History (HIST)

HIST 1097 CALL HIST Topics 3 Credits

Various topics in History. See each section description.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1098 CALL HIST Topics 3 Credits

Various topics in History. See each section description.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1099 Hist Focus 0 or 3 Credits

HIST 1099 is one of the required core classes in History for students in the College of Arts & Sciences and the SFS. All sections fulfill the same role, though each instructor will develop a specific topic. Please see individual section description or online syllabi for more information. The general aim is to introduce students to various elements of historical work and thinking, within the context of looking at a particular historical period, event, or theme in some depth. Though lectures and discussion will focus on particular topics, there will also be labs with class exercises, assignments, and readings that will allow instructors and students to explore how historians identify, define, and employ primary sources of all types, how historians analyze those sources, how they formulate questions, how they engage with the work of prior historians, and how they aim to reconstruct various elements of the human experience in particular times and places. Please note that if you receive AP/IB placement or credit, you cannot take HIST 1099 for credit. HIST 1099 must be taken at GU and cannot be transferred.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Students in a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree may not enroll.

Enrollment limited to students in the College of Arts Sciences college.

HIST 1101 World I 3 Credits

World I examines the history of the human experience from a global perspective. The bulk of the semester concerns societies and states from the time of ancient civilizations to about 1500 AD. The course pays particular attention to political, economic, and social changes, but also considers cultural, technological, and ecological history. The evolving relationship between human identities and their social and material environments forms one of the major points of analytical focus for this course. The overarching goal is to provide a general framework for the history of the world to help students understand the big picture, and to help them to contextualize what they will later study about history, politics, religion--in short, about the human experience. (This course fulfills the College's Core Survey Requirement for History)

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1102 World II 0-3 Credits

World II considers human history since about 1500 AD, focusing on the dynamics of global interaction. The class seeks to familiarize students with, and help them contextualize, historical processes and phenomena such as colonialism and imperialism, industrialization, modern population growth, nationalism and the rise of the nation-state, great power politics, and the emergence of modern science. Its goal is to explain how the world got to be the way it is, with a particular focus on how social and ethno-cultural identities have been shaped--and have in turn shaped--political, economic, and physical environments. (This course fulfills the College's Core Survey Requirement for History)

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1104 Indian Ocean World 0-4 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1106 Atlantic World 0 or 3 Credits

The events and processes initiated by Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492 transformed the world of Columbus’s contemporaries and shaped the world we live in today. Drawing together the histories of four continents, Europe, Africa, North America and South America, this course explores the new Atlantic world created as a consequence of the Columbian encounter. History 106 examines the Atlantic world through the experiences of the people who inhabited it from the mid-fifteenth century through approximately 1900. The final two weeks explore the legacies of Atlantic history on Georgetown's own campus and beyond. A volatile mixture of people and pathogens, of labor systems and crops, of nations, empires, and subjects, contributed to the painful and unexpected emergence of this new Atlantic world. The unforeseen and, for many, tragic consequences of this process of cultural conflict and exchange lie at the heart of this class. Topics will include the destruction and reconfiguration of indigenous societies, the labor migrations of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, the new and transformed societies that developed in all four continents of the Atlantic world, independence movements, piracy, slavery, abolition, disease, commodities, and different strategies of accommodation, resistance, and rebellion.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1107 Pacific World 0 or 3 Credits

This course examines the history of human interactions in and around the Pacific Ocean from roughly the 1400s to the present. The Pacific Ocean forms the world’s largest feature and has arguably its most expansive and diverse history. We will focus particularly on the islands, coastal zones, and ports where key encounters, exchanges and incursions took place that would have lasting significance for the peoples of the region and the history of the world. Bringing together global historical processes and local case studies, we will explore a wide range of exchanges that include commerce, diplomacy and warfare, migration, imperialism and colonialism, religion, and ideologies.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1108 Cent. Eurasia:World Crossroads 0 or 3 Credits

This course offers an introduction to the history of Central Eurasia from prehistoric times to the present, focusing on its key role in phenomena ranging from the rise of Islam to the Mongol Empire and Soviet socialism.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1109 The Islamic World 3 Credits

We can define the Islamic world in several ways: the regions in which Muslim populations predominate, states and societies in which the institutions of Islamic civilization flourished, or areas controlled by Muslim rulers. In the modern period, we can view the Islamic world through the lens of colonial experiences, religious revivalism (and its controversies) and efforts to negotiate and reclaim the heritage of classical Islam. The scope of this class is ambitious, but it is also rewarding. To understand the Islamic world one must understand the religion of Islam, its origins, internal debates and development. Exploring Islamic civilization means surveying how this faith brought about conversions and shaped institutions that redefined the world from Andalusia to Indonesia. Finally, understanding the Islamic world today means placing this legacy within the various geopolitical and religious contexts of the modern world. This course grapples with all these tasks.

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: SFS/CORE History: Modern Reg

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1110 Central Asia: Hist/Art/Culture 0-3 Credits

Throughout its history, the region now known as “Central Asia” has served as a shared space for diverse cultural traditions. This was not accidental, but rather the result of a long historical process. Its diverse geography, differing climates, and unequal distribution of economic resources created conditions that supported both sedentary and nomadic pastoralist populations. These groups lived alongside one another and maintained social, economic, cultural, and political ties. Over time, however, climate change, natural disasters, and the need for stable economic revenue to sustain large states transformed Central Asia’s relationships with neighbouring regions. For centuries, nomadic pastoralist forces emerged from the Central Asian steppes like a volcano, expanding into major regions such as China, India, Iran, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. At the same time, empires in these regions sought to reduce the threat posed by nomadic pastoralist powers by extending their own influence into Central Asia. As a result of these interactions, Central Asia was often politically unified with neighbouring regions, which further encouraged contact among peoples from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. One important outcome of these exchanges was the development of multifaceted cultural identities that incorporated elements from many different traditions. This course takes a longue durée and multidisciplinary approach to the field of Central Asian Studies, with a particular focus on the interconnectedness between Central Asia and its neighbouring regions. It provides a comprehensive overview of Central Asian history, politics, religion, art and culture from ancient times to the Mongol invasion. The course provides students with the opportunity to engage with primary and secondary sources and analyse them within their historical context. Students will develop an understanding of how Central Asia’s multifaceted cultural identity emerged and how it influenced neighbouring regions for centuries. Ultimately, students are expected to recognise the significance of this region in shaping the history of the world we live in today.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1150 Glob. History of Skateboarding 0-3 Credits

Skateboarding emerged in California in the 1960s. As it expanded around the globe, new adherents sought to retain its countercultural edge. Skateboarding became more diverse, and took on new manifestations. But skateboarding is now a billion dollar industry. Has its countercultural veneer worn thin? We will explore the growth of skate scenes around the globe. We will visit local skate parks, meet key practitioners, and conduct research on the meanings and implications of skateboarding around the world.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the College of Arts Sciences college.

HIST 1200 EarlyAfrica:HistoriesMethods 0 or 3 Credits

For College students, HIST 111 fulfills the core requirement in History for a broad introductory survey; these students complete the requirement by taking HIST 099. This course is a general survey and explores the rich history of people living in Africa from very early times through the 19th century. We will focus our attention on several regional case studies, including the early urbanism and medieval states of the West African Sahel, equatorial societies and kingdoms of the southern savannas, the Swahili coast and its hinterland in eastern and central Africa, and the Kongo Kingdom and Atlantic slave trade. We seek to understand transformations common to early human histories, such as the emergence of food production or the rise of centralized states, as well as the situational and contingent nature of ethnicity, slavery, gender, and wealth and poverty in the African context. We will also consider social achievements particular to Africans’ history, such as the multiple inventions of heterarchical forms of governance. We will study how persistent ideas from western cultures shaped what outsiders thought they knew about Africans and their histories at the same time that we try to understand what Africans themselves thought about their own actions and those of their ancestors. We will access these histories by analyzing a range of primary historical sources: archaeological artifacts and site reports, travelers’ accounts, art, oral traditions, photographs, the reconstructed vocabulary of dead languages, and many others.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1201 Modern Africa 0-4 Credits

This course examines the history of Africa from the 19th century to the present. We will explore major political, economic, social, religious and environmental changes on the continent, but we will also think about how historical knowledge is created and how historians assess evidence about the past. Topics include Africa's role in the 19th-century global economy and the political and social impacts of this early globalization; European conquest of the continent and African resistance to European domination; the political and economic impacts of colonialism; major cultural, social and religious changes of the early 20th century; and how independence from colonialism was achieved and what it meant. Then we’ll turn to the era of independent African nations and explore the historical context of some of the issues facing present-day Africa. We also will examine dynamics of age, gender, class, and ethnicity within African societies. And throughout the class, we will consider how Africans have acted to create their own history within the context of larger global and historical forces they do not control. Along the way, we'll ask how we know what we think we know. What do terms such as “African” and “European” mean in practice, and what do they obscure? How has “the West” created knowledge about “Africa,” and what are the implications of this? With Africa serving as the context, you will practice the art of historical analysis. Questions we will ask throughout this class include: Why did something happen when it happened and what were its consequences? How have unequal relations of power shaped the kinds of historical evidence we have today, and how can we interpret that evidence? To what extent can history explain the world we now share?

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: SFS/CORE History: Modern Reg

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1301 History of China I 0-3 Credits

This course is the first part of the Chinese history survey. It introduces the territorial, political, social, and cultural transformations that have shaped the places we call China today and challenge any singular definition of it. Equal parts content and critique, it introduces the histories of “China” since ancient times, but primarily between 750 and 1700. Throughout the course, we will focus on the role of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in shaping societies and cultures, the relations between the state, elites, and commoners, the changing gender and family relations, and the flow of people, ideas, goods, and technology between China and the rest of the world. This class fulfills a Core History survey requirement for College and SFS students. It is introductory and has no prerequisites. It assumes limited prior knowledge of China that you may acquire from news, social media, formal education, travel, and other educational and personal experiences. Chinese language skills are not expected.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1302 History of China II 0 or 3 Credits

HIST 123 History of China II This course continues from the first part of the Chinese history survey. It is taught with a somewhat different time frame on the main campus and in Doha at SFSQ. On the main campus: The course is introductory, has no prerequisites, and assumes no prior knowledge of China or its language. The organization of the course is basically chronological, but within that framework we will be approaching China from a wide range of viewpoints, taking up political, economic, social, religious, philosophical, and artistic developments. In the fall semester, we covered the formation of China's social, political, and philosophical culture(s), going as far as the consolidation of imperial autocracy in the Ming dynasty (14th-16th centuries). This term we will cover roughly four centuries: 1580-1990. We start with both the resilience and weaknesses of China's imperial system during its final quarter-millennium, including the tensions between a "Middle Kingdom" vision of China as a unitary, advanced, and self-sufficient civilization and the realities of the Manchu Qing state as a multi-ethnic empire in growing competition with others. We then take up the challenge to China's traditions and stability posed by internal developments as well as external economic and cultural penetration by a number of "outsiders" in the 19th century. We conclude with China's 20th century experiments in forms of government and search for new directions in social and cultural development, so as to survive, and later thrive, in an increasingly interconnected global environment. At the Doha campus: China II: Twentieth Century China The first two decades of the twentieth century shattered all assumptions about what it meant to be “Chinese” and to live in the “Central Kingdom.” The collapse of the imperial system in 1911 brought an end to over two thousand years of successive emperors and dynasties, but little consensus about what the new “Republic of China” would be and do. Was this new “China” an empire or nation? Would it include or exclude Tibet, Mongolia, and the Muslim regions of eastern Turkestan—territories that had become part of the multi-cultural Qing empire (1636-1911). Having abandoned the Confucian education system, what would replace it? What ideology should motivate and discipline the people? Who should serve the state? Who should the state serve? And above all, how would China extricate itself from the hostile international forces that pressed in from all sides? There were no easy answers to these questions. The result was a century of fierce conflicts—a chain of explosions, both metaphorical and real—that tore apart the fabric of society and then rewove it into new patterns. This course will examine the last century of Chinese history by focusing on individual and everyday human experiences as revealed by a variety of primary sources—journals, works of art, poetry, novels and memoirs, music, and government documents. We will discuss major political figures such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, but also explore the lives of the educated elite—the intellectuals and officials who carried out their policies. This course will also pay particular attention to the history of women and minority groups such as Tibetans and Muslims.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1304 History of Modern Japan 0 or 3 Credits

The history of modern Japan, from the 1850s to the present. The course is built around thematic readings in a wide range of topics, with emphasis on political and economic as well as social history. We will explore the universal and particular aspects of Japanese nation-state formation, imperialism, industrialization, and postwar democratization.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1305 South East Asia I 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1306 Southeast Asia II 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1307 South Asia I 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 1308 Modern South Asia 0 or 3 Credits

This course introduces students to the foundational events, concepts, and trends of historical change in Modern South Asia. The course has a particular focus on British imperialism but through subsidiary material students will familiarize themselves with the longue durée historical changes that made modern South Asia. Every week, in the discussion, students will be introduced to long-term changes in the pre-colonial period to recognize how perceptions of the pre-colonial period impacted politics in the modern period under British imperialism. The course roughly begins when the Mughal empire starts tottering and ends with India’s liberalization of its economy, covering the pre-colonial period in brief, the colonial period, nationalist mobilization, partition, decolonization, and the vicissitudes of India’s democracy. Through this course, students will get a strong foundation in South Asian history and politics which will enable them to further explore the complex and diverse landscape that is South Asia.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1309 East Asia I 3 Credits

This course provides a regional survey of the histories of East Asian states and peoples from ancient through early modern times (roughly through the 18th century). It examines the regions of China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, as well as adjacent areas of maritime and continental East Asia. East Asian polities and societies shared broad cultural similarities rooted in the classical Chinese textual tradition, but each developed in distinct ways and maintained links outside the Confucian zone. East Asia I is followed in sequence by East Asia II, taught in Spring semester, which will cover from approximately the 18th century through the present.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1311 Hist of Korea in NE Asia 3 Credits

The aim of this course is to introduce Korean history to those students with little or no exposure to Korea and to challenge commonly held assumptions by those who do. The course will explore the cultural, political, and social impact of Korea’s internationalization from early modern times to the contemporary period. The first part of the course will explore the turbulent interplay between Chos?n Korea, dynastic overthrow in China, civil war in Japan, and the threat of Western imperialism. The second part of the course will focus on twentieth century Korea – the colonial experience, division, war, and relations between the two Koreas, Japan, China, Russia, and the United States.

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: SFS/CORE History: Modern Reg

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1401 Europe I 0-3 Credits

The basic aim of this course is to provide a foundation in the cultural, political, and social history of Europe since the Middle ages, but its broader focus is to demonstrate how such a course is necessary for understanding what constitutes modernity. To that end it will emphasize the decisive role played by the West in creating the modern world and its ongoing influence in determining the nature of modernization wherever it occurs. Accordingly, a knowledge of Europe's changing perceptions of itself and the nature of the world is essential to an understanding of what modernity is about. The lectures and readings, therefore, will be organized around major themes that contribute to this understanding, such as the meaning of authority and the concepts of change and continuity.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1402 Europe II 0-3 Credits

HIST 008 Intro Late History: Europe II or World II For College students, all sections of HIST 007 or HIST 008 fulfill the core requirement in History for a broad introductory survey; these students complete the requirement by taking HIST 099. Please note that if you receive AP/IB placement or credit, you cannot take HIST 007 (or 008 or 099) for credit. The various sections of HIST 008 have different focuses, for which see below; moreover, each instructor may develop or stress particular themes within her/his focus. Students are urged to consult syllabi available on line or at the History Department. The World II sections consider human history since about 1500 AD, focusing on the dynamics of global interaction. The class seeks to familiarize students with, and help them contextualize, historical processes and phenomena such as colonialism and imperialism, industrialization, modern population growth, nationalism and the rise of the nation-state, great power politics, and the emergence of modern science. Its goal is to explain how the world got to be the way it is, with a particular focus on how social and ethno-cultural identities have been shaped--and have in turn shaped--political, economic, and physical environments. The Europe II sections offer an analysis of the significant political, social, economic, diplomatic, religious, intellectual, and scientific developments in European Civilization since the eruption of the French Revolution. Special attention is also paid to issues of class, gender, marginality, and the relationship of Europe to non-Western cultures.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 1410 Europe:Age of Reason/Sentiment 3 Credits

This team-taught interdisciplinary seminar course is designed for first-year students interested in the opportunity for deeper study of particular themes and periods. Our main focus will be on careful reading of texts, active class discussion, and close attention to writing. Our main focus will be the cultural and historical developments of Europe, and to some degree of other parts of the world affected by Europe, in the eighteenth century, the era of the Enlightenment. In particular, we will consider the ways in which the political, scientific, economic, social, and religious developments of the period interacted with cultural and intellectual developments and expressions. Specific themes may include the relationship between religion and the state; the emergence of concepts of nationhood, citizenship, and representative government; the workings of the first truly global and consumer economy; and debates about the significance of race and gender. Throughout the eighteenth century, European thinkers, writers, and artists increasingly thought of themselves as “modern,” and at the same time also confronted cultural differences shaped by nation, class, race, religion, gender, and other factors. We will always try to highlight the interrelationships between historical and cultural developments, stressing especially the ways in which literature, music, drama, and the visual arts both responded and contributed to historical changes.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate level students.

HIST 1501 The Americas I 0 or 3 Credits

The modern Americas began when Europeans intruded around 1500, imagining rights to rule a hemisphere populated by diverse peoples. They provoked radical changes that transformed the hemisphere and the world, in ways they rarely planned or imagined. Before 1500, most native Americans lived in communities sustaining families and state powers; others remained independent, dispersed across vast regions. Europeans arrived carrying deadly diseases that nearly emptied the continent, while global trade links created unforeseen opportunities for profit. Chinese demand for silver led to Spanish American societies grounded in rebuilt indigenous communities. European demand for sugar brought forced removals of bound Africans to work plantations from Brazil through the Caribbean. In New England, British settlers pursued religious liberties and profits, sustaining themselves and Caribbean plantations; to the south, others bought Africans to raise rice and tobacco. And across vast interiors, Europeans met staunchly independent peoples who traded skins, furs, and more for tools, mounts, and arms to reinforce independence. Everywhere, European assertions, indigenous adaptations, and enslaved peoples’ resistance generated cultural innovations. From the 1770s, conflicts broke European empires: the U.S. began promising liberty and defending slavery; Haitian revolutionaries destroyed slavery and the plantation economy; plantation slavery expanded in Brazil and Cuba; while In New Spain, popular insurgents broke silver capitalism to rebuild lives on the land before Mexico began in 1821. Across continental interiors native peoples solidified independence.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate level students.

HIST 1502 The Americas II 3 Credits

Europeans linked the peoples of the Americas to global processes after 1500. Long histories within European empires and global capitalism led to regionally diverse societies that became the bases of national projects. Beginning in the 1770s, nations were shaped by diverse ways of power and life within—while linked together and facing global challenges that changed over time. We focus on the US, Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba, exploring their complex political, social, and cultural trajectories as they evolved together in a world of change. Before 1800, Mexico made silver to fund global trades sustained by enduring indigenous communities, while Brazil set enslaved Africans to making sugar and gold. Both were pivotal to capitalism before 1800—while Cuba and the US found lesser dynamism. After decades of conflict and reconstruction from the 1790s to the 1830s, Brazil revived making coffee, Cuba led the world in sugar, and the US rose as an industrial power built on cotton—all made by enslaved hands. Meanwhile, Mexico revived silver and built industries, all sustained by family growers—to face a US invasion in the 1840s that blocked its northward expansion. From 1865 to 1888, the US, Cuba, and Brazil struggled to end slavery while the US drove west to claim continental hegemony. From 1895 to 1959, Cubans and Mexicans pressed revolutions seeking social justice in the shadow of US power, while Brazil struggled to industrialize after slavery, and the US fought to assert global hegemony set in social diversity. Then after 1950, globalization drew power to US cities while insecurities plagued families and communities across the world.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1503 Latin America I 0-3 Credits

"The arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492 kicked off a dramatic exchange of peoples and cultures, plants and pathogens that would have vast global impact. This class focuses on the 300 years of community and life that followed these initial encounters. We begin with the early complex societies of the Americas before turning to the 16th century, as these communities dealt with devastating disease and the extraction of labor and resources that would come with European interests and assertions of power. We will think about how indigenous communities maintained elements of earlier structures and developed new ones in response. We will talk about how many thousands of African men and women were forced across the Atlantic to work as slaves – first in agriculture and mining, and later in many other trades - and how they built lives and communities under constraint. We will look at how European regimes (particularly Spain and Portugal) claimed power over centuries - and we will end the course thinking about how communities now influenced by indigenous, African, and European legacies challenged and resisted that power in the late eighteenth century. The readings will be a mix of primary sources, such as memoirs and letters, and secondary sources across a wide range of Latin American geographies."

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1504 Latin America II 0 or 3 Credits

For College students, HIST 1504 fulfills the core requirement in History for a broad introductory survey; these students complete the requirement by taking HIST 1099. Using primary and secondary sources, this course explores the period from independence to the present. We begin with the independence movements against colonialism, and analyze the diverse roles of Creoles, priests, peasants, indigenous groups and enslaved people. Post independence, we will examine the dynamics of frontier societies, conflicts between conservatives and liberals, the phenomenon of caudillismo, and the challenges of foreign interventions. Turning to the twentieth century, the class will focus on case studies of nation-building, modernization, industrialization and the political and economic mobilization of the working classes in selected countries. We will also study the impact of the hegemonic role of the United States on Latin America. The course concludes by examining contemporary issues, including environmental protection, the participation of women, neoliberalism and globalization, criminal cartels, migration, and the flourishing of Hispanic culture.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1601 Middle East I 0 or 3 Credits

Through lectures, readings, class discussion and audio-visual material, this course examines the history of the Middle East from the late sixth to the late seventeenth centuries. The lectures focus on broader topics, such as the emergence of Islam; the history of major Middle Eastern empires; changing geo-strategic and cultural conditions; and the evolution and functioning of classical and medieval Muslim institutions. Discussion sections will enable students to deepen their knowledge regarding local diversities within the unifying systems of Muslim beliefs, law, and administration; the material and intellectual exchanges and interactions between the Muslim world and non-Muslim communities and polities; and Muslim reactions to the Crusades and the Mongol invasions.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1602 Middle East II 0 or 3 Credits

For College students, HIST 161 fulfills the core requirement in History for a broad introductory survey; these students complete the requirement by taking HIST 099. The course outlines the factors that have shaped the political and social features of the modern Middle East from 1500 to the present. Its geographic scope comprises the central provinces and territories of the former Ottoman and Safavid empires: Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Arabia, and Iran. The syllabus emphasizes three analytical themes: first, the historical evolution of "Middle Eastern" polities from dynastic and religious empires in the 16th century to modern "nation-states" in the 20th; second, the impact of industrial capitalism and European imperial expansion on local societies and their modes of production; and third, the socio-cultural and ideological dimensions of these large-scale transformations, specifically the rise of mass ideologies of liberation and development (nationalism, socialism, rights movements, political Islam), and the emergence of structural and social imbalances (economic polarization, cultural/ethnic conflicts, demographic growth, urbanization).

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1701 History of Russia I 0 or 3 Credits

The Slavs, Origins of Russia, Kiev, the Mongol period, Muscovy, Imperial Russia to 1825 with special attention to autocracy, serfdom, foreign policy, the Orthodox Church, Westernization, society, culture, and the birth of the revolutionary movement.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1702 History of Russia II 0-3 Credits

This lecture-based course is a survey of Russian and Eurasian history from the post-Napoleonic era to the present, covering the Russian Revolution, Stalinism, the Cold War, and the collapse of communism. It emphasizes the global connections of Imperial Russian history as well as the role of women, sexuality, and national minorities

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1703 East European History I 0 or 3 Credits

A survey of the history of the Slavic, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, and Jewish peoples, whose cultures developed on the borderlands between Catholic Christendom, Byzantine Orthodoxy, and the Islamic civilization of the Ottoman Empire. Over the course of the semester, students will become familiar with the major events, figures, trends, and ideas in the history of East Central Europe prior to the Congress of Vienna (1815), while gaining experience in the methods and practice of the historical discipline. Topics will include: the Christianization of East European “barbarians,” the formation of ethnically diverse societies, Jewish migration and settlement, the Hussite Reformation, the life and times of Vlad III Tepes (“Dracula”), religious tolerance and reform, gender relations and sexuality, and the influence of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1704 East European History II 0 or 3 Credits

About 1800 to the Present. Nineteenth-century nationalism, industralization, the euphoria of independence. Parliamentarism and democracy. Attempts at industrialization. Decline of democracy and resurgence of traditional conservatism and native fascism. The cauldron of World War II. The fate of the Jews. Sovietization. Titoism. Socialist society in Eastern Europe. The unraveling of Communism.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1801 U.S. History until 1865 0 or 3 Credits

This course explores the history of North America from the arrival of the first Europeans in the Caribbean to the conclusion of the American Civil War. Focusing on the colonies that became part of the United States, this course explores the dynamics of imperial rivalry, relations between European, African and Amerindian peoples, economic development and regional differentiation, the emergence of revolutionary nationalism, the westward expansion of the United States, the collapse of the Union into civil war, and emancipation. We will read extensively from primary sources.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 1802 US History Since 1865 0-3 Credits

This course traces the past 150 or so years of American history, covering the nation’s development from the end of the Civil War through the recent past. Over the past century and a half, the United States has undergone myriad social, political, economic and cultural transformations, and has assumed a decisive role in international affairs. This semester, among other topics, we will examine the United States’ development of an industrial economy, its forays into imperialism, its embrace of reform, its experiences of economic catastrophe and war, and its career as Cold War-era superpower. We will also look at how various groups of Americans have struggled for rights and equal treatment, attempting to get the United States to live up the promise of its founding ideals. The United States has been in many ways defined by Americans’ basic disagreements over the meaning of founding American principles – liberty, equality, freedom – and in this class we will consider the ways in which Americans’ conflicting definitions of these principles have defined the nation’s history.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2001 Internship Tutorial Fall 3 Credits

Majors may petition to attach a 3-credit tutorial to an outside internship during the Fall or Spring semester. Eligible internships will require at least 10 hours a week, and include substantial research and writing, in an area at least somewhat related to historical work. The petition should include a description of the internship and a statement of how the student sees the internship fit with the student’s academic progress. The internship tutorial will consist primarily of meetings with a faculty supervisor to discuss the progress of the internship research and work and to review work written for the internship, and of writing a reflection paper that, among other things, connects the internship experience with the student’s academic work.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2002 Internship Tutorial Spring 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to students with a major in History, History, History, History, International History, International History, International History or International History.

HIST 2102 World Without End 3 Credits

Would you like to cultivate a deeper understanding of the relationship between the West and the Middle East? This course is an introduction to late medieval and early modern interactions between Europe and the Islamic world through historical travel narratives. Students engage with the shared histories of daily interaction between these regions and are exposed to the methodologies and paradigms driving scholarship on Europe’s pre-modern relationship with portions of Asia and the Middle East. Texts are used to explore episodes of conflict, mediation, reconciliation, trade, patronage, pilgrimage, captivity, conversion, apostasy and intellectual exchange. The course is of interest to students exploring the history of science, gender, sexuality, warfare, geography, economics, art history and Area Studies.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2103 History of Antisemitism 3 Credits

Antisemitism has been a persistent phenomenon in Western (and other) cultures for over two thousand years. This course will examine the nature and historical development of anti-Jewish sentiment and Antisemitic theories, from their roots in the ancient pagan world to their current political and social expressions. We will discuss the texts and ideas that shaped attitudes toward the Jews throughout history, giving special attention to the ways in which they intersected with politics, literature, religion, and popular culture. Finally, we will consider the different ways in which both Jews and non-Jews have responded to Antisemitic behavior and beliefs.

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute:

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2105 Medieval Iberia 3 Credits

This course explores the rich history and culture of medieval Iberia. It will examine the interaction of Christians, Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain and Portugal, focusing on points of cooperation and conflict between the three communities. Class sessions will consist of close readings of a wide variety of literary, legal, and religious sources, and an analysis of medieval art and architecture.
< br> This course counts for Europe and Middle East regional distribution requirements for History majors.

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: Core: Theology

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2107 GlobalOceans:ThemesConnection 3 Credits

In the beginning there were islands and regions, each isolated from the other. Then, some five or six centuries ago, they lost their isolation as carracks and junks crisscrossed the watery highways of the world. The course looks at the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Pacific oceans to highlight intra- and inter-oceanic connections. It also stresses the importance of the exchange of ideas, peoples, and commodities. The course takes a longue durée view of oceanic history, stretching at least three or four millennia to understand how oceans were foundational for the development of all human civilizations. The regional oceanic systems slowly merged into a global whole starting from medieval times, developing into the mercantilism of early modern times, culminating into the capitalistic system of modernity. The linchpin of the course is the people whose agency made the world of Global Oceans, and the cost that had to be paid for it. The course dwells on themes like migration, freedom and unfreedom, trade, business practices, environment, and politics.

Level: Undergraduate

Prerequisites: HIST 007 or HIST 1401 or HIST 008 or HIST 1402 or HIST 104 or HIST 1104 or HIST 106 or HIST 1106 or HIST 107 or HIST 1107

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2109 The Islamic World 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: SFS/CORE History: Modern Reg

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Mutual exclusion: HIST 109, HIST 1109

HIST 2122 The French Empire since 1600 3 Credits

From the 1600s to the 1950s, France – as both a monarchy and a republic – governed many colonial and European empires, embracing (at different times) territories as diverse as Haiti, Algeria, Vietnam, India, and Canada. This course will trace the French Empire’s extraordinary rises and falls from its seventeenth-century origins to the era of decolonization in the mid twentieth-century. How did the French Empire come into being? Who ran it and how? How did French rule affect its colonial subjects overseas? And how did the French at home respond to imperial challenges and opportunities? Although the Age of Empires has gone, we will trace its political and cultural legacies as they are stamped across our world today.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Equivalent to HIST 2422

HIST 2201 Zambia Field School: Methods 3 Credits

Title: Zambia Field School: Methods Credits: 3 credits Dates: June 24 - July 29 in Summer 2018 (NB: plus mandatory online and in person orientations and IRB training in March, April for accepted students, though the registrar probably doesn’t care about that) Course Description: This course is part of a two-course field school program in Zambia led by GU Faculty; students must register for both HIST 210 and HIST 313. This course introduces students to an array of interdisciplinary methods from the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Students train with international experts in fields such as Archaeology, Oral History, Paleoclimatology, Soil Science, and Linguistics and participate in the collection of data in the field as part of a research project on central African environmental and cultural history. Although not required, students have the opportunity to continue working with the data they collect and to contribute as co-authors on scholarly publications after the field season.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2206 West Africa and the World 3 Credits

From Burna Boy’s Afro-fusion music to the Dahomean female warriors in Woman King, and the youth-led 2020 protest against police brutality in Nigeria, West African people and cultures have remained central to popular imagination and political debates. This course invites students to explore the historical backdrop of the events, peoples, and ideas that have shaped West Africa’s evolution. It traverses the rise and fall of empires from the first millennium AD onwards, examines the emergence of European imperialism and anti-colonial resistance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and concludes with the transformation in political and economic life from the 1960s to the present. The readings and discussions will emphasize the region’s contributions to global affairs and transnational movements’ influence on local developments. After taking this class, Students will understand how West Africans have adapted to changes and reflect on historical lessons that can shape the region’s future. Our study will include visits to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2304 Film Women in South Asia 3 Credits

In 2012, following the brutal gang rape and murder of the woman who came to be known as “Nirbhaya” in New Delhi, a wave of public protests engulfed India, as women demanded their constitutional right to access and occupy public space without threat of violence. In that moment, many strands of the history of women in South Asia were shown into sharp relief: their struggles against patriarchal state and private institutions and the violence to which it routinely subjects women, but also the maturation of the feminist movement in India and its visibility in the public sphere. This course will explore women’s history in South Asia through the lens of film, one of the most important technologies in modern South Asia in creating publics. South Asia’s early enthusiasm and adoption of film as a medium, the enormous scale of production and consumption of film in the region, and the crucial role women played in film makes the medium a fascinating lens with which to trace women’s struggles in the subcontinent. Students will be introduced to a women’s history of South Asia from the colonial period to the present, basic elements of feminist and film theory and some aspects of South Asian film history. The course will require students to watch one film a week, apart from assigned readings.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2311 Hist of Korea in NE Asia 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: SFS/CORE History: Modern Reg

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2404 Charlemagne to Napoleon: HRE 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2405 Spain Portugal:Age of Empire 3 Credits

This course offers an overview of the history of the Iberian peninsula from the late Middle Ages through the early nineteenth century. We will cover the histories of Spain and Portugal, and also devote considerable attention to the development and evolution of their colonial empires. We will concentrate on the period from the union of Castile and Aragon (1469) to the end of Habsburg rule in Spain (1700), but we will also survey the background to this period, and the eighteenth-century era of reform and revolution until most colonies achieved independence after the Napoleonic period. We will cover the basic political and economic history, but also discuss social, religious, artistic, and cultural developments. One of our main themes will be the interaction between European and imperial agendas, forces, and concerns throughout the history of the Iberian colonial empires. The course aims thus to offer a broad introduction to a complex period of history; to lead us to reflect on cultural interactions, differences, and similarities across wide geographical areas; and to allow students to further their understanding of historical thinking and analysis. The latter goal will especially be the focus both of our readings and of the writing assignments. The readings will consist of primary sources, works of many genres and origins. They will allow discussion of many diverse issues and themes of Iberian history, and we will examine how different types of sources shed light on various elements of that history. Writing assignments will push students to develop their critical reading, writing, and analytical skills. There will also be regular discussions, and a final examination.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2406 Early Renaissance Italy 3 Credits

The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 represents a crucial watershed in the history of European civilization. Nevertheless, the patrimony of ideas of pagan antiquity survives and continues to inspire political and religious beliefs. The course starts with a brief survey of the principal events which shaped this complex period in order to introduce some of the key lines of cultural history of the Middle Ages. A great transformation was later represented by the phenomenon of the re-birth of cities. In fact, around the eleventh century, demographic and economic factors produced a real urban revolution in some areas of Europe, and this turning point actually represents the transition from the feudal system to the late Medieval civilization. The course analyzes the society, the politics and the culture of medieval Italy, focusing mainly on cities from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. The structure of the city-state republic, the family, the daily life, the economy, the religious beliefs and practices, the world of the marginal and the mentality of the people will all be discussed in the effort of reconstructing the features of medieval urban civilization. Particular emphasis will be given to the city of Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The complex city universe expresses itself through a peculiar art and architecture (cathedrals, fresco cycles, city walls and gates, public palaces, altar-pieces, market squares and monasteries) which will be studied in order to reconstruct the material environment and the ideological aspects of late Medieval and early Renaissance Italian civilization. Offered in Fall at the Villa in Fiesole, Italy.

Level: Undergraduate

Corequisites: SABR 0011

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2407 Late Renais Early Mod Italy 3 Credits

The course is conceived as an historical and anthropological survey of the main events and issues that characterized Early Modern Italy. This period, which starts with the Black Death (1348) and goes until the Enlightenment (ca. 1700), will be considered as a consistent and unitary section of history in which the merging of classical heritage and religious creed produced many of the elements which shaped European Civilization. Attention will be broadly focused on culture, politics, and religion in order to grasp the elements of specificity of the Old Regime. Special emphasis will be put on the princely court, and on ideas, manners, and art forms that were codified by this aristocratic environment, as one of the most relevant contribution of Renaissance and Baroque Italy to Western behavioral and cultural codes. Attention will also be put on the analysis of the lower ranks of Italian society, studying how the lower sectors of the Italian population (servants, prostitutes, and the desperately poor) were excluded from political power. In this regard, the course will examine Italian mentality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how minorities were commonly persecuted in trial in which judges and courts were commonly legitimized by biased political forces. Offered in Spring at GU's Villa in Fiesole, Italy.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2409 Elizabeth I: Fact Fiction 3 Credits

Elizabeth I’s 45-year reign in England was over 400 years ago and yet she still holds sway in the modern imagination. From movies (Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth and Judy Dench in Shakespeare in Love), to novels (by Philippa Gregory, Alison Weir and many others) and even in video games (she’s a character in Assassin’s Creed and Sid Meier’s Civilization), Elizabeth continues to be a powerful and charismatic figure. But who was she really? How do artistic renderings of the Virgin Queen compare to the historical reality? This course will examine the life and reign of Elizabeth I, in both fact and fiction. It will cover some of the most famous, transformative events in English history, such as the Elizabethan religious settlement, the defeat of the Armada in 1588, Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, as well as her use of gender and iconography to create a public, political identity. The course will be a mix of lecture and discussion; readings include primary and secondary sources as well as novels and periodic film screenings. Types of papers and exams will depend on the size of the class.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2410 Europe after Rome 3 Credits

Profound political, cultural and environmental transformations occurred in Europe between the fourth and the tenth centuries CE. As the Roman Empire gave way to “Dark Age” kingdoms, the ways of life of ordinary people and elites, within and beyond Rome’s former limits, forever changed. This course draws upon traditional historical sources as well as the material record (bones, buildings, soils and trees) to delve into the human and natural processes that defined the era. Diverse topics are addressed, from saints and popes, to barbarian migrations and recurrent plague, to multiculturalism and Christianization, to climate change and economic fragmentation. Although focused on Europe, the course also considers connections with Rome’s Byzantine and Muslim heirs.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2411 Mid Ages:Millennium-Bl Death 3 Credits

In the period between 1000 and 1450, Europe was transformed from a provincial backwater into one of the most dynamic regions of the world. This course will explore how this transformation took place. It will provide a survey of the second half of the Middle Ages, concentrating on the political, economic, social, ecclesiastical, artistic and intellectual developments of the period. We will examine how some of the most important institutions of western civilization--representative assemblies, universities, and the nation-state, to cite a few examples--developed in this period. Classes will contain a mixture of lecture, discussion, and structured exercises (such as debates and re-creations of historical events), with a focus on analyzing primary sources in their historical context.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2412 History-Legend in Med Britain 3 Credits

This course looks at the wide sweep of British history through legend; it also asks questions as to why some figures become legendary and others do not. The semester begins with the Druids and their legends and ends with King Richard III (his life, legend and the recent discovery of his remains). It focuses on modern and medieval views of legendary figures while also tracing whatever contemporary historical evidence there is for the person behind the legend. The legends examined in this course include King Arthur, King Alfred, Thomas Becket and legends of saints, Robin Hood and outlaw legends, Braveheart (William Wallace) and Richard III. Final papers can focus on legends from other cultures, depending on one’s interest.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2413 The Vikings 3 Credits

The ravages of the Northmen throughout Europe and beyond have been an area of fascination and of historical interest for centuries. Yet few students understand or are aware of the actual history of the people that had such a tremendous influence. This course will attempt to remedy that gap while at the same time offer a deeper understanding of the Vikings themselves. Throughout the semester we will follow a multi-disciplinary approach to the history of the Vikings in the “Heroic Age.” We will survey the history of Scandinavia and examine the history of the Northmen within both the European and world context. As such we will look at Norse activity in continental Scandinavia, in Western and Eastern Europe, the North Atlantic and beyond examining the many ways in which the Vikings interacted with foreign peoples - as merchants, conquerors, pilgrims, colonists, mercenaries, and as pirates. The course will move thematically and chronologically from c. 600 CE to c. 1200 CE examining a range of topics. We will discuss the legendary history of early Scandinavia and the consolidation of the Scandinavian kingdoms. We will attempt to recreate the early Norse world view including the creation of the world and other aspects of the Viking religious experience. Students will be introduced to a wide variety of Norse Gods and heroes and understand how the mythological and cosmological lore of the region helped shape an ethos of the North. The course will also examine the great period of the Viking expansion which in many ways shaped the history of Europe. We will look at, among other things, the Danish invasion of England, the settlement of the Normans in Northern France, the Rus and the origins of Russia as well as the discovery of America around the year 1000. While the course does move chronologically during this period, we will also look at a wide variety of historical themes including the development of Europe’s first parliamentary government (the Thing); the arrival of Christianity in the North; the legal status of feuding; and the role of women in Viking society. Within this historical framework, a good deal of attention is devoted to Viking art and archaeology, to the pagan religion of early medieval Scandinavia, and to its system of writing (the celebrated runes) and its literature (including the mythological and heroic poetry of the Edda, the court poems of the skalds, and the Icelandic sagas). Finally, the course will address the modern ramifications of the Viking Age as well as the depiction of the Vikings in modern art, music and film.

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute:

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2414 Europe in World Wars:1914-1945 3 Credits

History 236 explores Europe in the era of the two world wars, from 1914 to 1945. Rather than highlighting military history in the narrow sense of the term, the course focuses on the relationship between war and society. Why did European civilization virtually self-destruct during this period? Were the calamities of these years an outgrowth of fundamental structural problems or of highly contingent events? How did this era's convulsive violence transform societies, cultures, values, and institutions? How did societies respond to the ordeal of military occupation, to the illusions of victory, and to the traumas of defeat? In what ways was the continent's crisis related to broader global trends and how did it transform Europe's role in the world? These are among the core issues that we will explore through a blend of lectures and discussions.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2415 Europe Since 1945 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2416 The Crusades 3 Credits

This course will examine the medieval crusading movement from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. We will attempt to integrate and understand the crusades from the three traditions directly affected by the movement, that of western Christian Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean. In addition the course will examine the important consequences on the Jewish communities both in Europe and in the Holy Land. While tracing the rise and fall of the movement, the course focuses on a variety of themes in this chronological context. We will certainly examine the origins of the crusading movement and what might cause thousands of men, women and even children to leave their established lives and undertake the arduous journey to Jerusalem. In addition, the course will also focus on the role of the Western church, the colonizing activities of the Franks in the Holy Land, the crusading orders and the popular crusading responses and legends, and then growing disillusionment with the crusades. Since the memory of the medieval crusades remains a touchstone for the modern discourse regarding the Middle East, we will look at a modern understanding of the crusades. The course will look at modern depictions of the Crusades in both film and literature to see how current popular culture understands or misinterprets the historic legacy of these events, including the recent films and of course the treatment of the crusading orders in modern literature. More importantly, however, we will examine the legacy of Crusades and how this affects current world events outside of the relatively unimportant aspects of popular culture. This course will help you to understand the importance of this historically defining movement, which in the minds of some is still an ongoing concern. There will be some reading in the primary sources, an emphasis on the art and architecture of the time, and a concern to examine the cultural clashes and accommodations between the Latin West and the Islamic East.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2417 The Reformations in Europe 3 Credits

This course will study major issues and developments in Christian life and thought during the Reformation era. It will begin by examining problems of Church and theology on the eve of the Reformation, and will trace the development of the Reformation in the theology and actions of the major Protestant reformers. Similarly, it will examine the currents leading up to the Council of Trent and its reforming impact on Catholic religious life. Finally, it will deal with the consequences of the Reformation on Christian life in general, including its effects on popular culture, women, gender, and sexuality. Readings include a mix of primary and secondary sources, covering the history, theology, politics, and culture of the sixteenth century.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2418 History of International Law 3 Credits

By employing an historical perspective, this course aims (1) to provide an overview of the different legal regimes or paradigms that have existed in western international relations since the “Age of Discovery”; (2) to examine when, how, and why changes occurred in international legal thinking and practice; and, most critically, (3) to explore the contingency and indeterminacy of international law—the values, expectations, and implicit norms that have developed over time and come to undergird international affairs today.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2419 Science Religion in the West 3 Credits

Science and religion have played powerful roles in shaping Western civilization: unparalleled resources – human, financial, and natural – have been invested in each of them, and they can be associated with many of the West’s proudest accomplishments and cruelest wrongdoings. Thought of together, science and religion conventionally conjure up images of conflict. They are envisioned as rival forces associated with contending institutions and serving opposing interests. Historical controversies over the structure of the cosmos and modern-day debates over the science curriculum in U.S. high schools offer support to the conclusion that science and religion exist in an unrelenting state of warfare. The aim of this course is to test that generalization by examining the actual history, focusing on key episodes in which scientific and religious interests have intersected.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2420 History of Ireland I 3 Credits

The study of Irish history often focuses on the question of what it means to be Irish. This course will engage directly with that question by surveying Irish society and culture from pre-Christian times down to the end of the old Gaelic order in 1607. We will examine Celtic society--its social structure, laws and literature--and then trace its impact on the Christianization of Ireland. We will look at the effect on Ireland of invasions by the Vikings and the Normans, and the establishment of English rule in Ireland. The class emphasizes active learning. Along with traditional lectures, there will be both discussions and structured exercises, with a focus on analyzing primary sources in their historical context. Instructions for in-class discussions and debates will be given in advance. Participation in class discussion is strongly encouraged. There will also be extensive use of visual materials, including slides, maps and videos.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2421 Modern Ireland 3 Credits

Modern Ireland: cultural Americana, Britannica, or Europeana? This course surveys the comparative transnational influences on the cultural development of modern Ireland, from the American Revolution to the European Union. It charts the social developments of ‘greater Ireland’ through an exploration of ‘island’ and ‘migrant’ cultures; examines Ireland’s relationship with political violence from enlistment in nineteenth-century British colonial campaigns in Egypt to the late twentieth-century IRA’s anti-colonial alliance with Libya; and evaluates the economic impacts of constitutional and cultural (dis)integration with America, Britain, and Europe, from the Act of Union to Brexit.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2424 The Renaissance 3 Credits

The subject of this course is the European Renaissance, with particular emphasis on the Italian Renaissance. We will study the political, economic, religious and social conditions of the Italian world in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and how they affected and responded to the cultural, intellectual, and artistic developments that are usually understood to form what we call the Renaissance. We will also examine how Italian developments were transmitted to other parts of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of our main themes will be how cultural and intellectual developments interacted with other elements of a society’s life. The course aims thus to help us examine a complex period of history; to lead us to reflect on the varied links between different elements of a highly dynamic society; and to allow students to further their understanding of historical thinking and analysis. The latter goal will especially be the focus both of our readings and of the writing assignments. The readings will consist of primary sources, works of many genres and origins, and we will examine how different types of sources shed light on various elements of the past. Writing assignments will push students to develop their critical reading, writing, and analytical skills. While lectures will constitute a significant part of class time, there will also be regular discussions, and a final examination.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2425 History of France since 1750 3 Credits

The course will survey French history, beginning with the causes of the French Revolution, and continuing to the 21st century. The focus will be on France internally, with some attention to its empire. Major topics will include Paris as Europe's cultural capital, industrialization, gender/sexuality, the impact of the world wars and the Holocaust on France, and the rise of immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment in recent decades.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2426 Women of the Medici Family 3 Credits

Building of a State through Female Agency: The Women of the Medici Family - This course is an introduction to some of the most famous and powerful women of the house of the Medici (1368-1743), who through their agency, contributed to the building of the Tuscan State. Particular emphasis will be given to their biographies and the unique role that these women played in the Florentine, Italian and European history.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2427 Renaissance of Florence 3 Credits

his course provides an in-depth examination of the political, social, and cultural history of Florence from approximately the mid-14th to the mid-17th century. During this period, the Renaissance brought significant changes to nearly every aspect of life in early modern Florence. A fundamental point of departure for interpreting the Renaissance lies in the period's own construction of its identity as a rinascita, or rebirth -an era of renewed intellectual and artistic vitality following what was perceived as a prolonged age of darkness separating antiquity from the present. According to Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444), Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, this rebirth began with Petrarch (1304-1374) and the rise of the Italian communes, which he believed restored the political freedom lost with the fall of the ancient Roman republic. By positioning Florence as the paradigmatic "the cradle of the Renaissance", the course investigates the features that made the city unique among Italian city-states and contributed to its status as a cultural, artistic, and political model during the early modern period.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2480 Plague in Renaissance Florence 3 Credits

Course taught at Villa Le Balze in Fiesole, Italy. Visit studyabroad.georgetown.edu to learn more.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2505 Brazilian Vanguards 3 Credits

This course analyzes major themes in the social, cultural and political history of Brazil from Independence (1822) to the present. Themes include the following: Independence, colonial legacies and national identity; state formation and the question of citizenship; the African slave trade; slave emancipation and the crisis of the monarchy; urban renewal and popular protest; social movements in rural areas; populism; the myth of racial democracy and its crisis; Brazilian popular music; Brazilian soccer; favelas and urbanization; dictatorship and democracy.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2506 Popular Music in Brazil Cuba 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2507 WomenGender in Latin America 3 Credits

Stretching from the early empires to the present day, this course will take on the big themes of Latin American history through a gendered lens. Through encounters with European regimes, structures of slavery, the upset of revolution, and twentieth-century political movements, we will discuss how gender factored into society and culture. We will think about where gender created, reinforced, and limited opportunities for individual, community, and national power. We will pay particular attention to the experiences of Latin American women, considering the impact of social status and economic roles and the influence of Indigenous heritage, African ancestry, and European legacies. The readings will be a mix of primary sources, from women’s personal accounts to social records, and secondary sources that explore various aspects of gender and women’s lives across a wide range of Latin American geographies.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2601 History of Modern Egypt 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2602 Modern North Africa 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2606 Gender in the Middle East 3 Credits

This course will examine the role of gender and sexuality in the making of the modern Middle East from the late Ottoman period to the present. It will focus on the relationship between gender and sexuality and how they have been transformed by processes of colonialism, capitalism, nation-building, middle-class formation, and racialization. Through key sources in feminist history, we will also explore the ways in which women in the MENA region have responded to and shaped these historical processes.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2607 Colonial North Africa 3 Credits

The course is an introduction to the modern history of former French North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) from the establishment of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers in the early sixteenth century until national independence and the post-colonial period. Its underlying aim is to familiarize students with recent trends in historical scholarship on modern North Africa specifically, while also engaging with the principal theoretical frameworks and schools of thought in the field of imperial and colonial studies. Selected primary and secondary documents from the colonialist and nationalist periods will serve as the basis for analytical assessments of the legacy of imperialism on North African historiography. Topics of study include: the Ottoman-European contest in the Western Mediterranean; its impact on North African societies, states, and economies; European (Portuguese, Spanish, French) imperial expansion and North African modes of resistance; the consolidation of the French North African empire; the socio-economic, political, ideological and theoretical dimensions of colonial rule and administration; the impact of colonialism on the formation of cultural/national identities and modern subjectivities; the overlapping histories and memories of colony and metropole; the historical modes of colonial interactions and representation; and finally, the role of resistance and violence in the processes of decolonization and nation-making.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2608 History of Iran 3 Credits

This course will cover the breadth of Iran’s social and cultural history from the Persian Empires of antiquity to the modern Islamic Republic. We will read a wide range of works from Iran’s impressive literary heritage in this class, including Zoroastrian and Islamic religious texts, mystical Persian poetry, and diplomatic, foreign policy, and business archives as we explore central themes in Iran’s history. Situated at the crossroads of Eurasia, Iranian societies have always been closely connected to broader global patterns. We will explore how diverse influences from Arab-Islamic invaders, to the Mongols, to European imperial powers have fused over the centuries to create a distinctly Iranian identity. We will also explore the influence of major social movements in Iran, including two major revolutions in the twentieth century – one of which brought to power the current Islamic Republic. This course will allow us to bring Iran’s modern politics into greater focus as communities of reformists, feminists, environmental activists, and artists are challenging Iran’s Islamic Republic on grounds of its authenticity in reflecting the diversity of Iranian society and long-held values surrounding human rights and dignity.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2801 U.S. Latinx History 3 Credits

The growth of Latinx groups has transformed cities and communities throughout the United States, and has led to heightened debates about their political power, cultural influence, citizenship, and ethnic and racial categorization. While increasing attention to Latinx peoples may in fact feel "new," Latina/o/x communities have played a pivotal role in U.S. history for centuries. This course explores the historical foundations and transformations of Latinxs groups across time and the range of issues that shaped their worldmaking from colonialism, immigration, race, gender, politics and culture. This course will draw on a range of historical, archival, and media materials in order to understand the histories of distinct groups, including Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Central Americans, and Dominicans – that forged communities in the U.S.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2802 Age of Fracture: US Since 1974 3 Credits

In this course, we will examine the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a period that historians have referred to as an age of fracture and social disaggregation. Using fracture as a conceptual framework to investigate American politics and culture in the last quarter of the twentieth century, we’ll consider how the recent past has informed present-day American society. Themes of study will include the rise of neoliberalism, the culture wars, changing understandings of race, gender, and sexuality, political polarization, the changing nature of work, and evolving notions of self and society. In addition, we’ll investigate the theoretical and methodological challenges of doing recent history.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2806 The US in the World to 1945 3 Credits

Born in 1775 as a loose confederation of former British colonies on the periphery of the Atlantic World, the United States rose to a position of world superpower over the course of 170 years. How can we account for this remarkable development in world history? While we tend to take an exclusive look at the United States to understand its history, we cannot understand its evolution without understandings its complex and multilayered interactions with the rest of the world. In this course, we will explore how the United States’ security environment, government capabilities, economic interests, social changes, and cultural forces changed over time and, combined together, powerfully shaped the shifting course of U.S. foreign relations through 1945. We will also examine how the United States developed and exercised hard power, soft power, and economic power in achieving its key policy objectives. The key events covered in the course include: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, territorial expansion, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the entry into the China market, and the two world wars. In examining these events, we will ask: What drove U.S. foreign policy? Why did the United States go to war? How did it make peace? Was the United States isolationist before 1945? If not, what was it?

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: FS54 name

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2807 The US in the World Since 1945 0-3 Credits

What factors have influenced the U.S. government’s and Americans’ interactions with the rest of world? Who has shaped these encounters? What has the relationship been between these relations and U.S. domestic affairs? How have foreigners responded to U.S. actors and influence? We will analyze U.S. foreign relations, a broader category than simply foreign policy by examining the political, military, economic, religious, and cultural influence of the U.S. In particular, we will discuss the U.S. as a global power following World War II through topics such as the Cold War, the Vietnam Wars, human rights, and globalization. We will also consider the different ways historians have sought to explain U.S. foreign relations. This course focuses on trends and ideas, focusing on critical thinking and events rather than attempting a comprehensive account of U.S. foreign relations.

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: FS54 name

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2808 U.S. Labor History 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2810 Slavery in North America 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2811 Baseball/American Society 3 Credits

This course will use baseball as a lens through which to examine developments in American society and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, the class will consider baseball as the creation of the United States' transformation from an agrarian republic to an urbanized, industrial nation. The class will begin with the development of the game in the 19th century, and trace the game's rise to prominence as the "national pastime" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The course will conclude with examination of the relationship between baseball and major cultural shifts of the 20th century. The course will not focus on individual players or teams, and is not a sports course, but rather a history course about the relationship between baseball as a social and cultural phenomenon, and historical change.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2812 Black Lives Matter 3 Credits

Black Lives Matter will center on the struggle for Black equality which stands as a unique and epoch-making saga in the quest for equal rights and human dignity. It surveys the lives of people who have suffered from racial and ethnic discrimination in the USA and throughout the world. This struggle had and still has domestic, national, and international dimensions. In this course, we will investigate the origins and flowering of the “Black Lives Movement ” tracing it from the “Civil Rights Movement” in America and study the developments and outcomes of the struggle to secure equal rights for African Americans. We will make the necessary links between the African American experience and the broader human rights issues. The course will use primary sources (many are now in book form) to chronicle both legal barriers and legal milestones related to the issues. We will examine violent acts against African Americans and both violent and nonviolent forms of resistance to discrimination. We will follow the everyday actions of the American people to secure equality for the descendants of former slaves. Special emphasis will be paid to the united efforts of African Americans, whites, and people of other ethnic backgrounds who have played prominent roles in the African American journey, from slavery to freedom and beyond. We will follow a thematic route to view the major events in the last decades of the 19th century to the “Civil Rights” decade of the 1960s to the Black Lives Movement of the 2000s. Visual presentations, shorts movies, documentaries, African American cultural expressions (especially music), and the study of actual events will be central to the class. All are encouraged to read newspapers (you can get your home paper on line) and to listen to newscasts short as we will discuss relevant recent events related to our topics.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate level students.

HIST 2814 US Women's History 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2815 Jazz and Civil Rights 3 Credits

Jazz, Civil Rights and American Society will trace social conflict and social progress through the study of Jazz music. Starting with its antecedents, the Negro spirituals of the mid and late 19th Century, and the development of Blues music at the beginning of the 20th century, we will explore how the lyrics and music of Black people have expressed their desires for freedom and equality. From Duke Ellington’s "Black Brown and Beige" to Louis Armstrong’s "Black and Blue" to Billie Holiday’s "Strange Fruit" to Charles Mingus’ "Fables of Faubus" and Charlie Haden’s "Liberation Music Orchestra," the sweet syncopations and heartfelt realities of Jazz music will be explored. We will look at how the music differed in various cites and areas of the country. We will look at similarities and differences among black and white musicians. In addition to studying and analyzing the influence of Jazz on America society we will also look at its spread throughout Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, South America, Asia and Africa. In addition to class readings, we will weekly listen to music, view audio clips of live performances and hear what the musicians themselves have to say. And most importantly, we will have fun as we learn.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2816 Conflict Reform:US 1877-1920 3 Credits

This course covers the tumultuous era of the Gilded Age and Progressivism, and the emergence of modernity in the United States. The course will be organized around alternating lecture and discussion, with a strong emphasis on reading primary sources. Topics will include (but not be limited to) Populism, the rise of Jim Crow, woman suffrage, industrialization and urbanization, Progressive politics and the transformation of the American West. The lives of ordinary life and the transformation of popular culture will be at the center of our inquiries. Texts will include fiction and non-fiction, primary and secondary sources.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2817 Radical Traditions in U.S. 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2818 Civil War Emancipation 3 Credits

The Civil War emancipated four million slaves, shifted the balance of wealth and power in the United States (at least temporarily) from the South to the North, killed roughly 700,000 Americans, and changed the lives of all who survived it. It overturned institutions, political habits, and the role of government for everyone in the nation. It raised fundamental public questions about the meaning of citizenship, loyalty, and dissent in democratic governments, and fundamental personal questions about what it meant to be a man or a woman. The war abruptly eliminated the basic social structure that defined and ordered every aspect of life in one part of the nation while dictating foreign policy for the whole country, and it neutralized one of the nation’s greatest sources of sheer wealth: slaves. At the same time, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction left unanswered questions and ambivalent legacies with which we still wrestle. In this course, we will explore the causes, progress, controversies, and consequences of the Civil War and emancipation, constantly challenging ourselves to ask and answer the question, “How do we know what we know about the Civil War and emancipation?”

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2819 Freedm Struggles:Afr. Diaspora 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2821 U.S. in the 1960's 3 Credits

This course seeks to understand key themes and events in one of the more turbulent periods in modern American history. Topics will include (but not be limited to) the decline of industrial cities, the rise of the black freedom movement (both North and South), military intervention in Indochina and the movement opposing it, the significance of rock and roll and soul music, the New Left, the beginnings of movements for feminism and gay rights and environmental protection, the emergency of a powerful New Right, and the international context in which the American "60s" occurred.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2823 Af Am History since 1865 3 Credits

Following the end of the Civil War, freedpeople and their descendants remade and contended with new meanings of and contestations over “freedom.” This course examines these ongoing struggles, exploring how African-descended peoples in the United States lived, resisted, negotiated, and created in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and other forms of antiblack violence. This course continues to ask: what is progress and freedom for Black people in the United States? Is the state of “freedom” just no longer being enslaved, being a citizen, having political rights or something else? Through primary and secondary sources, students will cover topics including but not limited to emancipation, lynching and sexual violence, gendered politics, arts and culture, migration, labor organizing, and ecological violence. This course will also introduce students to the field of African American History as a discipline and its relationship to Black Studies.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 2824 Five Minutes to love Jazz 3 Credits

This course will use the New York Times series, “5 Minutes that will make you love jazz” to study the history of jazz, jazz masters and American culture. In that series musicians, music critics (writers) and historians surveyed the history of different musicians. We will walk along their musical journeys and the history of their times and music. Among those we will explore are Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. We will study themes such as the jazz piano, jazz bass, tenor sax, South African, Brazilian and Cuban Jazz and Black musicians who moved to European ports seeking a better life. The class will be divided with one day listening to the music and the second day discussing the New York Times articles and assigned readings.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 2870 Sinners: Blk Religion Hoodoo 3 Credits

Ryan Coogler’s Southern gothic thriller Sinners has wowed audiences with its reckoning on black culture and most forcefully, black religion. Namely, the film showcases Hoodoo, an African American spiritual tradition, as a powerful system of thought and healing practice. Using Sinners as a cultural anchor, this course will explore a history of black religion in the United States, primarily focusing on the development of Hoodoo. By engaging texts in the fields of African American history, African American religion, cultural anthropology, and Black Studies, this course will examine how Hoodoo came to be and how it has changed over time. In addition, this course will also explore the intersection of gender and religion through the figure of the ‘Conjure woman.’ Students will engage film, tv, literature, and other popular media to investigate and challenge cultural representations and reception of Hoodoo. In all, this course urges students to consider Hoodoo as an intrinsic root of black life in the United States.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3101 Global Catholicism 3 Credits

This course investigates the relationship in Catholicism (and Christianity) between ideas and cultures. The semester will follow two plans: the first is diachronic (historical), focusing on threshold moments and controversies from antiquity to the present, e.g., Jewish vs Greek Christianity in the first century, established church in the fourth century, the Germanic adoption of Christianity in the early and central Middle Ages, the nationalization of Christianity in the late Middle Ages and early modern periods, Catholicism and European global colonization, Catholicism and liberalism, the “global Catholicism” of Vatican II and its legacy, and the era of Francis . The second is synchronic (diversity in a single time frame) and contemporary, comparing and relating Catholicism as practiced in different cultures, social strata, and world regions: Catholicism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and also in secularized western societies. The driving question throughout: is there such a thing as global Catholicism; if so, what is it; if not, what then.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Course attribute: Core: Theology

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3102 Empire and Film 3 Credits

Stemming from TS Eliot’s notion of the “historical sense,” which he defines as “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence,” this course engages with reconstructions of the imperial past in modern cinema. Beginning with Edward Said’s observations about “the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience,” this course aims to explore the ways in which films have contributed to contemporary understandings and interpretations of empire. Contrasting historical narratives with representations of modern empires in Western cinema, the course offers historical and theoretical readings on empire to contextualize discussions of film representations of British, French, and American empires. In weekly discussions students will be expected to offer critical analysis of the representations of empire in films. The final unit of the course will shift to portrayal from historical to fictional empires in fantasy and science fiction films in an attempt to draw parallels on the construction of national imperial mythologies through fictional empires. Taught in Doha Qatar.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3103 Comparative Empires 3 Credits

This class takes a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the history of empires of the ancient and early modern worlds, with a special focus on empires and their cultural expressions. Topics include cultures of conquest and occupation, provincialism, slavery, resistance, critiques and celebrations, and legacies, as we explore how empires were created, challenged, sustained, and dismantled in the past. The class is discussion-based and incorporates excursions in Washington, including a visit to Dumbarton Oaks and a walking tour. This class is cross-listed by the Classics and History Departments.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3105 Global History 3 Credits

Processes of historical change have become increasingly global during recent centuries. This seminar explores diverse approaches to historical globalization: political, diplomatic, economic, ecological, cultural. In addition, it examines the relations between globalizing processes and history as it is experienced, discussed, and debated in nations and communities. It asks why historical understandings have focused on national developments, while the forces of change have operated on ever larger scales. IHIS majors in SFS must take one section of HIST 305, preferably near the beginning of their major program. College History majors and other interested students are welcome. On the main campus, the course will be taught by different instructors with different emphases, and students may take it more than once in different versions. See section descriptions for specifics of how each instructor will approach the course.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3106 History of Globalization 3 Credits

This course takes a multidisciplinary and long-term approach to studying the history and nature of globalization. It shows that some long-term forces of globalization have been at play for centuries or millennia, and it questions how and why new, stronger forces of globalization were unleashed with the industrial revolution and the rise of modern finance. By adopting a very broad definition of economics, this course treats globalization largely as an economic phenomenon, without neglecting its social and cultural implications. No previous training in economics is required. Other disciplines that help shape this courses’ approach and content are History, International Relations, Finance, Geopolitics, and Current Events. This is a seminar course, which means that instruction is mainly discussion-based. The course also consists of many historical workshops – class periods in which students have the opportunity to engage with historical material hands-on, to discover and debate the meaning of the traces of the past. While the course is a broad overview in the style of a world history, it does not attempt to tell history as a single story, and it certainly does not attempt history only from a Western perspective.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3108 Empires 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 3109 Witches Witchcraft 3 Credits

This seminar investigates the phenomenon of witchcraft in premodern Europe, especially the witch persecutions of the seventeenth century. To what extent was “witchcraft” the projection of societal anxieties and stereotypes? Even today, after many decades of scholarly research and analysis, perhaps the only point of universal agreement is that no single explanation fully grasps the phenomena of European witch belief and persecution in all their multifaceted diversity. This course is designed to familiarize students with the main contours of witch belief, magical practice, and the prosecution of malefice as they evolved on the European continent from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. It is organized around both themes (including gender, sexuality, psychology, and religion) and geography (mainly central Europe, where the majority of the witch hunts occurred). As we will see, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century persecutions of witchcraft reflected a series of changes in European society, culture, and politics—including changes in relationships between “popular” and “learned” religion; the formation of the modern state and the rise of “social discipline”; changes in assumptions about the nature of gender and the formation of modern patriarchy; and so on.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3110 Topic: 3 Credits

Topic Course

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3111 British Empire 3 Credits

How did Britain – an island nation - establish imperial hegemony across the Global South? In what texts and contexts, did religious, racial, and ethnic identities define a ‘British world’? How have anti-colonial communities negotiated the processes of decolonisation, past and present?

This module charts the evolution of the British Empire from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the aftermaths of the Second World War. It explores the inequalities of the British imperial experience from the white dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to the colonial territories of India, Egypt, and South Africa. The course will examine themes such as slavery, state violence, immigration, nationalism, and multiculturalism from transnational perspectives. Students will interrogate contemporary debates on the memory of the British Empire through multidisciplinary sources, ranging from films such as James Bond to the street art of Banksy. Ultimately, this course asks, what is the legacy of the British imperial project to international relations, from the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ of the ‘scramble for Africa’ to the United Nations?

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3112 Crossing Boundaries 3 Credits

This is the core course for International History majors in the SFS. In this course, you will learn to approach major themes in modern history through a global and transnational lens. Topics include, but are not limited to, the history of mobility and migration, media, war and revolutions, protest movements, the environment, and consumption. You will gain a firm grasp of these topics and be introduced to related debates about historical theory and methodology. A number of guest speakers who are experts in their respective fields will join us virtually or in person.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3113 Expert Diplomacy 3 Credits

The seminar, "Expert Diplomacy," traces the emergence and growing influence of experts as pivotal actors in the international system throughout the 20th century. It will explore how politicians increasingly viewed these individuals as indispensable carriers of specialized knowledge and relied on them as policymakers within technical committees of institutions like the League of Nations and the United Nations. Through seminar-style discussions, students will critically examine how international institutions provided platforms where experts could collaborate across borders, legitimize their knowledge, and establish themselves as influential players in shaping global diplomacy. We will also delve into how conferencing emerged as both a technique of internationalism and a means for advancing scientific progress, and assess whether this phenomenon is exclusive to a liberal international order. The course is structured around six thematic sessions, each spanning two to three weeks, where we will explore the role of expertise in areas such as health, opium and international law, education and intellectual cooperation, economy, and development. Several central questions will guide our weekly discussions: How do expert communities form, and how have they shaped international relations? In what ways have experts balanced national interests with broader international goals? We will consider how these individuals, often navigating between the demands of national delegations and the priorities of international communities, have acted as de facto diplomats, shaping both state policy and non-governmental internationalism. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to critically assess the significance of experts in diplomacy and their impact on the trajectory of international governance.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3114 History's Influence on For Aff 3 Credits

Historical knowledge—and the knowledge of how nation states, politicians, world leaders, non-state actors, and national polities use history in the conduct of foreign affairs—is crucial to success as a diplomat or foreign policy practitioner. From the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to myriad examples of American policymakers using the Munich and Vietnam analogies when debating policy, to China’s current use of history to make claims in the South China Sea, history is an ever-present factor in international affairs. This course will examine the ways in which these groups have used history to create historical narratives and its effects on the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. It will also examine the ways in which some countries deal with difficult aspects of their history. Key to this course will be an exploration of what history is, how it is portrayed, and who decides how it is portrayed. We will pursue the questions of how we can learn from history, how it affects international affairs, and what kinds of “lessons learned” policymakers can derive from history (and why). Furthermore, we will consider the question of whether or not historical analogies aid or burden policymaking decisions. Understanding history and how it is used is only one aspect of affective policymaking. Students will also explore how to sift through this information to make informed policy decisions in a fast-paced environment. Tasks will include weekly reading and short writing assignments; student led class discussions; and researching, writing, and presenting an eight to ten page final research paper on a topic of their choosing that deals with an issue of history in international affairs. Issues to be covered will include: -The uses and misuses of history: an overview of history in international affairs -Using history in the decision-making process -The Vietnam Syndrome and the Munich Analogy -The Boxer Rebellion: memory and its effects on policy -Knowing who’s across the table: history, culture, and race in foreign affairs -I’m sorry: apologies in the international arena The professor is Director of Programs and Research at the SFS Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. He is a diplomatic historian who served in multiple roles at the Department of State. He recently completed a one-year tour for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as the Presidential Daily Briefing Book briefer for State Department senior officials.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3115 Critical Energy Studies 3 Credits

This seminar will introduce students to the vibrant interdisciplinary field of critical energy studies, sometimes referred to as energy humanities, and prepare them to undertake research in energy studies. Together, we will consider how energy systems shape and are in turn shaped by lived experiences, human cultures, and historical processes. We will also work to decenter the historical focus on North Atlantic in energy studies to instead foreground Global South and Fourth World contexts, perspectives, and methodologies. Through this shift in focus, we will apply a critical and imaginative lens to common concepts in energy studies such as “energy transition,” “sustainability,” and “energy futures.” By engaging with course readings, discussions, and assignments, students will develop dexterity in analyzing energy across multiple critical and disciplinary registers and in reading for energy in different media and objects. Students will also learn to articulate original research questions in energy humanities and develop ethical and sound research strategies to answer them. This course includes required experiential learning activities, which will take place both on campus and in other areas of Doha. Students with questions or concerns about these activities should contact the instructors before enrolling.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 3116 Brazil and the Atlantic World 3 Credits

Starting with the first ill-fated attempts at European colonization in the 16th century, all the way up to the rise of the far-right in the 21st, this course will offer students a deep understanding of the history of Latin America’s most populous, powerful, and diverse nation, and its importance in---and connections to---the broader Atlantic world. Along with standard historical primary and secondary sources, we will work with a wide variety of texts (fiction, memoir, ethnography, song lyrics) and visual materials (paintings, photography, feature film & documentaries) to consider key themes and trends of Brazilian history and the way that history is entangled with the histories of other Atlantic societies, especially West-Central Africa.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3117 CompHist of SettlerColonialism 3 Credits

Settler colonialism has been a permanent feature of the modern age, yet its utility as an analytical concept receded to the margins of efforts to understand the forces that shape the political, economic, and cultural landscapes of our contemporary world. In the wake of grassroots mobilizations and political debates around the question of justice for indigenous peoples, continued economic exploitation of populations in ostensibly de-colonized states, as well as ongoing settler violence and ethnic cleansing processes unfolding in occupied lands, the concept of settler colonialism has resurfaced as an explanatory tool in recent years. This course aims to explore this phenomenon, both conceptually and in its varied manifestations around the world. The course begins with an examination of the theoretical frameworks that inform analyses of this phenomenon. Historian Patrick Wolfe has defined settler colonialism as “an inclusive, land-centred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies.” Other conceptions have expanded upon this definition, informed in large part by shifts in emphasis on particular themes, including political economy, law, race, gender, empire, and the environment, as well as on empirical research covering diverse geographies. Following on from the theoretical discussion, the course then engages with a wide array of historical case studies, many of which have contributed greatly to theoretical discussions around settler colonialism and its persistence in the contemporary world. Beginning in the Americas, and continuing with examples from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, the course maintains a global focus, exploring both the commonalities across varied geographies, while also highlighting the unique features that have defined manifestations of settler colonialism across time and space. Along with the examination of individual cases, the course compares expressions of settler colonialism as represented in popular culture. Finally, having examined the persistence of settler colonial structures in contemporary societies, the course concludes with a discussion of notions of decolonization.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3124 Glbl Irish Revoltn 1912-1923 3 Credits

This course explores the Irish Revolution, for the first time, as a transnational historical event. It examines the Irish Home Rule and Ulster Unionist movements during the Ulster crisis from Canada to Australia; interrogates the relationships of Irish-American nationalists with African-American, Native American, and Latin American activists; and measures the post-war political impacts of Ireland from the Kremlin to the White House. Revolutionary Ireland, Woodrow Wilson would famously conclude, was the ‘great metaphysical tragedy of the day’.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3125 Development Its Discontents 3 Credits

Development has been a core concept in politics and the social sciences for more than 75 years, and its meaning has been shaped, debated, and transformed by an enormous group of people—economists and anthropologists, engineers and diplomats, colonial officers and anticolonial activists, communists and capitalists, home economists and agricultural extension experts. Today, the deployment of this concept is so widespread that it can be hard to imagine other ways of thinking about technological, environmental, social, economic, and political transformation. But as long as development has existed, so have its critics. In this class, we will both historicize the idea of development by tracing its roots into the early modern period. We will recover the contested and uneven history of development to better help us understand the appearance of this concept in urgent contemporary contexts, like the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We will also consider different alternatives to development that emerged at critical points in the history of the twentieth century.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 3133 Global Env. History since 1900 3 Credits

This seminar focuses on the character, causes, and consequences of environmental change around the world since about 1900. Likely topics include historical approaches to climate change, climate politics, deforestation, biodiversity, air and water pollution, the roles of technology, population, energy use, environmentalism, etc. The scale of inquiry will vary from the local to the global, depending on topic and available readings. Students should expect to read approximately one book per week; to write about 6,000 words; and to lead discussion one week during the semester.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3201 Zambia Field School: Research 3 Credits

Title: Zambia Field School: Research Credits: 3 credits Dates: June 24 - July 29 in Summer 2018 (NB: plus mandatory online and in person orientations and IRB training in March, April for accepted students) Course Description: This course is part of a two-course field school program in Zambia led by GU Faculty; students must register for both HIST 210 and HIST 313. This course trains students in the collection of field based research data across an array of disciplines from the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Students work in the field with international experts in fields such as Archaeology, Oral History, Paleoclimatology, Soil Science, and Linguistics, collecting data as part of a research project on central African environmental and cultural history. They also undertake a small, independent project relating to the larger research questions and methods. Although not required, this research experience opens opportunities for further research for senior capstone and thesis projects as well as work as contributing co-authors on scholarly publications after the field season.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3211 Back to Africa Movements 3 Credits

From Edward Blyden’s 1862 call for African-Americans to migrate back to Africa to the Ghanaian government’s celebration of 2019 as the “Year of Return” for Africans in the diaspora, people of African descent have debated and represented Africa as a site of belonging and resettlement. This course invites students to explore the history of black people’s (specifically African-Americans, West Indians, and West Africans who lived abroad) return to Africa from the eighteenth century to the present. We will examine how Africans engaged and reworked ideologies such as Pan-Africanism and Garveyism in their struggles against colonialism and postcolonial military rule. We will interrogate the following questions together: How and why did people of African descent pursue immigration to Africa? What were the limits of their political and cultural projects? How did they influence their host communities and vice-versa? To unpack these questions, we will situate the experiences of merchants, students, activists, formerly enslaved people, soldiers, and technocrats within the context of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, decolonization, and postindependence politics in Africa. Through lectures, discussions, and written assignments, you will gain a deeper understanding of the economic, political, and cultural relationships that people of African descent have forged across the Atlantic.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3260 History of African Cities 3 Credits

In a 2021 article, the Washington Post refers to African cities like Lagos and Khartoum as the “center of the world’s urban future.” Why and how are African cities central to discourses about futurity and urbanism? This course invites students to explore the evolution of cities on the continent of Africa and the innovative ways that its residents have developed to contend with everyday challenges. The first part of the course will focus on the rise and transformation of cities before and after the era of the slave trade, under colonial rule, and independent states. During this unit and the next one, we will address the following question: how have everyday people and policymakers adjusted to and shaped the cities’ shifting political and economic atmosphere? The second half will turn to how diverse actors such as architects, government officials, novelists, urban planners, young people, and garbage workers engaged with neoliberal policies and imagined new possibilities. We will consider themes such as governance, infrastructure, urban planning, and spatial practices. This course will enable students to think critically about the key themes and debates that have informed the field of African urbanism.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3300 Japan in Korea, Korea in Japan 3 Credits

This course and summer lab will explore the history of relations between Japan and Korea from the perspective of social and cultural interactions to understand historical memory issues in context. The Spring seminar will focus on topics ranging from early-modern diplomacy and trade to colonial rule, wartime mobilization, decolonization, and contemporary connections, including youth culture, J-pop, and K-pop. We will also explore social issues related to tourism, particularly the “dark tourism,” which will be one focus of the summer lab. The course's main objective will be to co-author a guidebook to sites that connect the two countries.

After the end of the semester in May, participants will embark for two weeks of fieldwork in South Korea and Japan. In addition to visiting historical sites and museums, we will meet with Korean and Japanese faculty and students to discuss historical memories and share experiences. Based on fieldwork during the trip, we will flesh out the guidebook for online publication.

Please note that students will be registered by their deans or SFS OGE staff for these courses, following application review and interview.

Level: Undergraduate

Corequisites: HIST 3302

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate level students.

HIST 3302 CLabJapaninKor,KoreainJapanIFW 1 Credit

This C-Lab module accompanies the semester-long course (ASST 3100/HIST 3300) with two weeks' fieldwork in May. Students signing up for one are obligated to participate in the other, although the international fieldwork can be taken for no credit.

Level: Undergraduate

Corequisites: HIST 3300

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate level students.

HIST 3308 Manchuria 3 Credits

As a historical "cradle of conflict" between a variety of competing ethnicities, empires, and nationalities, Manchuria is an important key to understanding the construction of the modern nation-state in East Asia from the 17th to 21st centuries. From the ethnically Manchu Qing Dynasty to imperial Russia, from the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo to the Republic of China to the People's Republic of China, this course will chart how rulers and intellectuals from a variety of ethnic and national contexts conceptualized "Manchuria" to further their own imperial and national aspirations.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3310 Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3313 Life and Legacy of Mao Zedong 3 Credits

Mao Zedong - revolutionary visionary or tyrannical megalomaniac? Few historical figures have quite as divisive a legacy as the founder of the People's Republic of China, yet there is no denying his impact on Modern Chinese History. Who exactly was Mao Zedong, though? How is he remembered today, and how has his legacy inspired activists in the 20th and 21st centuries, both in China and on the global stage? This course will examine Mao the man, Mao the myth, and Maoism the ideology to answer these questions.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3333 UsesofthePastinModernChina 3 Credits

This undergraduate seminar studies “places of memory” in modern China, or the sites, museums, monuments, and memories of the past. Integrating primary sources as well as interdisciplinary readings from anthropology, art history, cultural studies, and history, this course features case studies including the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, the Monument to the People’s Heroes, the Rent Collection Courtyard, and the ruins of Yuanmingyuan. These case studies will offer ways of thinking about official and unofficial history, and the role of the past in contemporary culture, society, and politics.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3334 Frontiers of China, 1500-1900 3 Credits

This course has three main goals: to gain familiarity with the historical dynamics linking China and its frontiers, to develop advanced skills in historical research, and to design effective oral presentations of historical material. Students will explore the processes of territorial expansion that characterized the Qing period (1644–1911) and China’s subsequent transition to its modern state form, the People’s Republic of China. The course covers Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, South China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It is designed as an upper-level elective within the International History curriculum, where students consolidate advanced research skills, design teaching sessions, and complete three written assignments requiring them to search for, document, and present historical evidence effectively. In terms of content, the course is situated at the intersection of the late imperial period and the transition to the modern state. Students will approach this theme from the perspective of China’s frontier regions, which played a major role in shaping how the last dynasty of China, the Qing, became a modern state actor. They will examine territorial expansion, religious and political ideologies, interactions among different ethnic groups, and the ways in which diverse ecosystems shaped historical processes. Material culture will be a core component of the class, with particular emphasis on maps, paintings, and other art forms.

Level: Undergraduate

Prerequisites: HIST 1099 or HIST 007 or HIST 008 or HIST 104 or HIST 106 or HIST 107

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 3350 HKChina:Cross-BorderHistory 3 Credits

This undergraduate seminar studies the historical development of Hong Kong and China in relation to each other, from the colonial and late imperial experience to their shared histories in national and political movements, from postwar and post-1949 transformations to reform-era economic takeoff, culminating in the 1997 handover and recent political movements. The readings from the first half of the semester will come primarily from the literature in history, while the readings in the second half will draw from anthropology, sociology, and political science. Students will read both primary and secondary sources, and the course will culminate in an independent research paper on a topic of their own design.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3400 Monarchy Modernity 3 Credits

The course examines the relationship between the institution of monarchy and the process of political and social modernization in Germany and Austria from the 18th through the 19th centuries up to the outbreak of World War I. This will involve the examination of various historiographical issues involved in the process.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Equivalent to HIST 4411

HIST 3401 Jesuits: Ignatius to Francis 3 Credits

Their reputation is complex. Lionized by some, vilified by others, the Jesuits have been involved in virtually every facet of early modern and modern culture in all corners of the globe for half of a millennium. This seminar is about the what, why, and how of Jesuit thought and action, and the strong reactions they inspired. Theology has been central to them, but they have also engaged in philosophy, the arts, and the sciences from their 16th-century founding by Ignatius Loyola to the present day, as a Jesuit reigns as pope. Jesuits, individually and corporately, have grappled with politics and political thought from Reformation de-bates over regicide to modern debates over social justice. Jesu-its can be found on all sides of the Galileo Affair, and Jesuits run the Vatican observatory today. Jesuits were among the first Europeans to enter the Forbidden Palace in the 17th century and were expelled from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 20th. Jesuits developed havens for indigenous people in 17th century New Spain and simultaneously engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. Jesuits produced anti-semitic tracts in 1920s Vienna, but participated in the plot to overthrow Hitler in the 1940s. In the last century they ran elite high schools in Mexico, but were executed for advocating radical social and economic reform in Central America. Theologians, polemicists, political theorists, astronomers, dramatists, pharmacists, architects, engineers, governors of Amerindian settlements, cartographers, musicians, and, above all, missionaries and schoolmasters, Jesuits were active in virtu-ally every country of Europe and Latin America, in many countries of Asia, and even in a few in Africa. They are thus an ideal subject for a seminar because participants have a wide range of areas of research to choose from.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3404 Crime/Justice:Europe 1300-1800 3 Credits

In this seminar course we will consider the theories and practices that shaped the justice system of (mostly western and central) Europe from the Late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Our focus will be on the criminal side of the justice system, with only tangential treatment of civil laws and cases. We will consider both secular and church justice. We will start by examining the medieval situation, then examine the main commonalities and differences between the western European and English systems, and the rise of new criminal procedures starting in the thirteenth century and spreading across continental Europe by the Renaissance. Other themes will include the treatment of specific categories of crimes, and its political, cultural, religious, and other implications; the depiction of the criminal world and the justice system in European fiction; and the appearance of new ideas, and of judicial reforms, during the time of the Enlightenment. We will also study a few examples of famous and political trials from various countries. We will use both primary and secondary sources to study these issues, trends, and examples. This course is a seminar, and thus most of our class time will be devoted to group discussions of relevant sources. The writing assignments will give students a chance to practice various forms of academic writing.

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute:

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate level students.

HIST 3406 Corporations and Empire 3 Credits

Business historians often trace the origins of modern multinational firms – from Amazon to McDonalds – to the European trading companies of the early modern world. Like modern firms, these corporations had investors, governance structures, and often tense relationships with political authorities in their home states. But these early European trading companies also commanded armies and navies, ruthlessly colonized and subdued indigenous empires, and participated in the enslavement and human traffic of millions. This course will examine the global histories of early trading companies, including the Virginia Company, the Royal Africa Company, and the British, Dutch, and French East India Companies. Who were the investors and shareholders in these ventures, and what power did they have in governing their companies? What political, military, and economic relationships did the companies forge with major, non-Western powers like the Mughal Empire and China? What kinds of financial and political controversies did they generate in Europe, and what was the ultimate human cost of their business abroad? What happens when a company acts like a "state," and what does the early modern period teach us about business structures today? We will read new historical work on the relationship between corporations and empire, from western and non-western perspectives. We will also read key primary source documents from the histories of the British, Dutch, and French companies, including charters, legal acts, diplomatic correspondence, and works of economic and political thought by authors such as Adam Smith, Josiah Child, Hugo Grotius, Denis Diderot, and Edmund Burke.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3407 Saints Society 3 Credits

This course is about: how and why saints fascinated medieval people and still fascinate modern historians. We will examine the various kinds of medieval saints: male and female, high-born and lowly, popular and official, aspiring and failed. We will also look at the ways that medieval people reacted to saints and the role that devotion to the saints played in medieval culture. We will study how medieval people honored their saints (and sometimes defamed them) and what was expected from saints in return; what kinds of people became recognized saints, and how this recognition happened (or failed to happen); and what sort of stories were told about saints and how this hagiography (hagio-holy, graphy-writing; thus writing about the holy) was valued within medieval culture. We will be examining popular (and unusual) practices regarding saints, such as the treatment of saints’ corpses, as well as the development of the juridical process of canonization. Our approach to the phenomena of saints and their veneration in medieval society will be historical, anthropological, artistic, literary, and sociological.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3409 The History of history 3 Credits

In our own troubled times, notions of evidence, truth, and the reliability of information are hotly debated and politically relevant. These questions have been at the core of the discipline of history as practiced in the western world since antiquity. In this seminar course we will read some of the major classics in the field of history from antiquity to the present, covering a variety of topics, from international politics to society and gender. By the end of the class, students will be familiar with the major developments in history in the western world, both as a form of inquiry and writing and as a scholarly discipline. History as an intellectual practice is not simply the retelling of past events, but their analysis and the development of a coherent examination of their significance; indeed, history as a discipline begins by questioning the process itself of reconstructing past events. The aim of this course is to introduce students to historical methodology and interpretation, as they have developed over the centuries since the ancient world. Our topics will include the definition and use of different types of sources and evidence, the question of objectivity, the definition of proper subjects for historical investigation, the changes in the larger issues considered important by historians and affected by their work, the development of different genres of history-writing, the evolution of different ideas of causality, and changes in the image, character, and role of historians as intellectuals. We will do this primarily through a critical reading of the works of several historians from the ancient world to the present day.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3410 Topics 3 Credits

Topics course

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute:

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3411 Magic Science and Religion 3 Credits

In this colloquium we will explore the relationship of official religion to magic, approaches to the study of the natural world, and healing practices in Western Europe from late antiquity to the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century. Although the course will concentrate on ideas and events in Western Europe, important points of interaction between Christian and Islamic worlds will be taken up (the practice of alchemy, after all, received its name in the Arab world). Relying on historical documents and other evidence, we will place varieties of magic and superstition in historical context. Throughout the course we will examine underlying assumptions about God, the supernatural, the preternatural, and the natural. Because the role of superstition and magic receded -- but did not completely disappear -- by the seventeenth century, the course will address the reasons why much of what was normal and normative from antiquity to the Middle Ages became marginalized by the seventeenth century. At the same time, neither Christianity nor early modern science was intrinsically hostile to forms of magic; instead, both incorporated it in positive ways during their formative years. It is precisely this paradoxical combination of faith and reason on the one hand, and unreason on the other, that we will seek to understand in the course.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3412 Art Power Europe:1300-1800 3 Credits

In this seminar course we will consider how the arts in all their forms have been used to express and strengthen power, in the political, religious, and social spheres of European states from the late Middle Ages to the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. We will primarily consider and examine works of painting, sculpture, and architecture, but we will also give some attention to urban planning, practices of collecting, the decorative arts, public rituals and festivals, music, theater, dance, garden design, and other forms of creative expression (including in a few cases literary texts). We will start by examining the historical, intellectual, moral, and theoretical bases for the connection between art and power, and by connecting these ideas and practices with the revival of the study of antiquity. We will then consider several case studies of how these connections were deployed in specific places and times. Many of our materials and case studies will come from Italy, where some of the main elements and language for these ideas were formed in the Renaissance, but we will also look at how these practices spread and were adapted in other parts of Europe and in later centuries. Because the dominant form of political power in Europe in these centuries was monarchical, most of our materials will pertain to the activities and pursuits of monarchs, aristocrats, and Church leaders, though we will also consider, especially at the start and end of the class, examples from different political systems. We will consider evidence both textual (descriptions, theories, biographical sources, etc.), and visual, and we will read the works of modern scholars about these issues and examples. This course is a seminar, and thus most of our class time will be devoted to group discussions of relevant sources (primary and secondary). The writing assignments will give students a chance to practice various forms of academic writing.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3413 Outer Space:Plato to Pluto 3 Credits

Human beings, regardless of when and where, have looked to the skies and pondered, “what’s up there”. Answers and speculations have found their way into religious texts, scientific books, and the canon of world literature. Some reflections highlight the differences between the world above and the world we live in, others on connections and similarities. But from tide tables to horoscopes, a common conviction linking Antiquity to the present is that the world(s) above influences the world below. The subject of this seminar is ideas about and reflections upon what in the pre-modern West, from Greek Antiquity to early modern Europe (seventeenth century), has been variously called “outer space,” “the heavens,” “the celestial sphere”. An upper-level history seminar, there will an emphasis on the analysis of primary materials, but the course is constructed to accommodate students with a variety of academic backgrounds and interests. Thus, while a background in pre-modern western history will at times be an advantage, so too will basic knowledge in physics, theology, and literature. In this respect, the seminar will benefit from the variety of strengths and interests the students collaboratively bring to the table. Research papers will be required rather than examinations

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3414 Film The French Revolution 3 Credits

The French Revolution has been a favorite subject of filmmakers, beginning with the inventors of film, the aptly named Lumière brothers, who made L’Assassinat de Marat in 1897 [38 seconds], continuing on to D.W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921) through Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938), and on to Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). Watching a selection of these films, we will look at the relationship between the actual events of the Revolution, as related by eyewitnesses and analyzed by historians, and the memory of it constructed through films. One of our points of comparison will be the contrast between French films about the Revolution and English-language films about it.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3415 Neghbring Wrlds: Mars, Moon, V 3 Credits

Neighboring Worlds: The Moon, Mars, Venus, and Asteroids in History We may be on the verge of a new era in humanity’s expansion into outer space. Space agencies in the United States, China, and Russia have all committed themselves to establishments settlements on or near the Moon, and are building enormous rockets to make that possible. A growing number of space agencies have now dispatched satellites or rovers to the worlds near Earth: the Moon, Mars, Venus, and nearby asteroids. These machines have revealed cosmic environments to be more dynamic places – with more dynamic histories – than scientists previously imagined. Companies led by ambitious tycoons are introducing revolutionary technologies that will allow them to reach, and perhaps even colonize, the Moon, Mars, and possibly Venus. This course will guide you through the long and often surprising history that has led us to this new era. You will discover, among other topics, how what happens in space has helped shape life on Earth; how early astronomers mapped and often misinterpreted environments on the Moon, Mars, and Venus; and how sudden environmental changes on Earth and on Mars provoked sightings of canals – and fears of alien invasion – across the western world. You will learn about the twin “space races” that led humans to the Moon and robots further afield; the plans to establish military bases on the Moon; the Martian dust storm that inspired the idea of nuclear winter on Earth; the shocking greenhouse effect on Venus that strengthened theories of global warming on Earth; and the history of a radical ambition to turn Mars into a world like Earth. You will also study the history of the quest for life on Mars, the Moon, and Venus, and the schemes to mine the rich resources of Near Earth Asteroids to save our world from environmental catastrophe.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3419 Conflict in N Ireland 3 Credits

Conflict (resolution) in Northern Ireland’ explores the communal cultures underpinning nationalist and unionist politics in Ulster; examines the dynamics of political violence and terrorism in modern Ireland; and evaluates the international influences on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, from the political mediation of the United States to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The course will investigate contemporary terrorist campaigns and political agreements in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Latin America, offering an international assessment of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Emerging from my European Union-funded ‘Peace Process: layers of meaning’ project, students will have access to unique heritage interviews on the Northern Ireland Troubles, opening the study of conflict resolution in Northern Ireland to new sources of inquiry. What local/national/international factors framed violence in Ulster as an ‘intractable conflict’? How can religion moderate communal understandings of a ‘just society’ in Northern Ireland? How has ‘treaty consciousness’ informed strategies for peacebuilding after Brexit? Students will participate in unique Q&A sessions with policymakers from Dublin, London, and Belfast during this course.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3421 Monsters Masses Modernity 3 Credits

The modern world ushered in by the French Revolution provoked both optimism and pessimism about the future of Western civilization. This course will look at the pessimistic reaction, especially as it relates to the development of mass society and how it manifested itself in fantasies of uncontrollable monsters such as those in Frankenstein and Dracula, in the dystopic science fiction of H.G. Wells, fears of social degeneracy, and the radical ideologies of Fascism and Nazism. The time period covered will be 1789 to the outbreak of World War II.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3423 Mind of Europe: Auth 1300-1600 3 Credits

The study of texts and contexts with a focus on the struggle between church and state, the rise of modern political theory, and the growth of religious toleration in the late medieval/early modern European context. The course will begin with the political writings of Dante and end with John Locke.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3424 St. Francis to Pope Francis 3 Credits

2026 marks the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi, whose relics will be displayed publicly for the first time this year. The course will focus on the life and death of Saint Francis, including many of his writings, his work with St. Clare of Assisi, founding the Franciscan Order, the Canticle of the Sun, and his other theological texts. We will read Thomas of Celano's vita and examine the swift canonization process of St. Francis.

It's impossible to understand the vision that Pope Francis had for his papacy without understanding his medieval namesake, whose ministry espoused care for the poor and the environment. By reading parts of Pope Francis's autobiography (Hope) and his most celebrated papal encylical (Laudato Si), we will understand how this Jesuit pope framed his papacy around the medieval Franciscan's identity.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3425 Mary Through the Ages 3 Credits

The goal of this course is to introduce students to the development of Marian beliefs, devotions, practices, and representations within Christianity, as well as in Judaism and Islam from Late Antiquity to the present day. Through examining Marian doctrines, Marian devotions, Mary in art and liturgy, Marian feasts, and principal Marian literary works, students will understand the historical development of this familiar and global figure. By examining the central influence of the Virgin Mary, students will gain a broader historical understanding of the cultures of world Christianities, Judaism and Islam. No previous history knowledge is required, though a cursory familiarity with European and religious history will be helpful.

Level: Undergraduate

Course attribute: Core: Theology

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3428 Eternal City: History of Rome 3 Credits

This seminar class focuses on the history of the city of Rome, from its foundation in ancient times through its contemporary role as the capital of Italy. Each week we will focus on a different period, and examine the history of the city, in terms of both the life of its population and the development of city buildings, neighborhoods, and structures. We will discuss political, economic, social, cultural, religious, intellectual, and other changes, with a special focus on the architecture and urban structures of the physical city itself. Rome is a place, but it is also an idea. Therefore, though the history of the city and its people will be our main focus, we will also discuss the image of Rome, the perception of the city by outsiders, its broader role in European and western culture, and the legacy of its history as the seat of antiquity’s greatest empire, the main center of western Christianity and of global Catholicism, and the capital of a modern European nation state. Please note however that this class will not offer an overall history of antiquity, of the papacy, or of the Christian church in general (or of modern Italy per se). The course aims thus to allow for a close analysis of specific themes and topics and of how they developed over a significant span of time. The course also has a methodological aim: to introduce students to the advanced use of primary sources and to further their understanding of historical thinking and analysis. Both class discussion and writing assignments will push students to hone their critical reading, writing, and analytical skills. In particular, we will try to understand how to read textual, visual, and other sources with an awareness of historical context and with attention to the specifics of genre, authorship, and audience.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3429 Medieval Travel and Pilgrimage 3 Credits

Whether it was to go to Jerusalem to see where Jesus lived, to make the hajj to Mecca, the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, or to travel beyond unchartered territory, the longing to see distant lands was a common desire in the Middle Ages (500-1500 C.E.). This course will reflect on how aspects of medieval travel have shaped our understanding of movement, tourism, pilgrimage, and even wanderlust in today’s world. The goal to move and discover in the medieval world permeated all facets of life: religious, political, economic, and the personal desire to encounter the unknown. Through great economic and personal costs, many made dangerous journeys to visit places of religious significance. Those who couldn’t travel read travelogs and letters from pilgrims who had made the arduous trek. Through the shared experiences of walking through religious spaces in D.C., as well as physically handling manuscripts and other medieval objects, students will gain a first-hand connection to the medieval world.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3430 Divided Germany 3 Credits

The total military and moral defeat of Hitler’s Empire in 1945 left Germany militarily and morally defeated. The two German states that were founded in 1949 – the capitalist liberal-democratic Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) – were built on the ruins of a genocidal dictatorship. This seminar will examine how the two states negotiated their common past and constructed competing political and social orders in an era of Cold War bipolarity. After surveying the general trajectories of both states from the late 1940s until the 1980s, we will examine German-German history thematically to tease out comparisons and contrasts between both societies. The themes covered include, but are not limited to, experiences with Soviet and U.S. occupation; political leadership in East and West; competing memories of war and the founding myths of anti-fascism and anti-communism; the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall; negotiating diversity and difference in the wake of genocide; popular culture and consumption; gender and sexuality; the environmental history of both German states; surveillance regimes in East and West; protest movements and political opposition; and overcoming the ‘wall in the heads’ after unification. Students will gain a thorough understanding of West German history beyond the redemptive tale of a smooth transition to liberal-democracy after ‘zero hour’ and insights into how to evaluate the ‘second German dictatorship’. Throughout the semester we will pay special attention to the manifold and resilient entanglements between both states across the Cold War divide. While providing an in-depth look at a key chapter in German history, divided Germany will thus also serve as a case study for thinking about comparisons, transfers, and linkages ‘across the blocs’ more generally.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3431 Florence:The City its Image 3 Credits

This seminar class focuses on the history of the city of Florence, from its ancient foundation through its contemporary position as an international tourist mecca. We will focus on the structure and appearance of the city, on its buildings and urban spaces, on their political, cultural, religious, ideological, and other meanings and impact; we will also examine how ancient ideas about city life and urban practices and policies shaped the development of Florence. Florence is a place, but over the centuries it has also acquired a mythical role as the epicenter of the Renaissance and as a sort of living museum. Therefore, though the history of the city and its people will be our main focus, we will also discuss the image of Florence, the perception of the city by outsiders, and its broader role in European and western culture. The course aims thus to allow for a close analysis of specific themes and topics and of how they developed over a significant span of time. The course also has a methodological aim: to introduce students to the advanced use of primary sources and to further their understanding of historical thinking and analysis. Both class discussion and writing assignments will push students to hone their critical reading, writing, and analytical skills. In particular, we will try to understand how to read textual, visual, and other sources with an awareness of historical context and with attention to the specifics of genre, authorship, and audience.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3432 Marriage in Western History 3 Credits

In this seminar course we will study the history of marriage in Europe, from the ancient Greek world all the way to today’s debates around same-sex marriage. Marriage is of course a fundamental institution of social life in all societies, but the ways in which it operates in the life of individuals and communities is shaped by many social, cultural, religious, political, scientific, legal, and other factors and ideas. We will aim to understand its developments in European history and to connect those developments to the broader context of each successive era. We will also consider depictions of individual marriages (and of marriage in general) in literary works, such as novels, poetry, (auto)biographies, and letters.

Most of our evidence will be textual, but we will also examine some visual sources. Our textual sources will be roughly evenly divided between primary sources of all genres and types (from fiction to judicial sources, from religious tracts to biographies of specific individuals) and secondary (i.e., scholarly) modern works of interpretation and historical analysis. This course is a seminar, and thus most of our class time will be devoted to group discussions of our sources. The writing assignments will give students a chance to practice various forms of academic writing.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3433 The Wars of Religion in France 3 Credits

The French Wars of Religion nearly destroyed the strongest state in Europe, and the St Bartholomew's Massacre was the worst episode of religious violence in European history. They were thus a crucial turning point in European history for both religion and politics.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3501 Making Nations in Lat Amer 3 Credits

After the United States and Haiti, Spanish and Portuguese America achieved political independence from European powers. In an age where monarchy was the dominant political formation of “civilized” countries, the new nations, with the exception of Brazil, chose a republican form of government. How to organize a country and create a nation from a colony? Who counted as a citizen? Who wanted to count as a citizen and how did they perceive their own roles within the new state? What territories could be included in the new state? All those questions and more were asked in the nineteenth century in Latin America as the different countries emerged from their colonial condition. Many of these issues, especially regarding the full integration of people as citizens into the nation-state persist into the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. This course will explore many of these questions, based on some of the new exciting research that has been published in the past decade. The course examines these issues through theoretical perspectives, biography, intellectual history, and the new cultural/political history.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3503 Global Sixties in LatinAmerica 3 Credits

This course covers the upheavals and transformations of the period historians call the long 1960s (roughly 1955-1975) across Latin America, looking at radical movements, the counterculture, and their repression; gender and student movements; transnational anticolonialism; and the tremendous impact of the Cuban Revolution. We will focus especially on cultural production from the period, examining how artists, filmmakers, and composers sought to depict history and effect change. We will also consider the history versus memorialization of the so-called Global Sixties.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3504 CURE: Brazilian Vanguards 3 Credits

Since the declaration of the world's first Modern Art Week in São Paulo in 1922, Brazilian artists and creative leaders have self-consciously positioned themselves in the cultural vanguard. This course explores Brazilian cultural movements and manifestations including modernism, neo-concretism, bossa nova, tropicalism, desbunde, and more, in literature, painting, film, sculpture, graffiti, comics and other media. This is a designated CAS CURE (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience Class).

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3510 Topic: [LatinAmericanHist] 3 Credits

This course number is used for seminars devoted to specific subjects in the area of Latin American history. Students may take more than one of the courses offered under this number. Each course will be announced in the course schedule and receive its own sub-title. Read the section description for the description of the specific topic being offered.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3602 Hist of Global War on Terror 3 Credits

Fall 2021 marks the twentieth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Those events and the responses to them unleashed the phenomenon known as the Global War on Terror, led in large part by the United States, though with the participation of many other states and a wide range of political actors. Twenty years on, this course seeks to examine these developments through a critical historical lens. Beginning with a discussion of key themes and concepts, we will examine the possible modes of studying the Global War on Terror as a unit of analysis in light of competing theoretical and analytical frameworks. Following a historical background unit that traces some of the Global War on Terror’s most salient features to the late Cold War era, the remainder of the course will be devoted to the study of major events and key developments of the era after 9/11. These include the conduct of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the evolution and globalization of securitization policies, including the use of rendition, torture, “black sites,” and drone warfare. Later units will explore the Global War on Terror’s impact on U.S. policies in other parts of the Middle East region, as well as the ongoing competition with Iran over regional influence. The course will also explore the competing narratives over the emergence and evolution of key targets of the Global War on Terror in the form of militant movements such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and their impact on perceptions of mainline Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Finally, the course will also examine the domestic impact of the Global War on Terror within the U.S., including the legal ramifications of the Patriot Act and the broader crackdown on free speech and association.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Prerequisites: (HIST 007 or HIST 1401) or (HIST 008 or HIST 1402) or (HIST 099 or HIST 1099) or (HIST 104 or HIST 1104) or (HIST 106 or HIST 1106) or (HIST 107 or HIST 1107)

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3603 Sci-fi in/and the Middle East 3 Credits

This seminar uses the genre of science fiction produced in the Middle East as both text and method to explore the history of the region. We engage with historical, legal, and cultural scholarship, fiction, journalism, and film, focusing on themes of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and (in)justice, as well as gender, race, and class. We trace the deep roots of sci fi in the region from as early as the 12th century, and also consider how political needs and desires are reflected in contemporary sci fi output of the 20th and 21st centuries, including the growing subgenre of Gulf futurism. Along the way, we explore concepts of time and temporality, history and futurity, technology, and culture. Science fiction reflects both hope and despair: it fires up the imagination and excavates despondency and hopelessness. It also allows the marginalized to write themselves in, ask questions about who gets to narrate past and future, and convert uncertainty from foreclosure into possibility. As such, we consider the methodological possibilities science fiction can offer people in the Middle East in imagining alternative, and perhaps even emancipatory, futures.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 3605 Gender Education in ME 3 Credits

This upper division course examines the history of education in modern Middle East history, with an emphasis on how gendered notions shaped the form, content, transmission, and reception of knowledge. What did educating girls/women versus boys/men mean in different societies at different historical moments? How did educational content and gendered social roles mutually reinforce – or detract – from one another? The course traces the shift from Islamic education to missionary and colonial educational institutions, to the rise of nationalist systems of pedagogy. Education is arguably the most formative aspect of a literate person’s life and has been perceived and used as an index of one’s “enlightenment,” the “modernity” of a society or nation, a harbinger of “freedom”, and as a vehicle for inculcating ideology. But what, really, does it mean to be educated? How did that change over time? What impact did the shift from an oral to written tradition have on the different societies? How is the definition of education related to notions of upbringing, knowledge, and culture? We will examine how competing notions of “modern” education influenced the rise of “secular”, Islamist, and western-oriented pedagogies, the role of the intellectual, the social, political, and cultural capital of language, and the role of gender to current discourses of educational reform in the region.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Course attribute:

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3606 Women Gender In Middle East 3 Credits

Middle Eastern women are often portrayed in the Western media as oppressed, and a fixed, unchanging notion of “Islam” is frequently cited as the most significant source of such oppression. But what exactly does studying “Middle Eastern women” mean? How do we begin to define the concepts of “freedom” or “oppression”? This colloquium is designed to provide students with a nuanced historical understanding of issues related to women and gender in the region, which includes countries from Morocco to Iran, and including Turkey. After an introduction to the main themes and approaches in the study of gender in the region, the first part of this course examines the development of discourses on gender as well as the lived experiences of women from the rise of Islam to the highpoint of the Ottoman Empire. The second part focuses on the 19th- century to the present. Topics to be covered include the politics of marriage, divorce, and reproduction; gendered political and economic participation; feminism, nationalism, and Islamism; sexuality; and finally, the impact of war, uprisings, and conflict on gendered lives

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3609 America and the Muslim World 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 3610 Topic: [Middle East History] 3 Credits

This number will be used for seminars devoted to specific subjects in the area of Middle East history. Students may take more than one of the courses offered under this number. Each course will be announced in the course schedule and receive its own sub-title.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3611 Shaping of Modern Iran 3 Credits

This course offers an overview of the intricate religious, political, and social dynamics that have shaped Iran over the last half-millennium. The opening module provides a background to Iran as a geographic and cultural concept, exploring various themes such as Persian kingship, priesthood, and messianism, and the evolution of Shi’ism and Sufism. It then delves into Safavid period themes, like sacral kingship and the philosophical traditions of the Isfahan School, along with the emergence of Iran’s characteristic artistic and architectural aesthetics. The course progresses chronologically into the Qajar and Pahlavi eras and the Islamic Revolution. Modules cover a wide range of topics, from interpreting miniature art, love poetry, and Iranian new wave cinema to deciphering the multiple languages of Great Power politics and the anatomy of rebellion. Broader themes include ideologies of protest and revolution, cultural collisions and exchanges, the evolving role of women, and the complex relationship between mysticism and legalism. Students will be encouraged not simply to try and reconcile apparent contradictions, but to look beyond the insufficient binaries of heterodoxy versus orthodoxy, religious versus secular, and so on. The course moreover traces the emergence of multiple indigenous modernities within Iran and considers the array of internal responses to colonialism and western notions of modernity. In addition to contextualizing modern developments, students will be introduced to historiographical debates and methodologies and critical analysis of primary and secondary texts.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3612 Modern Palestinian History 3 Credits

This course focuses on the lived experiences of Palestinians in the Middle East from the late Ottoman period to the present and the key historical developments that have shaped those experiences. Over the course of the semester, students will write a research paper on a topic of their choice relating to modern Palestinian history.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3613 Stories in the Data 3 Credits

When you see a graph representing the nationalities and genders of workers in the Gulf, what lies behind these numbers? Who are the people they represent, and what is gained and lost by looking at them collectively, as a source of data? As the historian Dan Bouk has written, “There are stories in the data–you just have to know how to read them.” This course will help you to develop the skills to engage data in interdisciplinary humanistic contexts by developing a critical approach to data gathering, interpretation, and visualization. We will consider core methodological questions such as What counts as data? and How does the context of a dataset’s creation pose practical, methodological, and ethical challenges for humanistic scholarship? We will also practice creating data sets from archival materials, conducting basic statistical analysis, crafting visualizations of data in support of humanities research, particularly for digital humanities projects. Following Bouk, we will consider our encounter with “data” as an encounter with “a complicated, multilayered cultural object, a deep, often tangled text.

To help us make sense of that opening question, our data and sources will deal with global histories of labor migration–forced, free, and somewhere in between–stretching from the 18th century Atlantic World to contemporary Arabian littoral of the Gulf. By the end of the semester, you will be able to read stories from the data often used to represent processes of labor migration and you will be able to see data in the stories which workers who migrate tell about their experiences, lives, and aspirations.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college may not enroll.

HIST 3614 Environmental History of Iran 3 Credits

In this seminar, students will master major works and debates in the emerging field of Iranian environmental history. Iran’s modern history has played out within a very unique set of environmental circumstances. Lying in the rain shadow of the Zagros Mountains, much of the Iranian Plateau has little rainfall, with farming communities suffering frequent drought alongside large numbers of mobile animal herders surviving on seasonal grasses in marginal lands. How have these environmental pressures shaped Iran’s modern history? We will use an environmental framework to explore how climate change, water scarcity, mobility, and environmental hazards like famine, disease, and earthquakes have shaped modern Iran’s history from the Little Ice Age in the 17th century to the dire environmental challenges shaping the politics of the Islamic Republic today. We will also explore the ways in which modernizing states have attempted to reshape Iran’s environment to serve human ends, from oil industrialization to railway and infrastructural development to the creation of Iran’s nuclear program. Underlying this seminar is the question of how environments are implicated in the rise of global inequality in the modern world.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3615 Arab Uprisings 3 Credits

This course considers the last two decades of uprisings, protests, and revolutions across the Middle East in historical as well as comparative perspective. From Tunisia to Yemen, the region’s history is full of examples of people who have mobilized against social, economic, and political injustice in the hopes of building a better future. In this course, students will learn to situate uprisings in their historical trajectories, studying regional, national, and global contexts, as well as the everyday lived experiences of ordinary people. What possesses people to do the desperate acts that they undertake in times of political hope, duress, and upheaval? How are political symbols born and remade? How do protests and protesters give meaning to spaces, to their bodies, and define agency and resistance? Students will examine changing roles and definitions of the 'state' and the 'people', including women, peasants, laborers, the military, and youth. This course will also delve into the place of imagination in protest, the generative role that protests play in terms of world-building, cultural and artistic production, as well as the limitations and hopefulness they bring to the fore.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3701 Cult of the Leader 3 Credits

This seminar explores political cults of personality in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia. We shall specifically examine the leadership cults of Tsar Nicholas, Aleksandr Kerensky, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin, in addition to thinking about leadership cults comparatively in a global context. What is a personality cult? How are they produced? Who orchestrates their mass production? How successful have they been in mobilizing the masses? We shall grapple with these questions, among others, while examining a range of primary sources, including newspaper articles, speeches, official histories, novels, songs, poems, paintings, posters, and feature films.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3710 Topic:[Russ/E Euro Hist] 3 Credits

This number will be used for seminars devoted to specific subjects in the area of Russian and Eastern European history. Students may take more than one of the courses offered under this number. Each course will be announced in the course schedule and receive its own sub-title.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Course attribute: FS54 name

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3800 Film and US History 3 Credits

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3805 Jazz/Civil Rights/Amer Society 3 Credits

Jazz and Human Rights will trace social conflict and social progress through the study of Jazz music. Starting with its antecedents, the Negro spirituals of the mid and late 19th Century, and the development of Blues music at the beginning of the 20th century, we will explore how through lyrics and music, the African American people have expressed their desires for freedom and equality. From Duke Ellington’s Black Brown and Beige to Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, to Charles Mingus’ Fables of Faubus and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, the sweet syncopations, and heartfelt realities of Jazz as music of freedom will be explored. We will look at how the music differed in various cities and areas of the country. We will look at similarities and differences among jazz musicians, black and white musicians. In addition to class readings, we will weekly listen to music; view audio clips of live performances and hear what the musicians themselves have to say. And most importantly, we will have fun as we learn.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3807 Hist American Gentrification 3 Credits

This course will introduce you to the idea of gentrification and its evolving history in the United States. Gentrification can be considered a process by which urban space is reorganized along an uneven socioeconomic and racial axis to privilege and serve the needs of the most advantageous class. Understanding this process requires the firm grasp of two important fields: (1). 20th century urban and suburban history and (2). American cultural and intellectual history. Gentrification or what some might call “back to the city” movements, has a long history since the founding of the earliest American cities. However, during the second half of the twentieth century, this term came into prominence when in the absence of industrial mass production and in the aftermath of deindustrialization, cities and neighborhoods underwent a re-branding as consumable experiences ripe with “authenticity.” The former central city districts that long sheltered communities of color and poor migrants after World War II became sites of failed federal policies during the 1950s and 1960s that further produced more, rather than less, segregation. The fiscal crisis of the 1970s generated new urban policies that effectively curtailed services to the inner city and created subsidies for gentrification and redevelopment in hopes of altering shifts in population that would bring to the city a new class of urban consumers. In this class, students will explore the long history of American gentrification, the political economy that shaped it, the voices and memories of those displaced, and the romance of authenticity that supplanted poverty. Students will also learn to interpret primary sources in this subject through written assignments and consider the historiographical debates about retelling this aspect of a seemingly recent American history.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3808 History of New Orleans 3 Credits

This colloquium will focus on the rich, unique history of New Orleans and its people from the city's founding in the eighteenth century to the present day. We will pay special attention to the intertwined themes of cultural diversity and mixture, class and race inequality, and the changing urban ecology -- concluding with a close look at Hurricane Katrina and its consequences.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3810 Topic:[US Hist] 3 Credits

This number will be used for seminars devoted to specific subjects in the area of American history. Students may take more than one of the courses offered under this number. Each course will be announced in the course schedule and receive its own sub-title.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3811 Cold War Lessons Legacies 3 Credits

The Cold War dominated world politics for 45 years, and its many legacies continue to shape the contemporary world. Scholars, students, policymakers, politicians, and others often look to the history of the Cold War for lessons to guide current policies. This course will examine the origins, persistence, and end of the Cold War, explore its key legacies, and analyze the lessons different groups draw from its history.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3813 Neoliberalism New Wave 3 Credits

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 not only signaled the mainstream arrival of America’s rightward turn but also the blossoming of new social and expressive movements that responded to a culture of conservatism, consumerism, and corporate governing. Although Reagan called for the reduction of government, in practice, both major parties expressed a new politics of austerity, defined by a fiscal retrenchment of the state and the moving away from a centrally governed economy. Wall street, corporations, and lobbyists exerted a greater influence on government during the late 1970s, ‘80s, and into the ‘90s, that only helped to exacerbate class and racial disparities, disproportionately affecting people in urban America. Music, art, and culture during these decades, but particularly in the long 1980s, reflected these new realities adopting technological innovations and making new meaning out of deindustrialized spaces. This upper-level seminar will focus on the United States during the long 1980s to think about the links between neoliberalism and US culture, particularly music, but also including art, sport, and entertainment. Readings will enable us to look at how neoliberalism developed and shaped cultural, political and urban space. This mix of social history, economic policy, political history, and urban studies will impel us to imagine the workings of American capitalism and the state through music, consumerism, and urban culture.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3815 Latinx Social Movements 3 Credits

This course will examine the long durée of Latinx social movements with an emphasis on the 20th century and into the present. The late 1960s ushered in a new period of mobilizations to organize around race, ethnicity, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality. In this course we will look at how various Latinx communities throughout the US articulated their struggles, protest, and change in this broader context. We will take a comparative and relational approach to the study of this history. Topics will include immigrant mobilizations, transnational organizing, agrarian and farmworker movements, political representation, feminisms and reproductive rights, environmental justice, labor, cultural and social transformation truck, education, and urban social movements. Great attention will be paid to the broader legacies of the struggles and what they mean for contemporary social movements and organizing.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Course attribute: FS54 name

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3817 Capitalism Amer Metropolis 3 Credits

Readings in this upper level seminar will be oriented around the concept of political economy of cities. We will focus on U.S. capitalism in its spatial and material form in so far as it helped create and shape U.S. cities, their prosperity and inequality. Readings, mostly focused on the 19th and 20th centuries, will enable us to look at how economic development, the state, labor, and markets gave rise to cities and their regional industries. City-making has been a product of uneven relations between the state, corporations, elites, reformers, activists, and others at different moments in time. How has the workings of American capitalism shifted in the lives of the city residents over time? What social movements have risen to address the inequities built by capitalist imperatives? How has urbanism reflected not only market power but people power? Students will write a major research paper or historiographical paper on one aspect of capitalism and the American metropolis, drawing on archival, primary, and secondary sources.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3819 Afr-Amer Life in Washington DC 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3820 Intel in US Foreign Relations 3 Credits

This course examines the influence of intelligence on U.S. foreign policy from 1914, when the First World War brought American entry onto the global stage, and will trace its evolution through a Second World War, a Cold War, and a War on Terror, to today. We will ask whether and how, and to what extent, intelligence impacted policy in some cases, and why, in others, it did not. In doing so, we will explore core themes of culture and emotion, the influence of sources, the efficacy of tradecraft and the phenomenon of intelligence failure, bureaucratic rivalries, and the relationship between American intelligence and the policymaker.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3821 History and the Graphic Novel 3 Credits

In the last few decades, graphic novels have emerged as one of the more popular culture genres representing the past. This course analyzes several graphic novels associated with U.S. history, focusing on several events and themes across the course of American history, including American Empire, World War II, the history of immigration, US foreign policy, race and ethnicity, and the struggle for equal rights, to name a few. Students will learn about both these events, as well as the ways in which graphic novelists frame the past in their books.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 3822 Georgetown Connections 3 Credits

Did you know that you can hop on a bicycle today on the Georgetown campus, ride down the hill under Canal Road and then follow the same historic trail 300 miles all the way to Pittsburgh? History is a fabric that weaves together elements of time and place. This 5-week course will explore local connections between the neighborhood of Georgetown and Washington, DC / Maryland as well as regional connections between the Chesapeake and Ohio River watersheds as they have evolved over the last 200 years. Each student will be required to complete a research paper and class presentation in the final week addressing 1 of 4 weekly themes: environmental sustainability, westward expansion, changing border lines and modern echoes. Students will combine research into targeted topics with in-person experiential learning through hiking and biking along the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal, the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Rail / Crescent Trail and the DC Trolley Trail. All three historic transportation corridors intersect in the vicinity of Georgetown's Car Barn. Together, they trace Georgetown's evolution from a small port town to an integral link in the nation's westward expansion across the Eastern Continental Divide. They also trace a history of connection and conflict, from Maryland's experience as a border state during the Civil War to the interplay among diverse communities in the Washington, DC region that has continued to the present day as each community struggles to define itself and expand or limit its connections with neighboring communities.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3823 HandsOn DC History: C. Barton 3 Credits

Clara Barton was one of the most significant Americans of the 19th century. Her home and headquarters of the American Red Cross, which she founded, are managed by the National Park Service in the DC Region. Students will partner with the NPS to learn about Barton, the 19th c. US, and public history while also learning how to do hands-on original research. Student work may contribute to the Barton site as interpretive materials, exhibits, displays, or talks delivered to the public.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3824 California Capitalism 3 Credits

California: the state that gave us Ronald Reagan and the Black Panther Party; New Age hippies and Silicon Valley; the Free Speech Movement and the tax revolt. How did one locale produce so much seeming contradiction? This course introduces students to the history of California from pre-colonial times to our own contemporary moment, with a particular focus on California as the vanguard of U.S. capitalist development and imperial conquest; and histories of grassroots responses from both the left and the right. We will both explore what makes California special and treat it as a case study to build broader historical understanding of big-picture issues like capitalism, settler colonialism, and social movements.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3825 Black America Since the 1960s 3 Credits

"Where Do We Go From Here: Black America Since the 1960s In the decades following the formal end of Jim Crow segregation, Black Americans achieved historic gains in political representation, economic success, and cultural influence, yet deepening racial inequality, state violence, and economic precarity persisted. This course examines this paradox, exploring how Black political culture evolved amid deindustrialization, austerity politics, the ascendance of the New Right, and neoliberal governance. Using Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” we will analyze shifting anti-Black ideologies and policies since the 1960s, as well as the ways Black communities have resisted, survived, and thrived despite persistent oppression. Examining a range of primary sources as well as the latest secondary literature, we will study a variety of topics, including Black political representation, environmental justice, the welfare rights movement, Black capitalism, hip-hop culture, the development carceral state, queer activism, and the fight for reparations."

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 3900 What's in an Archive? 3 Credits

What's in an archive? This class explores one of the basic building blocks of historical scholarship: archives. Students will learn about the theory and history of archives and get practical experience in navigating, managing, analyzing, understanding, and using historical archives in both analog and digital forms. Students will visit archives in person and meet with archivists at Georgetown and in the Washington, DC area. This class is especially designed for students who are planning to write a senior thesis based on archival research.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4101 History of Emotions Senses 3 Credits

From raging medieval European kings and falling in love in medieval Japan to tasting God and smelling race and "feeling cool" in twentieth century America, this seminar explores scholarship on the senses and emotions from a range of world regions and time periods in order to explore basic questions about the relationship between the mind and the body, the individual and society, biology and culture. This seminar is intended for history majors. However, students in psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science will have something to learn from how historians study the relationship between the experience and standards of feeling in particular historical contexts and the motives and actions inspiring historical transformations in experiences of the body.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4102 Global Age of Revolution 3 Credits

The century between 1776 and 1871 was one of the most transformative periods in world history, one that saw the emergence of political, economic, and social forces that continue to shape the lives of every human being alive today. From the birth of industrial capitalism to the emergence of its socialist opponents, from the creation of modern democracies to the consolidation of contemporary nationalism, from the abolition of slavery to the establishment of a world order defined by race and empire, understanding this era is vital for making sense of the modern world. In this class, we will look at the Age of Revolutions as a global phenomenon, linking familiar events like the US Civil War to less familiar ones like the Haitian Revolution and seeing how events in Asia both reflected and shaped what happened in Europe. By the end of the semester, these connections will unsettle and transform what you think you know about history.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4103 Ancient Climate Changes 3 Credits

In the fifteenth century, a sizable portion of humanity broke with the past and stitched together a new world. Societies across the globe encountered one another for the first time, developed novel intellectual and economic systems, and organized politically as they never had before. Their explorers, artists, scientists, merchants, and rulers set in motion a great expansion and intensification of humanity’s presence on Earth, in ways we are still struggling to manage today. This course will take you through these global developments. It will do so by introducing you to environmental history: the study of humanity’s past interactions with the nonhuman world. You will discover how European imperialism conscripted plans and animals; how climatic cooling triggered a seventeenth-century world crisis; and how globalization transformed humanity’s footprint on planet Earth. In the process, you will learn how to read and learn across disciplines, in ways that will deepen your understanding of our present and future.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4104 Global History of the Plague 3 Credits

This course considers the global history of Yersinia pestis, the zoonotic bacterium (a microorganism causing disease in people and other animals) that causes plague. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach to both tease out macro- and micro-histories of the three pandemics associated with the pathogen –the Justinianic Plague, Black Death, and Third Pandemic– and also to pin down transitions in plague’s past biological, cultural, and ecological– fundamental for understanding the bacterium’s inconstant pandemicity. Students will travel considerable time and space –the sixth century to the present, Alexandria to Buenos Aires– and draw on diverse sources –like Byzantine hagiography, the New York Times, and plague-victim teeth– to engage scholarly debates, unravel plague’s complexity, and assess plague’s impact.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4105 Global Slavery 3 Credits

This upper level seminar will examine the institution of slavery as a global historical phenomenon. We will consider case studies from a wide range of time periods and regions. In doing so, we will also investigate the global history of categories such as race which have been intimately connected to the history of enslavement and consider how the lens of global history can deepen our understanding of slavery as an institution.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4106 Environmental Inequality 3 Credits

In this seminar, we’ll look at the world through the unequal distribution of environmental resources and environmental harms and ask how it got that way. We’ll trace the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and industrialization, and we’ll research cases of environmental inequality and environmental justice in the places we all call home.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4107 Fascism and its Legacy 3 Credits

What are the origins and manifestations of fascism? Why did fascist ideology entice so many Europeans from different social backgrounds between World Wars I and II? Is fascism something that belongs to the history of the 20th Century, or are there parallels with what some call fascism today? In this course students will find responses to these and related questions, learning about the nature of fascism as an ideology and as a set of practices. The course will explore the birth and first flourishing of fascism in interwar Italy, Germany, Romania, Hungary, and other regions, before turning to its legacy for today's far-right populism and debates about fascism’s resurgence.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4108 RussiaChina: Imp. Encounters 3 Credits

Russia and China: Imperial Encounters, 1619-1927" explores the encounter between Russia and China in an era when both states were ruled by powerful imperial dynasties: the Romanovs and the Qing. We'll talk about how the two states traded, fought, spied on one another, and managed their mutual frontier--the longest land border in the world. By the end, we'll see both empires overthrown by powerful, interconnected revolutionary movements, whose legacy continues to shape our world.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4109 Global Industrial Revolution 3 Credits

Economic historians have debated when western European economic development surpassed China and other world regions, with answers ranging from 1500 to the late nineteenth century. This course takes a multi-regional approach to the study of economic development in the period. We will begin with foundational questions like how economic development should be measured, and then consider how political, economic, social and intellectual institutions interacted with global developments to foster industrialization, initially in Britain but rapidly spreading to the Low Countries, France, and Germany. Readings will be comparative, including detailed discussion of economic developments in China, India, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4110 Existential Risk 3 Credits

Existential risks threaten to drive humanity to extinction, or at least permanently prohibit humanity’s future flourishing. We seem to live in an era defined, in part, by the proliferation of such risks, from extreme climate change to nuclear war, from engineered pandemics to artificial intelligence. Half of this this course guides students through the history of such risks. It explores the origins of existential risk as a concept, and then reveals how different existential risks – including nuclear winter, asteroid impacts, the ozone hole, runaway global warming, and even alien invasions – were mitigated or exacerbated in different parts of the world between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. In the second half of the course, students collaborate to develop solutions to a present-day or near-future existential risk that seems particularly urgent. The solutions could, hopefully, guide government responses to that risk – and thereby make the world a little safer than it once was.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4111 Global Highways 3 Credits

Global Highways examines cities from a historical perspective focused on urban and suburban development, particularly infrastructure; experiences of slavery, resistance, and freedom unique to urban spaces; cultures of sound and music that have special relationships to urban populations, such as jazz, kwela, and samba; and the legacies of colonialism and forced labor in present-day tourist economies. The class centers weekly readings related to New Orleans, Louisiana; Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa; Paris, France; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using primary sources, including text, music, and film, as well as secondary literature written by historians, musicians, artists, and activists, students will learn how to listen to a city to know its history; acquire broad knowledge of the relationship between urban development and slavery in the Atlantic world; and apply this knowledge to urban planning, historic preservation, performance studies, and historical analysis.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4117 Nationalism 3 Credits

This seminar examines selected aspects of 19th- and 20th-century nationalism, combining theoretical readings with case studies. The case studies are mostly European (simply because that happens to be the instructor's field), but not exclusively so. The approach is broadly comparative, and issues discussed will include some of the classic ones debated in the field, such as: What connections are there between modernity and nationalism? What is the relationship between civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood? How did evolving information/communication environments and systems shape the development of nationalisms? Although the geographical focus of most assigned readings is on modern Europe, students are encouraged to write their term papers on any region and time period they are interested in, as long as the theme is connected to nationhood and nationalism. The course can thus be counted toward any regional field, depending on the paper topic and subject to approval.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4123 Asia in Washington 3 Credits

This course examines Washington's Asian history by focusing on sites, monuments, and markers throughout the District. Students will identify, research, and document the evidence of cultural and social interactions in the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries, examining present and bygone sites in the city through research that utilizes university, city, and national archives. Throughout the semester, we will explore the historical footprints of Asians and Asian Americans in Washington, with opportunities to study high politics, social interactions, cultural exchanges, and migration history, among many other approaches. Classes will be structured around discussion and fieldwork. Course requirements will be one major research paper and biweekly contributions to a guidebook to the capital.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4127 History of the 21st Century 3 Credits

It has been a pretty rough ride so far in the twenty-first century. What may have started with grand hopes for a glorious future as the world celebrated the advent of a new millennium on New Year’s Eve 1999 has so far, at least according to a widespread perception among people in the “West,” unfolded as a series of crises: 9/11 and the global “war on terror”; the devastating financial crisis of 2007-8; Brexit, the rise of rightwing “populism,” and the crisis of liberal democracy; the Covid-19 pandemic… Have we entered The Age of Crisis? In this course, we will explore the history of what is not history yet. We will investigate the very recent past and the ways contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic have tried to make sense of the first decades of the twenty-first century from a historical perspective. The goal is to situate the most recent developments in society, politics, and culture in a longer-term historical context and examine the central ideas and forces that shape the present – such as neoliberalism, globalization, ethno-nationalism, populism, polarization, the “culture wars” – from a historicizing perspective. More generally, we also want to reflect on the question of how the historical approach can contribute to a better understanding of the present: How does history relate to the present? How does the study of history influence our understanding of our current moment? And what, if anything, can we “learn” from history as we are navigating the crises and challenges of the twenty-first century?

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4128 East Africa the Indian Ocean 4 Credits

This seminar introduces students to the study of the Indian Ocean World, focusing on East Africa. The course engages multidisciplinary perspectives in the humanities.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4129 Indian Ocean Research Colloq 4 Credits

This is a multidisciplinary research colloquium on the Indian Ocean with an experiential learning component, designed to allow students to develop independent research projects.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4130 Gender and Empire 3 Credits

This upper-level history course examines gender as an important lens through which to understand questions of empire, colonialism, and anti-colonialism, with a focus on the British, French, and US empires from the 18th century to the present. Students will explore the relationship between ideological and material structures of power and historical experience, and examine the relationship between categories such as race, class, religion, and gender in imperial contexts. We will be concerned with the deployment of femininities and masculinities to justify imperial ventures and to establish clear lines of demarcation between ruler and ruled. We discuss the intricacies and contradictions of colonial relationships across genders, and the impact on changing understandings of intimacy on both sides of the equation. We examine colonial policies in several areas - including the regulation of medicine and public health, sexuality, education, citizenship, secularism, and the law - as well as how people accommodated and challenged these policies as part of larger social and political transformations. Finally, we consider the ways in which processes of decolonization and nation-building were influenced by the gendered legacies of imperialism, including a discussion of 21st century parallels.

Level: Undergraduate

Prerequisites: HIST 1099 or HIST 099

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 4131 Outer Space: Plato to Pluto 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Equivalent to HIST 431

HIST 4132 SouthAfrica inthe Indian Ocean 4 Credits

This is a multidisciplinary research colloquium on the Indian Ocean with an experiential learning component, designed to allow students to develop independent research projects.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Equivalent to ANTH 4132, ENGL 4132

HIST 4160 Medical Humanities 3 Credits

In this interdisciplinary course, students will pursue a semester-long project in the medical humanities. The course provides a brief introduction to the medical humanities and its subfields, from medical history to the philosophy of medicine to medicine in literature to medical anthropology, before diving into the process of designing, researching and preparing a major medical humanities project.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4161 Economic History 3 Credits

This course introduces students to the subject matter and methods of the economic approach to studying the past. Students will learn how quantitative data and economic logic can help historians frame and answer certain historical questions. Readings and examples from economic historians will represent various schools of thought and will address salient questions in world history. This is a seminar course, which means that instruction is mainly discussion-based. The course will also include historical workshops – class periods in which students have the opportunity to engage with historical material hands-on, to discover and debate the meaning of the traces of the past. No prior course in economics is required.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4202 African Politico-Economics 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4203 African Biography 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4204 African Environmental History 3 Credits

Please note: The content and organization of this course are subject to change, contingent on the university's decision about the fall mode of instruction. In this course we will explore the relationship between humans and the non-human world in African history. The course inquires into the ways that people and plants, animals and microbes, and ideologies and physical landscapes have shaped the African environment and human experiences. Our objective for the course is to understand the complicated histories behind contemporary environmental issues that affect Africa and the globe. We will begin with deep histories of the African environment. We will look at how historians have drawn on sources from the natural world—waterways, rainforests, plants, and pests—as a window into the local and global dimensions of the continent’s distant past. In the second unit of the course we will examine environmental conquests. We will consider how ecological traumas of colonization shaped European and Africans ideas and interactions with the environment. Next we analyze contemporary African environmental issues in historical perspective, including battles between poachers and rangers in wildlife preserves, agricultural development and degradation, and conflicts over natural resources. The course concludes with a session on the future of African environments and global climate change. Our readings and discussions will center on several key questions: How do we understand the relationship between humans and the natural world? How might we take apart the category of “nature”? How have local environments been shaped by regional and global encounters? What can local histories tell us about global environmental change? How does colonialism shape contemporary debates about preservation, degradation, and overpopulation in Africa?

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4205 Sex Society in Africa 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4206 Apartheid 3 Credits

In 1948, South African voters – a minority of the country’s population – elected a government on the platform of apartheid, a radical form of racial segregation. For much of the next half century, apartheid was official government policy and South Africa became a pariah to much of the rest of the world. This seminar delves into the historical roots of apartheid and what it meant for South Africans living it. We will examine the resistance of South Africans of all races to apartheid, as well as the international anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s. We conclude by exploring what might be called “apartheid’s afterlives” – the persistence of its social and economic structures in contemporary South Africa - as well as the internationalization of the idea of "apartheid" and its application to other contexts. Class readings will include a variety of historical documents and monographs; reading loads are substantial. Requirements include weekly discussion posts, student presentations, and a final research paper.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4208 Topics African Womens' History 3 Credits

African women’s history has experienced modest growth since Margaret Strobel published what is recognised as the first monograph of the field, Muslim Women in Mombasa: 1890-1975, in 1979. Since then, more monographs have followed in addition to several scholarly papers in both women’s history journals and general African history journals. This literature has enriched African history by broadening its horizons and diversifying its perspectives. The study of literature pertaining to a given area of specialisation is a crucial academic endeavour. It permits one to survey the extent of knowledge generated over the relevant period of time, examine its philosophical underpinnings, identify gaps in that knowledge, examine contradictions and confluences in the interpretation of research, and investigate methodological rationales and methodologies. As such this course will introduce you to a wide range of themes in African Women’s History that span regions, time and class as it enables you to engage in the sort of analyses that are necessary for a thorough exercise in historiographical reflection.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4209 Resistance/Reparations in Afr 3 Credits

Resistance and Reparations in Africa: This seminar examines how people in colonial Africa challenged the power and authority of those who sought to govern them, and how people in post-independence Africa have sought to hold those former colonizers accountable. We will focus on three primary case studies: the conquest of the Benin Kingdom, in modern-day Nigeria, and the quest to have Benin’s treasures returned from European and North American museums; the Herero war against Germany, in colonial Namibia, and the demand for reparations; and the Mau Mau war in Kenya and veterans’ search for compensation from Britain. The class will rely on a mix of primary sources, academic historical studies, podcasts, and more. Students will visit the National Museum of African Art (which recently agreed to return their collection of Benin Bronzes), and will do a final research paper on a colonial-era resistance movement or reparations debate of their choosing.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4210 STEM and Power in Africa 3 Credits

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: STEM. The preceding acronym is a buzzword often heard in all sorts of spaces from family living rooms to corridors of power all over the world. It is mostly associated with objectivity, progress, complexity, growth, development, intelligence, prosperity and stability i.e., the sorts of concepts that society generally associates with these disciplines. However, STEM fields are human fields and are not immune from subjectivity and other human flaws that bedevil every human endeavour. In this course, we study the interaction between STEM and power in Africa during a period spanning centuries: pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial. The course integrates Africa into broader developments of and discourses on STEM fields while examining the continent’s contributions to these fields, and critically, how fields we now think of as STEM have interacted with African societies over time to shape their politics, economies and cultures in general. It is an academic exercise in STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics, during which students will explore the research scholars of the humanities and social sciences have conducted using a variety of models and methods to study STEM-related histories in Africa. The goal is to enable students to think critically about how science and technology have forged and continue to influence policy-making, implementation and therefore, how STEM fields have been a source of power for African societies or have been used to wield power in Africa during the period under examination.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4211 Decolonization in Africa 3 Credits

The independence of African countries from colonial rule remains one of the pivotal events in the making of the modern world. Before and after the imperial flags were lowered in countries such as Ghana and Tanzania, many people of African descent questioned the extent to which decolonization equated liberation. This course invites students to examine how different segments of African society across age, class, gender, and ethnic backgrounds struggled for economic, gendered, social, and political freedom from the Second World War until the present. How did these actors define, experience, and imagine decolonization? What impact did their ideas have on their societies and the African diaspora? How can we apply their theories and practices of decolonization? The answers to these questions and more will help to shape students’ understanding of this pivotal period in world history.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4301 The Silk Road 3 Credits

The silk road (or silk roads) is a term used to describe routes used by travelers, merchants, monks and others across the Eurasian continent, or by sea between Asia and the Mediterranean basin. More broadly, however, the notion of "silk road" encompasses the longterm trans-Eurasian exchange of goods, crops, art, ideas, religion and other things, starting from when humans first fanned out across the old world. The question at the center of this course, then, will be "what has been the nature of trans-Eurasian exchanges, and what has been their historical impact?" In investigating this question, we will learn something about the basic dynamics and highpoints of Central Asian history (for a more thorough survey of Central Eurasian history take HIST 108), and tune in at various points to the history of China, India, the Islamic world, Russia and Mediterranean Europe. The course will be mainly discussion format, and students will develop and present research projects focused on one of the things exchanged cross the silk roads, for example, a disease, a precious material, a religion, or a technology.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4302 Imperialism/Colonialism:Asia 3 Credits

This course seeks to provide an introduction to recent studies of colonialism and imperialism in East Asia, with particular focus on the Japanese empire. The course is structured thematically and comparatively, and is designed to question in what ways the experience of Asia represents world historical processes, and/or regional or ethnically specific characteristics. Concretely, the course will focus on three aspects: first, introduce the varieties of colonial societies in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries; second, examine the role of colonial empires in the history of modern East Asia, including effects on nationalism, commodities and consumption, modernity, governance, gender relations, and other aspects; and third, analyze how Asian societies since 1945 have represented experiences of imperialism and colonialism in official and popular discourse.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4304 Capitalism in South Asia 3 Credits

This course examines the colonial transformations of the South Asian economy between 1750 and 1950. We begin by examining the nature of capital and labour in South Asia and the wider Indian Ocean world during the eighteenth century, prior to British dominance. We examine historiographic debates about whether colonialism was built atop existing South Asian economic structures and institutions, or whether it represented a fundamental rupture. We will then move on to examine three economic communities in South Asia: the peasantry, industrial workers, and traders. The course concludes by examining the place of economic thought in the Indian and Pakistani nationalist movements.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4306 Decolonization: Asia Africa 3 Credits

Between 1945 and 1975, Europe’s former colonies in Asia and Africa became sovereign and independent nations. More than 60 nation-states gained independence in these three decades. This course will examine the process of decolonization, both the anti-colonial liberation movements that preceded as well as the many challenges that followed formal independence. Amongst other aspects of decolonization, this course will examine the formation of the Third World; the Cold War context; the role of multi-lateral institutions like the United Nations and the International Monetary fund; neo-colonialism; the challenges of post-colonial state formation; and the enduring problems of poverty and material deprivation in Asia and Africa

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Course attribute:

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4307 EmpireNationDiversityinChina 3 Credits

"Empire, nation and diversity in China: East Asian worldviews and identity, past and present." Many contemporary issues involving China, from its vaunted Belt and Road Initiative to the status of Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan, turn upon questions rooted in the past: What is China? Who is Chinese? Is there a traditional “Chinese World Order” or Tianxia? Have China and East Asia exhibited a form of international relations different from that of other parts of the world? Sweeping from past to present, this course will consider Chinese thinking about identity and diversity within Chinese polities and between Chinese polities and other peoples, with an eye to understanding both separatism within China and China’s efforts to integrate with, or promote its own, world order.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4308 ThePacific:Past,Present,Future 3 Credits

This course is aimed at establishing literacy in the Pacific Islands, their storied histories and their complex presents. It will take students through the Indigenous human geographies in the Pacific, the coming of Europeans and the establishment of spheres of influence through various economies and imperial activities. It will pay close attention to the causes and consequences of power shifts, the imposition of imperial powers and resistance to it as well as the movement of Asian people into the island Pacific as indentured plantation laborers from the mid-C19th. It will investigate the building of tensions that led to World War Two and what happened in its aftermath. From here the course looks at the reasons the Pacific Islands have returned to western focus as the frontline of climate change and more urgently still, driven by massive and recent Chinese attention as an extension of its Belt and Road Initiative. As well as paying close attention to perspectives from Washington, Canberra, Wellington, Paris and Beijing, this course will be Pacific focused, giving much attention to Pacific island actors, voices and perspectives, and framed around the urgent situation of the present. Information about the course instructor Patricia O'Brien, Ph.D., can be found at this link: https://www.tautaithebook.com/

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4310 How to Pass the Exams 3 Credits

Since the seventh century, millions if not billions of Chinese men (and, in extremely rare cases, women) shared a dream: to pass the civil service examinations. The exam shaped both the literati world and popular culture of imperial China and still influence Chinese society today. This course gives you a chance to learn the basic texts of the exams (i.e. certain Confucian schools) and a minor dose of the exam-taking experiences. More importantly, it focuses on the dynamic and evolving interactions between the exam system and its curriculum (certain Confucian schools) and politics, culture, and the experiences and struggles of exam-takers and their families. At the same time, this course aims to introduce common digital humanities tools in historical studies. Throughout the course, you will learn text analysis, text analysis, georeferencing, geocoding, and other skills that pave the way for developing your own digital humanities skill set for your own research. No coding experiences are expected.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4313 ManchuriaEastAsianNationalism 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4314 Masculinity in Imperial China 3 Credits

Do every time you think about gender, you think about women or sexual minorities? This seminar guides you through the history of gender from the perspective of “heterosexual” men in imperial China. Asking what it meant to be a man, it delves into the dynamics within which men articulated their manhood, asserting the gendered characteristics, and negotiating their masculinities with their fellow men and others. The course comprises two distinct but interacted themes, “Hegemonic Masculinity and its Crisis” and “Sex(es),” through which we explore the influence (or the lack thereof) of Confucianism, social class and biological sexes, penetration in sexual intercourse, non-heterosexuality, as well as the masculinity crisis posed by colonialism that still haunts.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Equivalent to HIST 3334

HIST 4315 Rivers and Chinese Society 3 Credits

It is widely but wrongly believed that "oriental societies" like China developed "despotism" through mobilizing and monitoring hydraulic projects, from the century-old Yellow River Conservatory to the more recent Three Gorges Dam. Based on well-established studies, this course refuses such state-centered narratives between human and environmental landscape. Through the lens of rivers, we will collectively investigate both classic and emerging scholarship on the social, political, and environmental history of early modern and modern China. From North China Plain to the Upper Yangzi Valley, from Xinjiang to Shanghai, we examine the different agents of water governance (especially the relations between the state and riverine communities), the painstaking efforts to manage water resources, and how deeply everyday life was intertwined with rivers and their water.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4353 Korea's 20th-Century Wars 3 Credits

This course explores Korea’s long twentieth-century history through its engagement in regional and global conflicts. Focusing equally on geopolitics and social history, the course will examine Korea’s shifting significance in international affairs as well as how modern Korea’s institutions, culture, values, economy, and identity were transformed by its involvement in multiple global conflicts.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4400 Luther: Saint or Sinner? 3 Credits

“Luther is a child of the devil, possessed by the devil, full of falsehood and vainglory.” Johann Cochleus. “For he [Luther] was without doubt the angel concerning whom it is written in Revelation 14, who flew through the midst of heaven and had an eternal Gospel.” Johann Bugenhagen These two sixteenth-century descriptions of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther attest to his controversial stature during and after the German Reformation. This seminar will study Luther and his critics, paying particular attention to his more polemical writings on Jews, women, Catholics, Radicals, and the Peasants. Readings will include a mix of primary and secondary sources, covering the history, theology, politics, and culture of the sixteenth century.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4402 Popular Culture E Modern Europ 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4403 Sex Power in Europe 800-1600 3 Credits

This course examines beliefs about and the lived realities of women in Europe between 800-1600. The course traces the power and authority of women rulers, warriors, religious leaders and authors alongside the role of women within family networks and among the dispossessed, servants, and the sexually exploited. It examines theological opinions, legal codes and practices and literary representations, among other sources, in order to address questions regarding the status of women, their power, authority and opportunities or lack thereof. Along the way, the course will examine case studies of particular women and selected texts written by women.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4404 Sex Celibacy in Premod Eur 3 Credits

From the beginning of the Christian church in Europe, the roles of sex and celibacy have been highly contested and debated areas. The development of a celibate clergy, the role of sex within marriage, and the relative merits or not of virginity have formed a core part of the development of Western culture. By studying the debates over sex and celibacy from the perspective of two specific groups of women (nuns and prostitutes) who were intimately defined by these categories, this course analyzes their role in society and history. The course begins with a discussion of sex and celibacy in general, as well as theological debates about their place in society in late Antiquity. It then looks more specifically at the role of nuns and prostitutes in premodern Europe, through the sixteenth-century Reformations: their social utility, religious justifications, and changing role in culture. Nuns and prostitutes were often conflated, in large part because of their sexualized identity – either shunning sex or wallowing in it – and desires to control or reform these groups crossed religious, geographical, political, and chronological boundaries. Readings are a mix of primary and secondary sources addressing the history and culture of sexuality in premodern times.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4405 European Fascism 3 Credits

This course will look at the origins, practice, and nature of Fascism as it developed in Europe between the world wars. To that end, readings by Fascist theorists such as Mussolini and Hitler, as well as by historians who analyze and describe the phenomenon will be used. Films from and about the era will also be part of the material for the course. In addition to discussing historical Fascism, the course will also take a look at what, if anything, connects the meaning of Fascism as it existed in the past and how that term is used today.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4406 Hitler and History 3 Credits

This course will offer an in-depth examination of the Nazi leader’s role in German and European history, and it will pay particularly close attention to the manifold ways in which historians have interpreted the phenomenon of Hitler since the 1920s. We will read biographies and scholarly studies of Hitler, the man, but we will also look at different representations of the Nazi leader to understand the “Hitler myth” in its various facets. Students will gain a deep understanding of the history of the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, and they will learn to think critically about the role of the individual in history.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4407 Machiavelli and the Medici 3 Credits

This course will focus on Machiavelli’s writings within the context of the history of Florence from the early fifteenth century to Machiavelli’s death in 1527 with final sessions on the afterlife of Machiavelli’s writings, a round table discussion of various biographies of Machiavelli, and discussion of the debates over his legacy. We will look at the role the Medici played in Florentine politics, humanism, religion and art along with Machiavelli’s interactions with and responses to the Medici. Readings will include Machiavelli’s Florentine History (books 5-8), his Prince and Discourses, The Art of War, his plays and his “Sermon on Penitence,” along with some of his letters, including his diplomatic letters.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4408 Kristallnacht as Global Hist 3 Credits

This readings-and-discussion-focused seminar will explore how the November 1938 Nazi-organized assault on German Jewish communities and institutions, commonly known as Kristallnacht, was perceived and responded to across a range of places and contexts, from Germany itself to other countries in Europe, the United States, the Jewish community in Palestine, and beyond. Kristallnacht will thus serve as a window on the international history of fascism and anti-fascism, and on the global clash of ideologies, on the eve of the Second World War.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4410 The Enlightenment 3 Credits

The Enlightenment is widely seen as the key intellectual movement that created the modern world. This course will provide a historical survey of this movement, beginning in the late 17th century and ending in the late eighteenth century. It will focus on the movement's origins and development, especially in France but including other important European and American writers. Class discussion will emphasize close reading of key texts.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4501 Urban Poverty in Lat. Amer 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4505 Capitalism/Community/Americas 3 Credits

Capitalism shaped the Americas and the Americas shaped capitalism from the sixteenth century when the silver economies of Spanish America mobilized indigenous peoples to drive global trades, plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean took bound people from Africa to make sugar and profits, and British North America drew communities of settlers seeking refuges of truth sustained by trades supplying plantation colonies. Nineteenth-century industrial times saw slavery expand in Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S. to sustain industrial production in Britain and the U.S. It finally ended from 1865 to 1888, leaving freed people to struggle while immigrants flooded from Europe to make new farming and working communities. The US gained hemispheric hegemony after 1870 while Latin Americans faced underdevelopment—processes driven everywhere by assaults on native communities and their lands. The 20th-century brought struggles for national development promising equities that rarely came. Then the 1980s saw globalization build on urban concentrations of power and prosperity, marginality and exclusions that spread across the Americas. How did promises of plenty, the powers that promoted them, and diverse communities pursuing their own goals through negotiations, adaptations, and resistance, engage to generate changing ways of life mixing power and plenty, survival and exclusions—ethnic, racial, and gendered—within an enduring and always changing capitalism?

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4506 MexCuba: HistoryRevolution 3 Credits

Mexico and Cuba have been shaped by revolutions more than any other nations in the Americas. Mexico was built upon Mesoamerican communities and forged under Spanish rule, its silver pivotal to early global capitalism. Cuba was long marginal to Spain’s empire and the world economy. The Haitian revolution of 1790 to 1804 led to Cuba’s rise as the Americas leading sugar and slave society—still under Spanish rule. After 1810, the Bajío revolution saw insurgent families claim new lives on the land, cutting silver flows and opening the world to Anglo-American industries sustained by enslaved cotton growers. Mexico began in 1821, rattled by political instability, funded by silver revival, powered by new industries, and fed by family growers—while women claimed new roles at every level of society. Cubans rose against Spain from 1868 to 1878, then again from 1895 to 1898, when they gained national independence constrained by US power. After 1910, Mexicans made a national revolution that renewed access to land—excluding women. In 1959, Cubans—including activist women—made a socialist revolution. Then the world made in revolutions dissolved: a “green revolution” drove families off the land in Mexico, while the collapse of Soviet Socialism broke Cuban’s limited revolutionary gains.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4508 Mexico:Revol to Globalization 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4509 Resistance/Rebellion in Andes 3 Credits

The course will analyze the traditions of insurrection in the Andean countries, from the Túpac Amaru/Túpac Katari rebellions of the late eighteenth century to the modern-day indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia. Other major movements, such as the role of indigenous peoples in the construction of the Peruvian nation, the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, and the Peruvian Shining Path guerrilla movements will be studied in comparative perspective. Each student will prepare a research paper on an Andean indigenous movement and present it to the class.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4510 MexicoMexicans: HistoryFilm 3 Credits

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mexican lives have been shaped by a revolutionary search for justice and then a turn to urbanization, leading millions to migrate to Mexico City and millions more to labor and in time settle across the United States—working to forge diverse new communities there, too. Their struggles have been explored in classic films and powerful historical, social, and cultural studies generated by Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglo-Americans. This seminar draws students to engage five key films in the context of evolving scholarly visions in search of new understandings of Mexican lives in times of transforming change in Mexico and across North America

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4512 Indigenous Politics 3 Credits

Indigenous Politics explores the struggles of Indigenous Peoples to decolonize their past and present while seeking autonomy and self-determination. We are looking at Indigenous peoples in: USA, Canada, Mexico-Central America, The Caribbean, South America and Oceania. Our approach will be intersectional and multidisciplinary. We will start by studying the invasion and the 19th-century reserves relocations. Then, we are analyzing Residential School atrocities, pacific/violent protests, the role of international organizations, and persecution of environmental and human rights defenders. We will practice historical critical-thinking by relying on diverse historical sources, including Indigenous point of view presented via filmography, art, and music. A number of guest speakers, experts in their respective fields —including Indigenous Peoples— will join us virtually or in person. Students will write two independent analytical essays, one on a region of choice and another on a present-day topic they select.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4515 JusticeViolenceinLatinAmerica 3 Credits

Justice and Violence in Latin America's Cold War: The goal of this course is to provide students with the tools to analyze, navigate, and research processes of violence and justice in Latin American history during the Cold War (1945-1991). Violence is *not* endemic in Latin America, nor is discussing trauma the objective of this course. Through study of theory on the causes of violence in Latin America in the late 20th century, the historical roots of violence and justice projects, and the analysis of local, domestic, and international transitional justice and post-conflict programs, this course will demonstrate that incidents of violence are always accompanied by efforts for justice, sparking discussion of exactly what justice looks like in different historical contexts. Special focus will be given to case studies in Guatemala, the Southern Cone, and Panama.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4600 Islam and War 3 Credits

This course examines Islamic warfare from the earliest Muslim conquests through WWI. After discussing classical Islamic conceptions of war and peace, the course examines the early Muslim conquests, the Crusades, the Mongol invasion of the Islamic world, and the wars of the Mamluk, Ottoman, and Safavid Empires. In the second part of the course we consider topics such as land, naval, and siege warfare, military manpower and military slavery in Islam, war financing, military technology, weapons and tactics, logistics and provisioning, fortresses and border defense, and the impact of war upon societies. The last phase of the course studies military modernization attempts of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in the nineteenth century, and the ultimate defeat of modernized Muslim armies by the combined forces of ethnic nationalism and Great Power imperialism. In this section we also consider the increased destructiveness of modern warfare for non-combatants and the displacement of civilian populations.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4601 Pirates/Soldiers/Diplomats 3 Credits

The course examines the relationship between the Islamic World and Europe under four subheadings: 1) Encounters, 2) Diplomacy and Espionage, 3) Warfare and Soldiers, and 4) Pirates, Corsairs, and Slaves. The course aims to explore the complex relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, challenging the “clash of civilizations” approach and more recent historiography that has overstated the importance of encounters and acculturation, downplayed the significance of religion, and portrayed Ottoman sultans as Renaissance princes. We will focus on the multi-layered encounters and relations (diplomacy, intelligence gathering, commerce, and wars) between the Ottoman Empire and its main European neighbors and adversaries (Venice, Spain, and the Habsburg Monarchy) in the early modern period. While discussing trans-cultural violence, the course studies competing ideologies (jihad/ghaza and crusade) and practices such as raids, piracy, imperial campaigns, and frontier warfare.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4604 The Last Muslim Conquest 3 Credits

The course explores the significance of the Ottoman Empire in the history of Europe and the Middle East. It examines how the Ottoman wars of expansion in the Middle East, the Balkans, central Europe, and the Mediterranean led to imperial rivalries with the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt, the Safavids of Iran, and the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain and shaped the early modern world. The course studies the main political, military, and diplomatic events from the empire’s emergence in the early fourteenth century until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth, when a series of wars against the Habsburgs, Poland-Lithuania, Venice, and Russia ended the Ottoman expansion in Europe. In addition to military power and warfare, the course explores the role of soft power and lawfare, examining how alliances, diplomacy, and intelligence gathering across the Muslim-Christian divide influenced the fate of empires.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4605 Society/Politics Modern Turkey 3 Credits

The Republic of Turkey has transformed itself from a remnant of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire into a nation-state. This course examines the major political, social, and cultural expressions of that transformation, in law, architecture, fiction, film, TV, and music. Readings focus on the First World War and the violence amidst which the Turkish state was first established, the state- and nation-building projects under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and on the struggles for empowermentof women, Kurds, and migrants.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4607 Ottoman Palestine 3 Credits

This seminar examines society and politics – including the role of gender, empire, nation, ethnicity, and race – in Palestine during the Ottoman period. The focus is on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4610 Sufism – A Social History 3 Credits

This is an upper-level seminar on the Islamic spiritual tradition known as Sufism. It surveys the history of Islamic mysticism at a global level, its sources, and its literary, cultural, and social deployment in Arab, Persian, Indic, Turkish, and African regions. In addition to contextualizing beliefs, practices, and the development of multiple Sufi traditions, the course also introduces students to historiographic debates and methodologies, interpretive frameworks, and critical analysis of primary and secondary sources. Lectures and readings also bring theologies and philosophies in dialogue with social history. The opening sessions introduce students to the concept of Sufism, the early Sufi archetypes, and provide a historical outline of the development of Sufism. We will also consider mystical practices and cosmology, and the relationship between Sufism and other core Islamic sciences. The course will then turn to reading and interpreting hagiographies, with a special emphasis on women as Sufi masters, practitioners, and devotees, both in the past and within Muslim societies today.

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 4611 Race in the Middle East 3 Credits

What role have race and racialization played in the historical development of the Middle East and North Africa? How have local conceptions of race shaped historical institutions and processes, including slavery, imperialism, capitalist development, and nation-building? How did European conceptions of race intersect with and transform local understandings? This course will explore these questions through a study of histories of race and racialization in the Middle East and North Africa from the medieval period to the present.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4615 The Ideas of Iran 3 Credits

In the middle of the third century CE, the Sasanian emperor Shapur I (r. 240–270 CE) declared that his empire should be called Eranshahr, meaning “the land of the Iranians.” Eranshahr represented a political and ideological reinterpretation of the concept of Eran, as reflected in the Avesta, the sacred scripture of the Zoroastrians, adapted to serve the needs of the Sasanian Empire. The seventh-century Arab conquests and the gradual spread of Islam marked a major turning point in Iranian history. For nearly a century, Iran lacked a clear political and cultural centre of gravity. Nevertheless, the memory of Eran and its pre-Islamic legacy remained resilient, adapting to and incorporating new linguistic, literary, religious, intellectual, and political influences. With the Abbasid Revolution of 750 CE, Khurasan (covering today’s northeastern part of Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) emerged as a new centre of Iranian political and cultural identity. Over time, the Khurasanis revived ideas of pre-Islamic Iran through memories and traditions that had survived the Arab conquests. The Khurasanis developed a new vision of Iran that was more dynamic and inclusive than before, welcoming diverse groups of people without undermining their local social, political, and cultural traditions. Khurasan was ruled by Turko-Persian Muslim dynasties that modelled themselves on both mythical and historical Iranian kings, promoted the Persian language, and revived pre-Islamic Iranian political and cultural traditions. Until the rise of Safavid Iran, which introduced new conceptions of Iranian identity, Khurasan remained the living repository of the pre-Islamic Iranian legacy and the centre of the Islamised Persian cultural tradition. Despite repeated changes to Iran’s geographic boundaries, the ideas of Iran established by the Sasanians never disappeared; instead, they were continuously transmitted and transformed across different historical periods and regions. In this seminar course, we will explore large-scale historical questions concerning cultural continuity. What does Iran mean? How was it formed as an idea and practised as a reality? How were linguistic, literary, intellectual, political and artistic traditions originating in the pre-Islamic period transmitted and transformed throughout the Islamic era? The course adopts a longue durée approach to provide a comprehensive overview of the historical evolution of the memory of Iran, which has survived multiple invasions and helped sustain cohesion among diverse groups of people. It is organised thematically while following a chronological structure, addressing (a) the formation of Iran as both an idea and a reality, (b) the Arab conquests and the formation of Khurasan, and (c) the revival of the memory of Iran within an Islamic framework. The course requires students to engage with primary sources in their original languages and in translation, and to analyse them within their historical contexts.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4701 Russia in Age of Dr. Zhivago 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4702 Dostoevsky's Russia 3 Credits

This course explores Russian history through the life and work of Fedor Dostoevsky. In his lifetime, the great Russian writer witnessed political reform and revolutionary agitation, terrorism and political assassination, occultism and scientific positivism, mass migration and urban growth, and all of these events informed Dostoevsky's novels, short stories, journalism, and his life more broadly. In this course, we shall read Dostoevsky and his contemporaries selectively and examine recent historical scholarship on 19th-century Russia. We shall focus specifically on intelligentsia debates, revolutionary circles, mass incarceration, political exile, mental illness, urban environments, and the sex trade. In short, this course explores the history of Dostoevsky's Russia.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4705 From Tsars to Putin 3 Credits

To what extent is Vladimir Putin and today’s Russia a prisoner of the past, and to what extent does the past explain Putin’s Russia? This course examines continuities and discontinuities in Russian political history, engaging comparative, thematic, and theoretical perspectives. It pays particular attention to the imperial Russian autocracy starting in the reign of Nicholas I, Soviet power under Lenin and Stalin, and post-Soviet Russia under Vladimir Putin. In order to more deeply understand the particular dilemmas of autocracy and one-person rule in different authoritarian regimes that have coalesced in the Russian/Eurasian space, the course will first critically examine the most celebrated theories explaining historical continuity from Muscovy on, from Edward Keenan’s work on “Muscovite political folkways” to Alfred Rieber’s work on “persistent factors” in Russian foreign policy. Proceeding chronologically, the course encompasses investigations into such key areas as the effectiveness and organization of central state administration; the relationship between state and society; the governing of rural Russia and the regions; borderlands, non-Russians, and the multinational state; the projection and representations of power; personality cults; the role of ideology; political violence and repression; and relations with great power rivals and the outside world. The goal will be, to paraphrase Marc Bloch, not only to better understand the present in light of the past, but to better understand the past in light of the present.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4707 Ideology in Imperial Russia 3 Credits

The Russian Empire played a major role in global debates about the nature and purpose of political power after the French Revolution. In this seminar, we will discuss works by prominent Russian conservative, liberal, and socialist thinkers, including Dostoevsky, Herzen, and Lenin, in order to understand how Russia developed as a hotbed of ideological experimentation culminating in the revolutions of 1917. Topics will range from terrorism to religion, from economic thought to the rights of women and national minorities. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between Russia and other parts of the world, especially Europe and the United States.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4710 Hitler, Putin, Ukraine 3 Credits

Embark on a profound journey through Ukraine's tumultuous history, exploring the haunting theme of genocide from the era of Hitler to the present day under Putin's regime. This course offers a meticulous examination of historical events and political dynamics, providing students with a deep understanding of the tragic occurrences that have shaped Ukraine's destiny. By engaging with primary sources and expert analyses, participants will critically evaluate the far-reaching impact of genocidal actions against Jews and Poles on the nation’s culture, identity, and relationships with its neighbors. Additionally, the course will shed light on Putin’s view of history and global order, highlighting their relevance in Russia’s war against Ukraine and offering insights into how historical narratives can be manipulated for political purposes.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4711 Memory Wars: Ukr, Rus EE 3 Credits

What is the context of Putin’s bewildering claim of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine in his current war? Why are the European celebrations of May 8 and May 9 – the end of WWII – a constant source of conflict inside societies in Eastern Europe? Why does the history of WWII create tension in the post-Soviet space, leading to jailed historians, protest movements, and diplomatic expulsions? Why has 20th century history remained such a gripping topic in peoples’ minds today, and how has it shaped contemporary relations between countries in the region? This course will help students to find answers to these and other challenging questions related to the unprecedented weaponization of history and memory in the region. Course listed as REES 4463 and JCIV 4630.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4712 Russian Colonial Expansion 3 Credits

Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Colonial Expansion into Asia, 1550–1989

This seminar explores the colonial expansion of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union into Asia, from the conquest of Kazan in 1552 to the end of the Cold War era. Relying on history, literature, ethnography, and visual sources, this interdisciplinary course examines the colonization's political, social, environmental, and cultural aspects. We will discuss the literary legitimation of imperial ambitions in works by Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and other influential writers. Major topics include the colonization of Siberia, the conquest of Central Asia and the Russian Far East, and the state’s encounters with Indigenous populations. The course also addresses Soviet nationalities policy, as well as the ideological implications of international ventures and conflicts like the Soviet-Afghan War. We will discuss the complexities of Russia's eastward expansion and its engagement with the imagined Orient and Occident through various sources—ethnographic studies, personal accounts, and visual materials.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4713 Image as History 3 Credits

Image as History: Iconography/Photography/Film: This course examines images in three ways: historical, conceptual, and methodological. To begin, we shall read recent historical work that grounds argumentation in a close analysis of images, including religious icons, paintings, prints, photographs, and films, and we shall be especially concerned with examining the role of images over time in relation to state power and in shaping modern understandings of self. In addition, we shall read scholarship written by anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and media theorists that will help us develop a set of conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing images, carefully considering the status of different types of visual sources for historical research. Although we shall concentrate on 20th-century image-making, there is no geographic or temporal focus to this course.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4800 Lincoln 3 Credits

In 2009, the United States commemorated the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, who remains the most written-about figure in U.S. history. In this class, we will explore why that is, and ask what if anything remains left to say. In the first half of the semester, we will read some classic and some recent important books in order to establish the existing state of the historiographical conversation surrounding Lincoln: what questions have captured historians’ attention, what have the most recent answers to those questions been, and how and why have both questions and answers changed over time? Each student will also give particular thought to identifying questions that have remained unexplored or have not been answered to his or her own satisfaction, in order to prepare for the second half of the semester in which we turn to primary sources and original research. Each student will pose a manageable but significant research question about some aspect of Lincoln or his era, and then delve into the Lincoln Papers and other primary sources to draft, give a presentation on, and revise a research paper. This class is heavy in both reading and writing, and assumes significant prior knowledge of nineteenth century United States history; in return, it will provide students with the opportunity to engage in the work of a historian.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4801 Immigration in US History 3 Credits

This course traces the rise of immigration to the United States, restrictions placed on it, and the changing notions of citizenship and meanings of race applied to immigrants of African, Asian, Latin American, and European background. Topics explored include migration patterns and meanings, theories of migration, the history of the idea of the “illegal alien,” the relationship between race and citizenship status, the transformation of American life by immigrants, the class-based and gendered aspects of the immigration experience, and—not least—the way that historical context helps us understand current immigration issues. Each student will do original research using both secondary and primary sources. The final paper for the course will be built around the original research of class participants on the historical context of a contemporary immigration issue.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Course attribute:

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4802 Recent U.S. Political Economy 3 Credits

This course will examine the development of the U.S. economy, economic policy, and economic politics since World War II. Among the topics it will engage are: the roots of postwar prosperity; the economic crisis of the 1970s; the Reagan Revolution; the impact of globalization; the emergence of neoliberalism; and the growing problem of economic inequality. The course will examine the intersection of politics and the economy in order to provide a historical context that can clarify contemporary problems and debates.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4803 Conservatism in the U.S. 3 Credits

Conservative thinker Richard Weaver once wrote, “Ideas have consequences.” This colloquium examines the evolution of the American Right – as both an intellectual phenomenon and a political movement. It focuses on the period since 1945, when conservatism became a mass phenomenon. We will pursue such questions as: how have conservative ideas changed? What impact did the Right have on cultural change in the U.S. and vice versa? Were conservatives able to convert their electoral successes into major changes in policy? Readings include primary texts and recent scholarly works. This course emphasizes class discussion and is limited to 20 students.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4804 Social Movements in US History 3 Credits

This course examines the evolving nature of social movements since the Civil War by learning about the history of five major ones: populism, prohibition, industrial labor, Black freedom, and right-to-life. The focus is theoretical and comparative, as well as narrative. By discussing such factors as historical context, motivation, ideology, language, strategy, resources, and relationship with the state, we'll assess how and why these movements succeeded and/or failed.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4805 Race Gender in American Wes 3 Credits

This is a research seminar with two central goals. The first is to examine the meanings and significance of race and gender in the history of the American West. The second is to develop your research, writing, and analytical abilities through the study of primary and secondary historical sources. The first task asks you to think about the history of the American West through the prisms of race and gender. The American West was and is a place of stunning racial diversity. Given the broad reach of the course, we will have to be selective in our topics; this course should in no way be considered a comprehensive, or survey, history of the American West. Hundreds of distinct ethnic and cultural groups have called this place home. In addition to examining a sampling of diverse peoples in the American West, we will also consider the meanings of race and gender carefully. What does race mean? What is gender? Are they “real”? Why and when are some groups and not others called “races,” and why do these categories change over time? What does gender have to do with these processes? How do thinking about race and its history, and gender and its malleability, shape how we think about the American West? The second task of the course, which will include developing and completing independent research, will allow you to put into action the ideas generated by our investigations. The course will include discussions of historical research methods and analyzing primary and secondary sources, advice on how to search for and narrow down a topic, and lessons on how to organize and write a paper based on primary sources.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4806 Public HIST: Theory Practice 3 Credits

This course will explore the role of public history in society, through a deep dive into the past and theorical works that shed light on the function of historical memory in the present. We will explore the power of museums, the practice of commemoration, the politics of public monuments, and public history in the digital age.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4807 American Revolution 3 Credits

Americans argue over the events, meaning, and legacies of the American Revolution as if it happened recently, not almost 250 years ago. This seminar examines the age of the American Revolution, considering the war itself and the revolutionary transformation of America between 1754 and 1800. It investigates both those who were left out of the new nation’s republican experiment and those whose lives were unmistakably and irrevocably altered. The seminar analyzes the upheaval of the war and its aftermath in the lives of men and women, free and enslaved, loyalist and revolutionary. The class explores the creation of the new republic, the enactment of republican values in many aspects of American society, and the bitter conflict over the legacy and meaning of those values. The seminar concludes with some attention to other revolutionary movements in the era. The class will take advantage of our location in Washington DC by exploring how the origins of both the city and the university speak to major themes of the revolutionary era. Students will have the opportunity to visit and evaluate an area museum, to take a walking tour of Georgetown (both the university and the neighborhood), and, funding and schedule permitting, to take an excursion to a local historic site.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4808 Inventing Illegality in the US 3 Credits

This course offers a chance to do original research on the fascinating time period in immigration history from 1880 to 1929. It was during these years that the legal restrictions that ended mass immigration to the United States until the 1950s were put into place. Using both primary and secondary sources, the course will trace the rise of immigration and restrictions placed on it, changing notions of citizenship, and the differentiation by race—or scientific racism—among immigrants of Asian, Mexican, and eastern and southern European background. Topics explored will include the relationship between race and citizenship status; the history of the idea of the “illegal alien”; and the gendered aspects of the immigration experience. Each student will have the opportunity to do original research using both published and archival primary sources. A field trip to the National Archives is part of the course. The first half of the course will focus on common readings to establish themes and background; the second half will be built around developing individual research interests.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4809 W.E.B. DuBois Seminar 3 Credits

In this course we will examine the intellectual, social, political, religious philosophical and political history of slavery, reconstruction, women’s liberation, race, rebellion and revolution through the works of W.E.B. DuBois. We will discuss the key debates between DuBois and Booker T. Washington, DuBois and Garvey and others. We will explore his many stages, developments, organizational affiliations and changes. His theories of Pan-Africanism, Black Nationalism, Women’s rights, The Talented Tenth, Marxism and Communism, Decolonization and Democracy will be studied.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4810 History and Biography 3 Credits

Biography is the most ancient form of history writing (at least writing using words). Why are we so fascinated with the stories of individual human lives? What elements make up a biography? What are the advantages and disadvantages of biography as an approach to learning about the past? This class will explore all of these questions first by reading and discussing biographies in an array of styles about a broad range of subjects. Then in the second half of class, students will dive even deeper into the genre of biography by writing an original biographical study on a subject of the student’s choice based on primary sources. In short, members of this class will become a community of readers and writers together considering what we can learn from the study of a human life.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4811 Islam, Black Atl, Afr Am 3 Credits

Ibrahima abd al Rahman or Abdul Rahman Ibrahima ibn Soria Rahman was born in around 1762 in Guinea, captured and sold into American slavery in 1788. Ayuba Suleyman Diallo a Fulbe was born in Bundu ( located between Senegal and Gambia) around 1701 captured, sold in Maryland in 1730 and given the name Job Ben Solomon. Yarrow Mamout (born Mamadou Yarrow), a Fulani Muslim was most likely born in Futa Jalon (Senegal), in 1736. He was kidnapped at 16 and sent to Maryland. Rahman and Diallo won their freedom and retuned to African. By 1800 Yarrow had purchased his freedom and bought a lot at 3324 Dent Place, NW in Georgetown. The all were versed in Arabic and in the Quran. This course will follow their lives others Blacks like Malcom X ( Malik el-Shabazz) and Betty Shabazz who converted to Islam. We will look at their role in history, sports, music (jazz), politics and society.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4812 Great Books in US History? 3 Credits

Why were certain books about US history once considered pathbreaking and essential? Do they still deserve that status today? As a way of studying the history of our discipline, this seminar will discuss major works by such scholars as Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Hofstadter, Gerda Lerner, and Patricia Limerick as well as past and recent critiques of their work and divergent interpretations of the same subjects.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4813 RaceInequality Modern America 3 Credits

This seminar introduces graduate students to recent books that offer new conceptualizations on the making of race and inequality in modern America, roughly focusing on the long 20th century. Discussions and assignments will consider the expansion of this field of study through multiple vectors of race and racialization, immigration, histories of capitalism, political history, urban history, carceral studies, technology and the environment.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4814 Black DC:Hist/Policy/Demograph 3 Credits

This course will explore the history of Black Washington, DC. It will look at the politics, pubic policy, economic development, racial make up and racial strife in the city. It will explore the changing demographics of the city and the social and economic causes for it.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4815 Undocumented Immigrant History 3 Credits

This course offers a useful history to the category of the "undocumented immigrant," or -- more negatively -- "illegal alien " It offers a chance to do original research on the fascinating time period in immigration history from 1880 to 1929. It was during these years that the legal restrictions that ended mass immigration to the United States until the 1950s were put into place. Using both primary and secondary sources, the course will trace the rise of immigration and restrictions placed on it, changing notions of citizenship, and the differentiation by race—or scientific racism—among immigrants of Asian, Mexican, and eastern and southern European background. Topics explored will include the relationship between race and citizenship status; the history of the idea of the “illegal alien”; and the gendered aspects of the immigration experience. Each student will have the opportunity to do original research using both published and archival primary sources. The first half of the course will focus on common readings to establish themes and background; the second half will be built around developing individual research interests.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4816 US Women's Gender History 3 Credits

This is an upper-level seminar offering deep reading into books and formative articles on women's and gender history. Not a survey, but a deep dive into the literature, this course is an opportunity to examine the formative and recent methods and theories in use to understand the past of women and gender in the United States. We will also read primary sources. Papers, no exams.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4817 US WorkingClassHist Since 1945 3 Credits

This course will examine the history of workers in the U.S. from 1945 to the 2020s, looking closely at changing labor relations and labor markets, the rise of women's wage-earning, civil rights, immigration, law and government policy, public sector employment, the impact of technology and the reorganization of work, union decline and efforts at revival, and debates over the "future of work."

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4818 Hometown History 3 Credits

Take a look around where you are right now, or picture the view from your bedroom window at home. Whether you see an ancient temple or a fire hydrant in front of your neighbor’s yard, wherever you are has a history. This semester, you will dig into that history to learn about where you live, about the field of local history, and about how to do historical research. We will begin by reading and discussing some important works of and about local history, but most of the semester will consist of your research into whatever place you call home, whether that be a town, a block of apartment buildings, a county, or some other geographical unit. (You can also choose Georgetown University as your home, or Washington, DC as your home). Students will research a significant building, significant cultural landscape, significant individual, significant event, significant cultural or social institution, and significant controversy or social issue in the place they call home, and will share the results of their research with the class. They will also pick one of those categories to dive into even deeper and produce a written work based on primary research with a view to publishing their work (or a piece of it) in a local historical society newsletter, town website, local newspaper, or some other venue meaningful to the particular student’s home. We will devote purposeful attention to the steps necessary for good historical research (locating sources, evaluating credibility, constructing a bibliography, citing sources properly, etc.), but students will also be expected to exercise substantial creativity and independent resourcefulness. Assignments will include: a powerpoint tour of your home place, oral presentations, intermediate assignments (primary source analysis, annotated bibliography, project proposal, pitch to the venue you hope will publish your work), and a final piece of historical research such as an article for a local historical society publication.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4825 How the State Does Religion 3 Credits

Scholar of Black religious studies, J. Kameron Carter, poignantly argues that “the modern invention of religion works in close connection with the emergence of capitalist commerce and exchange and the idea of the state…” This advanced undergraduate seminar seeks to unsettle what we think we know about the category of “religion” and its relation to “the state.” It raises questions about the concepts such as “the human,” “the political” and “antiblackness.” Rooted in Black Studies, this course spans multiple centuries, geographies, and themes. Students will write a major research paper on one aspect of religion and the state, drawing on archival, primary, and secondary sources.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4900 History Portfolio Workshop 1 Credit

This 1-credit workshop course is required for all senior History majors who are not pursuing the Honors program (and thus are not enrolled in HIST 4998). It is offered in the Fall of senior year. Its purpose is to provide a common capstone experience to senior majors by helping them to reflect on and integrate what they have learned in the course of their studies and to present their work in varied ways. It will also help hone skills needed for further studies or for entering the work force. Rather than produce much new work from scratch in this class, students will have the opportunity to revisit, revise, reflect upon, and present work they have done over the course of their college career. Students should note that the skills of revising, reflecting, and presenting are essential skills and the class will be graded, not pass/fail.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to students with a major in History, History, History or History.

Enrollment limited to students in the College of Arts Sciences college.

HIST 4949 Tutorial: 0-4 Credits

Undergraduate tutorial - by permission only

Level: Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 4998 Sr Sem: History Honors 3 Credits

Hist 4998-4999 form a two-semester study of History as an intellectual discipline and culminate in the production of a history thesis, an original work of scholarship grounded in primary source research. Enrollment is by invitation of the Department. Fall: Readings and discussions of theory, method, and research process, resulting in a research prospectus and the drafting of one substantive, primary-source based chapter. Spring: Drafting, peer editing, and revising the thesis with the assistance of the seminar and a faculty mentor. Students commit to the full two semesters. The Department expects the Honors Seminar to be each student’s main academic priority. Enrollment only by permission of Director of Undergraduate Studies

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to students with a major in History, History, History, History, International History, International History, International History or International History.

Enrollment limited to students in the School of Foreign Service - Q college.

HIST 4999 Sr. Sem: History Honors 5 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to students with a major in BSFS in International History, BSFS in International History, BSFS in International History or BSFS in International History.

HIST 5001 History Core Colloquium 3 Credits

HIST 501 is required for and restricted to first-year doctoral students in the History Department. The course is an introduction to the theory and practice of history as an academic discipline. The major goals of the course are (1) to acquaint the incoming cohort of doctoral students with major historiographical approaches; (2) to encourage careful reading, thoughtful discussion, and cogent written analysis of historical scholarship; and (3) to provide some common intellectual denominators for the incoming cohort and to foster habits of collegial engagement.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

Enrollment limited to students in a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

HIST 5004 MAGIC Core Colloq 3 Credits

This MAGIC introductory colloquium is designed to equip first-year MAGIC students with perspectives, skills, and tools that are essential for success in the program and beyond. We will begin with the fundamental question: what is the role of history in today's society? Then we will discuss the potentials and challenges of doing global, comparative, and international history research by examining a few key concepts, scholarly debates, and methodology. The second half of the colloquium will introduce students to a range of geographical regions and sub-fields through a thematic focus on nuclear energy and its relationship to society. Sub-fields include: histories of security, diplomacy, and international politics; of energy, modernity, and democracy; of capitalism, communism, labor, and consumption; of empire and colonialism; of race, gender, and sexuality; and histories of science, technology, medicine, and the environment. Our readings will include a mix of classic works and promising lines of emerging research, and will showcase, as far as possible, the spatial breath of these subfields, including: the Cold War West and East; the Global North and South; continents and oceans; and the subterreanian and the outer space. Although the temporal scope of the topic is necessarily limited to the twentieth century, we will systematically heed the enduring influence of empire and colonialism as well as transnational networks and Indigeneous responses, all rooted in the deeper history of the pre-nuclear age. The goal of the colloquium is to prepare students to read and think at the graduate level, and will culminate in a proposal for the research project that they will pursue in HIST 5005 in the spring semester.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the MA-GHKC, MA-GICH, MA-GKGH or MA-HIST programs.

HIST 5005 Global Intrnl History 3 Credits

This is the second required course in for the MA in Global, International, and Comparative History and is open only to students enrolled in this program. This is a methods and research seminar for first-year MA students. Students will explore how historians frame their research questions, analyze primary sources, and place their work into conversation with other historians. Over the course of the semester, students will identify a research project that will form the basis of their capstone paper in their second year. Course assignments include weekly reflection papers and a final prospectus. For the first five weeks, students will read and discuss common texts. The remainder of the semester will be devoted to identifying and exploring relevant primary sources, analyzing a body of historiography around those sources, and reading and critiquing each other’s emerging work.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students in the MA-GHKC, MA-GICH or MA-GKGH programs.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 5105 Foundations of Grand Strategy 3 Credits

This course focuses on the formulation and implementation of grand strategy. It begins with an examination of leading strategic thinkers. It then focuses on the components of imperial power and on the political, economic, and strategic issues entailed in its management and allocation. We will next study in comparative perspective the grand strategies of past great powers. The class will end with an examination of grand strategy for the twenty-first century.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 5108 History of Central Eurasia 3 Credits

This course offers an introduction to the history of Central Eurasia (Central Asia, Mongolia, Tibet) from prehistoric times to the present. Some themes and topics include pastoral nomadism, "Silk Road" exchanges, the development of Islam, the Mongol Empire, Qing and Russian empires, and modern ethno-politics in the USSR and Peoples Republic of China. Lectures are podcast style, class-time devoted to discussion of primary and key secondary texts.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 5501 LA Origins Transformations 3 Credits

This course covers Latin American Origins & Transformations. Please see the section description as the course may vary from semester to semester, professor to professor.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6001 Methods and Historiography 3 Credits

Methods and Historiography for History Graduate Students

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6002 Thinking About Archives 3 Credits

This course explores the historian’s principal research tool—the archive—but it does so largely from the perspective of people who are not historians. We’ll look at how and why archives emerged in different places; how they were used to help create and cement European global empire; how their functions and operations changed in the Age of Revolution; and how people have come to use, preserve, and struggle over them in the modern era. Looking at the archive from outside of the historical profession helps us see them for what they are—as collections of material informed by the agendas of a variety of different actors, most of them not especially concerned with giving us an objective image of the past. From spies to genealogy researchers, archives belong to everyone.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6003 Public History 3 Credits

This course introduces the field of Public History by focusing on topics and themes that range from historical methods and interpretation, historical analysis, public interactions, and controversies associated with the practice of public history. Students will learn oral history methods, and consider the role of both individual and collective memory in providing distinct interpretations of historical events. We will examine the role of museums, monuments, archives and films in how societies understand the past. We will also discuss the role of digital humanities in presenting ideas about the past to new publics.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6004 Anthropology Linguistics 3 Credits

This course explores methodological and theoretical insights from the disciplines of Anthropology and Linguistics with an eye toward assessing their value for historians' research. We will read work in those two disciplines as well as examples of scholarship by historians that draws heavily from them. The course syllabus will be amended to include readings in the regions, time periods, and general themes of interest to students who enroll in the class, but possible thematic categories and methods include belief systems; medicine and health; inequality and capitalism; kinship, friendship, and belonging; conceptual analysis; cognitive metaphor; contextualizing meaning-making, and so on. The course is intended to check the box for PhD students for Methods and/or for Theory.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6101 Pandemic Disease in 20th cent. 3 Credits

Since the spring of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has dominated politics, society, culture, and economy in most parts of the world. While the situation is unprecedented in many ways, pandemics are, of course, not a new phenomenon per se. Since the late 1990s, in particular, the world has been under threat by seemingly never-ending waves of infectious diseases rolling over the planet. Or, to be more precise, the spread of diseases has given rise to a heightened *sense of threat*, particularly in the “Western” world. SARS, avian influenza, and swine flu have garnered a lot of political and public attention – as have the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 and the appearance of the Zika virus in the tropics in 2015/16. Such fears are in stark contrast to the belief that humanity might possess the means to eliminate infectious disease altogether – an idea that first rose to prominence in the “golden age” of bacteriology in the late 19th century and resurfaced after the Second World War, animating massive (and failed) international efforts to “eradicate” malaria and (successful) initiatives to eliminate smallpox. Since the emergence of new infectious diseases such as Ebola in the 1970s and, in particular, HIV/AIDS in the 80s, such ambitions have given way to recurring fears of deadly pandemics. Experts have long warned that globalization facilitates the dissemination of pathogens, and it is certainly no coincidence that outbreak scenarios and apocalyptic visions of global pandemics endangering the very survival of humanity have been a staple in popular fiction. The course explores the ways in which large-scale epidemics or pandemics have influenced the political, social, and cultural history since the mid-nineteenth century. We focus both on individual countries and regions, especially in Europe and North America, as well as on infectious disease as a challenge for international cooperation and global governance. How have ideas and perceptions of health and disease changed over time? How have societies reacted to, perceived of, and culturally appropriated the threat of disease? What role have health experts and international organizations such as the World Health Organization played? And how can we contextualize the politics of global health within the history of international relations and global governance regimes? Finally, we will discuss the question of what, if anything can be learned from the history of pandemics – or more generally: to what extent we can “learn” from history and what lessons we should and should not draw from the past when trying to navigate the present and figure out a way to prepare for the future.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6102 Habsburg Ottoman Empires 3 Credits

By 1914 critics of both the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires were calling them the "sick men of Europe". Yet, since the mid-eighteenth century Europe's two oldest imperial states were actively dealing with the challenges of modernity. This course examines how these multi-national states remained viable in a context of nation-states and what that says about the nature of political, social, and cultural modernization.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6103 Monuments, Museums, and Memory 3 Credits

This course explores the subject of monuments as sites of political, historical, cultural, and ceremonial significance. Focusing on a collection of iconic structures worldwide, the course examines how and why monuments are made; what forces transform them into symbols of national identity, cultural otherness, and/or world heritage; and the impact of tourism, heritage management, and nationalism in recent years. Roughly half of the case studies will be located in Asia, supplemented by student research that gives the course a global dimension. Bi-weekly reports, one major research paper.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6104 Pacific Empires 3 Credits

This seminar explores the frontiers of historical research on imperialism in the Pacific world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus is on oceanic (“terraqueous”), comparative, and inter-imperial perspectives to the evolution of two Pacific empires: the United States and Japan. Nineteenth-century topics to be examined will include how European exploration transformed indigenous societies and natural environments, as well as how European and American desire for products such as whale oil and sea-bird droppings (guano), along with Chinese desire for products such as otter pelts and sandalwood, further altered the relationship between humans and the ocean. We will also examine travels, shipping, and migrations and the impact of American and Japanese imperialism on insular and coastal societies. In the years following World War II, the United States brought former Japanese territories under its control and consolidated a new form of empire in the Pacific. Although the readings range widely, we will visit and revisit a few key sites in the history of these two Pacific empires: Okinawa and Hawaii, Taiwan and the Philippines, Japan and the west coast of North America.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6105 Environmental History 3 Credits

This one-semester course acquaints graduate students (both M.A. and Ph.D.) with the scope, methods, concerns, and, to a modest extent, literature of environmental history. Most of the times, places, and themes emphasized will be tailored to the registered student population. Students will choose among a range of possible writing assignments.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6106 Approaches to Global/Wrld Hist 3 Credits

This colloquium is intended to acquaint students with recent literature in global-scale history. It is intended especially for students curious about global connections and larger canvases, and students who might one day teach world history.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6107 HyperHistory 3 Credits

This experimental class is intended to acquaint graduate students with sources and methods other than texts. The process of historical research is undergoing a revolution in which increasing amounts of evidence concerning the human past come from fields usually unfamiliar to historians, such as genetics, linguistics, archeology and archaeometry, and the paleo-environmental sciences. The class will be taught in conjunction with an undergraduate HIST 099 class and as a result will be taught, in effect, by four professors: de Luna, Degroot, McNeill, and Newfield. Moreover, workshops led by scientists and archaeologists invited from across North America will introduce their techniques, methods, and sources. We will all be learning together, undergraduates, graduate students, and professors.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6108 Emotions and Senses in History 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6109 Occupations in WWII 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6110 Pacific History 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6111 Historiographical Turns 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6112 1960s in Global Perspective 3 Credits

From Berkeley to Mexico City, from Paris to Prague, and from Trento to Copenhagen, the years around 1968 witnessed a moment of political and cultural upheaval that challenged the authority of governments, institutions, and ways of thought. The events associated with the ‘long 1960s’ transcended the realm of conventional politics: long hair, colorful and exotic clothing, and ostentatiously casual behavior became distinctive marks of a ‘restless youth’. Contemporary observers already acknowledged that this was a global phenomenon, and in recent years historians have begun to study ‘the sixties’ predominantly through a transnational lens. The ‘transnational turn’ in history writing is itself closely intertwined with some of the legacies of the 1960s, a by-product of the rising ‘global consciousness’ that emerged in the decade’s wake. This graduate seminar, co-taught by Prof. Kazin and Prof. von der Goltz, will engage with the most recent literature on the 1960s to study the entanglements between movements in different countries (the New Left, the counter-culture, and conservatism amongst them) and to trace how ideas travelled from one country or continent to another. Students will gain a strong grasp of how the 1960s played out in different national contexts and an in-depth conceptual and methodological understanding of transnational history.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6113 Readings in Atlantic Hist 3 Credits

Drawing together the four continents surrounding the Atlantic ocean as a linked unit of historical analysis, Atlantic history was one of the first fields to take a deliberately transregional approach to the study of the past. History 702 explores the history of the Atlantic world from early interactions in the fifteenth century through the era of abolition in the nineteenth century. It offers both a rough chronological survey of some of the main topics in the field and a sampling of the approaches and methodologies employed by scholars.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6114 Historical epidemiology 3 Credits

This graduate seminar introduces students to state-of-the-art multidisciplinary studies concerning historical pathogenic disease. Students acquire foundations in the burgeoning fields of palaeomicrobiology and palaeogenetics as well as familiarity with the historiography on the great human and livestock disease events of the past. An ever-growing quantity of data directly relevant to the historian of health and disease is emerging from the bioarchaeological and natural sciences. Historians capable of tackling this material head on as it appears stand to gain immensely. While establishing a reading knowledge of the literature in these palaeoscientific fields, students as well assess the role history and the historian have played (and continue to play) in the production of palaeo-disease data. In doing so, opportunities for interdisciplinary research will become apparent. Most meetings focus on the pre-laboratory era, but time is given also to twentieth- and twentieth-first-century disease (influenza, foot-and-mouth, ebola) and the uses of past disease experience today. Emerging and re-emerging disease, the influences of climate and landscape change on disease occurrence, pathogen-to-pathogen interaction, and the relationship between war and illness are among the themes addressed.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

Enrollment limited to students in a Doctor of Philosophy or Master of Arts degrees.

HIST 6116 Global Age of Revolutions 3 Credits

This graduate reading seminar examines the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century "Age of Revolutions" in global context. Since at least the time of R. R. Palmer's Age of Democratic Revolutions, historians have debated the correlations and causation between these various, tumultuous events. Arguably, revolutionaries themselves recognized both theoretical and practical connections between the revolutions of their era. We will engage with these discussions, following a series of revolts and rebellions in sequential (though sometimes overlapping) order from the American War of Independence until the American Civil War. Not only is the content of this course global in expanse, but we will also investigate the idea of the “global turn” in history and its applicability to the history of revolutions.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6117 Nationalism 3 Credits

This graduate seminar examines selected aspects of 19th- and 20th-century nationalism, combining theoretical readings with case studies. The case studies are mosly European (simply because that happens to be the instructor's field), but not exclusively so. The approach is broadly comparative, and issues discussed will include some of the classic ones debated in the field, such as: What connections are there between modernity and nationalism? What is the relationship between civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood? How did evolving information/communication environments and systems shape the development of nationalisms? Although the geographical focus of most assigned readings is on modern Europe, students are encouraged to write their term papers on any region and time period they are interested in, as long as the theme is connected to nationhood and nationalism. The course can thus be counted toward any regional field, depending on the paper topic and subject to the approval of the student's advisor.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6118 Intro Hist of Climate Change 3 Credits

Human greenhouse gas emissions are today transforming our world. The hot Earth of our imminent future will scarcely resemble that of our past. Yet natural forces have long changed Earth’s climate, often on smaller scales that nonetheless powerfully influenced human history. In the thirteenth century, for example, Earth’s climate cooled of its own accord, beginning a “Little Ice Age” that endured – with frequent interruptions – for roughly six centuries. Today, environmental historians work with scientists to understand how Earth’s weather changed during the Little Ice Age, and to identify the consequences for human history. In this course, we will discover why Earth’s climate changes, contemplate how these changes have influenced human beings, and reconstruct past climatic trends using interdisciplinary sources. We will use case studies to investigate why some societies were vulnerable and others more resilient to the Little Ice Age. We will evaluate how climate change influenced organized violence, social upheaval, technological progress, and artistic responses. Finally, we will consider what the new environmental histories of the Little Ice Age can tell us about our warmer future.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6119 Global Envir Climate Hist 3 Credits

This course is designed for PhD and MAGIC students with no prior experience in environmental history. It will introduce students to the issues, concerns, debates, and methods of environmental history and one of its liveliest component fields, climate history. The course will be global in scope, with attention to multiple geographic regions, and primarily focused on the last 500 years. It will give special attention to the role of empires in environmental changes and the role of environmental conditions and changes in imperial histories.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6120 State, Society and Self 3 Credits

This graduate seminar will introduce students to canonical texts that have been crucial to the development of the modern social sciences in general and of history in particular. By revisiting these texts, we will explore fundamental assumptions that underlie historical research. This is the first of a two part graduate seminar focused on social scientific theory, the second of which is focused on theory from the global south. While this course is not required to take the second part of this sequence, it is highly recommended for any student interested in taking that course.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6121 Why We Fight Over the Past 3 Credits

Why are we currently witnessing such intense political conflicts over history, over who gets to tell the national story and what that story should be? The specific topics may vary, depending on national contexts: In the U.S., these “history wars” have come in the form of escalating fights over the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” Confederate symbols and monuments, and racism as a topic in high school curricula. In the UK, Belgium, and other parts of Western Europe, the conflict has focused on the legacies of the colonial past and the present-day responsibilities of the former colonizers. Meanwhile, in Germany – and just when the German attempts to grapple with the Nazi crimes and integrate them in the nation’s collective imaginary are being lauded as a role model in the U.S. – a new fight over Holocaust history and memorialization has broken out, perhaps questioning the idea that there is something to be learned from the Germans. Everywhere, the legacies of racism, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism are being hotly contested. In this seminar, we examine the current politics of history: These conflicts over the past, over the stories we tell about it and the way we teach it, that have been catapulted to the top of the political agenda. We compare them to previous “history wars” in past decades and ask why they are escalating right at this moment; we explore their transnational character; and we will reflect on what the stakes are in these fights, why they matter, how they are part of a much larger struggle over who gets to define national identity and the way that either stabilizes or questions the status quo and the existing political, social, and cultural order across the “West.”

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6123 Asia in DC 3 Credits

This course focuses on the history of relations between the US and Asia through an exploration of Washington’s Asian landmarks. Students will identify, research and document the evidence of cultural and social interactions in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, pairing present and bygone sites in the city with research that utilizes the university, city, and national archives. Classes will alternate between discussions of contextual readings, fieldwork, and presentations of our findings. The final projects will be an individual research paper and contributions to a shared website/guidebook that introduces Washington’s Asian heritage.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6124 Ways of Knowing 3 Credits

What is knowledge? What is a scholar? What is the university? This course showcases different approaches to the history of knowing, from scientific knowledge to the study of literature and art, covering the seventeenth century to the present. It will give you the tools to understand many of today's conflicts and anxieties about the gatekeeping of knowledge and the value of intellectual institutions. It will count as a methodological course for the PhD program. Multiple options are available for connecting assignments to your own region and time period.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6125 Emotions/Hist in the Age of AI 3 Credits

This course, offered as part of a joint project between Georgetown University and King’s College, London, will explore the history of emotions as a lens to make sense of our evolving social understanding of intelligence and of humanity itself in the age of the technological breakthroughs represented by machine learning and artificial intelligence in computing. While our primarily lens of analysis will be centered in the field of emotions history, students will also explore related bodies of historiography, including the history of the body; labor history; histories of race, gender and disability; history of technology and intellectual history. This seminar will also feature several guest speakers over the course of the semester who will share with us their ongoing research related to these questions and will culminate in a symposium where students will share their own research. While the primary disciplinary basis of this course is history, students in related fields are welcome. Given the research orientation of the seminar, and the emphasis on research methods, it is strongly encouraged that students consider how their own research may benefit from participating in this colloquium.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6126 Liberal Democracy in Crisis 3 Credits

The idea that liberal democracy is experiencing a severe crisis currently dominates much of the political, academic, and broader media discourses. Brexit in Great Britain, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the success of the AfD in Germany and similar far-right parties all over Western Europe, and the rise of “populists” in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and elsewhere – they all seem to indicate strong authoritarian leanings amongst the broader electorate in the “West” and a dangerous amount of skepticism towards the foundations of liberal democracy. What does the historical perspective contribute to a better understanding of our current predicament? We start by analyzing the diagnoses presented by politicians and journalists, political scientists as well as social and political psychologists and examine how they have interpreted the “crisis.” Next, we look at previous moments in recent history when democracy seemed, or was perceived to be, in trouble – in the period between the World Wars, for instance, and in particular after the Global Depression; or in the 1970s, when a series of economic “shocks” and powerful protest movements seemed to conspire to make democracies “ungovernable” – and reflect on the lessons that can (or should not) be drawn from this history. Finally, we explore the origins of the current “crisis,” focusing on possible longer- and medium-term causes such as the global financial / economic crisis of 2008/9, the dramatic demographic and cultural changes that most of the affected societies are undergoing, or the role of globalization.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6127 History of the 21st Century 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6128 The 90s: Birth of the Present 3 Credits

Were the 90s really the “last good decade”? A period of wonderful mediocrity before it all got too much, too complicated? An era when the promise of peace and prosperity still seemed real – before we entered the crisis-ridden twenty-first century? There is a lot of 90s nostalgia out there right now, both politically and culturally. And a lot of interest from historians as well, who have begun to assign the era to history. The underlying assumption of many people who focus on the 90s seems to be that this decade gave birth to our present. Are they right? This course explores the 90s as history – the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. The focus is on the United States and Western Europe. We start with what observers at the time briefly thought was the “the end of history,” the “West’s” triumph in the Cold War – and the anxious search for a “new world order” and ways to make sense of the post-Cold War world. We then investigate the key intellectual currents as well as the defining political, social, and (pop-) cultural developments and transformations of the 1990s – including the emergence of a new form of rightwing populism; a distinct “culture wars” politics; the hegemonic status of neoliberalism across the political spectrum; a specific form of (anti-)feminism and gender politics; a certain proud mediocrity, perhaps, in film, music, and literature; and the rise of the internet. Ultimately, we want to assess the relationship between our present and the 90s and reflect on the difficult task of “historicizing” that which is barely past yet. And we might even find an answer to the question of what all this 90s nostalgia is really about.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6129 Environmental History 3 Credits

This course is designed for PhD and MAGIC students with no prior experience in environmental or climate history. It will introduce students to the issues, concerns, debates, and methods of environmental history and one of its liveliest component fields, climate history. The course will be global in scope, with attention to multiple geographic regions, and primarily focused on the last 500 years. It will give special attention to the integration of methods and models from the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, as well as to the pitfalls and possibilities of making the past speak to the present.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6130 Global Environmental History 3 Credits

This class is intended for PhD and M.A. students with, or (more commonly) without, a background in environmental history. Students will be able to use the class as preparation for a PhD field or as a way to develop a research project. In the first month, the class will examine recent works of global- and national-scale environmental history; in the second, works pertaining to the world regions of interest to enrolled students; in the third, we will workshop research papers under construction by class members and by other students.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6131 RaceRiotsRebellionsRevolutions 3 Credits

Forthcoming.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6201 Precolonial Africa Diasporas 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6202 Settler Colonialism 3 Credits

TBA

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6203 Sex and African Enslavement 3 Credits

This course explores the dynamics of gender, sex, and enslavement in African communities on the continent and in the many African Diasporas produced through the enslavement and transport of African men and women. We seek to understand the gendered meanings of sex, rape, childbirth, and miscarriage to the diverse African communities built in the context of slavery. Historians have tended to believe that they could imagine how Africans understood sex in the context of slavery by studying the logics of their action in our own terms: as a strategy for manumission, as a violence endured, or (more recently) as an act of refusal and love undertaken in spite of slavery. Yet, African men and women brought other logics--of fertility quests, lineage politics, and situational gender and kinship--to bear on their interpretations of acts we might frame as 'intimate.' We'll explore these issues as we simultaneously debate the ethics and violence involved in researching and teaching acts of violence and intimacy within the limits of the colonial archive (and other archives).

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6204 Contemporary Africa 3 Credits

This seminar explores the historiography of 20th-century Africa. It is designed to enable students both to gain a broad overview of the field of contemporary African history and to begin to dig more deeply into particular topics relevant to their own research and intellectual interests. Students from other geographical fields interested in the colonial and postcolonial world, gender, youth, race, ethnicity, labor, nationalism, religion, agrarian history, and the Cold War will find opportunities to explore their thematic interests in comparative context. The class will also delve into African history’s methodological contributions to the larger discipline, including using oral history, critically reading colonial archives, and exploring ideas about tradition and law. For the most part the class is structured thematically. Each week (after the first) will feature a major monograph and a set of recommended readings that relate to one or two of the monograph’s dominant themes. Student final papers may take a comparative approach, putting African historiography in conversation with historiography from their own geographical field. The syllabus will in part be shaped by the interests of the students who enroll in the class. For the syllabus from an earlier iteration of this course, please contact Professor McKittrick.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6205 Early Africa 3 Credits

This course is a graduate-level introduction to the historiography and methods of the field of early African history. We will read both classic texts and theory while also exploring newer scholarship on gender, political complexity, health & healing, subsistence, Bantu Expansions, slavery, and the expansion of global capitalism. Students will also gain an understanding of oral historical, archaeological and comparative historical linguistic methods.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6206 MethodsHist: AfricanDiasporas 3 Credits

This course explores the varied histories of diaspora rooted in Africa. We will consider both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean diasporas as well as the value of the concept of ‘diaspora’ within the continent itself. Critically, our readings compare efforts to situate the study of diasporas within the field of African History as opposed to approaches with a footing in related fields, like European, South Asian, or Latin American history. We will attend to diaspora (and mobility more generally) as both theory and practice. Finally, we explore the wide variety of methods historians can use to reconstruct and rewrite histories of diaspora. This course supplements other offerings in the department, such as HIST 5501, 6002, 6205, 6808, 7605.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6301 Central Eurasia in World Hist 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6302 Late Imperial China 3 Credits

This is a graduate reading course on the history of late imperial China, primarily the Qing dynasty. There have been exciting developments in the historiography of this period over the past few years, which we will examine, along with major milestones of the development of the field. Each week we will read and survey a number of books and articles on one theme from the considerable literature in English on this period. Students will be expected to read at least one monograph and familiarize themselves with other works in preparation for class each week.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6303 20th Century China 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6304 Language,Lit, Power South Asia 3 Credits

This course explores language, literature, and power in South Asia.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6305 Modern Japan:Global Perspectiv 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6306 Graduate Writing Seminar 1 or 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6307 Central Eurasia 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6308 China: Empire,Nation,Ethnicity 3 Credits

The transition from Qing empire to Chinese nation-state has been obscured by an exceptionalist and Orientalist terminology by which we describe the past of the East Asian mainland differently from other places: "dynasties" (not kingdoms); "tribute system"; "Tianxia / All Under Heaven"; and, not least, the term "China" itself. And yet the Qing empire resembles other Eurasian empires, and the emergence of nationalist discourses in China was contemporaneous and comparable to those in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Like other post-imperial spaces, the People's Republic of China today is site of contentious identity discourses through which Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and others challenge the narrative of unitary Chinese identity and hegemonic Chinese Communist Party rule. This course, open to anyone regardless of background in Chinese history, examines interpretations of the Qing and ideologies of identity in modern China, including many Chinese writings in translation. It also considers the past and current situations of Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan against the backdrop of "new Qing history" understandings that have up-ended conventional narratives of modern China. This course is aimed at graduate students and advanced undergraduates interested in East Asia, nationalism, ethnicity and related themes.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6309 Theory from the Global South 3 Credits

This course will introduce students to landmark works of theoretical and historiographical import conceived in and written from the “Global South”- areas of the world colonized by Europe, whose postcolonial histories continue to bear the imprint of colonial marginalization and exploitation. We will read in a contrapuntal way, juxtaposing works from different areas and even eras, in order to better understand both theoretical production from (post)colonial spaces and to examine whether the term “Global South” has analytical meaning and may be defined coherently. Readings will be organized along the following topics: plantations and cities in the new world; the structure of colonial power; violence and rebellion; (post)colonial culture; the nation after colonialism; identity, alterity and subalternity; other feminisms. Although readings are not yet finalized, theorists we will read may include: B.R. Ambedkar, Shahid Amin, Kwame Appiah, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Bama, Homi Bhabha, Gautam Bhadra, Euclides da Cunha, Ochy Curiel, Ganesh Devy, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Frantz Fanon, Florestan Fernandes, Angela Figuereido, Gilberto Freyre, Luis González y González, Gopal Guru, Ranajit Guha, K Lalitha, Maria Lugones, Albert Memmi, Rigoberta Menchú, Fernando Ortiz, Urmila Pawar, Aníbal Quijano, Angel Rama, Sharmila Rege, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Rani Sivasankara Sarma, Edward Said, Lamin Sanneh, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Susie Tharu, among others. Readings will be provided in translation. However, readers who have access to the texts in the original language are strongly encouraged to read them in the original. MA students should check with the professor to make sure the course fits their needs.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6310 Topics in Modern Korean Hist 3 Credits

This course provides an introduction to some of the current issues in modern Korean history through selected readings. Moving chronologically through the 19th- and 20th centuries, it will cover major topics and issues as well as an historiographical examination of major scholarship.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6312 FemRevolutionaries20thC. China 3 Credits

What is a "female revolutionary," and how is she utilized to either solidify or challenge state control? There are a number of Chinese women who have been lionized (or demonized) as "revolutionaries" in 20th century history, and their lives and legacies form a crucial lens through which to view the evolution of even the concept of "China" itself. Accordingly, this course will examine women such as Qiu Jin, Li Zhen, Zhao Yiman, Kawashima Yoshiko, Ding Ling, and Jiang Qing and how they are remembered today to better understand the sociocultural construct of womanhood and how it is utilized in nationalist discourse today, both in China and globally.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6313 Life and Legacy of Mao Zedong 3 Credits

The Life and Legacy of Mao Zedong: Mao Zedong - revolutionary visionary or tyrannical megalomaniac? Few historical figures have quite as divisive a legacy as the founder of the People's Republic of China, yet there is no denying his impact on Modern Chinese History. Who exactly was Mao Zedong, though? How is he remembered today, and how has his legacy inspired activists in the 20th and 21st centuries, both in China and on the global stage? This course will examine Mao the man, Mao the myth, and Maoism the ideology to answer these questions.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6314 Manchuria and Modern East Asia 3 Credits

"Cradle of Conflict": Manchuria and the Making of Modern East Asia As a historical "cradle of conflict" between a variety of competing ethnicities, empires, and nationalities, Manchuria is an important key to understanding the construction of the modern nation-state in East Asia from the 17th to 21st centuries. From the ethnically Manchu Qing Dynasty to imperial Russia, from the Japanese puppet-state of Manchukuo to the Republic of China to the People's Republic of China, this course will chart how rulers and intellectuals from a variety of ethnic and national contexts conceptualized "Manchuria" to further their own imperial and national aspirations.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6315 HistoryInChinesePolitics 3 Credits

This graduate seminar focuses on the ways in which Chinese history has played a role in Chinese politics, from the commemoration of figures like Sun Yat-sen to the memory of the Cultural Revolution. We will study the making of official history through monuments and museums, and examine how unofficial history persists in popular culture and grassroots projects. Featuring primary sources and interdisciplinary readings, this seminar will culminate in an independent research paper.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6316 Hist. Memory of WWII in Asia 3 Credits

The specter of World War II continues to haunt Asia and influence national identities and diplomatic relations to this day. In this course, we will start with the historical context of World War II in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and Russia's Far East. Then, we will study how the war has been subsequently depicted and how its historiography has developed in relation to sociopolitical vicissitudes from the Cold War to present.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6383 Pearl River Delta to GBA 3 Credits

China’s Greater Bay Area is a political project to transform the cities of the Pearl River Delta into a megapolis of 86 million people. These cities—including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Macau, and Hong Kong, among others—have a long tradition of cultural, economic, and social connections. This graduate seminar examines the history and politics of the South China region, and includes topics such as diaspora and migration, urbanization and industrialization, and revolution and politics, among others. Readings include both classic and recent studies in anthropology, geography, history, political science, and sociology, paying particular attention to research methods. Students will write an independent research paper on a topic of their own design.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6400 Monarchy Modernity 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6401 Hist of Capitalism Econ Life 3 Credits

This course will explore recent transnational readings in the emerging, new economic history, which has at different moments been termed "the economic turn," the "history of capitalism," or the "history of economic life." Focusing primarily on recent books, especially on first monographs by emerging scholars in the field, this course will grapple with a variety of methodological and practical questions, such as: What is the history of capitalism? What are its origins, and where does it converge with/diverge from more traditional histories of empire, labor, and business? Is "capitalism" always a useful category of historical analysis, or is it more useful to speak in terms of "economic life" or "behavior"? What kinds of analytical, archival, and practical skills characterize projects in this field, and what are their limitations? The goal of the course is for students to think about the scope and methodologies of the "new" economic history and how/whether these skills can be applied to their own work.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6402 Divided Germany 3 Credits

Course Outline: The total military and moral defeat of Hitler’s Empire in 1945 left Germany militarily and morally defeated. The two German states that were founded in 1949 – the capitalist liberal-democratic Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) – were built on the ruins of a genocidal dictatorship. This graduate seminar will examine how the two states negotiated their common past and constructed competing political and social orders in an era of Cold War bipolarity. After surveying the general trajectories of both states from the late 1940s until the 1980s, we will examine German-German history thematically to tease out comparisons and contrasts between both societies. The themes covered include, but are not limited to, experiences with Soviet and U.S. occupation; political leadership in East and West; competing memories of war and the founding myths of anti-fascism and anti-communism; the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall; negotiating diversity and difference in the wake of genocide; popular culture and consumption; gender and sexuality; the environmental history of both German states; surveillance regimes in East and West; protest movements and political opposition; and overcoming the ‘wall in the heads’ after unification. Students will gain a thorough understanding of West German history beyond the redemptive tale of a smooth transition to liberal-democracy after ‘zero hour’ and insights into how to evaluate the ‘second German dictatorship’. Throughout the semester we will pay special attention to the manifold and resilient entanglements between both states across the Cold War divide. While providing an in-depth look at a key chapter in German history, divided Germany will thus also serve as a case study for thinking about comparisons, transfers, and linkages ‘across the blocs’ more generally. Course Goals As a graduate seminar, the class aims to combine empirical reconstructions about a wide range of topics with methodological and conceptual discussions that should benefit you in your future study and research. As part of our weekly seminar we will discuss and practice how to evaluate and contextualize a broad range of primary sources. In addition, we will explore themes such as transnational – or rather trans-bloc – and comparative history writing, and probe the usefulness of categories such as gender, memory, generation, class, and ethnicity as tools with which to interpret the histories of both German states after 1945. While the course is focused on the two Germanies, approaching the subject from different historiographical perspectives will enable you to engage critically with some of the broader concepts used to study postwar Europe as a whole. You will be expected to present your arguments clearly in class presentations and in written form and to carry out and present original research. This will help you to develop your analytical abilities, your writing skills and your research and presentation skills. By the end of the semester you should be able to interpret and analyze German division through different conceptual lenses and to speak and write confidently about the comparisons, contrasts, and entanglements between the FRG and GDR.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6403 Magic: A Historian's Problem 3 Credits

This seminar explores “magic” as a historical practice and a historically perceived phenomenon, and as the object of scholarly attention. Its geographical and chronological scope is intentionally broad, ranging from the Ancient Near East to the modern Americas. It covers big themes in the history of magic, such as witch trials and European encounters with non-European traditions of magic. It also examines the changing set of insights and ground rules that professional historians have adopted regarding what counts as “magic,” how it should be analyzed, and how can it be (and has it been) distinguished from religion and science. The historical study of magic crosses geographic fields, topical specialties, and methodologies; the seminar’s approach will therefore be eclectic and interdisciplinary.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6404 Material Culture 3 Credits

Studying material culture requires historians to move beyond familiar written documents as sources and to consider in addition the evidence offered by images and objects. It is an approach to the past that is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on art history and anthropology as well as changes within economic and cultural history. It also pushes us to ask fresh questions about the structures of everyday life, the meanings that people attached to possessions and consumption, and how these changed over time. Although the core of the syllabus for this course will focus on Europe from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, the history of material culture is an excellent platform for developing a comparative approach to other places and times. There will be some weeks during the semester when members of the class will focus on and present materials of their own choosing. Students will be encouraged to seek out sources that speak to their own interests across geographical and temporal fields.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6405 Erly Mod Rel: Historian’s Prob 3 Credits

This course introduces students to the changing world of early modern Christianity (1450-1800), a period that ranges from the Reformation to the Enlightenment and the transatlantic worlds of the eighteenth century. This era saw the expansion of Christianity beyond Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Americas; and the course explores the global nature of the early modern world. Students are exposed to a range of primary sources and historical methods to examine rival interpretations and perspectives. The colloquium is inspired by AHA surveys that show that “religious history” has doubled as a primary specialization among professional historians in the last four decades and that “religious history” is claimed as a specific “field of interest” more than any other, including social history, women’s history, and even cultural history. On account of the historiographical problems it covers, the colloquium may thus also be of use to graduate students not otherwise directly dealing with European cultures and religions.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6406 Coll on Early Modern Europe 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6407 Gender in Early Mod World 3 Credits

This course explores the role of gender as an analytical tool within history. We will cover gender theory, the construction of gender identity (both within a binary model and outside of it), sexuality, power, politics, and culture. Because studying gender does not follow the normal chronological historical periodization, the course will be divided more by topics than periods. All readings are in English and expertise in the geographical fields field is not expected. The first half of the course focuses on early modern Europe, while later weeks look at the Atlantic world more generally. Depending on the class makeup, the final weeks might move beyond that chronology and geography to explore gender within other areas.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6408 Modern Euro Intellectual Hist 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6409 Empires at War 1911-1923 3 Credits

In 1914 Europe and the world were dominated by empires. From imperial Russia and Japan to republican France and the United States all the great powers that participated in World War I were either empires in name or in fact. From the eve of the Balkan wars in 1911 to the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923, this course will use empire as its leitmotif to examine not only why and how the war began and changed Europe, but what its impact was on the non-Western peoples who either voluntarily or involuntarily participated in it. Accordingly, the course will involve several members of the Department of History whose expertise will complement the trans-regional character of the course. Like World War I itself, this course is not just a European affair.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6410 The British Empire 3 Credits

The British Empire was famously described by contemporaries as ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’. At its height, in the early twentieth century, Great Britain’s global imperial project had established its hegemony over 25% of the world’s landmass and 20% of the world’s population. By the end of the Second World War Britain had lost its global superpower status. This course charts the rise and fall of the British Empire, from the ‘Scramble for Africa’ over the ‘long’ nineteenth century to the loss of India (the ‘Jewel in the Crown’) in the post-war era of decolonization. Exploring themes such as civilisation, culture, power, race, resistance, and violence, the course will interrogate the inequalities of British imperial experience, from the white dominions of Australia, Canada, and Ireland to the settler colonies of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Engaging with a wide-range of historiographical debates – from official ‘British World’ histories to the postcolonial approaches of the ‘new imperial’ history - students will evaluate the historical, cultural, and societal legacies of the Empire in post-Brexit Britain.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6411 Europe Early Modern World 3 Credits

This course will explore key readings in the history of early modern Europe and European empires, broadly construed. We will alternate week-to-week between a core reading list for the entire class and specialized readings chosen by each student in consultation with the professor. Key themes to be explored include the development of the modern state, European diplomacy with the non-European world, the age of exploration and empire, the history of slavery, and the history of corporations.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6412 ConflictResolutioninN.Ireland 3 Credits

Conflict (resolution) in Northern Ireland explores the communal cultures underpinning nationalist and unionist politics during the ‘Troubles’; examines the dynamics of political violence and terrorism in modern Ireland; and evaluates the international influences on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, from the political mediation of the United States to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The course will investigate contemporary terrorist campaigns and political agreements in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Latin America, offering an international assessment of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Emerging from my European Union-funded ‘Peace Process: layers of meaning’ project, students will have access to unique heritage interviews on the Troubles, opening the study of conflict (resolution) in Northern Ireland to new sources of inquiry. Students on this course, finally, will have the opportunity to engage with policy makers in Dublin, Belfast, and London.

Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6501 Econ Hist of Latin Amer 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6502 Communities Making North Amer 3 Credits

Much history has been written focusing on how powerful people, institutions, and the visions they promote have “made history,” leading diverse people to adapt. This seminar turns to explore how communities of everyday interaction have worked to shape their own lives—and in the process made history in ways that impacted empires, nations, and the world. The first section will focus on comparing communities in New Spain, New England, and regions between before 1800. The second will turn to the complex interactions of communities in the same lands as they became Mexico and the United States between 1790 and 1870. The third section will explore how diverse Mexicans migrated to make new communities in the United States after 1900—remaking their own lives and both nations in important ways. The seminar will emphasize shared readings and historical comparisons, culminating in comparative analytical essays at the end of each section. Each student will choose an additional 3-4 studies (in consultation with the instructor) to build a deeper focus on one time period or a chosen region over a longer term, making one or more of the essays deeper and more complex.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6503 History of Modern Brazil 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6504 Revolution:CENTAM-US 1900-2000 3 Credits

Revolutions: Central America, Mexico, and US, 1900-2000 The twentieth century opened with revolutionary conflicts that shook Mexico from 1910 to 1930. El Salvador and Guatemala faced deep societal conflicts in the 1930s and 1950s, culminating in devastating confrontations in the 1980s. Then the 1990s brought a rising in Chiapas that proved explosive yet limited. Throughout, revolutionary conflicts challenged power and demanded justice; they rattled the US economic and military-diplomatic power that backed local regimes; in time the mix of political conflicts, social risings, and transnational repressions set off waves of migration that transformed life across North America. This seminar will engage key studies of revolution and resistance in three nations that became primary exporters of people to the United States. The goal is to understand the exploitations that set off revolutions, the repressions that limited their outcomes, and the transnational globalization that followed—generating societies of enduring, often deepening inequities and pervasive marginalities in times of population explosion. We will engage diverse texts analyzing these questions in three adjacent yet different societies—with the US taking distinct roles in each. Based on common readings, participants will write independent historical analyses probing the origins, courses, and outcomes of revolutions that sought societal transformations yet ended in population expulsions.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6505 Modern Cities and Urbanism 3 Credits

This graduate seminar will take a global thematic approach to the history of modern cities. The course is designed to accommodate students in all regional and subdisciplinary fields interested in cities and urban modernity. We will read selections from major works in urban history and theory as well as exploring themes that have only begun to receive attention relatively recently, including cities and waste cycles, urban branding and tourism, and urban bombing as an aspect of modern warfare. Participants will write short state-of-the-field reviews and a research paper on the city or urban issue of their choice. The reviews will be added to the website "Approaches to the Modern City."

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6506 Ecology/Power/Culture/Mexico 3 Credits

Europeans brought smallpox to Mesoamerica in 1520, starting waves of epidemics that destroyed 90 percent of the population, breaking states, communities, and cultures, opening lands for uncertain newcomers and desperate survivors. From the 1550s, Chinese demand for silver stimulated a new economy that drove mining, commercial cultivation, and global trades—grounded in Spanish-sanctioned self-governing landed communities forging Christian cultures. Economically dynamic while sparsely populated, New Spain became the richest society in the Americas: capitalist while ethnically diverse, stratified while stabilized by judicial mediations. Around 1800, silver soared as population grew during imperial wars. Deepening social predations amid regime crisis drove insurgencies proclaiming devotion Guadalupe—breaking silver capitalism after 1810. Armed forces defended Spanish power, property, and the Church for a decade more, then proclaimed Mexico independent in 1821. Decades of economic collapse, political conflict, and foreign invasions followed—while communities and their cultures held strong on the land. After 1870, political consolidation, commercial revival, and new population growth came with assaults on community lands and religious cultures, fueling revolution from 1910. In the 1920s, a new regime promised land, attacked the Church, and provoked new risings in deeply Christian communities. Depression-era reforms delivered land and secular education. Post-war times saw population explosion, urbanization, deepening inequities, cultural conflicts, and a globalization that profited a few and marginalized many. New Spain began in a disease-driven demographic collapse that framed centuries of power and community autonomies. Mexico’s history has culminated in demographic explosion, urban dependencies, global immersions, and pandemic inequities.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6507 Indians State in Lat America 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6508 CapitalAmericasWorld 1500-2000 3 Credits

Capitalism accelerated and spread globally from the sixteenth century, linking Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia in complex processes of economic integration, social exploitation, and cultural innovation that changed in significant ways over five centuries. Before 1800, European empires were the context (and military force) making the Americas a region of new production stimulating global trades: Spanish American silver drew Asian commodities to a wider world; Atlantic sugar drew enslaved Africans to labor at plantations serving European markets. The turn to industrial capitalism (amid wars and revolutions) after 1800 brought new concentrations of power and manufacturing in northwest European and the northeastern US, drawing commodities and using labor across a vast rest of the world, often via imperial and territorial expansion. The fall of industrial capitalism in wars, revolutions, and depression after 1910 led to experiments in national capitalism and socialist industrialism (amid continuing wars and revolutions)—until all collapsed in a new globalization that concentrates financial power while dispersing industrial and agricultural production across the globe. This seminar focuses on the Americas changing roles in these global processes—with implications for the world.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6509 Latinx Social Movements 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6510 Revolutions: Cuba/Mex/CentAm 3 Credits

This seminar explores the Cuban war for independence of 1895-98, the Mexican revolution of 1910, El Salvador's risings of 1932, Guatemala in the 1950s, Cuba in 1959, Central America in the 1980s, and Chiapas in 1994--all seen in the context of U.S. power. The goal is to understand the roots, gains, and limits of revolutionary risings, the responses and consequences for established powers, local and global, and the relevance of past conflicts to migrations challenges, historical and contemporary. Students will write four independent analytical essays based on our shared work and discussions.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6511 CapitalCommunityMex/N.America 3 Credits

Capitalism made the modern world as empires and nations rose and fell. Together they shaped diverse communities while men and women pressed to gain viable lives. From the 16th century, New Spain made silver to become an engine of commercial capitalism—sustained by Mesoamerican, Catholic, maize-making communities. Later, Boston became a periphery of early capitalism, building ships, trading slaves, making rum—sustained by Puritan wheat-growing families. After 1810, revolution in New Spain broke the silver flows that fueled Asian trades, opening the world to British cottons made of fiber raised by enslaved hands in the US South. A new industrial capitalism began in the Anglo-American world, sustained by slaves who forged lives and religious cultures to resist as they could. In Mexico, silver revived, stimulating new industries fed by free families entrenched on the land. Then in 1873, the US joined England on a global gold standard, breaking the power of silver as capital. The US rose to global hegemony, Mexico faced dependence, and both saw social transformations that privileged the powerful while growing numbers searched for viable lives and sustaining religious cultures—pursuits that continue as globalizing capital again remakes North America and the world.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6601 Ottoman 1st WW and Aftermath 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6602 Social Cultrl Hist ME N Afr 3 Credits

The course examines recent trends in social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its first aim is to introduce and discuss the central questions, concepts, and methods in social and cultural studies, especially as they pertain to notions of function, structure, and ideology. Its second purpose is to assess the application and use of these methodological tools in empirical and interdisciplinary studies of the modern MENA. To this end, the second half of the semester will be dedicated to critical readings of recent works in MENA history with a focus on leading relevant themes such as class and mobility; social movements and change; social life and identity; gender, family, and kinship; representation, ideology, and mentality; textuality and orality; new media and communication.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6603 Unmaking Diversity in Turkey 3 Credits

This seminar examines the role of ethnic cleansing, forced expulsion, genocide, and population exchanges in the making of the Turkish Republic, and the international treaties, legal and constitutional structures, and political, social, and cultural experiences that defined them.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6604 Ottoman Empire Imperialism 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6606 History of Modern Middle East 3 Credits

The first semester of a year-long research seminar. We read recent scholarship in early modern and modern Middle East history, with a focus on social and cultural history. We address particular subfields and themes, covering those topical areas that have proven to be of most interest to historians of the Arab World over the past couple of decades: the nature of modern empires, law and society, colonialism and post-colonialism, nationalism and identity, gender and family, sectarianism, political economy and the subaltern, modernities and circulations, and the environment. The fall semester can be taken as a stand-alone course with the permission of the instructor.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6607 Col. Nat. in North Africa 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6608 Approaching Ottoman Hist 3 Credits

This course aims to introduce graduate students to Ottoman studies. The first part of the course is devoted to studying Ottoman historiography. It will acquaint students with bibliographies, handbooks, surveys, and monographs in multiple languages, as well as various scholarly debates. The list of actual themes and sub-fields is compiled in consultation with the students and takes into consideration their specific interests and research projects. The second part of the course deals with archival and published sources. Here, too, the actual list of archives, manuscript collections, source publications, and types of source material we consider reflects the students’ interests and expertise and varies accordingly from course to course.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6609 Colonial North Africa 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6610 Social History of Middle East 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6611 Feminist Theory and Methods 3 Credits

This course will examine key texts in feminist theory and how they have shaped the historical study of gender and sexuality in the Middle East and beyond. We will focus on the topics, questions, sources and methods of various theoretical and analytical frameworks, including Marxist feminism, postcolonial and decolonial feminism, transnational feminism, intersectionality, queer theory, ecofeminism, and Islamic feminism. Students may write their final research paper on any region and time period as long as they apply feminist theory and methods.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6612 Late Ottoman Economy 3 Credits

This seminar explores the changes in the Ottoman economy from the early nineteenth century to the era of the First World War. It examines developments in agriculture and industry, the Ottoman economy’s links to global capitalism, and the transformation of work and workers’ life.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6613 Topics in Ottoman History 3 Credits

The course is tailored to the research interests of current doctoral and master's students, offering an overview of key topics in Ottoman history, including their sources, approaches, methodologies, and historiography. Topics covered will include Ottoman governance and provincial administration, as well as economic, social, diplomatic, environmental, and cultural history.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6614 The Early Modern Ottomans 3 Credits

The course introduces students to the history and historiography of the early modern Ottoman Empire, which ruled a vast region stretching from Hungary in the north to Yemen in the south and from Algeria in the west to Iraq in the east. We will examine the sources and approaches historians have used to study topics such as conquest, imperial rivalries among the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, and the Safavids, resource management, military power and warfare, soft power and lawfare, and provincial administration and border control. We will also consider how new research in environmental, social, economic, military, and diplomatic history, along with digital and quantitative historical methods, have enriched the study of the Ottoman Empire.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6627 Political Memoirs 3 Credits

The practice of writing biographies and autobiographies has a long history in both Western and Arabic civilizations. Historians have been challenged by the subjectivity of personal memoirs since the days of chronicling the Romans. Given the lack of archival resources in the Arab world, the recollections gathered in memoirs of all types can help bring the past to life in remarkable ways. The course will present both academic discussions of memoirs and then readings from different countries in all the important political spheres of life in the region. Memoirs shedding light on the military, political parties, economy, security services, and cult of personality will be read and discussed. In some cases, we will read from different angles: for example, with regard to security services, we will study both memoirs of security chiefs and political prisoners. Many readings will be in Arabic but ability to read fluently is not a prerequisite.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6702 Imperial Russian Culture 3 Credits

This graduate seminar examines current scholarly debates in the history of Imperial Russia, focusing on key themes like religion, Enlightenment, gender, and liberalism.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6703 Russian Visual Culture 3 Credits

This course examines recent scholarship in Russian history grounded in close analysis of images and visual texts, such as religious icons, maps, paintings, folk art, advertising, photography, film, architecture, and public spectacle. Specifically, it investigates the role of visual experience and seeing in relation to imperial Russian and Soviet state power, and in shaping modern understandings of self. The course also explores various approaches to studying 'the visual' pioneered by anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and media theorists. This will help our seminar to develop a set of conceptual tools for analyzing images during the semester, while considering the status of different types of visual sources for historical research. Although focused on twentieth-century image-making, the course also touches on Russia's medieval and early modern histories. Its methodological remit is global in scope.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6704 Approaches to Rus/Soviet Hist 3 Credits

This course is a core colloquium providing an analytical examination of the major schools and approaches that have shaped and continue to influence the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The focus is on English-language historiography, although some Russian/Soviet and European contributions and trends are considered as well. The course begins by examining the history of Russian Studies after World War II. It proceeds to analyze the split between those interpreting imperial Russia as European and those understanding its trajectory as a special path. It then imparts a critical exploration of such areas as the new imperial history, interpretations of the Russian Revolution, totalitarianism theory and revisionism, the history of everyday life, the cultural turn, and transnational history. But the course is about more than historiography. Even when readings concentrate on past debates in the field, they have also been selected with an eye toward shedding light on the current state of knowledge and relevance for discussions today. In addition, the course proceeds chronologically to treat selected historical developments, processes, and turning points in modern Russian/Soviet history that have been focal points for the successive methodologies and interpretations in the field.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6705 Image as History 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6706 Fascism, Communism, and War 3 Credits

From the origins of communism and fascism the midst of total war to their titanic clash on the Eastern Front in WWII, war was at the center of the relationship between Germany and Russia, the Soviet Union and the Weimar Republic, and Stalinism and Nazism. In fact, the new Soviet state was deeply affected by the formative period of “war communism” in 1918-1920 and Bolshevism itself evolved into a kind of ersatz or political warfare, while militarized masculinity and a quest for external domination were fundamental to the development of fascism. But while mature Stalinism undertook compromises yet was too entrenched to be reshaped by the existential crisis of 1941-45, Operation Barbarossa triggered a radical new phase of the Nazi revolution marked by euphoria, genocide, and racial colonization. How did the experiences and legacies of WWI and WWII shape this most consequential relationship of the “age of extremes”? To answer this question involves pursuing key questions in military history but also much more. It requires an investigation of how war and the expectation of it generated profound changes in ideology and politics, helping to reconfigure the social, cultural, and gender orders of Russia/USSR and Germany. Course readings include consideration of such topics as occupation policies and political systems; everyday life in armies and partisan movements; artists and intellectuals at war; the Gulag and the Holocaust in the context of unprecedented military and political violence; rape and sexual crimes in memoirs and diaries; and war in myth and memory politics. These examinations, taken together, provide vantage points from which to reconsider older and newer debates over totalitarianism, the Nazism-Stalinism comparison, and left-right entanglements.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6708 Russia The World 3 Credits

How different will Russian and Soviet history, so long interpreted through narratives of exceptionalism, look when debated in light of transnational and global history? To address this major question for the field and the discipline, this course critically engages key issues and noteworthy works in Russian/Soviet transnational, entangled, international, regional, and world history. Its chronological scope is broad, encompassing the modern period roughly from the Russian empire’s rise as a great power in Europe in the 18th c. to the USSR’s global engagement as a superpower during the Cold War. Geographically, there will be a special emphasis on three key areas where scholarship is particularly important and developed: Russia and Europe, Russia and the Ottoman world, and Russia and China. At the same time, however, the class also includes incursions into treatments of global history from the 19th c. to the global Cold War and targets broadly comparative and global thematic areas such as empire, revolution, modernization/modernity, and political violence.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6709 Russia as an empire 1550-1950 3 Credits

Covering the four centuries from the reign of Ivan IV to the Stalin era, this graduate seminar will introduce students to the historiographical study of Russia and the Soviet Union as imperial structures. We will discuss the multiethnic peripheries of the Russian Empire and the USSR through thematic lenses like religion, trade, and scientific discourse, as represented in both recent and classic scholarship. Students in non-Russian fields are especially welcome, as the course will have a strong comparative and transnational component; among our central points of discussion will be the relationship between Russian imperialism and other forms of imperial rule, and the extent to which this changed over time.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

Enrollment limited to students in a Doctor of Philosophy or Master of Arts degrees.

HIST 6710 Var. of Dissent in E. Europe 3 Credits

This course examines the history of political dissent and popular resistance in Eastern Europe. Beginning in the early 19th century with the movements of national liberation, it explores the ideas, values, emotions, and aims that fueled revolutionary action and tracks their evolution over two centuries of history. We shall also consider the different strategies of resistance adopted by political non-conformists—everything from armed revolt to strike action, civil disobedience, and forms of nonviolent resistance, including literary and symbolic protest, foot-dragging, and other so-called “weapons of the weak.” Finally, we shall investigate moments of revolutionary outburst when ideology, strategy, and history intersected to radically shift the path of historical development of Eastern Europe peoples, moments such as the Spring of Nations, the January Uprising, the Hungarian Revolution, the Solidarity movement, the events of 1989, and the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6800 US As World Power 3 Credits

This graduate seminar explores the frontiers of historical research on US foreign relations (“the US in the World”), with a focus on the watershed events that have defined American experience from the Revolution to 9/11. Some of the major topics to cover in the course include: isolationism, internationalism, and unilateralism; settler colonialism, extraterritoriality, and globalization; state-building, regionalism, and national identity formation; capitalism, modernity, and development; the imperial formation of class, race, and gender in American society; and liberalism, militarism, and the securitization of the American way of life. The objective of the seminar is to critically examine US history in its international, transnational, and global contexts.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6801 Interpreting US Pol Hist 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6802 US Women's Gender History 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6803 Race and History 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6804 Readings in African-Amer Hist 3 Credits

The study and historiography of African American history and its interaction with American and world society, as a whole, will be the mission of this class. History, politics, culture (music, literature, theater, art, poetry and the aesthetics) will be our guide. Political and philosophical debates about the nature of the Black struggle for equality will be issues that we explore. Each week we will have a central theme (slavery, anti-slavery, emancipation, labor, civil rights, women’s equality, urban studies, decolonization and foreign affairs, race/racism, Blacks in the Americas) will be topics of concern. Where relevant and possible we will be joined by subject specialist in the GU history department.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6805 Slavery and Emancipation 3 Credits

Today the study of slavery and emancipation is a thoroughly transnational field populated by a diverse array of scholars who have enlivened the field by asking new questions and examining new sources. This class, focused chiefly but not only on slavery and emancipation in the U.S. will take the pulse of this busy, comparative, transnational field. We cannot address every important development in this burgeoning field in a single semester. No one class—no one book, no one article, no one anything—tells us everything. But everything tells us something. So the purpose of this class is not “coverage” of everything you need to know about slavery or emancipation. Rather, this class will focus on a range of current historiographical conversations, training you to identify how each work relates to prior scholarship and changes what we thought we knew.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6806 U.S. Political Economy 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6807 US Migration in Global Context 3 Credits

This graduate readings course examines US migration in a comparative and international context.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6808 Black Atlantic 3 Credits

This course will explore key aspects in the history of the Black Atlantic world and its Diaspora, from about 1450 to the 1960s or through de-colonialization. We will focus on the development and changing relationships between select societies in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Central themes will include the slavery and the philosophical origins of antislavery ideology. The emergence and evolution of colonialism, racism, industrialism, capitalism, imperialism, neo-colonialism and post-colonialism will be explored. We will survey competing political ideologies of racism and white supremacy, nationalism, Marxism (socialism), Negritude, Pan-Africanism and Religion. We will also look at the separate but linked notion of the African diaspora and look at its cultural legacies.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6809 Gender and Sexuality in US 3 Credits

Gender and Sexuality in US explores the theoretical texts that have shaped the history of gender and sexuality, and how these texts have influenced the ways historians write about identity and politics. Students will also engage with how interdisciplinary texts are used in the service of writing of history. Students will consider how discourses on psychology, feminism, intersectionality, capitalism, and race provide historians with frameworks for studying notions of the family, human rights, sex, gender, power, and the state.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6810 Rising Empire: US to 1900 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6811 U.S. Since the 1960s 3 Credits

This course will broadly examine U.S. history since the 1960s. Its historical arc will trace the crisis and decline of the New Deal order and the subsequent rise and crisis of the neoliberal order. It will explore this arc using political, social, and labor history, political economy, cultural studies, and the history of U.S. foreign relations. Among the discrete topics it may address are: the impact of the civil rights movement; the Vietnam War; the economic crisis of the 1970; the rise of neoliberalism; the Reagan era; the U.S. in the post-Cold War world; the rise and impact of the feminist and gay rights movements; the emergence of a post-industrial, post-New Deal political economy; the legacy of 9/11; the rise and impact of digital technologies; and the roots and significance of Trumpism

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6812 Great Books in US History? 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6813 RaceInequality Modern America 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6814 Workers American Capitalism 3 Credits

Workers and American Capitalism: From the Gilded Age to the Gig Economy This course aims to introduce students to the most important recent works and discussions within the field of U.S. labor history. Set within a framework of changing political economy, the readings move from a focus on capitalist power in the era of Gilded Age factories to the attempted class compromise of the ‘New Deal’ order to the consequences of globalization and declined labor union power in the post-1970s era of Neoliberalism. The course is also attuned to the ‘crossover’ of labor history with related works in African-American, American women’s history, gender and sexuality, Latino/Mexican-American, Native American, as well as the history of social movements. Finally, the course is designed to stimulate subsequent primary research in the field. With this goal in mind (spelled out below), the major writing assignment for the term will focus on the student’s interpretation of a major primary source—at once emphasizing the process of documentary ‘discovery’, historiographical context, and construction of an argument or interpretation.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6815 Conservatism and the Far Right 3 Credits

“I thought I understood the American Right. Trump proved me wrong,” historian Rick Perlstein, one of the leading chroniclers of American conservatism, wrote in the New York Times shortly after the 2016 presidential election. Perlstein alluded to the fact that the established story of modern conservatism – what most historians and the broader public thought they knew and understood about the Right – could hardly have led to our present and Trump’s rise. Historians have begun to rethink the history of the Right. And at the center of that re-conceptualization stands the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the Far Right. According to the established story, in which rightwing extremism had been ostracized from modern conservatism since the 1950s, Trumpism had to be an aberration – a departure from the venerable tradition of principled conservatism. But since 2016, a counter-narrative has become a lot more popular: This was what modern conservatism, at its core, had always been – a political project animated by white grievance, in which rightwing extremism had played a key role at all times. In this course, we will examine the history of the Right since the middle decades of the twentieth century up until today and focus on the relationship between modern conservatism and rightwing extremism. We will discuss conservatism in the American political tradition; modern conservatism as a political project and the role of the Republican Party; the conservative and reactionary intellectual sphere; conservative grassroots activism and rightwing media; and the extremist milieu and culture, including militant white nationalist groups. We will also explore the Right’s transnational connections, its sympathy for and flirtations with foreign autocratic regimes like Franco Spain, Apartheid South Africa, and Victor Orbán’s Hungary today. Ultimately, our goal is to situate Trumpism in the longer-term context of the Right’s history and reflect on the promise and pitfalls of revising the history of conservatism in the age of Trump.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6816 Civil War, Abolition, After 3 Credits

Today the study of Civil War and abolition in the U.S. is a transnational field populated by a diverse array of scholars who have enlivened the field by asking new questions, examining new sources, and above all, by insisting that the study of the war cannot be separated from studies of state-making, state-breaking, and abolition, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. In this graduate reading seminar, we will take the pulse of this busy, comparative, transnational field.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 6817 History of Racial Capitalism 3 Credits

This graduate readings course introduces students to the history of racial capitalism from its roots in Black radical thought to its present use in historical monographs. We will survey literature that centers the role of race, racialization, and racism as fundamental to economic exploitation and projects of capitalist extraction. Readings will constitute recent and classic works that demonstrate through distinct case studies how race shapes the pursuit and accumulation of wealth, how capitalism produces and exploits ethnoracial difference toward greater aims, the relationship between labor migrations and economic development, and how the material and built environment have been shaped by a nexus of race and value. This course will lean heavily toward a focus on North America in the 19th and 20th centuries, however, classroom discussions will consider various contexts for understanding global capitalism in relation to race-making and exploitative forms of othering. Readings will include historical monographs that converge with studies of the state, labor, race and ethnicity, immigration, urban history, and money, finance, and banking.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 6818 20th c. US Urban History 3 Credits

This graduate historiography course will provide a broad overview of the field of 20th c U.S. urban history, with particular emphasis on transnational and interdisciplinary approaches (cities and the environment; cities and immigration; cities and gender/sexuality). Juxtaposing classic texts with more recent contributions to the literature, we will extract themes and approaches from U.S. urban history that could be applied to urban history more broadly; discuss trends, innovations, and limitations within the field; and develop historically-informed analyses of how urban societies and economies have shaped U.S. history more broadly over the course of the 20th century. We will also have the opportunity to compare how scholars from other disciplines, such as anthropology and political science, have approached "the urban" as a field of study in the United States.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 7050 Res Sem:Omnibus 3 Credits

HIST 809 serves as the second semester of the doctoral program's required Research Seminar. The seminar is itself field non-specific and is foreseen as the complement to a field-specific seminar that any enrolled student has already taken in the immediately preceding Fall Semester. The goal of the seminar is for enrolled students to bring to completion a research project that they have begun in that fall-semester field-specific seminar. Students should consult with their mentors and with the instructor before the first seminar meeting of the semester. Other students interested in enrolling must receive the permission of the instructor.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7103 Res Sem: Transregional I 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7104 Res Sem: Transregional II 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Prerequisites: (HIST 803 or HIST 7103)

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7105 Res Sem: Environmental I 3 Credits

HIST 805 is a research seminar in environmental history designed for graduate students. In S21 it will be online only, via zoom. It serves students contemplating dissertations or MA theses in the area of environmental history--of any place or time. It is also intended for students contemplating offering a minor field in environmental history. And for students who just think they might be interested. Some students will complete research projects; some will prepare for larger research projects; some will, with the permission of the instructor, do something else. The syllabus will be constructed in consultation with enrolled students, around subjects of their choosing, in the first week of class.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7106 Res Sem: Environmental II 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7301 Res Sem: East Asia I 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7401 Res Sem: Med/EME I 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7402 Res Sem: Med/EME II 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7501 Res Sem:Latin America I 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7502 Res Sem:Latin America II 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7601 Res Sem: Middle East I 3 Credits

A research seminar on the social history of the Middle East, with particular emphasis on the Arab World in the early modern and modern periods. In the fall semester, we read exemplary recent work in the field, with attention to issues of theoretical approach, method and sources. In the spring semester, students undertake individual research projects. Participants may take the fall semester only, but only those who have taken the fall semester may enroll in the spring semester segment.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7602 Res Sem: Middle East II 3 Credits

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Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7603 Res Sem: North Africa I 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7604 Res Sem: North Africa II 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7605 Historiography of MENA 3 Credits

The seminar will introduce central concepts and frameworks in historiographies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and explore developing trends in historical studies of the region. Assigned primary and secondary readings will highlight the historian's handling of methodological tools, documentary sources, units of analysis, and narrative structures.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 7615 Historians of the MENA 3 Credits

Hist7615 examines the historians and historiography of the broader MENA region from the classical era to the early nineteenth century, divided into two parts. The first part reviews classical Islamic historiographical modes prior to the institutionalization of historical studies in the nineteenth century. This section emphasizes the intellectual frameworks and methodologies that shaped early historical narratives. The second part explores the historians and historiography of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, including their court and local chronicles, which range from annalistic chronicles of dynasties, individual rulers, and campaigns to the works of littérateur-historians and official court historians. It also reviews Ottoman Ibn Khaldunism, the declinist and reform literature known as “Mirror for Princes,” and the Byzantine and European history writing about the Ottomans. Selected primary sources and assigned secondary readings aim to investigate the evolution of Arabo-Ottoman historical writing and recent historical scholarship.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7701 New Title: Res Sem: Imperial R 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7703 Res Sem: Modern Russia I 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7801 Res Sem: United States I 3 Credits

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7803 Res Sem: US Diplomatic I 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7804 Res Sem: US Diplomatic II 3 Credits

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 7900 Comps Prep Seminar 3 Credits

The Comps Prep Seminar gives second year PhD students the space and the opportunity for community building to be prepared for the comprehensive exams at the end of the second year. In consultation with the seminar instructor, their Comps committees, and each other, students will finalize their reading lists, work on their research readiness proposals and historiographical essays, and formulate and practice answering oral exam questions. In class, we’ll focus on reading tips for historians, thinking in terms of important themes and connections, writing and revising tips, and cheering each other on as you navigate this important milestone in your professional development, not on your own but as a cohort.

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

HIST 7949 Tutorial: History 1-5 Credits

Available by special arrangement and with permission of the instructor.

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 8001 Internship 0.25 Credits

.25-credit Internship Course open to HIST MAGIC and PHD students

Level: Graduate

Grading: Main Campus (UGrad, Grad)

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 9991 Continuous Registration

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: No Grade

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 9992 Continuous Registration

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: No Grade

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 9993 Continuous Registration

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: No Grade

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 9994 Continuous Registration

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: No Grade

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 9995 Continuous Registration

Level: Graduate

Grading: No Grade

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

HIST 9999 Thesis Research

Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Grading: No Grade

Course registration restrictions:

Enrollment is limited to Graduate level students.

2026-2027 Edition

History (HIST)

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