robert and Clara Schumann's struggles with gendered expectations of artistry and family; ballet, "The Rite of Spring," bourgeois morals, and the modern audience as spectacle; the Olympics as proving grounds for liberal democracy and totalitarianism; Hispanics and racial categorization in North American baseball; the transatlantic musical invasions (rock/jazz in Europe, the Beatles in America); the Cold War as culture war; Korean hip-hop; and gender in rock and sport. As historic sites of participatory spectatorship and cross-cultural encounter, what can music halls and sports arenas teach us?
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 315 — East Asia Displayed: Global Sports and International Exhibitions Course count: 1
From the inception of Worlds Fairs and the modern Olympic Games in the nineteenth century, global sporting competitions and international exhibitions have always been a way of showcasing national progress and strength, as well as material and technological achievements. This course examines both the representation of East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) in these international mega-events in addition to East Asian countries own participation in and hosting of expositions and games, from the London and Paris worlds fairs in the late 1800s to the 2008 Beijing and 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Shanghai World Expo in 2010. It will explore the changing meanings of sports and competition, scientific and technological innovation, artistic and cultural exchange, as well as national and racial identities in the shifting contexts of colonialism, imperialism, war, diplomacy, urbanization, environmental change, and globalization. Students will analyze both textual and visual sources and explore a topic through in-depth individual research.
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year, Spring
HIST 317 — Pain & Suffering: US History Course count: 1
This is a course in American religious and social thought from the late-18th century to the present. Through reading, discussion, and written assignments, students will explore the development of competing assumptions rooted in various religious, political, and moral traditions about the meaning of suffering in society in terms of causes, consequences, and obligations it creates within in the larger community. It begins with the development of humanitarianism in the context of American antislavery debates. It continues through the late-19th and early-20th centuries when the emergence of total war, systemic poverty, industrialization, and public health crises provoked widespread moral concern and political response through new media technologies that brought images of suffering to wider audiences. In studying the post-WWII era, the course revisits ongoing debates over the causes and consequences of poverty in an age of affluence, explores the role of suffering in nonviolent direct action movements of the civil rights and Vietnam era, and examines the sources of modern discourses on just war, humanitarian interventionism, torture, and human rights in the present. Students will have options to explore one or more of these themes in-depth through research projects.
Prerequisite: History majors must have HIST 200. Other majors must have taken one History course or permission.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 319 — Joan of Arc & Medieval Warfare Course count: 1
Joan of Arc has fascinated for centuries, yet continually eluded easy description. She is one of the most famous and best documented of all medieval individuals, yet she participated in public events for only two years, and died while still in her teens. This course explores Joan's history and legacy, through sources generated during her lifetime, and those, including film, created in later centuries. It also examines the 115-year-long conflict between England and France and their allies, known as the Hundred Years' War (1340-1455), in the context of medieval warfare in general. One unit.
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 327 — Cultures of Cold War Course count: 1
The superpower struggle that shaped the world post-1945 involved a competition not only for military might, but also for moral supremacy. During this time, the United States and the Soviet Union came to define themselves in opposition to each other, both seeking to demonstrate the superiority of their respective social and political systems and advertise the alleged degeneracy of those of their arch-rivals. This course looks at how each country portrayed its own society and imagined that of its major global foe, and the way these representations often differed from reality. Because the major emphasis is on the shaping and re-shaping of values and identities, it draws heavily on cultural sources such as novels, short stories, films, cartoons, and music lyrics, as well as other more traditional primary and secondary historical texts. One unit.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or one 200-level course in 20th C U.S., European or Soviet history.
GPA units: 1
HIST 329 — Collapse of Communism Course count: 1
What led to the surprise collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and how has Russia defined itself since the USSRs sudden disintegration? What has replaced the Soviet system and how is the capitalist Russia of today different from the country as it was under Communist rule? What kind of lessons about power, ideology, and freedom are to be found in the fate of the former Soviet superpower? This course will explore Russias troubled transition from one political and economic system to another, and the consequent evolution of Communist and post-Communist identities and values. In addition, the course will examine the politics of history, looking at the different accounts of Russias past, present and future that have been championed by different groups with different agendas at different times.
Prerequisite: Enrollment is limited to 3rd and 4th year HIST Majors only.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Alternate Years
HIST 352 — Rebels & Radical Thinkers Course count: 1
This course examines revolutionary movements in Latin America from the early 1900s to the present, focusing on the radical ideas that inspired the rebels. The course will discuss both the words and actions of some of the most salient radicals of the region--e.g., Emiliano Zapata, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara, and their relevance today. We will also trace some of these ideas/rebels as depicted in films-produced either in Latin America, the United States or Europe-analyzing their significance in popular culture. This course fulfills one cross cultural requirement.
Prerequisite: History majors must have HIST 200. Other majors must have taken one History course or permission.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 361 — Germans, Jews and Memory Course count: 1
Explores the place of Jews in German life before, during, and after the Nazi period. Commences with an examination of the centuries-old issue of assimilation. Explores the 20th-century "German world" of Einstein and Freud, everyday Jewish life in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, survivors and their problems, the place of Jews in divided Germany after 1945, the growing Jewish community in contemporary reunified Germany, and the changing relationships among the children and grandchildren of the Holocaust's perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Special attention is given to memory issues in postwar Germany. These issues too have a history. How have Germans dealt with their past? How has the passing of generations affected this issue? Are Jews and non-Jews in today's Germany comfortable with each other?
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or HIST 255 or HIST 256 or HIST 261 or 262 or 267 or 324 or permission of the instructor.
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 363 — Indigenous Latin America Course count: 1
Latin American history did not begin with the arrival of the Europeans on the shores of the New World. Rather, the history of the Americas is as old as the Indigenous societies that have inhabited these lands. This seminar traces Indigenous history in the Americas over the course of the late medieval and early modern periods from approximately 1400-1800 A.D. The course will focus on four geographical case studies: Southern U.S. borderlands, Central Mexico, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. We will examine the pre-contact history of each geographical case study and then examine how conquest and colonialism shaped the lives of Indigenous men and women. The class begins with an introduction to Indigenous history as a field of historical scholarship. This historiographical focus highlights trends and fractures within this vibrant and chronically marginalized field of study. We will then move chronologically and geographically from north to south, beginning with southern U.S. borderlands and stretching to the Andes.The course delves into several historical processes: the growth and decline of Indigenous empires, the impacts of disease and warfare that accompanied European conquest incursions, the formation of colonial economies that hinged on Indigenous labor, and the creation of hierarchies based on race, class, and gender. As Indigenous communities did not exist in isolation, we will explore how they engaged with historical actors of other ethnic backgrounds: Spanish and Portuguese settlers, free and enslaved Black people, and individuals of mixed ancestry. Students will assess the variety of historical methods that scholars have used to analyze Indigenous experiences of adaptation, resistance, and survival.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or instructor permission
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 365 — Resistance & Rev in Mod Africa Course count: 1
A critical study of anti-colonial nationalist struggles and their outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. The course traces the political economy of colonialism; the origins, rise and dynamics of anti-colonial nationalism; the strategy of armed insurrection and the role of revolutionary socialism. Lastly, it grapples with aspects of post-colonial Africa that reveal the changing balance between internal and external forces in specific African nations, the ambiguities of African independence, and post-colonial debates on nation and nationalism.
Prerequisite: History majors must have HIST 200. Other majors must have taken one History course or permission.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Spring
HIST 370 — Capital & Empire: United States in the World, 1870s-1920s Course count: 1
The era from the 1870s to the 1920s witnessed a global integration of markets, technological and corporate change (known as the Second Industrial Revolution), a new wave of imperialism, surging nationalisms, and a crisis of rising inequality. People, commodities, ideas, and cultural currents crossed borders at an unprecedented rate and scale. We will investigate how those who experienced the Gilded Age and First Globalization reckoned with migrations and dislocations, pursued international investment and endured economic panics, participated in the transnational transfer of social policy, elaborated and contested imperial civilizing missions, and reimagined theories of society. Recently, historian Leon Fink has proposed the Long Gilded Age to designate the period from the 1870s to the 1920s. Analytically, he challenges the problem-solution structure of the Gilded Age followed by the Progressive Era. Instead, he reminds us that the late nineteenth century was far from devoid of plans, radical and reformist, to remake society, while pervasive income and wealth inequality persisted deep into the 1920s. Consequently, we will examine the Long Gilded Age as a continuous period, albeit one wracked by transformations.
Prerequisite: HIST 200 or instructor permission
GPA units: 1
Typically Offered: Alternate Years, Spring
HIST 392 — Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Course count: 1
The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict is often defined in terms of competing Palestinian and Israeli national ambitions in the land of Palestine. Yet this was not always the case. In the early years of Israel's existence, Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir allegedly declared that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land" thus drawing on a highly polemical argument originally coined in the mid-19th century to describe the relationship between the Jewish diaspora and the Holy Land. It implied, on the one hand, that the Palestinian people did not exist in the land of Palestine and on the other, that the Jewish people had a special/ primordial right to this land. This course takes this expression as a starting point for considering the history and historiography of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the British Mandate period through the 1967 Six Day War and its aftermath. Through intensive reading and discussion about the rise of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, the demise of the Ottoman empire, the advent of the British Mandate for Palestine, and the broader conflict between the Arab states and Israel, this course will consider the historiographical revisions that Israeli and Palestinian historians have offered in order to address the "land without a people for a people without a land" polemic. We will investigate the reasons for the emergence of such historical revisionism and more broadly, the implications of newer historical paradigms for the history of the conflict and for its resolution.
Prerequisite: HIST 200
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Historical Studies
Typically Offered: Every Third Year
HIST 399-F10 — Mountains, Masculinity, and Empire Course count: 1
This course explores the historical intersections of gender, power, and imperial expansion through the symbolic and material significance of mountains. We begin by examining how European explorers and scientists of the eighteenth-century redefined mountains as sites of sublime beauty and scientific inquiry, transforming them from feared obstacles into spaces of conquest and national pride. We will then analyze how re-discovery of mountains contributed to the construction of a distinct masculine ideals. These ideals resonated deeply with the spirit of exploration and conquest, shaping the narratives of frontier heroes in the American West and influencing the establishment of US National Parks as spaces for cultivating national identity and a virile connection to nature. The second half of the course moves beyond Europe and America to examine the inter-imperial rivalries that fueled European expeditions to the Himalayas, culminating in the conquest of Everest. We will explore the ways in which these inter-European rivalries reinforced ideas of heroism, dominance, and national superiority. The course will particularly consider the impact these European perceptions had on the indigenous populations of mountainous regions. Through a critical examination of historical sources, including travel narratives, scientific reports, and visual representations, this course will interrogate how mountains have served as arenas for both physical and ideological struggles, shaping global histories of gender, power, and the environment.
Prerequisite: Enrollment is limited to 3rd and 4th year HIST Majors only.
GPA units: 1
HIST 399-F11 — Caste in Indian History: Power, Prejudice & Social Hierarchy Course count: 1
Caste has often been described as Indias defining social system but what is it, and how has it changed over time? This upper-level course examines caste as a historically evolving structure of power, prejudice, and social hierarchy. From early textual articulations to colonial codification and contemporary politics, we trace how caste has been defined, classified, and contested. Particular attention is given to communities historically marginalized as untouchables (Dalits) and to movements of resistance and reform. Students will engage major historiographical debates about whether caste is ancient, constructed, or continually reshaped.
GPA units: 1
Common Area: Historical Studies
HIST 401 — Seminar Course count: 1
An intensive research-oriented study on various themes; offered each semester; limited to 12 participants.
Enrollment limited to 3rd and 4th year students only
GPA units: 1
HIST 408 — Tutorial Course count: 1
Reading of selected sources, with individual written reports and discussion, under the direction of a member of the department. Students enrolled in a tutorial must receive the approval of the instructor. One unit.
GPA units: 1
HIST 420 — Fourth Year Thesis Course count: 1
An individual, student-designed, professor-directed, major research project. Usually available only to outstanding fourth-year majors. A lengthy final paper and public presentation are expected. Students engaged in a thesis may be nominated for Honors in History.
GPA units: 0
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 421 — Fourth Year Thesis Course count: 1
An individual, student-designed, professor-directed, major research project. Usually available only to outstanding fourth-year majors. A lengthy final paper and public presentation are expected. Students engaged in a thesis may be nominated for Honors in History.
Prerequisite: HIST 420
GPA units: 2
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 422 — Advanced Research & Writing Colloquium Course count: 0
This course is required of all History thesis writers who are working on research-based projects during their senior year. The colloquium has two aims: first, to assist students in developing and adapting the skills they will use in the course of researching, writing, and revising a 60-100 page manuscript and presenting their work orally to a broader audience (an advanced form of The Historian's Craft); and second, to alleviate, as much as possible, the isolation of the thesis writing process by offering students both formal and informal opportunities for peer support and review.
Corequisite: HIST 420
GPA units: 0.5
Typically Offered: Annually
HIST 423 — Advanced Research & Writing Colloquium Course count: 0
This course is required of all History thesis writers who are working on research-based projects during their senior year. The colloquium has two aims: first, to assist students in developing and adapting the skills they will use in the course of researching, writing, and revising a 60-100 page manuscript and presenting their work orally to a broader audience (an advanced form of The Historian's Craft); and second, to alleviate, as much as possible, the isolation of the thesis writing process by offering students both formal and informal opportunities for peer support and review.
GPA units: 0.5
Typically Offered: Annually