Introduction to American History to 1865

This course, designed for newcomers to American history, tells three interconnected stories. The first is about the European colonization of North America between the 1500s and the 1750s. The second is about the wars for empire and independence that reshaped the North American continent between 1754 and 1815. The third story is about the creation of the United States and its destruction and remaking during the US Civil War. At the end of the class, you will be able to tell these stories and talk about why they matter. Along the way, you will meet all kinds of people from North America's past: enslaved voyagers, visionary women, costumed parade-goers, and land-hungry presidents. You will get a sense of how they made early America such a wild and unusual place, and at the same time, how they shaped the United States that we live in today.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Hannah Farber
  h-index: 1 Info
• 4 points

The Battle for North America: An Indigen

Battle for N. America

This course will explore the struggle to control the continent of North America from an Indigenous perspective. After a century of European colonization Native peoples east of the Mississippi River Valley formed a political confederation aimed at preserving Native sovereignty. This Native confederacy emerged as a dominant force during the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. At times Native political interests aligned with the French and British Empires, but remained in opposition to the expansion of Anglo-American colonial settlements into Indian country. This course is designed to engage literature and epistemology surrounding these New World conflicts as a means of the colonial and post-colonial past in North America.  We will explore the emergence of intersecting indigenous and European national identities tied to the social construction of space and race. In this course I will ask you to re-think American history by situating North America as a Native space, a place that was occupied and controlled by indigenous peoples.  You will be asked to imagine a North America that was indigenous and adaptive, and not necessarily destined to be absorbed by European settler colonies.  Accordingly, this course we will explore the intersections of European colonial settlement and Euro-American national expansion, alongside of the emergence of indigenous social formations that dominated the western interior until the middle of the 19th century.  This course is intended to be a broad history of Indigenous North America during a tumultuous period, but close attention will be given to use and analysis of primary source evidence.  Similarly, we will explore the necessity of using multiple genres of textual evidence – archival documents, oral history, material artifacts, etc., -- when studying indigenous history.

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Michael Witgen
  Info
• 4 points

The Year 1000: A World History

This course is designed to introduce students to the study of premodern history, with a substantive focus on the variety of cultures flourishing across the globe 1000 years ago.  Methodologically, the course will emphasize the variety of primary sources historians use to reconstruct those cultures, the various approaches taken by the discipline of history (and neighboring disciplines) in analyzing those sources, and the particular challenges and pleasures of studying a generally “source poor” period. The course queries the concepts of “global history” and “world history” as applied to the “middle millennium” (corresponding to Europe’s “medieval history”), by exploring approaches that privilege connection, comparison, combination, correlation, or coverage.

• TR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Adam Kosto
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 4 points

MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY

An introductory survey of the history of Russia, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union over the last two centuries. Russia’s role on the European continent, intellectual movements, unfree labor and emancipation, economic growth and social change, and finally the great revolutions of 1905 and 1917 define the “long nineteenth century.” The second half of the course turns to the tumultuous twentieth century: cultural experiments of the 1920s, Stalinism, World War II, and the new society of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Finally, a look at very recent history since the East European revolutions of 1989-91. This is primarily a course on the domestic history of Russia and the USSR, but with some attention to foreign policy and Russia’s role in the world.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Yana Skorobogatov
  Info
• 4 points

NATURE & POWER: ENV HIST NORTH AMERICA

Environmental history seeks to expand the customary framework of historical inquiry, challenging students to construct narratives of the past that incorporate not only human beings but also the natural world with which human life is intimately intertwined. As a result, environmental history places at center stage a wide range of previously overlooked historical actors such as plants, animals, and diseases. Moreover, by locating nature within human history, environmental history encourages its practitioners to rethink some of the fundamental categories through which our understanding of the natural world is expressed: wilderness and civilization, wild and tame, natural and artificial. For those interested in the study of ethnicity, environmental history casts into particularly sharp relief the ways in which the natural world can serve both to undermine and to reinforce the divisions within human societies. Although all human beings share profound biological similarities, they have nonetheless enjoyed unequal access to natural resources and to healthy environments—differences that have all-too-frequently been justified by depicting such conditions as “natural.”

• TR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Karl Jacoby
  CULPA: 2 h-index: 8 Info
• 4 points

Nineteenth Century Britain: Politics, S

This course covers all aspects of British history – political, imperial, economic, social and cultural – during the century of Britain’s greatest global power.  Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of liberalism as a political and economic system and as a means of governing personal and social life.  Students will read materials from the time, as well as scholarly articles, and will learn to work with some of the rich primary materials available on this period.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Susan Pedersen
  CULPA: 15 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

EVERYDAY COMMUNISM

This lecture course comparatively and transnationally investigates the twentieth-century communism as a modern civilization with global outreach. It looks at the world spread of communism as an ideology, everyday experience, and form of statehood in the Soviet Union, Europe, Asia (Mao’s China), and post-colonial Africa. With the exception of North America and Australia, communist regimes were established on all continents of the world. The course will study this historical process from the October Revolution (1917) to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986), which marked the demise of communist state. The stress is not just on state-building processes or Cold War politics, but primarily on social, gender, cultural and economic policies that shaped lived experiences of communism. We will closely investigate what was particular about communism as civilization: sexuality, materiality, faith, selfhood, cultural identity, collective, or class and property politics. We will explore the ways in which “ordinary people” experienced communism through violence (anti-imperial and anti-fascist warfare; forced industrialization) and as subjects of social policies (gender equality, family programs, employment, urban planning). By close investigation of visual, material and political representations of life under communism, the course demonstrates the variety of human experience outside the “West” and capitalist modernity in an era of  anti-imperial politics, Cold War, and decolonization, as well as current environmental crisis.

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Malgorzata Mazurek
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

POLITICS OF TERROR:FRENCH REV

This course examines the political culture of eighteenth-century France, from the final decades of the Bourbon monarchy to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Among our primary aims will be to explore the origins of the Terror and its relationship to the Revolution as a whole. Other topics we will address include the erosion of the kings authority in the years leading up to 1789, the fall of the Bastille, the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793, civil war in the Vendee, the militarization of the Revolution, the dechristianization movement, attempts to establish a new Revolutionary calendar and civil religion, and the sweeping plans for moral regeneration led by Robespierre and his colleagues in 1793-1794.

• TR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Charly J Coleman
  CULPA: 7 Info
• 4 points

U.S. ERA OF CIVIL WAR & RECON

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the American Civil War as an event in the making of the modern United States and, indeed, of the western world.  Indeed the American Civil War and Reconstruction introduced a whole series of dilemmas that are still with us.  What is the legacy of slavery in U.S. history and contemporary life?  What is the proper balance of power between the states and the central government? Who is entitled to citizenship in the United States?   What do freedom and equality mean in concrete terms?

This course surveys the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in all of its aspects.  It focuses on the causes of the war in the divergent development of northern and southern states; the prosecution of the war and all that it involved, including the process of slave emancipation; and the contentious process of reconstructing the re-united states in the aftermath of Union victory.  The course includes the military history of the conflict, but ranges far beyond it to take the measure of the social and political changes the war unleashed.  It focuses on the Confederacy as well as the Union, on women as well as men, and on enslaved black people as well as free white people.  It takes the measure of large scale historical change while trying to grasp the experience of those human beings who lived through it.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Stephanie McCurry
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

HISTORY OF THE SOUTH

A survey of the history of the American South from the colonial era to the present day, with two purposes: first, to afford students an understanding of the special historical characteristics of the South and of southerners; and second, to explore what the experience of the South may teach about America as a nation.

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Barbara J Fields
  CULPA: 22 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

JEWS & JUDAISM IN ANTIQUITY

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Seth R Schwartz
  CULPA: 1 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Medieval Middle East

This course is an introduction to the medieval Middle East, starting from the Abbasid caliphate at its peak and ending with the establishment of the Timurid empire.  It explores political, social, and intellectual trends that configured the region’s later history, emphasizing both its complexity and interconnectedness. The course will feature not only on the Middle East and North Africa, but also other regions such as North India and Andalusia, considering the role of the Islamicate world in global history. Special attention will be given to political formations, intellectual and social diversity, and Islam as a cultural system. Students will be introduced to a large number of primary sources from different regions, languages, and religious communities, including objects, art, and music. Students will learn to analyze these materials and understand how history is written and made. This course does not presume any foreknowledge of the topic.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Ali Karjoo-Ravary
  Info
• 4 points

The Ottoman Empire and the West in the 1

“The Ottoman Empire and the West” is a course designed to familiarize undergraduate students with the major developments concerning the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the West throughout the ‘long’ nineteenth century, roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The course will adopt a predominantly chronological structure but will address a wide range of themes, from politics and ideology to economics and diplomacy, and from religion and culture to gender and orientalism.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Edhem Eldem
  Info
• 4 points

A History of the Indian Ocean, 19th Cent

This lecture course explores the Indian Ocean worlds of the nineteenth century and twentieth century by tracing networks of trade, labor, capital, pilgrimage and science. It offers an overview of how these networks were forged and who formed them, mapping their ebbs and flows across Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Zanzibar, Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Indonesia, and Australia. It begins with a brief overview of the premodern Indian Ocean and the seaborne empires of sixteenth centuries and the first encounters with Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonization and then looks at a range of different topics from the spice trade and caravan routes in the age of sail to the abolition of slavery and establishment of indenture as steamships began to take over oceanic journeys. We look at the travels of botanical specimens scrounged from tropical forests in the nineteenth century to the surveying of the ocean floor in the twentieth. At the end of the lectures, which will also feature active learning components using primary sources, we will learn how to reframe regional histories through the lens of oceanic mobilities.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Kalyani Ramnath
  Info
• 4 points

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

This course surveys some of the major historiographical debates surrounding the Second World War. It aims to provide student with an international perspective of the conflict that challenges conventional understandings of the war. In particular, we will examine the ideological, imperial, and strategic dimensions of the war in a global context. Students will also design, research, and write a substantial essay of 15-18 pages in length that makes use of both primary and secondary sources.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Paul T Chamberlin
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

THE GREEK INVENTION OF HISTORY

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Richard A Billows
  CULPA: 40 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

CENS/FREEDOM-EXPR-ERLY MOD EUR

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Elisheva Carlebach
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

The US-Mexico Borderlands

This reading and writing-intensive course explores the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through prisms including those of race, labor, politics, gender and sexuality, the environment, the law, indigeneity and citizenship, and migration and mobility. What is the definition of a “borderland” and who or what creates one, physical or imagined? What makes the U.S.-Mexico borderlands a unique space, and how has it changed from the Spanish colonial period to the present day? By the end of the semester students will have enough experience in analyzing primary documents and secondary sources to produce their own original research papers related to some aspect and era of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Lori Flores
  Info
• 4 points

TELLING ABOUT THE SOUTH

A remarkable array of Southern historians, novelists, and essayists have done what Shreve McCannon urges Quentin Compson to do in William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!--tell about the South--producing recognized masterpieces of American literature. Taking as examples certain writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, this course explores the issues they confronted, the relationship between time during which and about they wrote, and the art of the written word as exemplified in their work. Group(s): D Field(s): US Limited enrollment. Priority given to senior history majors. After obtaining permission from the professor, please add yourself to the course wait list so the department can register you in the course.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Barbara J Fields
  CULPA: 22 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

THE GLOBAL COLD WAR

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Paul T Chamberlin
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

The Struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty

Indig Sovereignty in Earl

The United States was founded on Indigenous land and in conversation with Indigenous nations who shared possession to most of the territory claimed by the republic. The expansion of the U.S. beyond the original thirteen states happened in dialogue, and often in open conflict with the Native peoples of North America.  This course will examine the creation and expansion of the American nation-state from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous history. Most histories of the Republic equate the founding of the U.S. with the severance of colonial ties to Great Britain and the proceed to characterize America as a post-colonial society. We will study the U.S. as the first New World colonial power, a settler society whose very existence is deeply intertwined with the Indigenous history of North America.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Michael Witgen
  Info
• 4 points

The Historical Imagination in Caribbean

Hist Imagination Caribbea

Caribbean literature offers complicated and vivid portrayals of the Caribbean’s past, and grapples with difficult histories lived by its people that compromised colonial archives can only partially capture. Literary works far exceed the limited narratives of Caribbean history by imagining entire worlds that official documents could never contain, rich selves, cultures and communities built by many generations of Caribbean people. This course is aimed at bringing forth a broader understanding of Caribbean history by examining a body of creative works by feminist and womanist writers that continuously remain attuned to the complexities of the past, which are either underrepresented or absent in the record. Chosen literary texts will also be paired with historical works that will illuminate and contextualize the multiple themes with which these Caribbean authors frequently engage, including slavery, and colonialism, racism and colorism, migration and immigration, gender and sexuality, poverty and globalization. From these pairings, students will explore both the divergences and alignments in how writers and historians approach the work of retelling the past, and will acquire reading and writing skills that will foster thoughtful critical analysis of the ever-changing contours of the Caribbean’s history.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Natasha J Lightfoot
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points

Left and Right in American History

Left and Right in US Hist

This course examines 20th-century American political movements of the Left and Right. We will cover Socialism and the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century; the Communist Party and right-wing populists of the 1930s; the civil rights movement, black power, and white resistance, 1950s-1960s; the rise of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s; the Women's liberation movement and the Christian right of the 1970s; and finally, free-market conservatism, neoliberalism, white nationalism and the Trump era. We will explore the organizational, ideological and social history of these political mobilizations. The class explores grass-roots social movements and their relationship to “mainstream” and electoral politics. We will pay special attention to the ways that ideas and mobilizations that are sometimes deemed extreme have in fact helped to shape the broader political spectrum. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the present political dilemmas of our country in light of the history that we study.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Kimberly K Phillips-Fein
  Info
• 4 points

Citizenship: Regional and Global Histori

Citizenship in South Asia

This seminar explores the making and unmaking of citizenship, adopting regional and global histories from South Asia. Beginning with a brief overview of early twentieth century debates over imperial citizenship involving the Britain, its colonies, and North America and the making of a global color line in the years leading up to the formal end of empires, we look at how important political events (the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, the 1971 War of independence for Bangladesh among others) were important inflection points in the rethinking of the relationship between national identity, belonging and formal-legal citizenship and its impact on people’s understanding of citizenship. Our discussions of citizenship after empire will include readings on citizenship debates involving the former Portuguese and French possessions in India in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a discussion of the broader debates over citizenship and belonging involving the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will also look at how debates over indigeneity and authenticity mark citizenship debates in Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka as well as parts of Southeast Asia, and how this shapes global citizenship and refugee regimes. Returning to India, we consider how unmaking citizenship affects both people who stay behind and engage with state structures as well as those who are on the move, pursuing education or employment opportunities beyond it, shaped by uneven access to rights and shaping their social and political identities.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Kalyani Ramnath
  Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR

A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors. Field(s): ALL

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• F 10:10 a.m.-noon
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Rhiannon Stephens
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Marwa Elshakry
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Tunc Sen
  Info
• Instructor: Hannah Farber
  h-index: 1 Info
• 4 points

Hist of Russian Thought: Faith & Reason

History of Russian Though

Russian ideas are familiar to the world through Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels. In this course, we will examine key texts in the intellectual tradition that forms the backdrop to these famous works. Emphasis is on close textual readings; but also on how Russian ideas have been read and interpreted across national and cultural boundaries, including in recent English-language works like Tom Stoppard’s play,
Coast of Utopia
. Thinkers include Schellingians and Hegelians, Slavophiles, Populists and Pan-Slavists, and Vladimir Soloviev.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Catherine Evtuhov
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

EASTERN EUROPE'S COLD WAR

This seminar explores the Cold Wars impact on Eastern Europe (1940s-1980s) and Eastern Europes Cold War-era engagements with the wider world. We will address the methodologies used by historians to answer questions like these: What was the Cold War? What did it mean, and for whom? We will also look at the Cold War as something more than a series of events; we will consider its value, uses, and limits as a device for framing the second half of the twentieth century.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Elidor Mehilli
  Info
• 4 points

Writers on History: Robert Musil

Writers on Hist: Robert M

This seminar is devoted to examining the work of writers who address the nature and course of history in their imaginative and non-fiction work. This semester we will be exploring the work of Robert Musil, in particular his great unfinished novel,
The Man Without Qualities
, with its imaginative account of Vienna in the lead up to World War I and an exploration into the fundamental historical dynamics of Western modernity.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Mark Lilla
  CULPA: 57 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

CULTURE, MEMORY, CRISIS IN US

This course examines how Americans have used culture as a means to respond to, interpret, and remember acute social crises over the last century. Why do some periods of social upheaval create breaks in cultural forms and practices while others encourage an impetus to defend cultural practices, thereby facilitating the “invention of tradition”?  How are the feelings released in such moments—whether trauma, outrage, rage, insecurity, or fear—turned into cultural artifacts?  What is at stake in how they get memorialized?  To answer these questions, this course examines responses to the lynching of black Americans, the Great Depression, World War II and the black freedom struggle during the postwar period.   We will examine a wide range of individually and collectively produced artifacts about these events, including photography, plays, songs, movies, comic books, novels, government sponsored programs, and world fairs.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Hilary-Anne Hallett
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

Medieval Franciscans and their World

This course will offer an examination of the birth and development of the Franciscan Order between 1200-1350. The topics will include Francis of Assisi, the foundation of the three orders of Franciscans, education, poverty, preaching, theology internal strife, antifraternalism, and relations with secular governments and papacy.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Neslihan Senocak
  CULPA: 5 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Imag(in)ing the Ottoman Empire: A visual

“Imag(in)ing the Ottoman Empire: A visual history, 18th-20th centuries” is an undergraduate/graduate seminar focusing on visual representations of the Ottoman Empire during the last two centuries of its existence, from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The objective is to study the development of visual representations both
by
and
about
the Empire, from Ottoman miniatures to early European paintings, and from the surge of Western illustrated magazines to the local uses of photography. The seminar’s chronological thread will be complemented by a thematic structure designed to explore different aspects and influences concerning the production and diffusion of images: curiosity, documentation, exoticism, propaganda, orientalism, modernity, self-fashioning, eroticism, policing, to name just a few.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Edhem Eldem
  Info
• 4 points

Engineering the Modern Middle East: Hist

Engineering the Modern ME

This course examines the history of science, technology and medicine in the modern Middle East. We will consider a number of themes from energy infrastructures and communication and transportation systems to modern medical, agricultural and environmental developments.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Marwa Elshakry
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

HEALTH & HEALING IN AFRICA

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Rhiannon Stephens
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

AFRICAN FRANCE, FRENCH AFRICA

This seminar
explores a tradition of historical writing (historiography) that constructs “Africa and France,” or “France and Africa,” or “FrançAfrique” as an historical object and as an object of knowledge. That body of writing accounts in various and sometimes contadictory ways for the peculiar, intense, and historically conflictual relationship that exists between France and the sub-Saharan nation-states that are its former African colonies.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Gregory Mann
  CULPA: 15 h-index: 13 Info
• 4 points

Encounters with Nature: The History and

This course offers an understanding of the interdisciplinary field of environmental, health and population history and will discuss historical and policy debates with a cross cutting, comparative relevance: such as the making and subjugation of colonized peoples and natural and disease landscapes under British colonial rule; modernizing states and their interest in development and knowledge and technology building, the movement and migration of populations, and changing place of public health and healing in south Asia. The key aim of the course will be to introduce students to reading and analyzing a range of historical scholarship, and interdisciplinary research on environment, health, medicine and populations in South Asia and to introduce them to an exploration of primary sources for research; and also to probe the challenges posed by archives and sources in these fields. Some of the overarching questions that shape this course are as follows: How have environmental pasts and medical histories been interpreted, debated and what is their contemporary resonance? What have been the encounters (political, intellectual, legal, social and cultural) between the environment, its changing landscapes and state? How have citizens, indigenous communities, and vernacular healers mediated and shaped these encounters and inserted their claims for sustainability, subsistence or survival? How have these changing landscapes shaped norms about bodies, care and beliefs? The course focuses on South Asia but also urges students to think and make linkages beyond regional geographies in examining interconnected ideas and practices in histories of the environment, medicine and health. Topics will therefore include (and students are invited to add to these perspectives and suggest additional discussion themes): colonial and globalized circuits of medical knowledge, with comparative case studies from Africa and East Asia; and the travel and translation of environmental ideas and of medical practices through growing global networks.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Kavita Sivaramakrishnan
  Info
• 4 points

The City & the Archive

How to write the city? What is an archive for writing the city? What liminal and marginal perspectives are available for thinking about writing the city? What is the place of the city in the global south in our historical imagination? Our attempt in this seminar is to look at the global south city from the historical and analytical perspectives of those dispossessed and marginal. Instead of ‘grand’ summations about “the Islamic City” or “Global City,” we will work meticulously to observe annotations on power that constructs cities, archives and their afterlives. The emphasis is on the city in South Asia as a particular referent though we will learn to see Cairo, New York, and Istanbul.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Manan Ahmed
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia h-index: 6 Info
• 4 points

North Korean History, Culture and Politi

North Korea is widely regarded as a country without a history; as enigmatic as it is isolated. Dispensing with this cliché, this course invites students to engage with North Korean history using a variety of primary and secondary sources. We begin in the medieval period to trace the distinct features of the northern region that made it uniquely receptive to outside ideas. Understanding the north as a frontier zone of experimentation and adaption allows us to examine the attractive power of modernity in the north during the early twentieth century via the influence of Christianity, capitalism and communism. Utilizing texts and materials made in North Korea and internationally, including feature and documentary films, women’s magazines, graphic novels, literary fiction and testimony, the course investigates the conditions within which knowledge about North Korea has been produced, circulated and repressed. Key topics to be explored include the history of Christianity and capitalism in Pyongyang and the northern provinces, communist cadres in the 1930s, the allure of the North in the 1940s, the Korean War and the purges that followed, North Korea’s relations with neighbors and the world, and the high cost its citizens pay for the country’s brutal sanction economy.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Ruth Barraclough
  Info
• 4 points

American Radicalism in the Archives

US Radicalism in the Arch

“American Radicalism in the Archives” is a research seminar examining the multiple ways that radicals and their social movements have left traces in the historical record. Straddling the disciplines of social movement history, public humanities, and critical information studies, the seminar will use the archival collections at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library to trace the history of social movements and to consider the intersections of radical theory and practice with the creation and preservation of archives.

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Thai S Jones
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

RES SKILLS/MTHDS-INT/WRLD HIST

In the first semester a series of workshops will introduce the field of international history and various research skills and methods such as conceptualization of research projects and use of oral sources. The fall sessions will also show the digital resources available at Columbia and how students can deploy them in their individual projects. In the second semester students will apply the skills acquired in the fall as they develop their proposal for the Masters thesis, which is to be completed next year at the LSE. The proposal identifies a significant historical question, the relevant primary and secondary sources, an appropriate methodology, what preliminary research has been done and what remains to be done. Students will present their work-in-progress.

• F 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ruth Barraclough
  Info
• 3 points

PERSP ON INT'L & WORLD HISTORY

This course gives students the opportunity to design their own curriculum: To attend lectures, conferences and workshops on historical topics related to their individual interests throughout Columbia University. Students may attend events of their choice, and are especially encouraged to attend those sponsored by the History Department. The Center for International History and the Heyman Center for the Humanities have impressive calendars of events and often feature historians. The goal of this mini-course is to encourage students to take advantage of the many intellectual opportunities throughout the University, to gain exposure to a variety of approaches to history, and at the same time assist them in focusing on a particular area for their thesis topic.

• Instructor: Line Lillevik
  Info
• 1-3 points

EARLY MODERN SOUTH ASIA

This graduate seminar focuses on  the material and political orders from 1500-1800 in South Asia. We pair primary, historical texts (in translation) with recent monographs which demonstrate the intersections between narrative and polity within material and epistemic realms. Our guiding interests will be in understanding the intimate relationship between power, agency and materiality within specific political spaces. Eschewing the center/periphery models, we take globally connective approach incorporating Western Asian, North American and Northern European histories. Some key ideas for the seminar include, “oceanic” perspective of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, role of “agents” (travelers, merchants, bureaucrats etc.), theories of colonization and decolonization, gender and sexuality.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Manan Ahmed
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia h-index: 6 Info
• 4 points

THE JEWISH BOOK IN EARLY MOD WORLD

This course will situate the Jewish book within the context of the theoretical and historical literature on the history of the book: notions of orality and literacy, text and material platform, authors and readers, print and manuscript, language and gender, the book trade and its role in the circulation of people and ideas in the early age of print.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Elisheva Carlebach
  CULPA: 6 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Knowledge and Materiality in the Early M

Knowledge/Materiality Ear

Intended for advanced graduate students, this course considers classic and recent works in materiality and material culture in the early modern period (ca. 1400-1700), especially as they are fruitful for the history of science and knowledge. Class sessions will include discussion, museum visits, and hands-on work in the Making and Knowing Lab. Topics to be considered: embodied knowledge, material complexes, materialized concepts and identities, agentive matter, human-environment relations, and material imaginaries.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Pamela Smith
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

New Directions in Eastern European, Russ

E. European Eurasian Hist

This is an intense reading seminar in new directions in East European, Russian and Eurasian history from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. The seminar explores the “Other Europe” as a constellation of specific regions as much as key localities from which to view the world. The course is based on the premise that global history should be narrated beyond center-periphery frameworks, and from any place where people have reimagined their relationship to a shared global modernity. We will investigate topics ranging from multi-confessional and multi-ethnic land empires (German, Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, Soviet) and their post-imperial forms; globalization and isolation; nationalisms and internationalisms; modernization; communisms; borderlands; dictatorships; Orientalism outside of Western Europe; migration and expulsion across borders and the rise of so-called closed societies; interethnic and communal violence, genocide, and mass killing. Through the lens of cultural, intellectual, social, international, transnational, environmental, regional, urban, legal and gender history, and the history of science and technology, we will explore the region’s historic liminality (as a bridge between “East” and “West’) and its historic ties with Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and Southeast Asia.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 4 points

Readings in Labor History

This seminar traces major historical trends, transformations, events, and eras that have shaped labor and the lives of workers, mostly in the United States but also around the world. With some prefatory readings about the 18th and 19th centuries, this seminar will concentrate on the 20th and 21st centuries and examine different sectors of work and the varied laboring lives of individuals and communities. Topics covered include labor during Reconstruction; the racialization and feminization of labor; industrial factory work; agribusiness’s power and the food industry; union formation and campaigns; workplace traumas and tragedies; citizen-migrant tensions and solidarities; globalization and outsourcing; sex, tech, and gig work; and how cultural changes and political schisms affect attitudes in the working and middle classes.

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Lori Flores
  Info
• 4 points

METHODS IN HISTORY OF SCIENCE

• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Malgorzata Mazurek
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

RESISTANCE & THE BLK ATLANTIC

This course investigates in-depth the significance of resistance among African-descended communities in the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone Atlantic Worlds from approximately 1700-2000. We will examine the genesis, forms, and limits of resistance within the context of key historical transformations such as slavery and abolition, labor and migration, and transatlantic political organizing. The class will explore the racial epistemologies, racialized labor regimes, and gendered discourses that sparked a continuum of cultural and political opposition to oppression among Black Atlantic communities. The course will also reflect on how resistance plays a central role in the formation of individual and collective identities among black historical actors.Resistance will be explored as a critical category of historical analysis, and a central factor in the making of the “Black Atlantic.”

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Natasha J Lightfoot
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 4 points

RESEARCH SEMINAR FOR PHD STUDENTS

This course will provide a structured environment in which graduate students will write a research paper. It will be offered in the spring and will not be field-specific. It will be recommended for first-year students in particular, who will be expected to enter from GR8910 (the required first-year course) and with a topic and/or prospectus for the paper they plan to complete in the course. The aim of the course is to ensure that all PhD students complete one of their two research papers within the first year. This seminar is recommended for, and restricted to, PhD students in the History Department. The aim of the seminar is to guide and assist students in the completion of a 10,000-12,000 word research paper appropriate for publication in a scholarly journal. The seminar is not field-specific, and students may work on any subject of their choosing. The paper must however be based on primary source research and represents a substantial departure from earlier work. The assignments for the course are designed to help students complete a polished piece of work by the end of term.

• W 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Catherine Evtuhov
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

Capitalism and Democracy

It is a common-place that the twentieth century ended with the establishment of capitalism and democracy as the “one best way”. In triumphalist accounts of the end of the Cold War the two are commonly presented as sharing a natural affinity. As never before the democratic formula was recommended for truly global application. To suggest the possibility of a contradiction between capitalism and democracy has come to seem like a gesture of outrageous conservative cynicism, or leftist subversion. And yet the convergence of capitalism and democracy is both recent and anything other than self-evident. It has been placed in question once again since 2008 in the epic crisis of Atlantic financial capitalism. This course examines the historical tensions between these two terms in the Atlantic world across the long 20th century from the 1890s to the present day.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Adam Tooze
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points