HIS 301J - Globalization: A Modern History
Yoav Di-Capua, Professor
Tracie Matysik, Associate Professor

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%

Luther was one of the seminal figures of the second millennium whose impact is still felt today. We will examine some of his writings and his activities, the conditions that led 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 lifetime. 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 as well as of Martin Luther and his writings. This course also will relate the historical material to our own time; we will learn that history plays a cultural, social, political and ideological role in the present and that therefore historiography is work-in progress. 

Grading:

• Attendance, Participation 10%
• Reading Check Quizzes 10%
• Homework 10%
• Group Presentation 10%
• Two Short Papers 20%
• Two examinations 40%

This course offers an introduction to the entangled histories that have shaped the past of Africa and the world. Historians cannot imagine Africa’s past without recognizing the impact of global historical processes. Conversations on the major themes in global history unavoidably lead historians to discuss the role and place of Africa and the Africans. The course examines the meaning of global history as well as explains the problem associated with uncritical study of history through analogy. It begins with topics such as the history of human evolution and evaluates Africa’s connected history in the ancient world. Thereafter, the course maps the historical changes in Africa during each major phase in global history such as the spread of Islam, emergence of capitalism as socio-economic organization, the age of great divergence, the rise of European empires, the Second World War, and the Cold War. Simultaneously, it explains how African societies responded during each major phase of global history. The course ends with discussions about Africa’s contemporary presence in a multipolar world. As the course brings together themes in global history and African history into a conversation, students will be able to appreciate the connected histories that have shaped our world.

Robert Harms, Africa in Global History with Sources, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2018. (First edition) ISBN 978-0-393-64318-3
Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, (Fourth edition)
ISBN 978-1137504036
Suggested readings
David Northrup, Seven Myths of Africa in World History, Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 2012. ISBN 9781624666391
Erik Gilbert and Jonathan T. Reynolds. Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the
Present, London: Pearson, 2012. (Third edition) ISBN 978-0205053995
Gwyn Campbell, Africa and the Indian Ocean World from Early Times to Circa 1900,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. ISBN 9781108578622
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. (Second edition) ISBN
0521622174
DocuSign Envelope ID: 2A69B719-9B91-4B97-9B24-2D10E05D4BEE
2
Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I: The
Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
2020. ISBN 9781978807136
Ralph A. Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa in World History, New Work: Oxford
University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-19-515731-4

Grading components
Primary source response paper (1): 20% (February 11)
Midterm examination: 30% (March 11)
Primary source response paper (2): 20% (April 13)
Final examination: 30% (May 6)

This course will survey the history of the Middle East from the beginning of the Neolithic period (9000 BCE) through the invasion of the region by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE and into the pre-Islamic era. It will examine the civilizations of ancient Iraq (Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria), Turkey (the Hittites), the Levant (Syria and Palestine), and Iran (the Persians, Parthians, Sasanians). Some attention will be paid to ancient Egypt as well. While the focus will be on political history, the course will also cover important aspects of these societies’ culture, law, religion, and daily life.

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 introduces students to selected topics in Latin American history and culture through lectures, film, readings, documentaries and class discussion.  One goal is to explore significant influences that have molded Latin American history during the 20 and 21st centuries.  The focus will be on the Mexican Revolution, Immigration from Mexico and Central America, the Cuban Revolution and the Argentine Dirty War.  A central goal is for students to develop their analytical capabilities to utilize both visual and written materials as they share discussion comments and write outlines and essays.  The materials for the course—lectures, films, documentaries--- will be posted with zoom on Canvas with the professor providing commentary throughout. There will be an initial zoom meeting to set up the class and 7 zoom meetings where students post comments and participate in discussion.  All meetings will also be taped on zoom if students cannot attend.



Texts:
Assigned readings are posted on Canvas.


Grading:
3 Essays 60%
3 Outlines 30%
Discussion 10 %

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.

An examination of the historical development of the Mexican community in the United States since 1848, with an emphasis on the period between 1900 and the present.

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 four take home exams in this course and a final exam.

The goal of this class is to introduce students to the complexities of understanding the past and to the diverse ethnic and racial groups and political and religious ideals that shaped the United States from 1492-1865. In this class, we’ll assess the development of the U.S. from a colonial backwater to independent nation. We’ll explore the various kinds of people who contributed to the growth of the United States, and discuss how many of those groups fought to be included in the freedom promised by the American Revolution. Finally, we’ll examine the events, ideas, and beliefs that finally pushed the nation into the Civil War.

The chronology of the course is divided into three major eras: the Colonial Era (1492-1700); The Revolutionary and Early National Era (1700-1820); and the Antebellum and Civil War Era (1820-1865). It is organized around 3 central themes: competing notions of religious and political freedom; changing ideas around gender and sex roles; and the development of race-based slavery, leading to sectional conflict. Students can expect to see essay questions related to these themes, as well as to the economic and political development of the US, in all course units.


Readings:

Eric Foner, Give me Liberty!, Brief 6th Edition, Vol. 1

*Primary Sources posted to Canvas.

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%

Surveys the development of American Jewish life from 1492 to the present. Students will examine cultural, religious, and migratory trends that have shaped Jews in the western hemisphere and in the United States in particular. Focus will be on the emergence of Jewish life in America, its growth into the world’s leading Jewish community in the twentieth century, and its continual transformation both in the past as well as the present.

This class explores how religious people and communities in the United States affirm their faith, understand the ethical life, engage in ritual acts, and organize their communal relations. Through a historically organized survey of religious groups, we will focus particularly on the themes of colonization and immigration, two phenomena that have impacted the American religious landscape.

We begin with the continent’s original diversity in its hundreds of Native American traditions. Moving to the colonial era and continuing through the contemporary moment, we will explore colonizing and migratory movements that have brought European Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, along with practitioners of Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism from Asia and Africa to North America. We will also investigate communities birthed in the United States, including Mormonism, Pentecostalism, and the Nation of Islam. Through this survey, we will consider a variety of religious traditions, the changing state of the population’s religious composition, as well as how Americans have navigated those shifts using concepts such as disestablishment, diversity, and pluralism.

This course fulfills the core curriculum requirement for U.S. history. It 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 the American cultural experience. You should therefore expect a substantial portion of your grade to come from assignments covering the practices, beliefs, and histories of at least one U.S. cultural group that has experienced persistent marginalization.

Whether they used a language of equality, justice, freedom or liberation, an array of social groups in 20th-century America forged struggles and organizations that advocated for recognition of their rights, and yet there was never unanimity about the meaning of rights. This course explores changing and clashing ideas of rights that propelled social movements in different historical periods of working-class people, women, Blacks, Latina/os, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and students, paying close attention to perceptions of race, gender, labor, national identity, sexuality, and place. To better understand these struggles and contested meanings of rights, we also draw on comparative and relational approaches to this history. That is, we strive not only to identify similarities and differences among these groups, but to develop insights into how they influenced each other. Such an approach can lead to surprises; in Austin, for example, African American and Mexican American attorneys filed suit for school desegregation on the same day, with both arguing that the city had violated their rights guaranteed by Brown v. Board of Education.

The last unit of the course turns to such struggles over rights at the University of Texas during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those involving racial justice. Students will have the opportunity to study documents from UT in time period and to listen to interviews with participants.  

Classes will be taught synchronously. The central texts are memoirs and original historical documents. A goal of this course is for students to gain a sense of how historians approach their work, thus class activities include analyzing such narratives and documents and, in lieu of traditional exams, writing short essays and creating digital presentations based on their own historical arguments. Classes include short lectures, discussions, breakout group discussions, and one or more guest lectures.


Possible readings
Historical documents
Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry:  A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High
Carlos Bulosan, American is in the Heart: A Personal History
Charles Denby, Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal
Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People
Cherrie Moraga, Native Country of the Heart
Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Requirements
3 short essays based on class readings and lectures (15% each) 45%
3 historical documents analyses (10% each) 30%
Digital project 20%
Class Participation (discussion boards, breakout groups, class discussion) 5%

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.

Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the U.S. and South Africa, Fredrickson
After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Foster
American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, Self
Khayelitsha: uMlungu in a Township, Otter
The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America, Hill and Rabig
The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville, Hyra

Grades will be based upon the following:
•    Two critical book reviews
•    Weekly blogging
•    Two exams
•    Oral History Project
•    A fifteen page historical paper that compares and contrasts inner-city economic development efforts in the United States with similar efforts in Khayelitsha. Your oral history project should form the basis for the South African portion of the paper.
•    Internship
•    Class participation

Grade Breakdown
•    Two critical book reviews (20%)
•    Weekly Blogging (10%)
•    Internship (10%)
•    Class Participation (10%)
•    Mid-Term exam (20%)
•    Oral history Project and Final Paper (30%)

There is a mismatch between popular culture and academia. Some stories that in popular culture are celebrated as bright moments of discovery or insight are instead dismissed in academia as merely popular myths. We will analyze claims from popular books in the light of accurate historical sources. This course will introduce students to the process of making discoveries in historical research.

We will place special attention on debunking myths. Each day, as a group, we will develop interesting questions for research. Students will each freely propose topics that draw their curiosity. Our discussions will be guided by those questions. In this course, history will not be presented as knowledge that is prepackaged in books and articles to be memorized. Instead, we will use history as a tool for making discoveries about what really happened. The professor will give examples and anecdotes, from his own research, showing why he became interested in particular puzzles, why they seem fascinating, and how he managed to make new findings. Throughout the semester, the professor will also present findings from his ongoing research projects, to illustrate how historical discoveries are made.

This course is designed for first-year students, and it has no prerequisites. However, upperclassmen are also invited to enroll.

Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation (Sebastopol, Canada: O’Reilly, 2007/2010).

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008).

John Stossel, Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity (New York: Hyperion, 2006).

Optional Books

James Burke, The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996).

Alberto Martínez, Science Secrets: the Truth About Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).


Participation 20%, Presentation 10%, Research Project 40%, Final Exam 30%

Course Description, Expectations, and Objectives:  This course focuses on the basic history of Texas from roughly 1450 to 1900.  While major events such as the Texas Revolution and Civil War will be covered, emphasis will be given to how and why Texas, its culture, and its groups of people changed and did not change over time.  Among the goals and objectives are for all students to understand how and why Texas was and was not like the regions and countries on its borders, what caused change or the absence of change, and what influenced the particular path to the 20th century of all Texans.
   I expect you to attend class, do the readings, and move beyond a simple mastery of factual information.  It is my hope that by the end of the semester you will think and act like an historian by engaging in the debate about the past and by using primary source material, the ideas and insights of trained professional historians, and your own critical thinking skills to place your understanding of the Texas past on a firm foundation.  The readings and assignments in this course are designed to help you achieve these objectives by building skills as well as knowledge, and you will be graded not only on your mastery of basic factual information but on your ability to effectively organize and utilize that information.

The reading and lecture course surveys change and continuity in the history of Texas within the context of U.S. history and Mexico-U.S. relations.  Special attention is given to Mexico-U.S. relations, politics and social relations between 1900 and 1970, as well as the home front experience of Texans during the Second World War.  The overriding theme is the incorporation of Texas into the national socio-economy from the state’s early “colonized” status to its modern position as a fully integrated part of the nation.  The course is organized around our readings.  The De la Teja/Marks/Tyler text provides a synthesis of Texas history while the Zamora text provides a closer examination of home front experiences.  The two chapters from the Campbell book will serve as a basis for an examination of the post-war period extending into 2001.
            Three semester hours of Texas history may be substituted for half of the American history requirement.  Course materials, including a copy of my resume, this syllabus, lecture notes, bibliographies, and notes on interviewing techniques, will be available on Blackboard (http://courses.utexas.edu), UT’s course management site.  Call the ITS help desk (475-9400) if you have problems accessing the site.

Students learn to read, write and think like historians: that is to understand history as an academic discipline in terms of research methods, evidence, and analysis. We use a wide variety of case studies from Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Asia to examine civil and human rights across time and place. Students will read primary sources and examine how different historians have competing interpretations of particular topics. They will learn to navigate in archives and work with primary sources.

In addition, we will also explore professional development career options in History, such as public history, museum curation, oral history and interviewing, and how to apply your history training to opportunities in government, non-profit work, and others.

Assignments:

Students will write take part in a variety of skill-building and professional development assignments, produce a digital humanities product, complete two
group research projects and develop a research paper framework. This is a hybrid course. Students will use predominantly online archives for the projects. If safety permits, we will also engage with some of the physical archives on campus (The Benson Latin American Collection, Briscoe Center for American History, the Barker Texas History Center, the LBJ Presidential Library, and the Federal Documents Depository in PCL) to develop and produce final research projects.

Readings:

Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, (McMillan, most recent edition).   
Additional books and articles will be available on Canvas and via e-books.

Basis for Grading:

Skill building assignments: 30%  (total)
Digital humanities project: 10%
Two team projects: 25% (total)
Preparation and Engagement: 10%  
Research project framework: 25%

“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%

To think like historians, students will explore different approaches to understand and write about the past. Our case study will be the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-85) and the nation’s path to democratization and transitional justice.  We will consider different approaches to socioeconomic and (geo)political origins of the breakdown of democracy in Brazil in the context of the Cold War. We will also explore the military’s national security doctrine and developmental goals, the regime’s civilian supporters and opponents, human rights abuses and victims’ struggles for accountability and justice.  Students will read secondary and primary sources including human rights and truth commission reports, documentaries, and feature films. They will also use on-line or campus archives to access primary source materials

Assignments:  Students will write brief responses to readings, several short papers, group research projects, and develop a research paper prospectus and bibliography. 

Historians use a range of analytical skills and our discipline, like the rest of the world, is entering the age of big data. In this class we will explore changes in American society using a massive data source, the hundreds of millions of names in the Social Security database. We will treat changes in baby names as evidence of broader political, social, and cultural change. When and why did the name Adolph drop in popularity? That should be obvious, but which name dropped in popularity the fastest: Adolph, Benito, or Hillary? Which name switched genders the fastest: Ashleigh, Kerry, or Jackie? Have personal names in the US become more or less diverse? Do the answers to these questions vary by state or region? Is Texas more “name diverse” than Wisconsin? Through these questions, we will explore the intersection of history with the interdisciplinary field of data science.

So that we can analyze name trends, this course will introduce the computer language R and review some basic algebra. Math and coding-related questions will include how to measure name diversity and how to calculate it by state and year. We will also explore more conventional historical sources and methods: newspapers, magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, and archival materials. Which politicians, celebrities, or fictional characters might have changed the popularity of a name? Was the name Marion, for example, already trending female when Marion Robert Morrison chose the screen name John Wayne? Did Cassius Clay spark a trend toward Islamic and Afro-centric names when he became Muhammed Ali? How do biographies, autobiographies, and other sources explain trends in names? How do those explanation match our quantitative evidence?

You do not need any special background in mathematics or computer science, just curiosity and a lack of “math anxiety.” If you have a strong math, stats, or coding background, you will learn to apply those skills to real world data. If not, this is a great introduction to data science. For all students, by combining humanistic critical thinking with computational analysis, this course will give you skills applicable to a range of careers.

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,
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%).

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.

This course introduces students to the writings of Karl Marx as well as to those of his intellectual successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will treat the nineteenth century context of industrialization and democratization in Europe in which Marx formulated his social, political, and philosophical critique, as well as the theoretical and philosophical legacy that followed through the twentieth century. The course will not focus on Soviet Marxism, but will examine how western Marxism’s critique of capital evolved in complex relationship to the existence of Soviet Marxism. We will spend roughly eight weeks reading Marx’s writings, and then seven weeks reading his  intellectual successors (including writings from Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Walther Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Cedric Robinson, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Slavoj Žižek).  This course focuses on intellectual history, and students should thus expect to read philosophy and social theory throughout the semester.

Textbooks:

Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Norton, 1978).Vincent Barnett, Marx (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Grading:
First paper: 25%

Second paper: 25%

Option II or III: 10- to 12-page paper: 50%

Final Journal: 30%!Class Presentation: 10%

Participation (including attendance and also sustained constructive contribution to classdiscussion): 10%

This course studies the history of the thirteen colonies and the United States during the last third of the eighteenth century, with a concentration on the origins, nature, process, and effects of the American Revolution. Specific topics include: American colonial society in the mid-eighteenth century, the French and Indian War, the collapse of the colonial system in British North America, the War for Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, the launching of the national government, and the beginnings of American party politics.

The following books will probably be assigned:

1. Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the American Republic (4th edition)
2. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life


Classes will usually consist of both a lecture and discussion. Unless authorized by SSD, no laptop computers or similar devices may be used or open during class. The use--any use--of phones in class is not permitted.

There will be three exams. The first and second exams will each count 25% of the course grade. The third exam will count 30% of the course grade. These exams will consist of short-answer and essay questions on the material from the classes and reading assignments. Exams will not be given ahead of schedule, nor will any make-ups be given, for any reason.

This course surveys the emergence of modern China from the nineteenth century to the present, covering the Qing dynasty, the Republic (1912-49), and the People's Republic (since 1949). Beginning with a review of the intellectual, economic, and sociopolitical trends in imperial China, it examines the rise of nationalism and the challenge of modernization in the midst of dynastic decline and foreign threats in the nineteenth century. Its coverage of the twentieth century emphasizes the struggles between the Nationalists and Communists for the making of a modern state and their experiments of contrasting political schemes. The course further examines recent changes in the post-Mao era, focusing on economic and political reforms as well as China?'s ongoing integration into the global system.

Textbooks:

Huaiyin Li, The Making of the Modern Chinese State, 1600-1950 (Routledge, 2020)
Kerry Brown, China (Polity, 2020)

Grading:

Four quizzes: 5% each Mid-term: 40% Final exam: 40%

Same as Asian Studies 341K. This course focuses on Japan’s early modern age, from the end of the warring-states period in the 1500s to the stirrings of the industrial revolution in the mid 1800s.  The central focus is on the period of government by the Tokugawa shoguns (1600–1867), a period that reveals the social-ecological dynamics of an island country at a time of chronic resource scarcity and unprecedented development of popular culture.  Topics include the classical and medieval heritage, social and economic change, national isolation and national opening, the Meiji revolution, and the origins of modern nationalism, imperialism, and democracy.   We pay special attention to the subjective experiences of Japanese men and women who lived and created Japan’s distinctive path to modernity.

This upper-division course mixes lecture, reading, writing, and discussion to explore the cultural movement known as the Italian Renaissance. Our focus this semester is on the Renaissance reception of classical moral philosophy.

Grading:

• Reading worksheets – you’ll complete and turn in via CANVAS a worksheet for nine secondary source readings. Nine worksheets = 50% of your final grade.
• In-class writing assignments – you’ll write in class almost every meeting. Some of these projects will be graded and some won’t. Some will be individual and some will be in pairs or groups. On occasion you’ll revise your classroom draft at home. In-class writing = 50% of your final grade.
• There are no exams in this course

Description: The Russian Revolution was one of the greatest events of the twentieth century.  Focusing on the breakdown of the Old Regime, the revolutionary turmoil of the 1917 Revolutions, the Civil War the Communists’ seizure of power triggered, and the establishment of Soviet Power allow us to examine in depth the political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics at work in early twentieth-century Russia.  Students should gain a sense of the meaning of revolution, the causes of the upheavals in Russia, the nature of the society and politics that resulted from those upheavals, and the implications of that experience for later Soviet history and for Russia today.

Written Assignments: During the course of the semester students will write three critical reviews of assigned reading, five-six pages in length each.  Be sure to heed my writing tips.  In addition, by 12:30 each Tuesday and Thursday (except for the three class days when essays are due) students will e-mail me three questions addressing the assigned reading for the day.



Textbooks: Some of the readings will analyze the revolutionary process and historiographic debates.  Others will convey the excitement and suffering in the streets.  In addition, short documents may be distributed in class.
    Lincoln, Bruce, In War’s Dark Shadow.
    Pipes, Richard, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution.
            Figes, Orlando, A People’s Tragedy.
    Read, Christopher, From Tsar to Soviets.
    *Course Packet: Available from Paradigm Books


Grading: The final grade is based on the essays (65%), weekly questions (10%), and classroom participation (25%).  Plus/minus grades will be assigned for the final grade.  Each student is expected to participate fully in class discussions and will be graded on the extent and quality of participation.

European society changed so rapidly and extensively between 1050 and 1200 that medievalists often call it a "renaissance," ( a period of rebirth not to be confused with the later Italian Renaissance.) During this period, agricultural technologies changed, new forms of religious life developed, schools and universities emerged, cathedrals were built, towns became self-governing, and royal governments experimented with new forms of administration and law. Though a reading of primary documents - including love letters, memoirs, accounts of religious visions, chronicles of urban revolts, court poetry, theological treatises, and artistic creations – this course examines a series of these intellectual, religious, social, and political developments.

Grading:

• Class Preparation Exercises 26% 13 Total at 2% each (complete/incomplete)
• 2 short (3-page) papers 30% (15% each, re-writes average grade)
• Map Exercise (on line) 4%
• Final Paper (8 pages) 30%
• Class Participation and Attendance 10% Your attendance grade is the number of classes you attend

This course investigates the political, constitutional, economic, and social causes of disunion and the American Civil War. It seeks to provide students with an understanding of how the stability of the Union was affected by key developments of the period 1829-1861, including the growth of slavery, the rise of abolitionism, the development of modern political parties, economic modernization, immigration, and territorial expansion.

The following books will probably be assigned:

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (third edition, edited
by David Blight)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War

Classes will usually consist of both a lecture and discussion. Unless authorized by SSD, no laptop computers or similar devices may be used or open during class. The use--any use--of phones in class is not permitted.

There will be three exams. The first and second exams will each count 25% of the course grade. The third exam will count 30% of the course grade. These exams will consist of short-answer and essay questions on the material from the classes and reading assignments. Exams will not be given ahead of schedule, nor will any make-ups be given, for any reason.

This course introduces students to the history of the Indian subcontinent from approximately 1500 to 1750. In this period substantial part of South Asia was ruled by the Mughals, whose splendor introduced the word ‘mogul’ to the English language. The Mughal empire declined in the early 1700s and was gradually replaced by the British from 1750 onwards. We will study the political formations of the Mughals and other regional dynasties, cultural, religious, and socio-economic history of this period. Along with secondary scholarly works, students will engage with primary sources such as memoirs of prominent royal women and the stories told by awe-struck European visitors. The class will induce students to analyze and evaluate primary sources and encourage a critical reading of history.

Learning Objectives:

• To familiarize students with geography, prominent personalities, chronology, basic concepts, and the highlights of the history of South Asia.
• To encourage the critical reading of history.
• To teach how to read, analyze, and differentiate between the primary and secondary sources.
• To encourage the students to reflect on how history is remembered.
• To introduce students to critical scholarly perspectives on the Mughal history

Assignments and grading:

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.


Texts:
John Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: from Conquest to Revolution and Beyond
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Austin Ivereigh (ed.) The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival
Edward Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934
Shorter readings (supplied)


Grading:
Reading responses, 60%
Final essay, 40%

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.

The Cold War involved the whole world. It began in 1945 when the victorious Allies of World War II broke up into ideological enemy camps that divided the East (Russia, Eastern Europe, and China) and the West (the United States and Western Europe). Whether to follow the capitalist West or the socialist East also split many developing nations of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Moreover, the proliferation of nuclear weapons complicated the tensions between and within these ideological struggles.
While the grim prospects for mutual nuclear annihilation forced the United States and Russia to maintain an uneasy peace between them, many armed conflicts did arise at the margins of the great powers. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 eventually led to serious but limited wars on the Korean Peninsula as well as in Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). Africa also became involved, as fighters in the “wars of national liberation” engaged with ideological struggle between West and East. Latin America joined the Cold War struggle when the Cuban Revolution of 1959 sought to eliminate traditional U.S. domination with a military and commercial alliance to the Soviet Union. In fact, the emergence of socialism in the Western Hemisphere led the East and West to the brink of nuclear warfare.
Needless to say, the Cold War did not treat democracy kindly. In Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, the emergence of new nations from colonial rule usually resulted in dictatorships rather than electoral governments. In Latin America, the threat of the spread of Cuban Communism doomed most democracies to long-term military rule. In the Eastern Bloc countries, communist totalitarianism predominated—not socialist democracy. Only the United States and the countries of Western Europe preserved democracy throughout the Cold War period. Nevertheless, the Cold War did come to a definitive end. China and the United States came to an agreement, and Soviet Union collapsed. The world today may be no safer than it was during the Cold War, because the legacy of the “New World Order” resulted neither in order nor in a new world liberated from the burdens of the past.

Texts:
Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006
Chen Jian, Mao’s China & the Cold War



-Three essays based on the above texts, 600 points or 60 percent
Essay 1 (4-5 pages) 100 points (may be revised for extra points)
Essay 2 (5-6 pages) 200 points
Essay 3 (6-7 pages) 350 points
-Five bi-weekly quizes, 300 points or 30 percent
-Attendance 50 points (minus 3 points per missed class) or 5 percent

What does Fashion tell us about historical change? In this class, we will learn how the making of fibers, fabrics, and fashion have shaped African history. The course begins with an analysis of  who owns fashion designs to consider controversies behind costumes in the land of Wakanda created for the film Black Panther. Course participants will then study the making of fibers in African societies across time including cultivation of cotton, sourcing of silk, and indigo dyeing. Through reading and immersive activities, we will next examine the history of textile making including weaving and printmaking. We will learn about different ways to tie and wrap fabric for personal adornment. Finally, how have people cut up fabric to make clothing and what are the politics of textile and fashion ownership? The course examines fashion history through readings, films, videos, social media and textile making to provide students with an immersive experience in African design history. It addresses the ways in which textiles are tied to class distinctions and politics, wrapped up in the history of trade including human trafficking and slavery, mixed into revolutionary struggles and post-independent governance, and inspire haute couture and global fashion trends.

Texts:
Boateng, The copyright thing doesn't work here: Adinkra and Kente cloth and intellectual property in Ghana
Byfield, J. A. The bluest hands: a social and economic history of women dyers in Abeokuta (Nigeria),1890-1940
Gott and Loughran, Contemporary African Fashion.
Jauch and Traub-Merz, The Future of the Textile and Clothing Industry in Sub-Saharan Africa

Grading:
Online course participation: 50%  Writing and Immersive assignments: 50%

There is something intrinsically mysterious about money. Throughout history, how does money become created? What problems arise from the processes and power to create money? This course will investigate how financial crises have arisen in the past and to what extent they transpired because of wrongdoing. We will study the origins of the Great Depression and of the financial crisis of 2008. We will also study the development of the recent financial crises in Iceland, Greece, and Puerto Rico.
 
In the Renaissance, it was illegal to create gold in England. The British government still believed that it might be possible to create precious metals through alchemical experiments, and if so, anyone with such a power might generate enough wealth to constitute a danger. Nowadays, we no longer worry about alchemists, yet money has been detached from precious metals, collateral, and even paper. Money consists essentially of digital numbers in bank accounts. What is the historical process by which money became abstract numbers that can be created as loans? We will study how loans and the creation of money “out of nothing” have led to hyperinflation in countries such as Germany, Argentina, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
 
This is a writing seminar. Students will write and revise two Essays. Each student will also propose a research topic, to be approved by the Instructor, to prepare a longer Research Paper.

Texts:
•  John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (New York: Penguin/Plume, 2006).
•  Michael Hudson, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy (ISLET-Verlag, 2015).
•  Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy (New York: Norton, 2015).
•  David Stockman, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).

Grading:
Class Participation 20%
Essays and Quizzes 20%
Research Paper 30%
Final Exam 30%
minus absences  –1 course point per unexcused absence.

The contents of this course cover the contexts, causes and short and long-term effects of the partition of British India in 1947 into two nation-states of India and Pakistan. The Partition rivals the Holocaust as one of the most horrific events of twentieth-century history. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives, millions lost their homes, migrations of unimaginable magnitude occurred. While most histories till the 1980s focused on the 'high politics' of the Partition, since then, historians have paid greater attention to the effects of these wide-ranging events on the lives, health, memories and amnesias of ordinary people caught up in the Partition. In order to understand these consequential effects on ordinary people, this course will use a variety of official and unofficial eye-witness accounts, as well as novels, short stories, oral histories recorded on film and video in subsequent decades, as well as films based on novels written by men and women who lived through those events.

Grading:

• Students will be expected to have read the materials before coming to class and should be willing to discuss their materials on a daily basis. Each day, one student will serve as discussion leader, and will write up a report of the discussion to be mailed in a week later (30 marks)
• Two short essays from each student -a book review (10 marks) another a review of a book and a film (20 marks)
• A final 10-page essay (40 marks)

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.



•    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%

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.

Texts:
Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides.
John Scott, Behind the Urals.
Lydia Chukovskaya, Sofia Petrovna.
    Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon.
Richard Overy, Russia’s War.
Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War.
Geoffrey Roberts, Victory at Stalingrad.
Other Readings will be in the Course Packet or available online from the library.

Grading: This course contains a substantial writing component.  During the course of the semester students will write three critical analyses of assigned reading, five-six pages in length each.  In addition, by 11:00 a.m. on most class days, students will e-mail me three questions dealing with that day’s reading.  The final grade is based on both the written assignments (60% essays; 10% questions) and classroom participation (30%).

Same as African and African Diaspora Studies 351E and History 350R (Topic 12). Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Only one of the following may be counted: African and African Diaspora Studies 351E, 374D (Topic 2), American Studies 370 (Topic: Hist of Black Entrepren in US), 370 (Topic 58), History 350R (Topic 12). Additional prerequisite: Upper-division standing and six semester hours of coursework in history.

Same as History 355N. Traces the development of American culture and society from the colonial era until the end of the Civil War. Major themes include racial conflict, religion, slavery, the development of democracy, and cultural reform. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Upper-division standing.

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
 

Topics include American higher education’s 17th, 18th, and early 19th century legacies; the rise of the research university; expanding access to higher education and efforts to exclude or redirect the college aspirations of women, African Americans, and Jews; the advent of mass higher education; colleges and the courts; the history and future of educational technology; contemporary challenges involving access, affordability, finances, and learning and employment outcomes; economic and racial stratification within higher education; and shifts in pedagogy, curricula, and campus life.

Topics include the history, varieties, and philosophies of museums; the evolution of museum architecture and design; changes in the ways that museums interpret art works and historical artifacts; the challenges contemporary museum’s face; controversies surrounding exhibitions, acquisitions, deaccessioning, repatriation, and museum financing; and reinventing the museum in the digital age.

Without a doubt, the untimely deaths of Native American leaders Marsha Gomez (Choctaw/Chicana) and Ingrid Washinawatok (Menominee), in the late 1990s, accentuates the complexity, globality, and intersectional nature of their labor, activism, and vision that predates and foreshadows current concerns of multifaceted decoloniality and self-determination. Gomez, a sculptor and peace activist, was a founder of Indigenous Women’s Network (IWN) in 1983 and an instrumental organizer of a 1997 multiday gathering of indigenous women, who were community leaders, activists, healers, educators, writers, thinkers, on the grounds of Alma de Mujer. Washinawatok was a human rights activist who served as the chair of the NGO Committee on the United Nations International Decade of the World's Indigenous Peoples. Her work embraced a global indigeneity as an approach to advocate, demand, and highlight the human dignity of Natives peoples across the world and challenged the constrictions of geopolitics. This course investigates the histories of Native American women to reaffirm and reclaim their place and role in the histories of Native Americans, indigenous peoples, women, Chican@/xs, Greater Mexico, and the United States. We will use a historical approach to unravel Western paradigms of women’s history that erase and omit the histories of Native American women because they defy the singular lens of gender. Furthermore, we will contemplate how multiplicitous understandings that center colonization, settler colonialism, genocide, race, and environmentalism are essential to examining Native American women’s history. Overall, this class will illuminate the stories, struggles, and ideas of community-building, sovereignty, self-determination, and liberation as integral to their genders and sexualities as Native American, Indian, First Nations, indigenous, and red and brown women.

Readings(Selections):

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1994.

Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2015

_____. Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.

Gonzales, Patrisia. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing. University of Arizona Press, 2015.

Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press, 2019.

Katz, Jane B., ed. Messengers of the Wind: Native American Women Tell Their Life Stories. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

LaDuke, Winona. The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings. Penticton, B.C.: Theytus Books, 2002.

Miranda, Deborah A. Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Berkeley: Heyday, 2013.

Mihesuah, Devon Abbott. Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Muñoz, José Esteban, Jinthana Haritaworn, Myra J Hird, Jasbir K Puar, Eileen A Joy, Uri McMillan, Susan Stryker, Kimberly TallBear, Jami Weinstein, and Judith Halberstam. “Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: The Sense of Brownness.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies21, no. 2 (2015): 209–210.

Perdue, Theda, ed. Sifters: Native American Women's Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

TallBear, Kim. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” Journal of Research Practice 10, no. 2 (January 1, 2014): 1-7.

This course focuses on the past and present environmental issues in Russia and the US. Students explore geography, economics, history, and culture through an environmental lens, as well as engage in comparative analysis of policies and resource security (the US and Russia). Each topic includes a lecture by a professor from Irkutsk State University. Students take classes in the city of Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, which is located two hours away from Lake Baikal, a World Heritage Site. Throughout the course students enjoy a range of local excursions, including day trips to the lake and surrounding areas. In addition, participants have the opportunity to master Russian language and delve into cultural aspects of life in a vibrant Siberian city.

Grading:

• Pre-departure meetings and lectures (X14)
• International Travel Safety Training (X1)
• Course Readings (X12)
• In-country Course Lectures/Discussions (TBA)
• Russian Language Class (X16)
• Cultural Excursions
• Weekly Field Journal (X4)
• Final Research Paper & Presentation 

Classical Zionism declared the Jewish people a nation in need of a state, “a people without a land for a land without a people.” Today, some claim that Jewish nationhood was a fiction created with political goals in mind. This course considers the nature of nations: Are they real or imagined, “organic” or invented? Examines how history has been used and abused for political purposes in the history of Zionism, Israel/Palestine, and beyond.

This course examines the cultural significance of medieval animals, both creatures that are familiar to us today and creatures that exist only in medieval sources. Animals are a large part of the everyday life in the Middle Ages. However, these creatures are more than just food, possessions, prey, or entertainment; they are mirrors that reflect ideas and beliefs of medieval society. Bestiaries, fables, saints’ lives, natural history, and religious texts are filled with fabulous descriptions of animals and hybrid creatures that are imbued with moral and symbolic meaning.

The medieval sources we will consider include, images, texts, and material objects ranging from the 4th century to the 14th century. Through these primary sources we will explore topics related to hunting, food, domestication, status, and the complex symbolic meanings attributed to animals in medieval religion and society. Although the majority of the sources were created in a largely Christian context, we will also study a selection of Jewish and Islamic sources.  Through the lens of animals, we hope to gain greater insight into the daily lives and beliefs of medieval society.

 This course introduces students to the history of Modern Latin America through a long story of migration and exile in the region. The class emphasizes global and hemispherical movements to the region since the Spanish American Revolutions. It covers the Wars of Independence; the forge of new nations; the development of second slavery; the nineteenth-century theorization of empire; the arrival and movements of European, African, Caribbean, and Asian populations; the rise of nationalist and anti-foreigner movements; the long and complex relationship between the United States and Latin America; the Cold War and the rise of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements; and the emergence of a global Latin American culture. The course readings explore questions of race, gender, and identity as well as the global connections of Latin America with other regions of the world and, especially, with the United States. Lectures and course readings will focus particularly in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Panamá, Chile, Perú, and the United States.
Throughout the semester, students will consider the global connections of Latin America through the movement of diverse types of populations. Moreover, students will understand how diverse populations have faced the impacts of political violence and exile while contributing economically, socially, intellectually, and culturally to their host communities. The goal of the class is to shed light on the history of the continent through a transnational lens that challenges the nation-state narrative privileged by more traditional historiographies.

This class explores Sufism and other Islamic mystical traditions that color cultural milieus spanning four continents and fourteen centuries. The first half of the semester focuses on the historical developments in the Islamic theosophical traditions of the Arab and Persian worlds. In the second half of the semester, we move on to discuss the growth of Islamic mysticism over time and beyond the porous borders of Arabia and Iran. The relationship between Sufism and poetics, Sufism and colonialism, and Sufism and post-colonial resistance movements also constitutes a significant part of this course. Issues of authority, gender, sexuality, music, globalization, and religious pluralism are topics of discussion throughout the semester. Only one part of the class lecture springs from the readings so it is important for the students to carefully note that material which is not found in the assigned readings.

Grading:

• Two in-class Exams (40%)
• Comprehensive Final Exam (50%)
• Class Attendance & Participation (10%)

Course Description

(No background in Chinese language, culture or history required.)

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 氣) of the body with the mind. The Chinese holistic approach to the concept of “well-being” by eating, taking medicine and engaging in 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 communities in Austin, China, Taiwan

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.

Texts:

David Kennedy, The American People in World War II

E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed

John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

Michael B. Stoff et al., eds., The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction

to the Atomic Age

Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day

John Hersey, A Bell for Adano

Grading:

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.

Texts:

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/

Grading:

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. The first and second document essays will ask you to comment on the meaning and significance of several documents(or parts of documents) assigned for the class. You will be given a copy of the document(s) which will be clearly identified for you (i.e. author, date, place). These are, therefore, not identification quizzes; your job is rather to write an essay in which you show why the particular documents are important in terms of the larger history of the period from which they derive and what they tell us about that particular phase in the rise or development of Nazism.

            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 second take-home document essay (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.

This course explores alternative histories of the Spanish invasion of the indigenous empires of the Aztecs and the Incas and the consolidation of Spanish imperial power and colonial rule. Traditional narratives of Spanish conquest and colonialism emphasize the military conquest of the two most powerful pre-Columbian empires by a handful of Spanish conquistadors. Recent scholarship, however, insists on the need to accept such an interpretation with skepticism. We will examine these revisionist interpretations through discussions of the kinds of primary sources – textual, visual, and material – with which historians have worked and the interdisciplinary approaches used to develop radically different interpretations of Spanish conquest and colonialism. We will analyze these alternative histories through the lenses and lives of indigenous translators, indigenous artists and writers, power brokers, and rebels. We will also examine how post-conquest indigenous societies of Peru and Mexico differ in their responses to Spanish conquest and why such differences occur? How do we explain, for example, the eruption of the largest anti-colonial rebellion in Peru in 1781 under the leadership of Tupac Amaru, but nothing comparable in scope and scale in Mexico at the same time?

Texts (subject to change):
• Matthew Restall and Kris Lane, Latin America in Colonial Times
• Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices
• Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis eds. Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes)•Charles Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion• Guaman Poma de Ayala, The First New Chronicle and Good Government•Matthew Restall et al, Mesoamerican Voices•Matthew Restall & Susan Kellogg eds., Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes•Ward Stavig ed., The Tupac Amaru and Catarista Rebellions: An Anthology of Sources•Readings on Canvas•

Grading (subject to change):
• reading grids 15%
• Analysis of primary sources 15%
• Critical reviews 20%
• Research project/essay Draft 10%
• Peer review 5%
• Research project/essay 20%
• Media Presentation of Research project 5%
• Discussion Board assignments 10% (participation and engagement)

A half century removed from the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many participants and observers of intersecting social justice movements today—whether about racial violence, women’s empowerment, immigrant rights, medical inequality, labor conditions, or climate change—and are looking back to that history for clues about today. Historians have much to contribute, not by looking for one-to-one connections in which “history repeats itself” or prognosticating about the future, but by critically analyzing roots of today’s challenges in the specific historical context of that time period. This capstone course offers students the opportunity to be the historians by undertaking original research projects about those turbulent decades. Projects focus on campus and community social justice movements in Austin itself, most of which have received scant scholarly discussion despite their significance to larger historical narratives about racial justice, women’s liberation, Vietnam, labor and poverty, and popular and political culture.

Course activities:

We begin with readings on the central themes of the course. Students then conduct research and write a substantial essay (15-25 pages) on one of these themes based on critical evaluation of primary and secondary sources. They learn to develop original research questions and arguments situated in relation to scholarship in the field. Due to Covid-19, students won’t visit archives in person, but will participated in virtual workshops with archivists and have access to digitized materials including documents, newspapers, broadcasts, visual arts, and oral histories. In this capstone, students have the opportunity to conduct an oral history that will ultimately become part of the Austin Women Activists Oral History Collection. Because of the public value of this research to the community, the semester culminates with short digital projects that will be presented in a special class session with visitors and may be accessible afterwards online.

Possible Texts

Acuña, Rodolfo. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe

Cohen, Robert, et al., Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s.  

Goldstone, Dwonna. Integrating the 40 Acres: The 50-Year Struggle for Racial Equality at UT

Kendi, Ibram X. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972

Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 9^th Ed.

Requirements

15%     Participation during class and on discussion boards, including discussion questions.

15%     Oral history and creation of metadata

20%     Assignments toward full draft of final paper including revisions based on feedback

30%     Final essay

15%     Digital presentation of project, combined with oral commentary

5%       Course reflections

This Capstone Seminar for history majors requires students to utilize all the research skills, evidential analysis, and expository writing they have developed in other history courses. We as a group of investigators will devote class time to perfecting our understanding of the Principles of Analytical Writing as a guide to each student’s production of a research paper of 20 to 25-pages.
This course enables the student to engage in original research in international relations during the 1960s, the most turbulent decade of the Cold War.  Each student will choose one foreign country in order to study its relationship to the United States during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The primary documentation that researchers will use for this project comes from online resources. They consist of the Foreign Relations of the United States document series and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Reading Room.
    Once students begin reading the documentation, we will discuss via Zoom the world affairs of the 1960s as if we constituted the National Security Council of the Kennedy and Johnson White House. These dialogues will aid students in placing their individual country of study in its worldwide perspective.


Graded assignments:
An analytical essay of 5 pages on JFK and the student’s country = 200 points
Class attendance = 50 points (minus 3 points per class missed)
Final research paper (20-25 pages) = 750 points
        Total possible points 1000
This course carries the Writing Flag and Independent Inquiry Flag.

HIS 381 - Gender and Decolonial Histories
Indrani Chatterjee, Professor
Judith Coffin, Associate Professor

Our goal in this course is to both historicize and pluralize regimes of gender: in other words, to understand that those regimes vary, often quite starkly, across and within cultures and change historically due to a variety of circumstances. Decolonizing gender in the present global context implies re-investigating plural epistemologies (ways of knowing), ontologies (ways of being, identifications and identities) and practices that gender histories of labor, love, sex, slavery, and family. We will investigate different forms of accommodation, confrontation, and appropriation within and across cultures and times stretching from pre- through post-colonial centuries.

This is a dual-track (reading and research) graduate seminar. Every student will follow the same track for the first 10 weeks. After that, each student will follow a path specific to either a reading track or a research track.

Those who choose the reading track will develop a historiographical final essay (see FAQs at the end of the document) made up of between 5 books or 10 articles, or a combination of these. At least 2 articles and 1 book in this combination should be from readings not included in this course. We recommend this track for early graduate students who want to prepare a preliminary review of literature on a theme that interests them.   

Those who choose the research track will use this opportunity to use some particularly significant primary archives or documents to chart part of an eventual chapter or research proposal.  


FIRST REQUIREMENT: Choose a track.

Reading Track Students: Complete all the required reading and attend all classes. For 6 class meetings (of your choice), write brief reviews of 2-5 pages for 5 marks each (6x5=30). On any one day in the syllabus, lead a class discussion (10). Participate actively in enabling your peers’ discussions (10). As a final project, reading-track students write a historiographic essay of 10-15 pages on a topic developed in conversation with the professor (50).  Finalize topic by Week 5 at the latest. Everyone gets Week 14 off to finish draft of the essay, which will be presented in class for feedback on last class day. Final drafts will be handed over on last day of class to the instructor.  
Research-track students: Attend at least ten classes, completing the assigned reading for those weeks. For 5 of those classes, write brief reviews of 2-5 pages for 5 marks each (5x5= 25). Choose one week when readings are most relevant to your area of interest and lead the class, including in your discussion of the readings an oral presentation in brief relating your own research interest to the reading (for 15 marks). Additional marks depend on your enabling your peers’ learning and discussion. (10). As a final project, write a research paper of 15-20 pages on a topic of relevance to your research proposal (50). Everybody gets Week 14 off to finish a draft of a final essay, which will be presented to peers in class, and then handed over to the instructor on the last day of class.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS COMMON TO BOTH TRACKS:
Though the reading list is currently incomplete, we look forward to teaching and discussing the following books:
1)     Khaled el-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500 – 1800, University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 1-12, 53-110.
2)    Francesca Bray, Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered. 2013 pbk ISBN 9778-0-415-63959-0
3)    Cynthia Eller, Gentlemen and Amazons: Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory 1861-1900. 2011. ISBN-13: 978-0520266766/ ISBN-10: 9780520266766
4)    Devesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures, UChicago, 2012. ISBN-10: 0226768104
5)    Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: UNC Press. 1996.  ISBN 0807845965
All other readings will be available on Canvas OR through the PCL. It remains the students’ responsibility to ensure they keep up to date with the syllabus and course requirements.


GRADING: This Course will use A, A-, B+, B. Graduate course work should not qualify for a C or lower. 20% of all graduate course work can be taken for Pass/Fail grade as well. If you choose this option for this course, you should find out the date by which you are required to register this option with your department’s graduate office. Making this decision does not exempt any student from the requirements of reading, writing and speaking as part of course-work.

Geocultural categories such as the West, the East, Asia, and their subcategories such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and East Asia have gained political relevance only in the last two hundred years. This graduate seminar examines the significance of the transnational movement of people, ideas, and goods in the process of constructing these categories. In particular, instead of studying European/Western construction of Asia/the East as a course on Orientalism would do, this course pays attention to the engagement of various peoples of Asia/the East in constructing the ideas of Asia/the East in the contexts of imperialism, nationalism, and decolonization. These peoples include the Japanese, the Chinese, Indonesians, Indians, Iranians, Arabs, Turks, and many more. Specific topics through which we study construction of Asia/the East include revolutionary politics, religious discourse, feminism, sports, film, and food. In short, this course is concerned with how regions were produced through global interactions.

This is a graduate reading course designed to facilitate historical and policy research across regions and methodological approaches. Intensive course readings will examine historical scholarship on the major international phenomena and events that transformed multiple societies during the twentieth century. Topics will include globalization, industrial capitalism, total war, economic depression, fascism, communism, Cold War, decolonization, post-industrial capitalism, human rights, and terrorism. The course will analyze how different societies and regions experienced common phenomena and events in diverse ways. The course will also interrogate legacies, memories, myths, and lingering traumas.

HIS 381 - Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Violence in the Modern Mediterranean
Yoav Di-Capua, Professor
Ben Brower, Associate Professor

This seminar will examine the problem of political violence across the Mediterranean world in the last 150 years.  The violence of political upheavals transformed states and societies around the Mediterranean in the modern era.  Colonization and decolonization both were typified by extreme violence, including assassinations, mass killings, torture, and the “uncivil wars” that claimed an untold number of non-combatant lives. The post-colonial period also witnessed costly wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions, leading to tropes that figure the Mediterranean as a theater of “fire and blood.” We will critically interrogate this history of violence from 19th century colonialism to political Islam of the last 50 years.  Readings come from both at the accounts of historians and other scholars as well as the political theories and original documents that influenced how actors at the time understood the relationship between violence and political power.


Primary Source Readings
•    Emir Abd al-Qadir, “On the Minor and Major Combat,” Mawqif 73 (ca. 1870)
•    Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908)
•    Lenin’s Notes on Clausewitz (1915)
•    Walter Benjamin “Critique of Violence” (1921)
•    Antonio Gramsci, “Political Struggle and Military War,” from Prison Notebooks (ca. 1930s)
•    Benito Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (1935)
•    Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (1961)
•    S. Qutb, Signposts (1964)
•    Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970)
•    Shock and Awe doctrine

Secondary Source Readings
•    Alessandro Orsini, Anatomy of the Red Brigades: The Religious Mind-Set of Modern Terrorists
•    Achille Mbembe On the Postcolony
•    Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
•    Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing
•    Faisal Devji, Terrorist in Search of Humanity


Assignments:
•    Lead seminar discussion: working with a partner, you will lead two discussions sessions.  You should be prepared to field questions concerning the author’s biography and reception of the book, as well as the book’s sources, method, principle argument, as well as its contribution to the field and significance to the seminar’s work.  
•    Book review:  This review should be around 1,000 words long and should provide both an accurate summary of the book’s argument and sources and critically evaluate its achievements.  (See full description of assignment on Canvas).
•    Final paper: in this paper, you will be provided the opportunity to pursue a topic of your own choice (such as a possible dissertation project) which you will read and develop through the perspectives offered by the seminar readings.  We will take time during the semester to workshop possible topics and critically evaluate your proposals.
•    Presentation: in our final meeting, you will informally present your final paper to the seminar in a short (15 mins) communication.

Fabric is at the heart of cultural production in African spaces. From birth, to initiations, to weddings, to funerals, fabric binds together communities, adorning families, and providing the basis for personal wealth. This course explores emerging research on the social history of textiles and clothing, with special reference to cases in Africa and comparative work in South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. It seeks to integrate this work with ongoing debates in the field of science and technology studies on innovation, and technology transfer and appropriation. Through the lens of fabric, we will examine the meanings of diaspora, empire, modernity, postcolonialism and globalization for everyday people. Case material address the history behind fibers, dyes, weaving, and construction techniques, as well as issues of industrialization, intellectual property rights, sustainability, and global fashion. Course participants will also learn to “read” fabrics, clothing, and textile technologies for historical information through textile and clothing analysis exercises.

We’ll explore recent literature on early-modern Atlantic history, particularly literature that emphasize trans-regional and trans-imperial connections. We’ll identify different models and approaches.

The goal of the seminar is to provide students with the skills to identify the structure and scaffolding of scholarly arguments: how historians build articles and books. The ultimate purpose of this exercise is for students to develop the skills to frame their own arguments as competitive research proposals.

This graduate seminar is an introduction to the theories, methods, and best practices of public humanities. The course draws on theories and methods in history, ethnic studies, and American studies. We will consider case studies to see how practitioners put theories into practice. We will also consider contemporary debates, topics, and projects.  
 
In course readings we will discuss key questions: who is the public and what is the public sphere, how do public humanists work with the public, what is the place of expertise in public projects, and what is the place of community knowledge and public memory in public projects. We will also consider the role of race and histories of slavery, conquest, colonization, genocide, and war in shaping public understandings of the past. During the course readings participants will also explore the theories and foundations of cultural institutions and practices in the field: museums, memorials, public art, preservation, collecting, and digital humanities.

This graduate research seminar examines the emergence of Latin America as a world region through its engagement with and contribution to long-term global trends. Students will read weekly monographs and essay collections covering themes that include (but are not limited to): colonization, migration, scientific knowledge transfer, the Atlantic Slave Trade, decolonization, nation-state formation, second slavery, the rise of commodities trade, settler colonialism, changing relations between gender and the state, the Cold War, and illicit flows.

All students will write weekly reviews of assigned readings. Each student will select up to 4 weeks for which they will complement their reviews of assigned secondary sources with relevant primary sources they found at the Benson. For their final project, students have a choice of developing a grant proposal to conduct research on a topic of their choosing OR developing a syllabus to teach an upper-division undergraduate course on Latin American history that incorporates primary sources available online.

This graduate-level seminar focuses on the history of modern Mexico, from the mid-century liberal Reforma through the revolution of 1910-1940 and the Global Sixties. We will look at the ways in which recent historians have approached and conceptualized the linkages between popular groups and diverse iterations of the Mexican state and we will read some new works covering such major topics as secularization, crime and punishment, foreign policy, the development of commodity capitalism, labor history, indigenous history, and gender history.
 
In the first half of the semester, until Spring Break, we will convene as a readings seminar: students will write short weekly responses to the set readings as a basis for class discussion, and if desired there will be an emphasis on professionalization (project management, conference organization, seeing a manuscript through to publication).
 
In the second half of the semester, we will convene more as a research seminar: a longer research paper on an aspect of modern Mexico is expected by the end of the semester. Students who wish may also elect to complete the seminar as a readings track and produce a longer historiographical paper.

Texts may include:
 
Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Berkeley: University of California, 2020)
 
Helga Baitenmann, Matters of Justice: Pueblos, the Judiciary, and Agrarian Reform in Revolutionary Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2020)

Casey Lurtz, From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)
 
Brian Stauffer, Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019)
 
Eric Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020)
 
Susie Porter, From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2018)

Grading:
Book reviews (30%)
 
Class participation/presentation (20%)
 
Final paper (50%)
 

This course will use newly developed digital archives to explore modern Central American history, with a particular focus on revolution and counterrevolution in Guatemala (1954-1996), El Salvador (1979-1992), and Nicaragua (1961-1990).  Approximately half of the course will consist of readings and discussion regarding the major historiographical works of recent Central American history in order to provide a context for subsequent research. The other half will consist of original student research using digital archives. The final grade will be primarily based on a semester-long research project, with the end product being either a traditional research paper or an original work of digital scholarship.

Readings:

Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke, 2014) and additional bibliographical material



Grading:

Historiographical in-class presentations: 20%

Digitial archives exercises: 5%

Original research paper based on digital archival sources: 75%

Migration is one of the most widespread of human experiences yet generates tremendous conflicts and contradictions in constructions of identities, communities, and inequalities of power.  Perhaps the chief systems of differentiation troubled by migration are those of racial categorizations and nation-state formations. This reading seminar guides graduate students to develop a vocabulary and conceptual understanding for migration studies and its interventions into nation-based conceptual frameworks through transnational, diasporic, critical race, and ethnic studies projects.
 
This course fulfills the core course requirement for the portfolio in Asian American Studies with completion of the syllabus assignment.


Texts:
READINGs from Aihwa Ong, Melissa Brown, Mae Ngai, Adam McKeown, Philip Kuhn, Wang Gungwu, Natalia Molina, Madeline Hsu, Eiichiro Azuma, Vivek Bald, Lisa Lowe, Elaine Lynn-ee Ho, among others. 


25 % Class participation and attendance
10 % Historiographical class presentation
30 % Two 750-word book reviews
35 % Annotated bibliography or syllabus for “Introduction to Asian American History” course

This course will use a variety of exercises to help graduate students learn how do three things: to teach well; to apply their skills to the pursuit of a wide range of careers; and to navigate the process of searching for an academic job.