COURSE DESCRIPTION:    

This course is a history of globalization, roughly 1500-present.  While cognizant of the general course of World History, our goal is to concentrate on five themes that have shaped that history:  (1) economic developments (rise of capitalism and its discontents); (2) migration of humans, ideas, technologies; (3) imperialism and decolonization; (4) modern forms of political and social order; and (5) environmental transformations.  Students will learn about the processes that have created both the interconnected world we have today and the related global destitution in resources, political and economic power, and cultural influence.   

Books for purchase:

Robert Tignor, et al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart:  From 1000 CE to Present, Concise Edition (New York:  Norton, 2014).  ISBN:  039391848

Jůrgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson, Globalization:  A Short History  (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2009).  ISBN:  0691133956

A collection of primary sources that we post through Canvas

GRADING:

Midterm:  30%

Final Exam: 40%

Quizzes and Assignments:  20%

Participation and Attendance:  10%

This course introduces the study of Chinese history, society, and culture through an examination of the cultural unities and diversities, continuities and discontinuities that comprise the historical development of Chinese civilization. Topics include philosophy and religion; population and economy; power and authority; gender, ethnicity, and cultural identity.  This course provides a foundation for continued study of Chinese history and society for students who plan to go on to more specialized, upper-division courses including Chinese anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, economics, law, policy, international business, art history, architecture, environmental science, and philosophy.

J. K Fairbank & M. Goldman, China: A New History (Belknap, 2006)
P. J. Ivanhoe & B. W. Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Hackett, 2006)
H. Li, Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-history (Stanford, 2009)

Mid-term exam (30%)
Final exam (30%)
Two short essays (15% each, 30% total)
Attendance and participation (10%)

Description

This course asks students to recognize the ethical implications of the ways we talk about religion – both our own religion (if any) and those of others. Choosing definitions for religion is an ethical choice with social, political, and civic implications; the goal of this course is to assist students in becoming self-conscious about that choice. In so doing, students will improve their ability to tolerate and reduce moral disagreements about religious beliefs and practices, something that is at the heart of practical ethics education. Specifically, the ethical issues in this course encourage students to: • reflect on different definitions of religion, to choose which ones appeal to them, and to explore their implications • analyze the ways in which religions form “communities of memory,” to consider in what ways these communities create boundaries that both enclose and exclude • understand the different ways that religions have historically intersected with with politics, with science, and with culture •consider how these intersections might influence the students’ perceptions of religion and the ways in which religion is presented in contemporary media and popular culture.

Texts

Required:

• John Corrigan, Frederick Denny, Carlos Eire, Martin Jaffe, Jews, Christians, Muslims:  A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions  (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1998)
• Documents and readings on the Canvas site. 

Recommended:

• The HarperCollins Study Bible, ed. Wayne Meeks
• The Qur’an. Trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem.  (Oxford, 2004).
• Grading

The course requirements are the following:

• Reading response journal: 20% 
• Short paper on definition of religion: 5%
• Quizes : 25%
• Midterm essay: 25%
• Final essay: 25%

This is the second half of a two-semester survey of Jewish civilization. It begins with a brief discussion of Jewish history from earliest times, but focuses on the period from Spain’s Expulsion of the Jews in 1492 to the present. We will examine the major movements of Jews within an expanding diaspora, the impact of the Reformation, the changing attitudes to Jews, the breakdown of traditional authority in Jewish communities and the trend toward secularization. It will deal with the following transformative events: the rise of eastern European Jewry, the spread of kabbalah (a form of mysticism), the entry of Jews into a capitalist economy, Hassidism, Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), emancipation, modern antisemitism, Zionism, Jews in the Muslim world, the rise American Jewry, the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The thematic core of the course will be the concepts of exile and return – their various meanings and interpretations over time, in a variety of historical contexts.

Texts:
Eli Barnavi, A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People: From the Time of the Patriarchs to the Present. 

Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History.

Grading:
Two quizzes (20%), first mid-term (20%), second mid-term (20%), final exam (40%).

Description:

In Fall 2017 we observed the quincentennial of the beginning of the Protestant Reform initiated by Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) 95 theses. Luther was one of the seminal figures of the second millennium whose impact is felt today. We will examine his writings and his activities, the conditions that lead to his rise, and the impact he had on the world after him. Just as importantly, we will study the historical, cultural, and social context in which he lived and whose product he was.

In a broader sense, this course focuses on the transformation of European culture (with special emphasis on Germany) from the late Middle Ages to the early modern age (1450-1600), roughly during Luther’s life time. Humanism and the Protestant Reformation will be the main focus of this course, but we will also discuss political, social, economic, scientific, and philosophical developments as well as architecture, art, music, and literature of the time period. At the end, students will have a good understanding of German and European culture at this particular crossroads.

We will break down the course into the following themes:

*          What is Humanism? Renaissance?

*          The printing press and the first information revolution

*          A new urban culture (literature, architecture, music)

*          Political power and social order

*          Heliocentrism and discoveries: America, Cape of Good Hope

*          Trade networks: the first age of Globalization

*          The Catholic church and monastic life before Luther

*          Luther’s life

*          Luther’s theology: his writings

*          The Protestant Reform: Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and others

*          Catholic responses

*          Social and political impact of the Reformation

*          How Luther changed the world

Readings:

*          Scott H. Hendrix. Martin Luther: A Very Short Introduction.

*          John Dillenberger (ed.). Martin Luther: Selections From His Writing.

*          R.C. Sproul and Stephen J. Nichols (eds.). The Legacy of Luther.

*          Jerry Brotton. The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction.

*          Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History

*          other materials on Canvas

Grading:

Attendance, Participation                             10%

Quizzes                                                           10%

Oral presentation                                          10%

Two short writing assignments                   20%

Two examinations                                         50%

This course focuses on the history of medieval Europe primarily through the lens of material culture. In addition to manuscripts, we will explore the significance of several categories of historical artifacts including: art, textiles, reliquaries, architecture, pottery, crowns, and jewelry. We will discuss what we can discover about the production, circulation, reception, historic and geographic context, and the meaning attributed to the materials from which these objects were created. This class explores what these objects reveal about the religious, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual history of medieval Europe, beyond what we can learn from medieval texts and how these objects may have been experienced in a pre-modern world.
Required texts and sources:
Course Packet available at University Co-op

(Includes primary sources:  Abbot Suger,  “On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures”, Paulinus of Nola, "Poem 27", Theophilus, "An Essay on Diverse Arts" and selected readings by Gregory the Great, Augustine and Isidore of Seville. )

Grading:
Map quiz: 5%
Quizzes (cumulative): 20%
Mid-semester exam (cumulative): 20%
Presentation: 15%
Last exam (cumulative): 20%
Attendance: 10%
Class Participation and Presentation Feedback: 10%

This is an introductory class to the history of the Middle East in the 20th century. The main question for consideration is which forces and what sort of developments transformed this region from a relatively peaceful region to a radicalized environment and a source for opposition against the “West.” By exploring critical political, social, intellectual and economic themes such as colonialism, Arab nationalism, secular modernism, the impact of Zionism and military conflict, the rise of political Islam, the status of women and the oil revolution, we would identify the main internal and external forces, as well as the critical processes, that shaped the region during the last century.

·        James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East; A History (Oxford: Oxford
                 University Press, 2004).
·        James Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict : One Hundred Years of War
                  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

This lecture course surveys the history of the West and its overseas expansion from the later Middle Ages to the present.  The central theme of this survey is the emergence and development of modernity in this world region.  We will examine the origins and evolution of capitalism, the centralized state, the Westphalian state system, secularization, civil society, industrialization, urbanization, imperialism, and mass democracy.

Book for the course:
Joshua Cole and Carol Symes, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture, Eighteenth Edition, Volume 2 (New York, 2014).

Grading policy:
1. Attendance -- 10% of grade.
2. First mid-term essay exam -- 25% of grade.
3. Second mid-term essay exam -- 25% of grade.
4. Final essay exam -- 40% of grade.

This course introduces students to the history of Africa since 1800 to the present. The course is divided into four parts: Part I – an overview of African life before 1800. Part II – an overview of the partition of Africa and the upheavals to economic, political, cultural, and social institutions. Part III – an over view of colonial histories, the struggles for freedom, and the euphoria of independence. Part IV – an overview of the legacies and disappointments of colonialism, and the post-colonialism. Because the continent is so vast, its history complex, and the time period so wide, each part will have a case study to illuminate each section of the course more concretely, giving students both depth and breadth in a subject for which they have little or no prior knowledge. The readings augment the lectures and allow students to follow their interests from the topics covered. This is a great course to take before “that trip to Africa!” The class will also utilize feature films and documentaries to illustrate the historical issues more vividly. Karibu! Welcome!

This course surveys the history of Latin America from the pre-Columbian era through the wars of independence. It examines the European arrival in the Americas in 1492, the consolidation of colonial rule in the ensuing two centuries, and the fall of the Spanish American empire in the early nineteenth century. During the semester we will concentrate on such key themes as discovery, conquest, religion, slavery, race, gender, reform, rebellion and independence. Although we will focus on three key geographic areas – Mexico, Peru and Brazil – of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, we will also pay attention to the Caribbean, Central America and the Southern Cone.

The reading and lecture course examines the historical development of the Mexican community in the United States since 1848, with an emphasis on the period between 1900 and the present.  The primary purpose of the course is to address time and place specific variations in the incorporation of the Mexican community as a national minority and bottom segment of the U.S. working class.  One of my central concerns is to explain two inter-related historical trends in this incorporation, steady upward mobility and unrelenting social marginalization.  I emphasize work experiences, race thinking, social relations, trans-border relations, social causes and larger themes in U.S. history such as wars, sectional differences, industrialization, reform, labor and civil rights struggles, and the development of a modern urbanized society. Also, I incorporate relevant aspects of the history of Latinos, African Americans, and Mexico.

AMS 310 is designed to provide an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, that is, the study of American history, culture, and politics. Though not a comprehensive U.S. history survey, this course will cover a broad time period, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and extending into the present day. “Home” will serve as our central trope and organizing framework, allowing us to track changes and themes in the American past in three major ways. First, we will examine “home” in a literal sense, as a dwelling place or lack thereof, to help us uncover persistent forms of racial and economic inequality. Second, we will consider “home” in a metaphorical sense, as a powerful and enduring symbol of the nation as a whole, drawing our attention to issues of immigration and citizenship. Finally, we will consider “the home” in an ideological sense, as a site at which ideas about family, gender roles, and sexuality cohere. Throughout, this course will examine shifts in what it means to be American, the ways in which that identity has worked to bring people together and push them apart, to bestow power and privilege on some while taking them away from others. Hopefully, students will come away from this course with a firm grounding in the diverse methods of American Studies research, a richer understanding of the American past, and a deeper sense of the multiple meanings of home in the present.

AMS 310 is designed to provide an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, that is, the study of American history, culture, and politics. Though not a comprehensive U.S. history survey, this course will cover a broad time period, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and extending into the present day. Using a variety of sources and methods, this course takes as its focal point American attitudes regarding place, landscape, community, nature, and the physical environment as demonstrative of social values both historic and current, dominant and resistant. This course examines three major conceptual categories connecting the North American continent and the people who have inhabited it--landscape and the physical environment, people and place, and community and place-making--demonstrating great transformations in American society, culture, and everyday life, while also showing main currents and trajectories over time.

Lectures, readings, videos, maps and other graphics are used to provide students with a survey of US history from before the European encounter through the Civil War. Students will study significant aspects of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural history and will be challenged to understand the why, how, and so what of this history. You begin with learning about what happened and then proceed to questions of causality and consequences.

Moving from what happened to why or how, and, then, to so what students will sharpen their skills in critical thinking. Both exams will include essay questions to encourage students in their written communication skills. Along the way, students will consider some of the ethical dilemmas confronted by Americans who lived long ago.

Students will examine issues of personal responsibility and social responsibility as they learn about how previous generations understood these responsibilities. For example, many Americans in the late 18th century and in the first decades after the creation of the United States, emphasized “civic virtue” as essential if republican (representative) government was to survive.

Texts:
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty, brief 4th edition, volume 1.

Eric Foner, ed., Voices of Freedom, 4th edition, volume 1

Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly

Grading:
1st Midterm essay exam, 25% of grade

2nd Midterm essay exam, 25% of grade

3rd Essay exam (last week of class), 25% of grade

Final exam:  cumulative, multiple choice, 25% of grade.

Too many students spell history b-o-r-i-n-g. They regard history as a jumble of disconnected facts. The word they use to describe history is "irrelevant."

High school history too often consists of little more than lectures, textbooks, worksheets, and memorization of names and dates. In fact, history need not be dull.

In this class, you will be a detective, a myth buster, a problem solver, and a forensic scientist. You will debunk or confirm legends and folklore. You will investigate some of history’s most gripping mysteries and take part in some of history’s biggest debates.

You will uncover the hidden history behind front-page headlines as well as the roots of a host of everyday rituals and customs.

You will examine Hollywood’s version of the past and separate fact from fiction. You will re-fight past battles, re-live key episodes in the past, and ask what-might-have-been.

You will also explore the uneasy relationship between academic history and popular memory—those legends and traditions that exert a much more powerful grip on our imagination.

This class offers an innovative approach to U.S. history from global and multicultural perspectives, ties past events to contemporary issues, and allows you to investigate U.S. history's most gripping mysteries.
Divided into 15 modules that must be completed weekly, the course includes a wealth of sources including gravestones, maps, film clips, and music—that bring the past to life and allow you to understand the key issues and controversies of U.S. history from a fresh perspective.

Grading is based on multiple-choice questions, essay questions, and interactive activities.

Survey of United States history from the colonial period through the Civil War.

Partially fulfills legislative requirement for American history.
The two books required for the class are available for purchase at the University Co-op or online via Amazon, et. al.. One copy is also on three-hour reserve at the PCL.

Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, Volume One, Fourth (Seagull) Edition, (Norton, 2013).

Robert Olwell, ed., The Presence of the Past: Documents in American History, 1492-1865, Second Edition, Kendall-Hunt, 2013).

Grading:

There will be a mid-term exam in this course and a final exam. The mid-term will address materials covered in the preceding half of the semester. The final will cover the materials from the last half of the course as well as ask students to answer a comprehensive essay drawing upon themes developed throughout. Each exam will also include a list of ten terms drawn from the lectures and readings and you will have to briefly identify and describe the significance of five of those terms. A make-up for the mid-term will be given the Friday of the week following the regularly scheduled exam. There will be no make-up for the final exam.

Survey of United States history from the colonial period through the Civil War.

Partially fulfills legislative requirement for American history.
The two books required for the class are available for purchase at the University Co-op or online via Amazon, et. al.. One copy is also on three-hour reserve at the PCL.

Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, Volume One, Fourth (Seagull) Edition, (Norton, 2013).

Robert Olwell, ed., The Presence of the Past: Documents in American History, 1492-1865, Second Edition, Kendall-Hunt, 2013).

Grading:

There will be a mid-term exam in this course and a final exam. The mid-term will address materials covered in the preceding half of the semester. The final will cover the materials from the last half of the course as well as ask students to answer a comprehensive essay drawing upon themes developed throughout. Each exam will also include a list of ten terms drawn from the lectures and readings and you will have to briefly identify and describe the significance of five of those terms. A make-up for the mid-term will be given the Friday of the week following the regularly scheduled exam. There will be no make-up for the final exam.

Lectures, readings, videos, maps and other graphics are used to provide students with a survey of US history from before the European encounter through the Civil War. Students will study significant aspects of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural history and will be challenged to understand the why, how, and so what of this history. You begin with learning about what happened and then proceed to questions of causality and consequences.

Moving from what happened to why or how, and, then, to so what students will sharpen their skills in critical thinking. Both exams will include essay questions to encourage students in their written communication skills. Along the way, students will consider some of the ethical dilemmas confronted by Americans who lived long ago.

Students will examine issues of personal responsibility and social responsibility as they learn about how previous generations understood these responsibilities. For example, many Americans in the late 18th century and in the first decades after the creation of the United States, emphasized “civic virtue” as essential if republican (representative) government was to survive.

Texts:
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty, brief 4th edition, volume 1.

Eric Foner, ed., Voices of Freedom, 4th edition, volume 1

Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly

Grading:
1st Midterm essay exam, 25% of grade

2nd Midterm essay exam, 25% of grade

3rd Essay exam (last week of class), 25% of grade

Final exam:  cumulative, multiple choice, 25% of grade.

This course is a survey of 400 years of American history, from the Age of Exploration to the Civil War.  It meets three times weekly for lectures.  Your TAs will lead weekly discussions of required readings at the beginning of class on Fridays. 

Two of the three required readings are available for free as e-books on UTCAT.  Print copies of the readings are available at the UT Coop, via online sources, and (most) on PCL Reserve.

Primary documents will be assigned on Canvas for discussion on Fridays for most weeks (check Canvas Tuesday afternoons for the following Thursday) from Michael P. Johnson, ed., Reading the American Past, Vol.1: to 1877.  Other required readings include the revolutionary war history Minutemen and Their World by Robert A. Gross, and William Freehling’s civil war history, The South Versus the South (both Gross and Freehling are available as e-books on UTCAT).
Requirements include midterm and final exams (both essay format), and a quiz on Minutemen.  Study questions will be provided in advance of both exams. 

Exams will test specific knowledge of both lectures and readings.  There will be a question devoted to South v. South on the final.  There will also be a series of 10 short quiz questions and a map quiz on Canvas.  Grades will be calculated according to the following percentages: Final exam 40%, Midterm 30%, Book Quiz 10%, Canvas Quiz 10%, Map Quiz 10%.

This online interactive course is designed to provide students with a grounding in some of the most controversial, enduring, and relevant topics in the history of the United States, broadly defined.Students will read a wide range of monographs and primary source materials. Lectures anddiscussions will encourage students to compare and contrast various points of view, and interrogate broad historical transformations since the Civil War. The course will emphasize intensive reading,analytical writing, and critical thinking. The instructor and teaching assistants will, at all times,encourage students to articulate different points of view. Our central purpose is to stimulate informed, thoughtful, and intelligent perspectives on the American experience. This includes close attention to politics, society, culture, economy, diplomacy, and military affairs. It also includes an international and transnational understanding of how Americans have interacted historically with those defined as non-Americans. Instead of comprehensiveness and textbook detail, this will be a course about big ideas, big transformations, and big debates – that continue into the twenty-first century. We will not strive for consensus or agreement in this course; we will nurture learned discussion and collective engagement with the complexities of our society’s history.

Course meets online during scheduled class times and includes a live-streaming video component. Students are encouraged to visit http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tower/online/courses/ to test their computer and network connection and learn about the course structure.

Students will be required to attend several sessions in person in the on-campus studio.

Texts:

Brinkley, Alan. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Foner, Eric. Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, Volume 2, Fourth Edition

(New York: W.W. Norton, 2014).

Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South

from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 2005).

Leffler, Melvyn P. The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).

McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

McPherson, James M. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Self, Robert O. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).

Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Grading:

Weekly Response Essays: 20%

Document Analysis: 20%

Examination #1: 20%

Examination #2: 30%

Lecture Attendance: 10%

The course covers American history from the end of the Civil War to the present. The basic themes are (1) the struggle to define the boundary between the public sector and the private sector in American life, or between democracy and capitalism; and (2) the striking fact that a nation that professes to love peace has so often gone to war.

Course objectives

The course has two primary objectives: (1) to make students more familiar with the major events and developments of American history since the Civil War, and (2) to help students learn to think like historians: that is, to imagine how the world looked to people in the past, to try to understand why they did what they did, to formulate historical explanations and test them using historical evidence.


Texts:

Required materials

- Revel online text and quizzes for "The United States since 1865 - HIS 315L (38445)." The access code can be purchased athttps://console.pearson.com/enrollment/ejn4q2

 (Links to an external site.)

 or at the UT Co-op.

- The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield, paperback book. At UT Co-op.

- Four movies, to be assigned and placed on reserve.
Grading:

Assignments

Chapter quizzes

These online quizzes are in the Revel text. The deadline for each chapter is Friday at 6 pm. Extensions will be granted only for sudden documented illness or grave family emergency. Computer and network problems are not acceptable excuses. It is the responsibility of students to monitor their grades for the quizzes. The exams will add up to 40 percent of the semester grade.

Essays

Two, on topics to be assigned. 20 percent total.

Movie responses

Two, from prompts to be given. 15 percent total.

Book report

On The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield. 15 percent total.

Attendance

10 percent.

Too many students spell history b-o-r-i-n-g. They regard history as a jumble of disconnected facts. The word they use to describe history is "irrelevant."

High school history too often consists of little more than lectures, textbooks, worksheets, and memorization of names and dates. In fact, history need not be dull.

In this class, you will be a detective, a myth buster, a problem solver, and a forensic scientist. You will debunk or confirm legends and folklore. You will investigate some of history’s most gripping mysteries and take part in some of history’s biggest debates.

You will uncover the hidden history behind front-page headlines as well as the roots of a host of everyday rituals and customs.

You will examine Hollywood’s version of the past and separate fact from fiction. You will re-fight past battles, re-live key episodes in the past, and ask what-might-have-been.

You will also explore the uneasy relationship between academic history and popular memory—those legends and traditions that exert a much more powerful grip on our imagination.

This class offers an innovative approach to U.S. history from global and multicultural perspectives, ties past events to contemporary issues, and allows you to investigate U.S. history's most gripping mysteries.

Divided into 15 modules that must be completed weekly, the course includes a wealth of sources including maps, film clips, and music—that bring the past to life and allow you to understand the key issues and controversies of U.S. history from a fresh perspective.

Grading is based on multiple-choice questions, essay questions, and interactive activities.

This course examines the chief characteristics of Anglo-American culture from the initial permanent English settlement of British North America in the early seventeenth century to the emergence of provincial societies in the mid-eighteenth century.  Its theme is the settlement and unsettlement of North America as migrants from Europe and Africa mingled with aboriginals already in the New World.  We will look comparatively at different colonizing experiments in North America and the Caribbean, in order to comprehend the varied and often international context within which colonial history took place. At he same time, we will look for the values that shaped early American institutions and social norms and examine them against alternatives both that other contemporary societies offered and that the circumstances of colonial life suggested.  In doing so we will attempt to understand how environment and experience shaped distinctive new world cultures.

This course may be used to fulfill three hours of the U.S. History component of the university core curriculum and addresses the following four core objectives established by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board: communication skills, critical thinking skills, personal responsibility, and social responsibility. It also carries two distribution flags: Cultural Diversity and Writing.

This course carries the flag for Cultural Diversity in the United States. Cultural Diversity courses are designed to increase your familiarity with the variety and richness of the American cultural experience. A substantial portion of your grade will come from assignments covering the practices, beliefs, and histories of at least one U.S. cultural group that has experienced persistent marginalization.

This course also carries the Writing Flag. Writing Flag courses are designed to give students experience with writing in an academic discipline. In this class, you can expect to write regularly during the semester, complete substantial writing projects, and receive feedback from your instructor to help you improve your writing. You will also have the opportunity to revise one or more assignments, and you may be asked to read and discuss your peers’ work. You should therefore expect a substantial portion of your grade to come from your written work.
Readings:

The following books are available at the Bookstore.

Richard Middleton and Anne Lombard, Colonial America. A History, 1565-1776,
4th edition (Oxford, 2011).
Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972; 2000).
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography. Various editions. [Louis P. Masur ed., (Boston, 2016)].
Anthony S. Parent Jr., Foul Means:  The Formation of Slave Society in Virginia, 1660 -1740 (Chapel Hill, 2003).
John Woolman,  Journal.  Various editions. [Phillips P. Moulton, The Journal and Major Essays (Richmond, IN 1971, 2007]

Alternative books for essay #3
Ian Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America  (New York, 1994).
Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeny, Captors and Captives: the 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Boston, 2003)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale:  the Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990).
Woody Holton, Abigail Adams: A Life (New York, 2009).
Course Requirements

All students will attend weekly lectures and discussions that take place in the third class hour.  Discussions will focus on the assigned readings and students will be expected to participate actively. Participation marks will be based on attendance and the instructor’s evaluation of student contributions to discussion. Students are responsible for lecture material along with that contained in the required readings and for any changes to the syllabus that are announced in class.  Although there is some overlap between texts and lectures, lectures do not simply repeat material in the readings. I do not provide copies of lectures and attendees are prohibited from recording lectures and discussions.  A schedule of the required readings is attached.

Written Work:  Students will hand in three short essays.  The first will be a 5-page paper comparing the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and John Woolman. This essay is due on Sept. 18 for peer review, final version due Sept. 25.  The second is a comparison of Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves and Anthony Parent, Foul Means, due on Oct.16 for peer review, final version due Oct. 23. The third is a comparison of EITHER Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale and Woody Holton, Abigail Adams: A Life (New York, 2009), OR Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeny, Captors and Captives and Ian Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America, due on Nov. 13 for peer review, final version due Nov. 27. The second and third papers will be a maximum of 6 pages.
You may choose to hand in ONE of these papers up to a week late. Essays later than one week will be credited as work completed but will receive a mark of zero.
You also may choose to submit a re-written version of paper one.
Examination:  The final examination will cover all material addressed in class and all readings assigned for essays or for consideration in the classroom.  We will discuss the nature of the examinations and essays in class.  

Marking Scheme:

Essay on assigned primary sources (5 pages) – 15%
Comparative essay on Dunn and Parent (7 pages) – 25%
Comparative essay on either Ulrich and Holton or Anderson and Haefeli & Sweeney
(7 pages) – 25%
Class discussion participation - 10%
End-of-Term Examination – 25%
Final marks will include a plus and minus range.

    The purpose of this course is to provide students with a thorough introduction to what is best described as the foundations of American History.  “Establishing America” covers the two centuries of English/British colonization ventures in North America and the ensuing, crucial four decades from the Declaration of Independence in 1775 through the aftermath of the War of 1812.  No later period of United States History compares with these two and a half centuries in contributions to the fundamental shape and character of American society.
    Too often American History courses merely gesture toward a slender list of perspectives on the extremely varied, North American colonial experiences before focusing heavily on the “origins” of the American nation in the Revolution and through the adoption and early implementation of the U. S. Constitution.  What this approach fails to acknowledge properly is that most members of the founding generation grew up in, and were deeply influenced by the colonial/provincial societies their parents and grandparents consciously constructed and adapted to, and that the Revolutionaries inherited. Pre-Revolution experiences and the structures of the various provincial British-American societies mattered in all that ensued. Building on these experiences late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Americans undertook a variety of experiments in politics, economics, social relations and international affairs that – just as the colonial past had done – posed profound questions about ethics and leadership in the nascent American society.
    The establishment of America over the first two decades of Euro-American habitation of North America constitutes a continuum of ethical considerations and choices, which spring from a variety of themes: immigration, both voluntary and forced; the commerce of the Atlantic, both in goods and people; traditional English rights and their metamorphosis in American hands; British and American constitutionalism; experiments with sovereignty, federalism, and the language of rights; the meanings and institutionalization of religious liberty and freedom of speech; claiming, expropriating, and establishing title to land; slavery and various other forms of unfree labor; the role of the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic economies; native American/Euro-American contact, trade, conflict and demographics; various theatres and experiences of violence and warfare; ethnic and racial distinctions; institutional, cultural, and economic Anglicization and Americanization; patriarchy and equality; family structures and gender roles; imperialism, provincialism, nationalism and exceptionalism; monarchy and subjecthood; republicanism and citizenship.  While these topics will inform weekly lectures, readings and discussion, they will be structured around four basic themes; occupation of the land; slavery; loyalty in the Revolutionary struggle; and the meanings of rights and equality in the new republic. These will require students to reflect on and appreciate perspectives that will enrich their capacity for present-day civic mindedness and engagement.

Geographical literacy. This class will participate in a new History Department initiative to improve student geographical literacy using a digital history tool called Cerego. Along with other conceptual dimensions, geographical literacy helps us deepen our understanding of the complex processes of human interaction. You will be required to complete a series of map exercises this semester that are intended to reinforce your grasp of geographical knowledge. These exercises are accessible through Canvas.

This course may be used to fulfill three hours of the U.S. history component of the university core curriculum and addresses the following four core objectives established by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board: communication skills, critical thinking skills, personal responsibility, and social responsibility.

This course also carries the flag for Ethics and Leadership. Courses carrying the Ethics and Leadership Flag equip you with the tools necessary for making ethical decisions in your adult and professional life. Courses carrying this flag expose you to ethical issues and to the process of applying ethical reasoning in real-life situations.


For background and some perspectives on American History students might refer to the UT History Department’s website NOT EVEN PAST  (https://notevenpast.org/teaching-us-history-with-not-even-past/).

Readings:

The following books are available at the Co-op Bookstore:

Eric G. Nellis, An Empire of Regions: A Brief History of Colonial British America, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Eric G, Nellis, The Long Road to Change: America’s Revolution, 1750-1820, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World, revised edition, New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.  
David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution:  From Revolution to Ratification, New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.
Book of Primary Sources.
Course Requirements

All students are expected to attend Monday and Wednesday lectures and to have read the assignments listed for that date in advance of each class. Students are responsible for lecture material along with that contained in the assigned readings and for any changes to the syllabus announced in class.  Although there is some overlap between texts and lectures, lectures do not simply repeat material in the readings. A schedule of the required readings is attached.

I do not provide copies of lectures and attendees are prohibited from recording lectures. No cell phones, tablets, e-readers, iPods, iPads, laptop computers, etc. This is an electronics free classroom.  All laptops, cell phones, and other electronic devices must be turned off at the beginning of class.

Written Work:  Students will hand in one short essay on Nov. 5.  This will be a 5-page paper comparing the analyses in Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World, revised edition, New York: Hill and Wang, 2001, and Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.  Student’s should read the following article as they think about how to compare these two monographs. John Keown, “ America’s War for Independence: Just or Unjust”, Journal of Catholic Social Thought 6(2009), 277-304.
We will discuss how to structure such written comparisons in class. Late papers will be penalized by one full grade per day.

Attendance: Students are expected to attend all classes. After two absences students will be penalized one half mark for each missed class from the assigned total of 5 marks for full attendance.
Test and Examination:  There will be a test made up of multiple choice questions, short answer questions and one longer essay question in the second class period of Week 8 – Mar. 7. There will be a final examination in this course during the end of term examination period.

Marking Scheme:

Map Quiz 5%
Attendance 5%
Test 20%
Comparative essay on Gross and Jasanoff – 30%
End-of-Term Examination – 40%
Final marks will include a plus and minus range.

Partially fulfills legislative requirement for American history.

Course description

Political context affects the way we study the natural world in myriad ways. Scientists compete for state funding, and national policies establish legal boundaries for researchers. Science has equally influenced the development of state institutions and concepts of governance. This course explores the relationship between politics and science by tracing the way that each has changed in the United States from the colonial period to present. Lectures will explore the role that science played in the intellectual, cultural, religious, and political life of the United States. We will also trace the emergence of institutions that create scientific knowledge, with special attention to the relationships between science and the state. The course is accessible to students of all majors. No advanced scientific training is required, though a basic familiarity with U.S. history will be helpful.


Course objectives

By the end of this course, students should be able to:
1.    Narrate a basic history of US science from 1750 to the present.
2.    Use historical context to analyze the development of new scientific ideas.
3.    Explain coproduction and the relationship between politics and science.
4.    Provide alternatives to “Whig histories” of scientific development.
5.    Evaluate conflicting historical interpretations of the same event.
6.    Formulate intermediate-level history of science research questions.
Required texts

Numbers and Rosenberg, The Scientific Enterprise in America: Readings from ISIS (1996) Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-
1970 (2004)
Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997)

All other readings will be available on the course website. You are expected to print these sources and bring the readings to class or to take extensive notes and to bring those notes to class. All textbooks will be available on reserve at the library. Other sources are also available through Project Gutenberg and Archive in PDF, Kindle, etc., format for free. Follow the provided link to access the online sites.
Assessment

5%    Participation
20%    Midterm Exam
20%    Final Exam
10%    Archival Document Analysis 15%    Context Paper
30%    Research Paper

Description:  Widely considered a wellspring for U.S. greatness, immigration has also been an abiding site of our deepest conflicts.  The republican foundations of the United States with its promises of democracy and equality for all seem to strain against ever increasing numbers of immigrants from parts of the world barely conceived of by the Founding Fathers, much less as sources of new citizens.  What is the breaking point for the assimilating powers of U.S. democracy and how much does national vitality rely upon continued influxes of a diversity of immigrants with their strenuous ambitions and resourcefulness?  Today we remain embattled by such competing beliefs about how immigration shapes our nation’s well-being and to what ends we should constrain whom we admit and in what numbers.  

This seminar emphasizes the following themes:  the changing population of the United States from colonial times; ethnic cultures, communities, and cuisines; ideologies concerning eligibility for citizenship and for restricting immigration; the development of immigration law as an aspect of sovereign authority; the entwining of immigration policy with international relations; and the evolution of institutions for immigration enforcement.   

This course may be used to fulfill three hours of the U.S. history component of the university core curriculum and addresses the following four core objectives established by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board: communication skills, critical thinking skills, personal responsibility, and social responsibility.  

This course also carries the flag for Cultural Diversity in the United States. Cultural Diversity courses are designed to increase your familiarity with the variety and richness of American cultural experiences. A substantial portion of your grade stems from assignments concerning the practices, beliefs, and histories of at least one U.S. cultural group that has experienced persistent marginalization.  

Texts/Readings: *main texts are on 2-hour reserve at PCL
*Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (Harper Perennial, 2002 edition)
Supplemental readings are available on Canvas

Grade Distribution: Final grades will be allocated as follows: A 93-100; A- 90-92; B+ 88-89; B 83-87; B- 80-82; C+ 78-79; C 73-77; C- 70-72 and so forth

    Family Immigration Narrative:  10%; 2-page essay
    Midterm: 20% bluebook exam; short essay IDs
Final: 30% bluebook exam; short essay IDs and long essay
    Attendance and class participation: 15%
    Primary document analysis: 25% research and 4-5 page essay

Overview
In this course we will investigate the histories of the Native peoples of North America from the beginning to the present day. Students will learn about the unique and specific histories of indigenous nations in North America, deepening their knowledge of Native cultures, languages, religions, political and economic systems, gender relations, astronomies, cartographies, as well as the internal dynamics that helped propel each nation’s history. The course will also consider commonalities in the experiences of Native peoples. In particular, we will examine the effects of colonialism in great detail, connecting students with a wide array of Native American perspectives on colonial and United States history. You will become familiar with the development of Native American rights in North America and with the many Native leaders who led the struggles to secure them.

Training in Native History

This semester will prepare you for further study in the field of Native American history. Your training will include delving weekly into various archives, both in-person and online, to explore a range of primary sources and discuss them in class. Weekly “Flashback Friday” discussions will help you sharpen your analytical skills.

You will also hone your advanced reading skills, learning how to evaluate works of historical scholarship by their arguments, the evidence they employ, their methodology, and place in the literature. To test your skills in reading, you will complete five “Challenge Statements,” one roughly every two weeks, in which you will summarize the main idea of a work of historical scholarship in 50 words or less.

You will choose for analysis one primary document of particular interest to you. The document can be from any time or place covered in this course. This assignment will be due near the end of the semester. Detailed guidelines will be available in the syllabus.

Online Magazine Project
Working with editorial advisors from UT-Austin’s history department, you will collaboratively write, design, edit, and publish the May 2019 issue (the work will be complete before the semester ends) of a new online magazine that explores unique topics in Native North American history. Detailed guidelines will be available in the syllabus on the first day of class.

Reading for Background, Discussion, and Primary Sources
Textbook for Background Reading: Calloway, Colin G. First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. 5^th Edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Primary Sources, including links to archives, and Discussion Readings will be available each week as assigned. The syllabus will include links to online databases available through UT Libraries and elsewhere on the web.

Grades

Cerego Map Exercises:                  5%

Challenge Statements:                   10% 

Primary Document Analysis:         15%

Midterm:                                            20%

Online Magazine                             20%

Final Examination                            30%   

Partially fulfills legislative requirement for American history.

This course will look at the history of urban economic development within the United States and South Africa, with a special focus on the growth, development, and neglect of low-income racially homogenous communities. Both countries share a racial past and both countries are still trying to find ways to bring its low-income residents into the economic mainstream. Within the United States inner-city communities are now becoming prime business locations because of its close access to downtown and the city’s financial and business markets. Further, emerging entrepreneurs are not only choosing to locate their firms in the ‘hood but they are also using local residents who were previously unemployed or underemployed. The goal of these efforts is to create jobs and income for inner-city residents, instead of relying upon charity and goodwill. A similar market-led approach is taking place in South Africa as well as entrepreneurs and developers are finding ways to bring economic development efforts to the countries notorious townships.  

While these efforts have only recently received widespread media attention, this course will show that the drive for vibrant communities is nothing new. Within the townships of South Africa there has been a sustained drive for economically competitive communities and likewise within inner-city America. This course will look at these efforts within the historical context of apartheid and the post colonial era within South Africa; and in the historical context of post-war and post-civil rights America.

“Thinking Like a Historian” is a lower-division seminar for History majors/potential majors/interested students of history. Its goal is to familiarize students with the problems and practices involved in the interpretation and writing of history. Group writing assignments will require students to engage with historical resources located in on-campus archives (for eg., the LBJ Presidential Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, the Benson Library, and the Harry Ransom Center) to analyze different aspects of the turbulent 1960s, both in the U.S. and around the world. Other facets of the historians’ craft will be explored through reading and short writing assignments about slavery, empire, revolution, and the development of modern capitalism. By the end of the semester students should be able to critically evaluate historical interpretations rather than simply memorize them.

Required Texts:
*Arlette Farge (with Natalie Zemon Davis) The Allure of the Archives (Yale University Press, 2013)
*Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History  (WW Norton, 2000)
*Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History (Bedford/St. Martins, 7th ed, 2012)
 *Additional articles and readings will be posted online

Grading:
Exam 1: 20%
Exam 2: 20%
Group Writing Project 1: 10%
Group Writing Project 2: 15%
Group Writing Project 3: 15%
Weekly Written Responses: 10%
Participation, Attendance, In-class Engagement:  10%

Survey of the ancient Mediterranean from ca. 3000 BC to AD 476. Focus on

the development of ideas and institutions in the Greek and Roman worlds

and on the active cultural exchange among the diverse civilizations of

the broader region that shaped Greek and Roman history and cultural

 identity.

In 2017, Texan journalist Lawrence Wright claimed, “America’s Future is Texas.”1 He emphasized not only the outsized role that Texas has played in national politics recently—with several 20th- and 21st-century presidents coming from Texas and with Texas’ significant role in the creation of the far right conservative movement—but also Texas’ economic and cultural leadership. Lawrence noted, however, that despite with the radical growth that Texas has experienced in recent decades, its society is often sharply divided over issues of race, religion, immigration, access to healthcare, government intervention, and so on—issues divisive around the U.S. today. Is it true that, as Gail Collins wrote in 2012, As Goes Texas, so goes the nation?2 If so, how did we arrive at this Texan Present? How does Texas’ past play a role in defining “America’s Future”?

This course will examine the history of Texas in the 20th century with an eye toward its political, economic, and socio-cultural development. This class is divided into two units that cover, roughly, Texas from Reconstruction to World War II (1865-1945) and Texas from World War II to the Present (1945-2018). As this course comes with a Cultural Diversity flag and is cross- listed with Mexican American Studies, we will especially emphasize the experiences of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, African Americans, and women in the state. By the end of the course, students should have a clear conception of the development of racial and ethnic relations and conflict, political shifts and realignments, and major economic and urban developments in Texas—and hopefully be better prepared to understand how they, as citizens of Texas can influence the direction of a powerful state within the United States.

Class readings may include:

* de la Teja, Jesus F., et al. Texas: Crossroads of North America, 2nd Ed. Boston: Cengage, 2016. (ISBN: 978-1133947387)
* Ladino, Robyn Duff. Desegregating Texas Schools: Eisenhower, Shivers, and the Crisis at Mansfield High. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
* Zamora, Emilio. Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican workers and Job Politics during World War II. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009.

* Study materials; workshop materials; primary sources; and (brief) lecture outlines will be posted to Canvas throughout the semester. [No purchase required.]


Grading based on:
Primary Source Responses 100 points [2 papers @ 50 points each]
In-Class Exams 100 points [2 exams @ 50 points each]
Book Analysis Paper 100 points [1 paper @ 100 points]
Quizzes Only given on an as-needed basis; total points possible raised accordingly
Extra Points Up to five points added to total; awarded in class with Exit Tickets

Your final grade will be determined by taking your total points earned and then by dividing it by the total points possible [300 points]. Grades will be awarded on a plus/minus scale (e.g. 87-89 is a B+; 83-86 is a B; 80-82 is a B-). I will “round up” (e.g. 89.5-89.9 will become an A-).

This course will survey the development of modern science from the early 18th century to the present. We will examine the growth of scientific ideas and institutions and seek to understand the changing place science has held in modern life and thought.

Texts:
Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment,
Charles Darwin, Evolutionary Writings (ed. James A. Secord),
Bruce J. Hunt, Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein,
James D. Watson, The Double Helix (Norton Critical Edition, ed. Gunther S. Stent),
plus additional readings to be posted on Canvas.

Grades will be based on three essay exams (25% each) and a short paper on a topic to be assigned (25%).

This course explores interesting episodes in the history of science, focusing on questions about what aspects of human behavior are essentially determined by biological factors rather than by experiences and society. Changing beliefs about what is natural have affected how some people are treated, so we will discuss the social consequences of such notions. The course will include the following topics: theories of race, Darwin’s works, evolution in schools and U.S. courts, American eugenics and Nazi science, differences between women and men, IQ testing, the controversy about DNA and Rosalind Franklin, studies of twins separated at birth, genetic engineering, ethical issues on cloning animals and humans, biotechnology, the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks, designer babies, biology in forensic science. This is a lecture course, with participation encouraged.

Brazil, the largest nation and economy in Latin America, is a country marked by geographic diversity, cultural complexity, and social inequality. This course examines modern Brazilian history with a focus on political movements and socioeconomic change.  It looks at how various social actors in Brazil--elites, peasants, slaves, workers, women, the military, and indigenous people--have contributed to and been affected by the process of nation-building since Independence.  Through a variety of texts (historic, ethnographic, literary, musical, and sociological) and visual material (film, documentaries, video clips) the course explores key issues in modern Brazilian history: the transition to Independence; slavery and emancipation; export agriculture and oligarchic rule;  social banditry and folk Catholicism; urbanization and marginality; regional disparities and rural poverty; racial discourse and inequality; frontier expansion, colonization and indigenous policy; popular culture and music; military dictatorship and repression; the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s and the turn to neoliberalism in the 1990s; the rise and fall of the Workers Party; and contemporary politics.

Perspectives on Science and Math explores the intellectual, social, and cultural history of science and mathematics, focusing on the 17th century to the present. This is an upper-division history course designed for students in UTeach Natural Sciences. This course has four interlocking goals: to give you an overview of the history of science and math in order to broaden your understanding of subjects you will teach in the future; to enable you to put this broader history and context to work in science and math pedagogy; to improve your ability to research, analyze, and evaluate information; and to improve your writing and communication skills.

This is a Writing Flag course. It is designed to give you experience writing within an academic discipline––in this case, history. You can expect to write regularly during the semester, complete substantial writing projects, and receive feedback to help you revise your writing. You will also have the opportunity to read and discuss your peers’ work. For more information about the benefits and expectations of Writing Flag courses, see http://www.utexas.edu/ugs/core/flags/writing.

Perspectives on Science and Math explores the intellectual, social, and cultural history of science and mathematics, focusing on the 17th century to the present. This is an upper-division history course designed for students in UTeach Natural Sciences. This course has four interlocking goals: to give you an overview of the history of science and math in order to broaden your understanding of subjects you will teach in the future; to enable you to put this broader history and context to work in science and math pedagogy; to improve your ability to research, analyze, and evaluate information; and to improve your writing and communication skills.

This is a Writing Flag course. It is designed to give you experience writing within an academic discipline––in this case, history. You can expect to write regularly during the semester, complete substantial writing projects, and receive feedback to help you revise your writing. You will also have the opportunity to read and discuss your peers’ work. For more information about the benefits and expectations of Writing Flag courses, see http://www.utexas.edu/ugs/core/flags/writing.

Our stereotypical image of an early modern woman is a witch - for some good reasons because thousands of witch trials took place.  In this course, we will look beyond that perspective to explore the complex of material, political, and cultural factors that shaped experiences of gender and family and that shaped attitudes about gender and power in early modern Europe.  The early modern centuries between about 1500 and 1800 were years of tremendous change in many ways – including religious reformations, more powerful governments, global colonial empires and the domestic impacts of colonialism that included the rise of racial categories, and the economic transformation we call the transition to capitalism.  Some features were slower to change, however, especially with regard to family life. We will explore how women's experiences compared to men's - whether as workers, consumers, criminals, political subjects and political actors, peasants or nobles, members of racial, ethnic and religious minorities, spouses or parents.  Along the way, we will explore why some of these dynamics fed into a proliferation of "witches."

Discussion of the assigned readings (see below) will be an important element of this class: you will learn more effectively when you take an active part in the analysis of the material to be covered. Consequently you must expect to read every reading assignment very carefully and thoughtfully. You should come to each class ready to ask questions and contribute observations.

You will need to demonstrate mastery of the readings to do well on the exams.

Warning: absence from class will inevitably have a serious impact on your grade because you cannot participate if you are not present. Each of you may be absent twice with no penalty. For every absence after that, three points will be deducted from your participation grade for each absence not justified by a written explanation. Please note, however, that attendance is the only the first prerequisite for participation, so that perfect attendance and complete silence will result in a grade that reflects only partial fulfillment of participation.

Daily class readings are available on Canvas or online through the Library Catalogue. (Deleted last section here.)

Grading:
Midterm 25%
Final 35%
Reading grids 20%
Witchcraft group projects 10%
Preparation and engagement 10%

This intensive writing course focuses on some of the main topics that have affected rural Latin American society in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, with a view to understanding the causes of some of the tensions and unresolved conflicts affecting Latin America today. Using selective national case studies, the course will discuss the social-agrarian relationships linking landlords and campesinos; the role of the state and the impact of official ideologies embracing (or constraining) indigenous people, such as indigenismo; religion and the Catholic Church; the history of rural institutions, such as the hacienda; and the success or failure of the main land reforms enacted in countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Our focus throughout will be on understanding the different ways in which Latin American peasants have been protagonists in, not merely passive witnesses to, the histories of the countries in which they live. The course will follow a seminar as opposed to strict lecture format: the emphasis throughout will fall on researching and crafting extended written assignments in consultation with the instructor; there will also be elements of peer review, in which students will engage critically with the work of other members of the group. Students will be expected to participate actively in class through responses to readings or presentations.

This course traces the history of the politics of religion, and of the religion of politics, in modern Latin America, with special emphasis placed on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. Chronologically, the course covers begins with a brief survey of the colonial period and then gives special attention to the national period running from independence (circa 1820) up to the Cuban Revolution (circa 1960), after which Church and state entered significantly new and distinctive phases (e.g. Liberation Theology). Thematically, we will examine the various causes of Church-state tension in the aftermath of Latin American independence, and the Church’s multifaceted response sto the gradual rise of political liberalism, nationalism, and secularism. In the second half of the course, we will emphasize significant national cases (e.g. Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala), allowing the course to branch out in a more comparative sense as we proceed. As the focus on questions of devotion as well as power implies, we will not just be looking at the way in which the Church responded to changing political circumstances after the demise of the colonial regime, but at changes in religious practice and meaning, and how these were experienced by ordinary people.

SEMINAR IN HISTORIOGRAPHY: HONORS PROGRAM
Open only to students admitted to the History Honors program.

This seminar introduces students to a range of historical methods, topics, and sources, with no claim to being comprehensive. We will consider how “history” has changed along with other forms of knowledge. We will read different kinds of history (social, intellectual, cultural, and so on). We emphasize research with primary sources that students will be able to use in their theses.

Faculty from the Department of History will lead discussions about their areas of expertise, giving the class examples of documents and sources that historians use, or showing how they generate questions for research. By the end of the semester, each student will have come up with an advisor and a prospectus for the senior thesis she or he will write next year.

This is a reading- and writing-intensive course, and it moves quickly from introductory to advanced work.

REQUIREMENTS:

1) Preparation for and participation in each weekly seminar, including short writing assignments. Reading is about 200 pages a week. (10%)

2) Students will focus and find a topic for their senior thesis and write a draft and final version of the historiography of their subject in the first half of the course (40%).
They will then draft and revise a 10-12 page research prospectus as described below. (40%) The preliminary stages of research entail reading at least 15-20 books, review essays, and articles. They will present this prospectus orally to the class for discussion. (10%)

You will meet with me individually to consult on your topic a little over halfway through the semester. Short topic statements and bibliography are due a week later. We will spend the last three weeks of class in editorial session: discussing the structure, prose, style, and subject of each prospectus. By the time students leave, they will have found a professor in the History Department to advise their Honors thesis work in the senior year.

PROSPECTUS

A prospectus is a “description in advance of a proposed undertaking.” It sets out your topic based on preliminary research. It should identify the problem or event that will be investigated, explain why it is important, survey the historical literature on the subject, describe the primary sources you will use, and discuss how you intend to carry out the work.

The prospectus is not binding; you will certainly change your topic in some way during your senior year, and you may change it entirely. It is nonetheless very important preparation. It also requires substantial background work. I expect you to have looked at and read in at least 10 books, articles, and review essays.

The prospectus should also include a bibliography of secondary and primary sources. You may discuss the usefulness of the sources in either the text of the prospectus or in notes attached to the copies of the sources.

This course examines histories of Africa and travel through eyewitness accounts. Course participants will study journeys Africans have made within and from the continent alongside accounts of travelers visiting Africa from elsewhere. These travelers included migrant laborers, market women, Peace Corps volunteers, enslaved individuals, soldiers, political activists, adopted children, and religious evangelists since the 18th century.

 The course readings and films focus on different groups of travelers in a number of time periods.

 Some of the guiding questions we will consider:

    How did people experience the movement of their bodies from one location to another?

    How has ‘Africa’ taken on different meanings for our travelers?

    What do their narratives indicate about changing conceptions of ethnicity, migration, tourism, citizenship, and the environment in different time periods?

    And how did shifts in medical, transportation, and communication technologies shape their journeys?

Lectures, discussion, reading, and research on selected topics in the field of history.

May be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

Designed for History majors. 

History 350L and 350R may not both be counted unless the topics vary.

Course carries Writing flag. 

Political commentators and scholars alike often describe Chile as one of Latin America’s most “exceptional” countries, identifying it as among the region’s richest, most politically stable, and most “modern” nation-states. But as the history of Chile’s twentieth century reveals, such characterizations stand atop a more complicated—and frequently turbulent—recent past. In 1970, Chile became the first country in the hemisphere to freely elect a socialist government that promised a far-reaching social and economic revolution. However, just three years later the country would be ruled by one of the region’s most brutal twentieth-century dictatorships. While the country experienced gangbusters growth during the 1980s and 1990s, Chile would so too come to hold the infamous distinction as one of the region’s—if not the world’s—most unequal societies.
 
In this writing-intensive seminar, we will investigate this challenging and often contradictory history by discussing—and most importantly, writing about—some of the key political, social, and economic events that underpin contemporary Chilean society. In so doing, we will also use the case of Chile to explore the key issues at stake in Latin America during the global Cold War era. Some of the questions we will ask (and seek to answer) include: what constituted “social democracy” in modern Chile? How did democracy relate to the allure of socialism in the twentieth century? How did political participation shape both individual and collective identities of those who supported Chile’s conservative right, its socialist left, and those who felt excluded from both? In addition, we’ll explore the political and economic role of the United States in shaping Chile’s recent past, while also examining how both traumatic periods of revolution and counterrevolution were experienced by everyday people—at the workplace, within self-constructed neighborhoods, and in the most intimate spaces of family life. Finally, we will examine how processes of peaceful reform and violent counter-reform shaped and reshaped ideas about racial difference, social class, gender, and sexuality.
Required Texts:


Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, et. al, eds., The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2014)
 
Jody Pavilack, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile’s Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Penn State University Press, 2011)
 
Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1986)
 
Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet (W.W. Norton & Co.: 1991)
 
*Additional journal articles and book excerpts will be scanned and uploaded to the course website on Canvas. You will be expected to download and print these readings yourself.
Evaluation and Grading:

*Course Participation, Attendance, and Engagement (10%)
*Skill Assignment #1 (10%): Short paper #1 TBD
*Skill Assignment #2 (10%): Short paper #2 TBD
*Skill Assignment #3 (10%): Short paper #3 TBD
*Core Assignment #1 (5%): Paper on Research Topics & Research Questions, 1 pg
*Core Assignment #2 (10%): Annotated bibliography & outline, ~5-6 pgs
*Core Assignment #3 (5%): First draft of Final Paper, 6-8 pgs
*Core Assignment #4 (10%): 10-minute research presentation to the class
*Core Assignment #5 (30%) Final Research paper, 10-12 pgs  + 2 pg revisions memo

The British Empire at the end of World War II still extended over one fourth of the world and represented a complex, worldwide system.  The seminar will focus on the era of decolonization.   

This seminar is designed as a reading and research course in modern British history—and in the history of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.  Above all it is a class in professional writing.  It includes a cartographical component in which students are required to master the geography of the British Empire.
 
The main requirement of the course is a research paper focusing on one of the three components of British decolonization: the decisions made in Britain itself; the international influence of the United States and the United Nations in the context of the Cold War; and the initiatives by nationalists in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.  The paper in its final form will be about 6,000 words or 20 double spaced pages including notes.  

The writing component will be fulfilled in three ways.  First, critiques of books, approximately one a week (or comparable assignments), each less than 400 words or one page.  Second, a draft of the research paper.  The critiques and draft will be circulated to all members of the class who will make annotations on style as well as substance.  The third stage is for each writer to take note of the comments offered by others and to rewrite the research paper for final submission.

The principal primary source on which the papers will be based is the extraordinary archival collection in British Documents on the End of Empire (BDEEP).  The class sessions will be enriched by a film series produced by Granada Television entitled ‘End of Empire’.

In a general way, the seminar upholds the principles of the Modern History Faculty at Oxford—to enhance (1) intellectual curiosity; (2) conceptual clarity; (3) intellectual flexibility; (4) accuracy and attention to detail; (5) critical engagement; (6) capacity for hard work; (7) enthusiasm for history, literature, and politics; and (8) historical imagination and understanding, that is, the possession of appropriate historical knowledge and the capacity to deploy it.

John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation; W. David McIntyre, Decolonization, 1946-1997; Geoffrey Best, Churchill; Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Oh! Jerusalem; David Carlton, Suez Crisis; and Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning.  
Grades are determined by attendance and participation in discussion (25%); weekly critiques (25%) and the quality of the final research paper (50%).  Final grades include plusses and minuses.

This course examines seminal texts and significant episodes in the intellectual and political history of Western Europe and its Atlantic colonies during the later seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.  In doing so, the seminar aims to understand the intellectual and cultural revolution known as the Enlightenment as well as the relationship between it and the political revolutions of the period, particularly the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century (c. 1640-1660), the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, the American Revolution of 1775-1783, the French Revolution of 1789-1815, and the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804.

Books:
1. Margaret C. Jacob, ed., The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017).
2. Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (Modern Library, 2003).
3. Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996).
4. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Hackett, 1980).
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Donald A. Cress (Hackett, 1992).
6. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. James W. Ellington, 2nd edition (Hackett, 2001).
7. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro, trans. Henry R. Bishop (Digireads, 2011).


Grading:
Attendance and Participation (20%)
Weekly Reading Responses (15%)
Mid-Term Essay (25%)
Term Paper (40%)

This seminar will analyze the effects of Hitler’s dictatorship upon German society, politics, economy and culture. It will explore the consequences of defeat, occupation, the Cold War and the political division of Germany after 1945. It will also compare and contrast the history and development of East and West Germany in the years between 1949 and 1989. Finally, the course will examine some of the consequences and prospects created by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the unification of East and West Germany in 1990.

REQUIRED READINGS:
(Books marked with * are available as electronic resources from the UT-Library system at no charge with your UT-EID. Please feel free to read these materials on-line if you prefer.)
*Doris Bergen, War and Genocide, A Concise History of the Holocaust(Rowman and Littlefield,2016-third edition)
*Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge.How East and West Germany Made the Iron Curtain(Oxford, 2012)
Hanna Schissler,editor, The Miracle Years. A Cultural History of West Germany 1949-1968(Princeton,2001)
Peter  Schneider, The Wall Jumper. A Berlin Story (Chicago,1983)
We will also be working intensively with documents and images on this Website
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/home.cfm
COURSE REQUIREMENTS/GRADING
All written assignments for this course are evidence based and must be footnoted according to Chicago Manual of Style guidelines

The assignment are:
(1)You will be required to write one longer analytical essay(6-8 pages).To complete this assignment you will need to respond to the prompt by using the relevant primary source materials from the Website, “German History in Documents and Images” http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/ as well as those assigned readings that you consider relevant to the particular prompt you have chosen. This assignment is worth 30% of your final grade (Due date=TBA)

(2)In addition, you are each required to give two in-class reports(details to follow) on images I will select from the Websites of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/ and  from “German History in Documents and Images”
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/home.  To complete these assignments you will need to do research on the provenance, historical context and use of each image.
Each in-class presentation should be sent to me as an essay (2-3 pages in length)no later than one week after you present in class. (These assignments are each worth 15 % of your final grade)

(3)the final assignment for this class is to construct a Power Point(or alternative program) presentation on a specific theme or period  covered by this course using relevant documents and images you have selected from the Website, “German History in Documents and Images” http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/ (20% of your final grade/details to be discussed in class). Due no later than the end of the day in May on which a final exam would be scheduled for this course.

Class attendance and participation count for 20 per cent of your final grade. I will be using the full range of +/- grades

One historian has described Poland during the Second World War as “the devil’s playground.” During the war, 1 in 5 Pole died, hundreds of thousands were displaced, entire cities, regions, and communities destroyed. The Germans murdered almost all of Poland’s Jews and made the country the staging ground for the Holocaust. This course examines the occupation of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union and the ways in which this dual occupation impacted people and their communities. We will explore topics such as the social and racial experiments undertaken by German and Soviet authorities; mass displacement and interethnic relations; collaboration and resistance; genocide and ethnic cleansing, as well as the ways in which the memory of the Second World War in Poland has evolved.

Texts (subject to change):
•    Wesley Adamczyk, When God Looked the Other Way: An Odyssey of War, Exile, and Redemption (The University of Chicago Press, 2004)
•    Jerzy Andrzejewski, Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1945)
•    The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto (originally published 1945)
•    Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Jedwabne, Poland (Penguin, 2000).
•    Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World (Georgetown University Press, reprint edition, 2013)
•    Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2012)
•    Course reader

Attendance and Participation                30%
Book Essay I                         15%
Book Essay II                        15%
Group Project (Presentation)                40%

This course explores important episodes in the history of biology regarding the classification of human races. For ages, human groups have endured conflicts with one another over racial differences and prejudices. However, according to many biologists and scientists, human races do not even exist. We will discuss how bodily traits such as skin color have affected how scientists and societies struggle to understand human differences.

We will analyze racism in several contexts, such as the Spanish Inquisition, the history of slavery in the U.S., the history of eugenics, the Civil Rights era, etc. We will discuss how classifications of races have changed over time in the works scientists such as Georges, Buffon, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Blumenbach, Charles Darwin, and others. We will analyze claims from popular books in light of primary historical sources. We will also trace the evolution of categories such as “black,” “white,” “Asian,” “Hispanic,” etc. We will discuss why such categories have varied in different places. We will especially analyze how racial categories have changed over time in government and institutions, such as the U.S. Census, and Texas public schools and universities.

Students will each freely propose topics that draw their curiosity. Students will be trained to make original historical findings rath.er than echo statements from history books. Throughout the semester, the students will present findings from their ongoing research projects

The revolutionary turmoil of the 1917 Revolutions, and the
Civil War the Communists' seizure of power triggered, allow us to examine
in depth the political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics at work in
early twentieth-century Russia. The Russian Revolution, which began in
1905, provides much of the prism through which we view processes of
revolutionary change. Moreover, the mass and variety of scholarly attention
lavished on it makes Revolutionary Russia an ideal subject for studying
different approaches to history. The issue of possible alternative outcomes,
which has always engaged Western historians of the Russian Revolution, is
now of considerable interest in the former Soviet Union, which once again
finds itself in a state of flux, facing an uncertain future.

Violence, famine, and epidemic disease took more than fifty million Soviet lives between 1914 and 1953.  Over half of these deaths occurred between 1941 and 1945, when the Soviet Union fought the most savage and immense war in history.  No other nation ever endured anything like it.  The Soviets defeated the invading Axis powers despite the purge of its military leadership in 1937, horrible mistakes at the outset of the war, and widespread hostility within the country to the Stalinist regime.  We will focus on the impact of the Stalinist state’s brutal revolution from above, popular and elite fears and beliefs during the Great Terror, the death and destruction during the German occupation, as well as the courage and barbarism in the fight to the death on the Eastern Front, especially during the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.  Evaluating the role of Stalin (or “Uncle Joe” as the American and British public knew him) and his inner circle, as well as what the Stalinist Revolution and “Great Patriotic War” meant for ordinary Soviets, will be of particular concern.

In a self-proclaimed “nation of immigrants” such as the United States, our narratives of migration, race, and ethnicity emphasize themes of acculturation and assimilation symbolized by the metaphor of the “melting pot.”  In this class, we will explore experiences of migration, adaptation, and settlement from the perspective of an emigrant society--China--which has one of the longest and most diverse histories of sending merchants, workers, artisans, diplomats, missionaries, and so forth, overseas.  Over the last millennia, Chinese have migrated around the world and made homes under a great range of adversity and opportunity, producing many fascinating stories of encounters with difference and the building of common ground. Drawing upon this rich set of narratives, we will consider some of the following topics:  As ethnic Chinese have moved and settled in so many places among such diverse societies, what is Chinese about the Chinese diaspora? What kinds of skills and attributes have helped Chinese to become arguably one of the most successful migrant groups? What do Chinese share in common with other migrant groups? How do Chinese adapt their identities and cultures under different circumstances?  What can Chinese experiences of migration contribute to contemporary debates and perceptions of migrants and different kinds of migration?
Texts:
Chirot, Daniel and Anthony Reid, ed. Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Kuhn, Philip A. Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Chan, Shelly. Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Duke 2018)
 
Hsu, Madeline. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and Southern China, 1882-1943 (Stanford 2000)

Roberts, J.A.G., China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West. London: Reaktion, 2002.

Wang Gungwu. The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.


Grading:
25 % Class participation and attendance

24 % Two 2-3 page book reviews

36 % 9-10 page research paper

10 % In-class presentation of research

5% peer review

This seminar course provides an overview of race, class, gender, and sexuality constructs in the late 19^th and early 20^th century using the public trials of women. Students will investigate the trials of women like Rosa Lee Ingram and Angela Davis in the context of their historical moment while also exploring how these women shaped, and were shaped by, contemporaneous definitions of rape, civil disobedience, sexual harassment, and self-defense. Students will examine primary media coverage of the trials along with secondary sources on race, gender, and queer theory to learn how these historical moments shaped and reflected public understandings of womanhood, race, class, and sex. By the end of the course, participants will have a more nuanced understanding of American history and the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexuality shape public opinions of womanhood today.

In this course, students will examine, through discussions, lectures, and an extended exercise in historical role playing, the precipitant events and ideas leading up to the American Declaration of Independence in July 1776. The first half of the semester will be comprised of lectures, readings, and discussions on the Imperial Crisis between Britain and the British American colonies. The second half of the semester will be organized around the “Reacting to the Past” game: “Patriots, Loyalists, and Revolution, in New York City, 1775-1776” (created by William Offutt). At the start of the game, students will each be assigned a “character” (who might be a patriot, loyalist, or neutral, wealthy, “middling,” poor, or slave) who they will portray through the subsequent six class sessions, moving through time from the spring of 1776 until the summer of 1776. Students must individually determine, describe, and depict how they believe their character would respond to historical events, and attempt to persuade others to support their position. Collectively, the class will decide if New York City will decide to join the revolution and declare independence or support the King in his effort to suppress the rebellion. During this half of the course, besides their active participation in the “game,” students will each write several “position papers” explaining their assigned character’s perspective on changing events.

Books

Boyd, Nan Alamilla, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965

Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960

Orleck, Annelise, Rethinking American Women’s Activism (Routledge). Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography

Dreyer, Thorne, Alice Embree, and Richard Croxdale. Celebrating the Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground Newspaper

In this seminar students will explore the experience of American women, in sickness and in health. Students will learn about medical and biological views of woman and women’s health, the social context of those views, the development of medical practices and, indeed, a new medical specialty, for the treatment of illness and debility. This study of American women focuses on the 19th and 20th century and looks at the experience of Native-American women, African-American women, Latinas, working class women, and white middle- and upper-class women. Health topics include menarche and menstruation, childbirth, birth control and abortion, gynecological disorders and reproductive organ cancers, as well as mental health and mental illness.

Assigned reading will include:
Judith Walzer Leavitt, Women and Health in America, 2nd ed., 1999.
Dorothy and Richard Wertz, Lying-In:  Childbirth in America
Barron Lerner, The Breast Cancer Wars, 2001
AND several scholarly essays posted on Canvas on a variety of related topics

Class participation = 30% of course grade
Writing assignments = 70% of course grade
Three 3-5 page essays = 14% each; for total of 42% of course grade;
8-10 page essay = 28% of course grade

The black power movement has not only shaped how we think of American society and race relations, but also how we think about gender roles and gender equality. This course examines the movement through the experiences of African American women activists as well as gender and sexuality constructs that prevailed during the second half of the twentieth century. The class will familiarize students with the history of the black power movement and examine scholarship about how femininity, masculinity, and heterosexuality shaped and were shaped by the struggle. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with the leading female figures of the movement as well as be able to engage in critical debates about the intersection of gender, sexuality, and African American activism.  

The French revolution is one of the most famous events in history. Historians, social scientists, and politicians have studied and debated it for over two centuries, and they still have not resolved the fundamental questions it raises. Why does a regime collapse? How is a new state built? Why are some revolutions peaceful while others become protracted and violent? The human drama, too, of this tumultuous decade and a half is irresistible. How were extraordinary careers made and then lost? How did people take sides? How did ordinary people survive?
            In this course, we’ll use the French revolution to think about all these questions concretely. We have three aims, and they are all related. The first is to help you master the major events and developments of the revolution itself. The second is to understand what those events meant at the time and how their importance has been magnified since – how, in other words, they have produced classic political arguments about the conditions for democracy, the sources of rights, and the process of historical change itself. The required readings represent some of those arguments. Third, we consider how the revolution has shaped the world, and how it compares with other revolutions, including ones going on right now.


Texts:
Rousseau, The Social Contract
William Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short History
Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight
Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution
David Bell, Napoleon, A Biography

Grading:
•    2 4-5 page take home papers (25% each)  (total 50% of grade**)
•    1 comprehensive test (25%)
•    group political club assignments (25%).
•     points deducted for more than 2 absences and points added for participation in discussion sessions if we have them.Historians care about writing. It is impossible to separate form from content, and both count in your grade. Check your grammar, sentence structure, and word usage. Go to the writing center. Have someone read and comment on your paper. Give yourself time to revise.

In many ways, what we now call the United States began as a national entity as a blank slate.  As late as two hundred years ago, there was no conception of what it meant to be American.  Yet, within seventy-five years, this entity would fight its most bloody and vicious war ever over insistence upon this very identity. 

This course traces the concept of the American identity in cultural terms from the time of first settlements up until the Civil War.  We will study not politics per se but political ideas and institutions as well as such subjects as religion, work, gender roles, race, painting, literature, philosophy, the law, and social reform.  Throughout the course and especially in the assigned reading the emphasis will be upon the interaction of the lives of ordinary people including women, Native Americans, ethnic immigrants, and African Americans and the newly developing ideas and institutions that helped create this new American identity.  The books, indeed, will all be about very specific ordinary people—except for the very extraordinary Frederick Douglass—and the impact of a rapidly changing society upon their lives.

This course explores how different communities organized around identifiers such as race, ethnicity, national origin, class, gender, and ideology have negotiated with and contributed to changing conceptions of American identity. This course follows a rough chronology of the past 150 years, demonstrating changes and consistencies in social attitudes regarding individual, communal, and national identities, revealing a century and a half of political and social conflicts that complicate narratives of national consensus.

A half century after the high point of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., most American students learn about the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1957 Little Rock conflict over school desegregation, the 1963 March on Washington, and the fire hoses in Birmingham. Far fewer encounter the less-televised moments of civil rights history, the meanings of freedom that included but went beyond desegregation, and the breadth of participation by local people. It is even less common to consider other movements that paralleled the black freedom movement among, for example, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. Taking a comparative perspective, this upper division lecture course explores these aspects of the civil rights era. It also examines their larger historical context within American culture from the Second World War to the present. Finally, we consider questions about the writing of history: What does it mean to look back at such historic events with the benefit of hindsight?  How did they come about?  What changed?  What did not?  


Possible texts-
Cone, James H . Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare            :
Mankiller, Wilma. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People.
Garcia, Mario T. Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice
Martin, Waldo E.  Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents
Sellers, Cleveland.  The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC          
Strum, Philippa. Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican American Civil Rights.
Takaki, Ronald.  Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II

Three reading handouts  (5% each, 15% total)
Three in-class exams  (20% each, 60% total)
Five-page essay  (25%)
Regular class attendance (5%)

Subject

For more than a century, the presidency has occupied the center of American politics. Yet the modern presidency bears faint resemblance to the institution the founders created in the 1780s. This course will examine the presidency and the individuals who have held it, with an eye toward discovering trends of historical and contemporary interest. Topics will include the presidency in the Constitution, the emergence of political parties, the role of the president as diplomat-in-chief, the presidency and the sectional crisis, the president at war, the emergence of the United States as a world power, the president as a celebrity, the family lives of presidents, and the president and the evolving media.

Method

An essential part of the course will be the attempt to understand what goes into presidential decisions. Successful presidents differ from unsuccessful presidents chiefly in their ability to make good decisions: to do the right thing. How does a president know what is the right thing? Whose interests and opinions does he weigh? How does he enact or enforce right decisions? Students will examine case studies of crucial presidential decisions. By close reading of primary historical documents – letters, diaries, speeches, government documents, newspaper accounts – students will reconstruct the presidential decision process. They will make the arguments for and against presidential decisions. They will explain and defend the decisions they would have made in the president’s place.
Required books

George Washington, by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn
Thomas Jefferson, by Joyce Appleby
Woodrow Wilson, by H. W. Brands
Harry S. Truman, by Robert Dallek
Richard M. Nixon, by Elizabeth Drew
Case study materials
Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase
Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation
Theodore Roosevelt and Panama
Wilson and the Lusitania
Truman and the atom bomb
Nixon and the Pentagon Papers

Assignments
Daily in-class writing assignments (100 words each)
Two book reviews (500 words each)
Three case studies (1000 words each)
Grading

Daily writing assignments: 25 percent
Book reviews: 25 percent
Case studies: 50 percent

This course examines the history of West Africa from around ca. AD 1000 to the present. The approach focuses on key themes within a chronological framework. The syllabus is divided into four major eras: States and State Formations till 1800; the Nineteenth Century; Colonial period; and the Post-colonial. The course emphasizes key regional innovations generated by women, farmers, political leaders, and others. As many of the events took place in the concept of a "global world", the connections between West Africa and other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas are woven into the weekly lectures. West Africa operated but at the regional level, but also as part of a larger African continent and the Atlantic World. Local and regional events are treated in relations to global events and their consequences.
 
Course Objectives:
    1    To learn how to assess historical materials (their relevance to a given interpretative problem, their reliability and their importance) and to determine the biases present within particular scholarship. These include not only historical documents, but literature and films as well.
    2    To identify and discuss the main themes in West African history.
    3    To recognize the dynamic nature of African history and culture, and to apply new knowledge of the different agencies that have impacted upon the region.

Required Texts:
Course package, one fiction, and primary documents
 

This course reaches back to the first centuries of Protestantism in Central Europe, from about 1400 to about 1700. The Czech Lands, under the names of Bohemia and Moravia, and under the dominion of the Habsburg Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, were heavily implicated in the various breaks from and returns to Catholicism, as the reformation started by Luther gave way to the counter-reformation of the organized Catholic Church, resisting the fracturing of its One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. This hotbed of religious dissidence pitted newly emerging Protestant groups on several sides of each doctrinal and political issue that arose as the region sought its religious identity: Utraquists, Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Czech Brethren, and others.  

The course will explore the theologies, politics, and personal identities that emerged, and passed away in this era through the accounts in primary sources, including the writings of the reformers as well as through the lenses provided by current scholarship. In addition, the course examines the visual arts and music (especially hymns) that played such a huge role in this battle for land, power, hearts, and minds shaping the lives of believers and non-believers alike. The course concludes with an examination of the evolutions within Catholicism reflected in the Catholic catechism as a result of the Counter-Reformation.

Britain in the Victorian age has been subject to a great deal of myth-making. It is often seen as a prudish age in which women were kept in the home and children were seen and not heard. This course will offer a more realistic view of the period, as well as exploring how such visions of the Victorian era came about in the twentieth century.

The course is intended to introduce students to the main contours of social and cultural British history both in Britain and in its burgeoning empire. It will examine the paradoxes and contradictions that characterize late eighteenth and nineteenth-century British society, and explore what the idea of “being British” might be said to mean at this time. ‘The World of the Victorians’ offers a broad survey of Victorian social and cultural history, and will include such topics as religion, sexuality, gender, class, family life, the countryside and the city, science and society, and much more.

This course focuses on 20th century France, with an emphasis on three critical conflicts: World War One, World War Two, and the Algerian war.  
      At the beginning of the 20th century, France stood as a beacon of democracy, individual rights, and cultural unity. In 1940, France became the most dramatic case of the sudden and devastating collapse of all that –of the corrosive effects of the Great Depression, political polarization, xenophobia, and authoritarianism.
      Why did France (and Europe) collapse? How did the country (and the continent) recover? We will look at the victory of World War I, the defeat of 1940, collaboration and resistance, and then World War II’s difficult aftermath. France was an empire as well as a nation-state, and we will study how the violent dissolution of that empire, especially the Algerian war, has contributed to creating the country we will visit in May.

Texts:
Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth
Hélène Berr, The Journal of Hélène Berr
Marguerite Duras, The War

Grading:
Attendance is required, as per Normandy regulations.
- Discussions of reading, lectures, and films, and short writing assignments: 20 %. Since this is a small class,
participation and quality of participation matter. Prepare carefully, and be prepared to talk or write about the readings.
Listen to each other. Be prepared to summarize another person’s argument, especially when you disagree with it. Do not
consider your own position final. Bring everyone in to the discussion. Discussion is a collective as well as an
individual responsibility.
- 3 short papers: 2 of them 4 pages (25% each); one 6 pages (30%)

Topics in European History.

May be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

May be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

The main objective of the course is to understand the role of maps in the creation of Latin America as a specific sort of place.  As such, the course itself will allow students to become familiar with a broad overview of Latin American history from Pre-Columbian civilizations to the modern period.

May be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

This is a three-part course that examines the shifting nature of modernity between precolonial and colonial periods in the Indian subcontinent. The first part immerses students in plural ways of thinking, inhabiting and performing gender. They will be asked to read Sufi and Bhakti poetry, distinguish between biological personhood and social selfhood, place relationships of men and women in wider matrixes of kinship, caste-jati, economy and class formations. The second part will enable students to explore British colonial legal, administrative and economic processes in 1700-1900. These processes reconstituted older codes of gender as well as the structures within which women experienced marriage, abortion, inheritance, divorce and death. In the final segment, each student will evaluate how these developments empowered some women while disabling others. They will learn to assess the contradictory movements by undertaking direct research into one of the reform movements of the nineteenth or twentieth century, or by writing a review essay based on the available books on this theme in the UT library.


Required Reading: 1 text book, 1 novel, and multiple articles and primary documents posted by the instructor on Canvas ( Students must buy:  Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge University Press, revised edition) and  Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice Candy Man (older title) Cracking India (new title, Penguin Books, 1989, 1991, 2006).


Required Written Work: 1 map quiz (10), 2 short responses (20) , 1 mid-term with IDs (30), 1 final essay (20).

Grading is based on Attendance (10), in-class discussion of a document (10), and all segments of written work (80)

(Meets with HIS 364G)

Carries the Global Cultures Flag

In Chinese history, food and healing shared the same set of cosmological assumptions, all of which had to do with harmonizing the “vital energy,” “breath” or “life force” (qi) of the body with the mind. The Chinese holistic approach to the concept of “well-being” by eating, taking medicine and engaging in the healing arts, was to ensure that all of these activities created a healthy balance. Lectures, discussion and coursework will focus on the cultural, historical, social, and scientific background against which the relationship of food and healing have evolved through history. The course will address how this holistic approach has manifested in China and Taiwan today, and form the basis of the final research inquiry projects, some of which may also be applied to Austin and Houston locales.

Introduction – What is the connection of food and healing in Chinese history?

Section I – Concepts of well-being, the mind and body, “health and healing”

Section II – History of relationship between food and healing, food as medicine

Section III – Healing Practices in China and Taiwan

Required:

E.N. Anderson, The Food of China (Yale, 1990)

Paul U. Unschuld, trans. Karen Reimers, What is Medicine – Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing (University of California Press, 2009)

            Further Reading (selections available on Canvas/Files)

On December 5, 2013, the world mourned the loss of international icon: Nelson Mandela.

As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward a multiracial government and majority rule. His story is certainly one that is rooted in South African political history. Yet, his life, especially after enduring twenty-seven years of unjust imprisonment, captivated the world. He was revered as a champion of human rights and racial equality. As the former president of South Africa and a recipient of the Nobel peace prize, he became fixed in public consciousness as a remarkable model of supreme tolerance, generosity, grace, and reconciliation. This course relies on the personal and political history of Nelson Mandela to examine the history of modern South Africa. It seeks to unpack the Mandela as a mythical figure by examining some of the key experiences that shaped him as a man, revolutionary, and respected elder statesman. It will draw heavily on an array of primary evidence ranging from Mandela’s own writings, to government reports, contemporary newspaper articles and books, as well as popular art, films, and music. It critically traces his development across a range of issues from resistant strategies, gender, Pan-Africanism, as well as multiracialism, and nonviolence—hoping to give life to one of the most powerful and inspiring stories of the 20th century.

May be repeated for credit when the topic titles vary.

This course surveys the history of South Asia during the era prior to British colonial rule.  It begins ca. 1200 with the establishment of Muslim political power in North India and ends ca. 1750 with the emergence of British dominance in East India.  The large states which emerged in this period – the Delhi Sultanate, the Vijayanagara kingdom of South India, and the Mughal empire – incorporated  regions of South Asia that had previously been politically divided and stimulated the circulation of ideas, peoples, and goods throughout the subcontinent and beyond.  The increased scale of these political networks led to greater uniformity and communication in the society and economy of South Asia, as well as the growth of a pan-Indian elite culture.  At the same time, the diversity of South Asian culture and society increased during the timespan from 1200 to 1750, due to the influx of peoples and religions of foreign origin coming overland from Afghanistan and Persia and also overseas from Europe and elsewhere.   The roots of contemporary South Asia -– an area that is distinctly different from other parts of the world yet is also very diverse internally – thus lie in the precolonial era.
Texts:
1) C. Asher & C. Talbot, India before Europe
2) Banarsidas, Ardhakathanak: A Half Story, trans. Rohini Chowdhury
3) excerpts from The Rehla of Ibn Battuta, Hasan Sizji's Morals of the Heart, 
    Baburnama, Humayunnama, Michael Fisher's Visions of Mughal India etc.
Grading:
2 papers (4-6 pps each)= 40%
2 exams (ID & essay))= 50%
1 set of discussion questions=   5%
attendance & participation=   5%

For almost seventy years, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has influenced significantly our understanding of Second Temple Judaism, the formation of the Bible, and the origins of the religious movements of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. This course presents an in-depth study of the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to understand better the development of law, interpretation, ritual, messianism, apocalypticism, and prayer in the late Second Temple period. This course will include discussion of the archaeology of the Qumran community, textual production and transmission in antiquity, scribal practices in antiquity, and pseudonymous authorship.

The borderland occupies a prominent space in the political and social imaginations of both the United States and Mexico. For nearly two hundred years the border has provoked intense hostility and rancor. But it has also engendered cooperation and has fueled prosperity. This course invites students to go well beyond the clichés, stereotypes, and anecdotes that inform most discussions of the border, and challenges them to use the historical record to think in innovative ways about the borderland.

Grading:

• Participation 20%
• Exam 1 40%
• Exam 2 40%

Partially fulfills legislative requirement for American history. May be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

Description: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Great Britain was the world’s dominant power and chief proponent of a liberal international order.  By the middle of the twentieth century, a badly weakened Britain was mostly replaced by the United States in those roles.  But British thinking about diplomatic and military affairs exerted a strong influence on American strategy, and the two nations formed what became known as the “Special Relationship.”  This course, to be held in London as a Maymester, will explore the diplomatic and military history of the United Kingdom and Great Britain and especially how the two nations have interacted and shaped each other’s national security policies and visions of global order.  Classroom sessions will include faculty guest instructors from the renowned War Studies Department of Kings College London, and the course will be supplemented with regular field visits to historic sites in London and throughout the United Kingdom.  The group will also make a visit to the battlefields of Normandy.  

Possible readings include:
Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945
Robert Kagan, The World America Made
Packet of photocopied essays and documents

Active participation in seminar (40 percent of course grade); daily reading response papers (20 percent); journal of approximately 20 pages due at the end of the program (40 percent).  

This course introduces undergraduates to the complex and controversial history of the wars fought in Vietnam from 1941 to the 1980s.  It will focus especially on American intervention, but students should be aware that the course will devote careful attention to Vietnamese history as well as the history of French, Japanese, British, and Chinese interventions in Indochina.  In this way, the course will attempt to place the American war in the broad context of colonialism, nationalism, communism, and cold war.  

The class will begin by considering the development of Vietnamese nationalism and communism during the period of French colonialism.  It will then examine the profound impact of the Second World War, which brought about, in succession, Japanese, Chinese, and British intervention before the country fell once again under French domination.  The French war (1946 to 1954) will receive careful attention before the class shifts its focus to the United States for the second half of the semester.  Lectures and readings will consider many of the major controversies associated with the American war:  Why did the United States intervene despite the lack of tangible American interests in Vietnam?  To what extent and why did American policymakers misunderstand the nature of the war?  Was the war “winnable” in any meaningful sense?  If so, why did the United States fail to achieve its objectives?  What social, cultural, and political legacies has the war produced in the United States and Vietnam?

Class time will consist of lecture, film clips, and discussion.  Students will be expected to read approximately 150 pages a week.
Possible readings include:
Mark Philip Bradley, The Vietnamese War
Christian Appy, Working Class War
Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect
George Herring, America’s Longest War
William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American

Requirements will likely include a few reading quizzes (25%), a paper of approximately 5-6 pages (25 %), a midterm examination (25 %), and a final (25%).  Students will have the opportunity to improve their grades through class participation but not through extra credit assignments.

Course Description:

The histories of the United States and Mexico have long been intertwined. The societies and economies of both nations are also interdependent. This course examines the nature of this relationship, beginning with the U.S.-Mexico War in 1846 and culminating in the present day. Though interactions between both countries have often been fraught with tension, we will strive in this course to understand the complexities of the bilateral relationship in ways that go well beyond oversimplified narratives of unauthorized migration and smuggling. In particular, we will focus on the social dimensions of trade, environmental history, and the relationship between Mexican history and the history of Mexican Americans.

Summary: This Globalized Classrooms course will ask students to consider the impact of visual culture (photographs, documentary film, and video) on practices of political violence in the last 200 years. Students will pursue a research project focused on a specific event or theme.  Students’ archival research will concentrate itself on the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) on the Université de Paris Nanterre campus and the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) located at the University of Texas, Austin.  This archival research will be framed theoretically and methodologically with prior readings and preparation.  Students will work in mixed teams of UT and Nanterre students who will coordinate their efforts via electronic media and research blogs.  Teams will produce a final multimedia project and papers presenting their team’s findings and conclusions.

Topic/Problematique: The mass proliferation of images has changed political violence in the modern era in important ways. Governments can no longer hide violent practices but must reckon with the impact of factual images on public opinion.  At the same time, films and photography can manipulate viewers or indulge reactionary voyeurism and sadism, such as the phenomena known as “militainment” wherein wars are seen as entertainment.  There is also the problem of what is called today “fake news” deliberately manipulated evidence, that can draw an epistemological fog across troubling events.  The dynamic of this problem connecting violence, images, and politics can be traced within the genre of wartime photography and films.  For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, pioneer British photographer Roger Fenton stunned viewers with his stark images of the Crimean War (held at the HRC). Instead of the action and heroism previously portrayed in paintings, his photographs showed the chaos and confusion of the battlefield with all the realism of the new medium.  When Matthew Brady included corpses in his US Civil War photographs the impact was sealed.  War was no longer a simple theatre of glory but had to be approached in its “terrible reality and earnestness” as the New York Times wrote in 1862.  Early war photography struggled nonetheless to emancipate itself from traditional views. Its incapacity to reflect the heroic battles of the illustrated papers' engravings disappointed operators and audiences alike in the first decades of the new media. By the 1900s, technological changes modified the perspective and a new face of battle emerged from the “kodakisation” of photographic practices.
The realism of photographs and films certainly did not put a stop to war, but it intensified and transformed struggles on the battlefield of public opinion.  This can be seen at the end of the twentieth century. Thus, the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos transformed global public opinion against U.S. practices in occupied Iraq.  Outside of war zones, the films and photos documenting migrant suffering have also mobilized public opinion in important ways (see these BDIC films).  The photographs and films of social movements have also moved politics, such as the struggles around civil rights, decolonization (see Eli Kagan archive BDIC), student and workers’ movements (see Raymon Depardon’s photos of 1968 Massacre in Mexico City held by the HRC). In all these cases, visual media cast unflattering light on violence.  In many cases visual images can humanize victims of political violence, like Vladimir Ablamski’s rare photos of life inside the Soviet Gulag (held at the BDIC).
Of course, photographs and films can work to reinforce, legitimate, and extend violence. Examples of this include “embedded” images and their highly partial vision of violence; macabre photos and films intended as terrifying warnings to enemies (like the 1871 photograph of bodies of Parisian worker killed in the suppression of the Commune, held by the HRC); hostage photos and political snuff films, or more recently homemade battlefield videos made by combatants who give a grassroots image of themselves, often in a highly unflattering light. Thus the political work of visual culture and violence emerges in varied and unpredictable ways.  It will be the task of students in this course to historicize this question by working on specific events in team projects researching original archival sources.

Course work and organization: In this course, UT students will collaborate with students in the Department of Anglophone Studies, Université Paris Nanterre.  The main focus will be on student research in primary historical sources, focusing on the rich collections held by the Harry Ransom Center the Harry Ransom Center and La Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine.  These two archives rank among the richest collections in the world for photographic and film sources, giving students an unrivaled research experience.

Students will combine their research projects with readings that will provide the necessary perspectives to effectively contextualize their sources and pose historiographically meaningful questions to them.  Course work and research will connect across the Atlantic with simultaneous teaching technologies along with asynchronous course work and discussions via a shared Canvas site.   The combined UT-Paris Nanterre student teams will cultivate cross cultural perspectives to questions of common concern. English will be the language of instruction and research.


REQUIRED TEXTS:
You will need to purchase the following books (order placed at University Coop), or use reserve copies in the Perry-Castañeda Library.  Some titles are also available electronically through the library catalogue.
•    Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (selections).
•    Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (selections).
•    Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (selections).
•    Zahid R. Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (selections)
•    Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All – Four Photographs from Auschwitz (selections)
•    Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence  (selections)
•    James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (selections)
•    Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Additional required readings, as noted in schedule of class meetings, will be available electronically via Canvas.  

Other: Required material in the course also includes several films.  Students will watch these on their own prior to the scheduled discussion.  Please see the schedule of class meetings.

This lecture course explores the most significant political, religious, social, economic and cultural developments in seventeenth-century England. The unifying theme of the course is the problem of revolution, and the lectures investigate the causes, nature, and development of the two revolutions of the seventeenth century—the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. The lectures are topical and therefore do not follow a strict chronological order.

Roger Lockyer, Tudor and Stuart Britain (3rd ed., 2005)
Brian Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland (208)
Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell  (1991)
Peter Laslett (ed.), John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (2nd ed., 1989)

This course fulfills part of the requirements for the Normandy Scholars Program as well as part of the American history requirement for the University.  It explores American involvement in the Second World War.  Among the topics covered are: American isolationism; the controversy over Pearl Harbor and American entry into the war; the rise of air power and strategic bombing; the conduct of war and diplomacy; everyday life and politics on the home front; the experience of battle; the use of the atomic bomb; the seeds of the Cold War; and conflicting visions of the postwar world.
No course can be encyclopedic.  This one will divide its time between events in Europe and the Pacific without trying to cover either theater in all its detail.  Two events, one in each theater, will serve as case studies for in-depth analysis: 1) the D-Day invasion and the opening of the “Second Front” in Europe; and 2) the atomic bombs and the surrender of Japan in the Pacific.

E. B. White & William Strunk, The Elements of Style
David Kennedy, The American People in World War II
E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed
Michael B. Stoff et al., eds., The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction
to the Atomic Age
Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day

Class work consists of lectures and discussions of weekly reading assignments, lectures, and films.  Discussions constitute 20 percent of the course grade.  Five in-class quizzes based on lectures and readings make up another 20 percent of the grade.  A research paper, done in three stages, serves as the written portion of the workload and is worth 50 percent of the course grade.  Each student will also present his or her work orally.  The oral presentation is worth 10 percent of the grade.

How was an obscure, unemployed Austrian, who never rose above the rank of corporal in the German army, able to become the leader of a mass political movement which overthrew the most democratic political system Germany had ever known? Why did Germany begin the most devastating and brutal war in world history just two decades after having lost the First World War? Why did the Nazi state systematically murder 6 million Jews? How did the implementation of Nazi plans for a “racial empire” affect the lives of millions of Europeans during the Second World War? And what is the legacy of the Third Reich, for Germany today? These are the primary questions addressed by this course.

Required Readings:
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
David F. Crew, Hitler and the Nazis. A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)[also available on-line at the PCL as an e-book]
J. Noakes and G. Pridham(editors), Nazism. A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-1945 (University of Exeter Press Edition: Volumes 2 &3)
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
We are also going to be working with the images at these two web-sites: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/ and http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/

A distinctive feature of this course is the fact that we will be working extensively with original documents, in translation. This will give you a more direct and immediate connection to the past, will allow you to experience, at first hand, the language and ideas of the period. It will also allow you to engage directly in the process of interpretation. Rather than simply ingesting the arguments of historians who write about the Nazi period, you will have the opportunity to analyze the "raw materials" with which historians themselves work.
Your general participation in class discussions (i.e. attendance + involvement) counts for 20% of the overall grade. There will be a take-home mid-term document essay (5-6 pages, 20% of the final grade).There is no final exam per se but you will have a Power Point assignment based upon the documents we have red and discussed in class(5-6 pages, 20% of the final grade). You will also be asked to write one short essay on any one of the books by Remarque or Levi (4-5 pages, 20% of final grade). Finally, you will be asked to write two brief (2-3 page) analyses of the visual evidence(photographs, propaganda, election posters, etc.) discussed in class and/or those that are available on the web-sites listed above. Each of these two assignments is worth 10% of the final grade. I will be using the full range of +/- grades.

"Cultural Encounters: Europe & Asia, 1450-1750" is the theme of this Capstone in History research seminar.  As individuals and their objects moved in larger and larger circuits around the world during this first era of globalization, they often interacted with people and places that were new to them.  This course focuses on cultural encounters that occurred in Asia, primarily between Europeans and South, Southeast, or East Asians.  Source materials relating to these encounters include paintings by Asian artists that depict the novel appearance of foreign bodies and costumes, as well as hybrid forms of architecture that emerged in port cities like Goa, Batavia, Macau, and Nagasaki.  While students will be exposed to a range of primary sources, in addition to a general survey of their historical background,  the emphasis will be on the most abundant and accessible type of materials for us – the letters and memoirs in which diplomats, traders, and missionaries wrote about their travels in strange lands.  Travel narratives were especially popular in seventeenth-century Europe; we will see some of the original books in a visit to the Harry Ransom Center.  In the second half of the course, students will engage in a substantial research project, conducted in several stages and culminating in a 15-20 page paper.  As in other HIS 378W seminars, the objective of this course is mastery of the essential skills of the discipline of History: a critical evaluation of primary sources, active engagement with secondary sources, and the articulation of a cogent argument that is situated within the existing scholarship.

Texts (tentative):
John E. Wills, The World from 1450 to 1700
Meredith Martin & Daniela Bleichmar, eds., Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World
Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period

Grading:
attendance and participation (20%); quiz on general history (10%); 2 drafts of short paper comparing travelers to Mughal India (20%); research project including research proposal, 2 drafts of research paper, class presentation (50%).