History (HIST-UH)

This course is a broad survey of African history. The course will explore the African past in its diversity. Students will explore the continent's political complexity and social creativity across a period of several millennia. The class will consider the impact of gender, religion, healing practices, trade, mobility, and the environment on major historical developments in Africa before the continent's colonization by European imperialistic powers, through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and up to the contemporary period. The course will also introduce students to African history's methodology and to the use of linguistic, material, and oral sources in the writing of history.

This course introduces students to the colonial origins of Latin America and examines colonialism's lasting impact on the region. It follows the unfolding and demise of a new social order under European rule over a period spanning from the 16th-century conquest through the early 19th-century wars of independence, highlighting international and global connections that shaped this region's social, cultural, and political history. Specific topics covered include Pre-Columbian worlds, Native-European confrontations and negotiations, the Catholic Church and popular religiosity, patriarchy and honor codes, racial dynamics and slavery, the development of capitalism, anti-colonial struggles, imperial rivalry, reform and decline, and colonial legacies.

The course surveys the relationship between modern Russia and the rest of the world from 1917 to the present. It will begin with the Bolsheviks and their dream of worldwide socialist revolution as situated in its international context, the creation and expansion of the Soviet socialist state, the onset and development of Stalin's personal despotism, the experiences and consequences of World War II, and the various postwar reforms. Special attention will be paid to the dynamics of the new socialist society, the connections between Soviet domestic and foreign policies, the economics of the cold war, Soviet orientalism, the 1991 collapse, and the legacies of Soviet empire under Putin.

This course offers an opportunity for in-depth study of the history and culture of the South Asians who comprise the majority population of the United Arab Emirates. Situated at the center of the Indian Ocean world, the Indian subcontinent is currently home to over a billion people, and is the site of richly interconnected histories with regions around the wider Indian Ocean, including the Gulf. The course explores these histories, with a focus on understanding major cultural, political, economic, and environmental connections and changes as they affected ordinary people (including migrant laborers) and shaped the nature of collective identities (ethnic, national, religious, caste, class, gender, regional, and linguistic) over time. In developing an understanding of how collective identities were produced historically, students ultimately acquire valuable tools for appraising and navigating competing models of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism in the wider Indian Ocean world today.

This course introduces students to the theoretical and practical impacts of digital technologies on historical scholarship with a focus on Middle Eastern history. We will examine how algorithmic tools and an abundance of digital sources affect historical research, especially for digitally under-resourced languages/histories. The course will strike a balance between exploring the scope of digital history and conducting research digitally. Students will engage in researching, crowdsourcing, and presenting a topic using digital tools while considering the ethical and professional challenges that may arise. The course will also integrate some of the key concepts and practices of public history, highlighting how digital methodologies can enhance public engagement and historical interpretation.

From the jungle palaces of Angkor Wat to the eight million person futuristic metropolis of Kuala Lumpur; from the fall of Saigon to President Obama slurping Pho in the street of Hanoi; from the Portuguese, Persian, and Arabic trading ships sailing the Strait of Malacca to Bangkok's Tom Yum Kung crisis, Southeast Asia has always been a vital nexus for the interaction of cultures from both within Southeast Asia and without. This course explores key themes in Southeast Asia's connections with world history: colonialism, maritime trade connections and cultural contacts, religious division, the diversity of political regimes, war and conflict, economic development, and international relationships with Great Powers. Paying special attention to the history of diversity within and across countries in this region clarifies how politics operates and produces different social and economic outcomes for different national and non-national communities. The first part of the course reviews long-term history trends. The second part turns to a series of thematic discussions on issues related to ASEAN nations' constructive engagement, conflict management, and international relations.

History offers a unique perspective on the process of globalization, by virtue of its insistence that human experience be understood in its spatial and temporal contexts. Rigorous global history questions and even supplants common understandings of globalization as Westernization. But how does history do this, and can a global historical framework enhance all forms of historical, humanistic, and social scientific inquiry? Following an assessment of foundational modern Western frameworks for understanding world history, including those of Marx and Hegel, students examine how and why people around the world have variously embraced and rejected such foundational accounts. Readings address all world regions, including Asia, Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania, and familiarize students with state-of-the-art knowledge about globalization. NOTE: This course maybe used in place of SOCSC-UH 1011 (GEPS) for Social Science Majors or Minors.

This course explores the artistic and intellectual avant-gardes, counter-cultures and protest movements of the 1960s and the early 1970s from a global perspective, assessing their impact on individual identities, social and gender hierarchies, domestic politics and international relations during the Cold War. It traces the history of the various protest movements and explores a plethora of national experiences with respect to domestic and transnational networks of dissent as well as global imaginaries. Taking into account the aesthetics and performativity of protest, the course examines the role of cultural practices, action repertoires, the media, visual representations, lifestyle and fashion, the politics of memory, and the impact of dissent on political decision-makers and society at large.

The course will explore the beginning of colonial museums in Europe, in particular the early museums established in Britain, France, Belgium and Netherlands in the 19th and the 20th centuries. Set against the backdrop of empire building, the course will discuss how museum spaces, collections, display and labeling of objects was planned to fit the colonial ideology of racial supremacy and territorial conquest on the one hand, and establish the "otherness" of the colonial subjects on the other. The museums were also meant to display the "splendors" of the colonies such as crafts, flora, fauna and minerals, produce knowledge about the acquired territories as well as disseminate this knowledge among museum visitors. Finally, the course will shift the focus to colonial museums of South Asia and analyze how museum-making has shaped the way in which we understand the history and heritage of these former colonies and how these museums are being restructured in the present day, post-colonial world.

This course takes today's headlines and places them in historical perspective. Each week we will examine a news story and ask what history can reveal about its roots, meaning, and consequences. We will consider not only the work of historians but also historically minded journalists and scholars, and pay close attention to how political and social actors draw on the past to understand the present and advance their claims. The course also examines how historical analysis can help us detect long-term shifts that often remain hidden in the daily news cycle and imagine new horizons for the future.

Is genocide a useful category of analysis, or does it obscure as much as it reveals? Genocide is recognized as a crime under international law and codified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It is hailed as the crime of crimes and all states, regardless of their ratification status, are legally bound to prevent and prosecute genocide. Yet genocide not only continues to proliferate in international society, it has also proven a politically useful term of legitimation evidence by its invocation to justify wars, in issues of state sovereignty and territoriality and in questions of reparations to post-colonial states. This class poses and tries to answer the following: How and why did armed conflict and violence against civilians occur? How are war and genocide related? How, if at all, does localized violence relate to broader processes like state decomposition, formation, and consolidation? Or is racial hatred really the main factor? How were the categories of civilians, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide constructed in the history of the law of armed conflict ("international humanitarian law")? How did contemporaries define and categorize violence excess?

This course explores Public History as the practice of presenting historical knowledge and research to a wider audience beyond academic settings in order to make history accessible, relevant, and meaningful to the general public and foster dialogue about the past. It explores the connections between the past and contemporary issues, demonstrating the relevance of historical understanding to current debates, challenges, and events. In doing so it encourages students to engage in a critical reflection on how the past shapes the present and informs the future. The course focuses on different contexts, themes, and media for public history engagement: oral history, cinema, radio, museums, archives, fiction, and memory.

What makes a woman? What would the history of the world look like through women's eyes? How might such a perspective prompt us to rethink concepts like "work," "politics," "economics," "family," "revolutions," "leadership," "activism," and "periodization" in history? This course will debate answers to these questions by exploring how gender systems, mediated by power relations of class, race, religion, nationality, and sexuality, shaped women's lived experiences in different times and places from 1500 to the present. We will seek the clues to these systems by studying a variety of sources created both by and about women from religion, politics, philosophy, law, science and medicine, and public and popular culture. We will study how ideas about gender traveled, adapted, and sometimes changed through case studies of cross-cultural encounters, empire-building, revolutions, social movements, and economic and technological transformations. And we will evaluate how the rich diversity of women's lives in our collective past, judged by their legal status, family lives, work, and public roles, accommodated or contested these gender norms and expectations. We will conclude with exchanges about the variety of contemporary visions and policy implications of gender justice

Do the police exist primarily to protect people from violence and solve crimes, or is it fundamentally and by design an instrument of state repression and social control? This course will address this question by looking at the history of the police in France, the United Kingdom, and their colonies in Africa and Asia, from the 18th century to the present. Police forces are a central element of the state apparatus and exercise authority in most societies. Their powers are extensive, and often face little government scrutiny. Yet, the police are also a deeply contested presence, with overt or underground civil resistance limiting their powers or legitimacy. By looking at metropoles and colonies, the course will address the following questions: How did the concept and realities of policing evolve between the 1700s and today? Why are some groups or individuals more likely to be targeted by the police? Who decides what constitutes a crime, and how did these definitions evolve over time? In what way has civil society pushed back against policing? How is policing linked to broader issues such as racialized power structures in metropoles and colonies, nationalism, decolonization, the rise of the far right, and human rights?

How is history written? This course offers a survey of the major theories and practices that have defined history as a scholarly discipline, and as a way of writing, over the last fifty years. Students are introduced to the major theoretical and narrative perspectives that have shaped historiography: to the kinds of historical questions that drive the research agendas of contemporary historians; and to the kinds of historical literature historians write, including analytical, narrative, scholarly, popular, and experimental. How do historians find and interpret their sources? How do they engage with existing scholarship while still striving to push their discipline forward? What methods do they apply to communicate the results of their research to other scholars and to a wider public readership? Students will learn to evaluate a wide array of different historical sources (including written documents, material artifacts, oral histories, and visual culture). They will also gain experience in meeting the challenges of writing their own works of historical scholarship, producing an original piece of written history by the end of the semester.

Can China strike a balance between economic development and environmental protection? This question, perhaps the most important question facing China (indeed the world) over the next few decades, pits economy and environment against one another. How did this adversarial relationship come about? Is it necessarily adversarial? Is it rooted in long-term trends in Chinese history, or in the most recent decades of double-digit economic growth? Are there solutions? Or are there better ways of asking the question? This course will look closely at the benefits, the consequences, and the costs of economic growth to society, ecology, and environment in China. The focus in on present dilemmas, examined through an historical perspective.

How do we study peoples, places, and societies that lie within "borderlands," spaces that either connect or separate larger powers? This course considers that questions through two examples of borderland regions that lie within and between southeast Asia and China. The first is a place that appears on no world map by which scholars now call "Zomia," the densely populated upland regions of mainland Southeast Asia and Southwest China. We will look at different ways studying this "non-place," test the heuristic limits of key analytical categories like nation, state, and citizenship, and explore alternative notions of political and cultural community. The second borderland region is the South China Sea, which others call the Champa Sea, or the Philippine Sea, or the North Natuna Sea. It is a place that few people inhabit, but which has been a crucial source of natural resources and mobility for states and peoples claiming ownership or rights to parts of it. Some fear it may be the flashpoint of a third world war, and how we understand its history may make the difference.

The course explores the relationship between arts and politics in modern Latin America. It focuses on the role played by the arts in some of the region's main political processes, such as state formation, revolutions, and modernization. The course traces the intellectual and social repercussions of theater plays, music, literature, and the visual arts in Latin American societies. Specific themes include baroque and neoclassical poetics, nationalism, modernism, race and ethnicity, avant-gardes, memory, and truth.

This course focuses on love in Africa, from the late 19th Century to the present. By doing so, the course introduces students to a multiplicity of themes in African history, from the history of gender and sexuality to popular culture, generational conflicts, and the AIDS epidemics. Studying love is central to understanding how Africans have imagined and lived their lives as gendered individuals and members of their societies, often in the face of oppressive colonial regimes and strenuous living conditions. The course will view love in its various declensions: as an emotion and expression of intimacy (the notion of romantic love), as virtue (love in theological and political discourses), as a set practices at the chore of conjugality and sexuality, and as an object of debate in the public sphere. Students will learn how to historicize affects and their relationships to society, politics, and economy. We will read fiction and primary sources, watch movies, and discuss recent academic works that will help us understand change and continuities in how individuals and communities across Africa have defined, debated, and experienced love.

The Indian Ocean has provided an important avenue for the movement of people, traditions and ideas over centuries. The course explores the cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean world with the spread of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and later Christianity. How are the different regions of the Indian Ocean littorals tied together through networks of piety, pilgrimage and mythologies? Do the surviving material remains that dot the littorals - built structures, religious iconography, inscriptions, maps, travelogues, legends and poetry of traveling saints and mythologies about the Oceanic waters itself, attest this dynamic exchange and interconnectedness? How do the circulation of people, relics and mythologies connect the hinterland with people and places across the waters?

This course examines the relationship between art and politics in Europe from the French Revolution to 1945, focusing on public monumentality and politics, allowing students to study the political history of European regimes through this lens. It focuses on how art was conceived by contemporaries, in different and evolving modalities, as essential to the construction or perpetuation of a state or political system, and not merely as a "covering" for politics. This course will focus on two major "moments" in the relationship between art (as architecture and public monumentality) and politics. The first is that of Revolution and artistic production - and destruction. Did the French revolution have a specific vision of art compared to the monarchical regime that preceded it? What was expected from artistic production in terms of politicization? Why did the Revolution destroy a large part of the Ancien Régime artistic production (and especially churches)? What is iconoclasm? The second moment focuses on the construction of nation-states and art, mainly in 19th-century Germany and Italy.

The History Capstone Seminar guides students through the capstone writing process. The course helps students identify the challenges of conducting long-term historical research and writing and develop strategies for meeting those challenges. Course assignments help students complete the project in stages, in collaboration with each student's capstone advisor, and clarify the specific expectations for submitting a polished work of historical scholarship for review. The course combines writing workshops and individualized review sessions with structured time for research and writing.

The capstone experience provides seniors with the opportunity to work closely with a faculty mentor and to conduct extensive research on a topic of their choice. The program consists of a capstone seminar, taken in the first semester of the senior year, and a year-long individualized thesis tutorial. During the capstone seminar, students define a thesis topic of their choice, develop a bibliography, read broadly in background works, and begin their research. In the tutorial, students work on a one-to-one basis with a faculty director to hone their research and produce successive drafts of a senior thesis. The capstone experience culminates in the public presentation of the senior thesis. Students may also elect to participate in a College Capstone Project with students majoring in other disciplines in the arts, and the natural and social sciences. Collaborating students work with a faculty member to define the overall goals of the Capstone Project, as well as the particular goals of each participant.