Department of History

Spring 2010 Schedule

click on any of the linked courses to see the course description

Monday/Wednesday/Friday

Spring 2010 Schedule – Upper and Graduate

Tuesday-Thursday

Course Descriptions for Spring 2010

 

3000-level courses

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AMH 3544 11418 1960s and the Vietnam War – David Courtwright.  10:50-12:05 TR

An examination of key political, economic, and cultural developments in the United States during the 1960s, with special reference to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; an analysis of the war in Southeast Asia  from Vietnamese and American perspectives; the legacies of 1960s liberalism and the Vietnam War.

 

 ASH 3932 12436 Manchuria and Empire – Martin Fromm. 3-5:45 W

This course approaches China’s modern history by focusing on one region in China’s northeastern frontier called Manchuria.  We will examine how this region became the center of new ethnic identities, imperialist ambitions, nationalist movements, and experiments with modernization during the early twentieth century.  In the process, this course will explore the political and cultural struggles that Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and Koreans waged over this territory.  We will discuss how different groups including Russian Jews, Korean communists, Japanese farmer-colonists, and Chinese warlords all converged to contribute their diverse visions of society, nation, and empire, and to play their part in a transnational, cross-cultural history that transformed and continues to define the contours of modern China and East Asia.

 

ASH 3932 12450 Travels in Asia – Martin Fromm. 12:15-1:30 TR

This course will lead the student on a journey across the history of East Asia through the lens of travel writing as recorded in the journals, letters, diaries, and memoirs of a heterogeneous group of men and women who left records of their wanderings in their intertwined pursuits of religious, military, commercial, and cultural enterprise.  The course will trace encounters with the West from the early Jesuit missions to China, to East Asia’s increasing incorporation within the expanding sphere of European imperialism.  It will examine how travel writers’ visions of the lands that they visited both reflected and contributed to the elaboration of Western colonial discourses for ordering the world and defining the modern self.  At the same time, we will investigate how Chinese and Japanese travel narratives expressed changing articulations of self and other, home and frontier, modernity and Orient, and empire and colony in East Asia.

 

EUH 3411 10305 (FC) Ancient Rome – Philip Kaplan. 

Rome grew from a small town in central Italy to rule one of the largest empires in history. The Romans came to govern an enormous territory that contained a diverse assortment of peoples. The legal and administrative structures of the Roman state, its religious, artistic and cultural traditions, its physical infrastructure, cities, and monuments, spread throughout Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near East, profoundly shaping the development of these regions. In this course, we will trace the history of Rome from the early days of the Republic, through the establishment of the Principate, to the transformations of the later Empire. We will explore how it encountered, absorbed, and was influenced by the surrounding peoples. We will also examine how the characteristic institutions of Roman life emerged, and how they shaped the lives both of the elites and of the common people. In addition to a textbook, we will read translations of significant works of Latin literature, and will examine inscriptions and the archaeological remains and artistic monuments of Rome to help us to understand how the Romans saw themselves and their world.

 

EUH 3932 12449 Medieval Women Authors – David Sheffler

This course explores social, intellectual, religious, and political developments from late Antiquity to the fifteenth century through the lens of women authors.  Broader themes to be considered will include the development of female religious communities, scholasticism and universities, courtly love, heresy and mysticism, and the emergence of national monarchies and national identities.  Although women authors are by definition exceptional (most women and men could neither read nor write) their works provide unique and until recently overlooked insights into the lives and experiences of medieval people.  Their works also open up new historiographical questions.  Did women develop peculiarly feminine spiritualities? Literary genres? Or identities?  Through close reading of selected texts, students who successfully complete the course will gain a more nuanced understanding of the culture, politics and religiosity of the Middle Ages, as well as the roles, expectations, and agency of women in the Middle Ages.

 

HIS 3932 12455 The Mystery of Murder: Topics in Law and Society – David Courtwright. 3:05-5:45 T

A study of homicidal violence in American and comparative historical perspective that examines the origins of and reaction to three types of killing: individual murder, state executions, and mass murder in the service of empire. This course is designed for students who want to sharpen their skills in research, critical thinking, analytical writing, and public speaking. Students considering law-related careers are especially welcome.

 

LAH 3735 12435 Colonial Latin American History in Film – Michael Francis. 3-5:45 M

This course explores colonial Latin American history through the unique perspective of film. Students will view a series of films that cover a broad range of topics in colonial Latin American history. Course readings will help students analyze and contextualize each film.  In addition, the course will examine how motion pictures represent and reconstruct the past, how historians, moviegoers, and filmmakers approach historical film, and lastly, how film helps to shape our understanding of the past.

Senior Seminars

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AMH 4390 12445 Sem: Gender and Race in Early America – Denise Bossy. 12-2:45 F    (see graduate section)

This course asks how the peoples of early America – European, Indian and African – understood gender and “race” and how these concepts changed over the course of the colonial period. Gender was the dominant model for other forms of social difference among all of these peoples, yet each group defined gender and gender roles in surprisingly distinct ways. We examine the anxieties and conflicts that resulted from cross-cultural contact and the expansion of slavery in early America, and pay special attention to how and why race supplanted gender as the main marker of social hierarchy in this period. Course readings focus on the early South, a particularly enlightening window into these larger questions because of the remarkable cultural diversity of the region.

 

AMH 4390 12447 Sem: The 1890s – Claire Goldstene. 12-2:45 F    (see graduate section)

The 1890s have often been referred to as a watershed decade in U.S. history.  This course undertakes to evaluate that characterization through an examination of the major political, social, and economic developments of these years.  This will include, among others, Populism, labor-capital relations, the Spanish-American War, the emergence of Jim Crow, radical movements, suffrage, and anti-trust efforts.

 

EUH 4932 12438 Sem: Rome and Carthage – Philip Kaplan. 3-5:45 M    (see graduate section)

This course will examine the rise of the two great powers of the central Mediterranean in the first millennium BC, Carthage and Rome. We will explore how these states emerged among the expanding societies that were spreading throughout the Mediterranean; how they each achieved the leadership over their respective empires; and how this process led to an inevitable struggle for supremacy between them. We will chart that conflict, known to later ages as the Punic Wars. We will consider the roles both of the leaders of each side, such as Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, and of the armies and peoples who participated in this life-and-death struggle, for what some would say was the fate of the west. In doing so, we will read the Roman and Greek sources that preserve the record of the conflict, and examine the archaeological evidence that supplements the written record, in the hope of recovering the lost Carthaginian perspective on the struggle that resulted in the death of their civilization.

 

LAH 4932 12459 Sem: Rebellion and Revolution in Latin America – Alison Bruey. 6-8:45 R    (see graduate section)

This reading and research seminar offers the opportunity for in-depth study of rebellion and revolution in 20th-century Latin America. From the Mexican Revolution to the revolutionary movements of the Cold War era, including especially the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions, this course provides a strong base for further study of the political and social processes that profoundly marked the history of Latin America and the world.

 

 

Graduate Courses

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AMH 5934 12446 Gender and Race in Early America – Denise Bossy. 12-2:45 F

This course asks how the peoples of early America – European, Indian and African – understood gender and “race” and how these concepts changed over the course of the colonial period. Gender was the dominant model for other forms of social difference among all of these peoples, yet each group defined gender and gender roles in surprisingly distinct ways. We examine the anxieties and conflicts that resulted from cross-cultural contact and the expansion of slavery in early America, and pay special attention to how and why race supplanted gender as the main marker of social hierarchy in this period. Course readings focus on the early South, a particularly enlightening window into these larger questions because of the remarkable cultural diversity of the region.

 AMH 5934 12448 The 1890s – Claire Goldstene. 12-2:45 Friday

The 1890s have often been referred to as a watershed decade in U.S. history.  This course undertakes to evaluate that characterization through an examination of the major political, social, and economic developments of these years.  This will include, among others, Populism, labor-capital relations, the Spanish-American War, the emergence of Jim Crow, radical movements, suffrage, and anti-trust efforts.

 

AMH 6936 12442 Sem: The Long 1960s – David Courtwright.  6-8:45 M

            A graduate research seminar devoted to the political and cultural history of “the long 1960s.” We will focus on the United States, but we will also consider European, Asian, and African developments. Topics will include presidential politics, the Cold War, decolonization, civil rights, feminism, consumerism and its enemies, the rise of an international youth counterculture, and the expansion of the welfare state. We will also consider the pattern of conservative backlash, economic and moral, the led to rise of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the late-twentieth-century “culture war.”

 

EUH 5934 12439 Rome and Carthage – Philip Kaplan. 3-5:45 M

This course will examine the rise of the two great powers of the central Mediterranean in the first millennium BC, Carthage and Rome. We will explore how these states emerged among the expanding societies that were spreading throughout the Mediterranean; how they each achieved the leadership over their respective empires; and how this process led to an inevitable struggle for supremacy between them. We will chart that conflict, known to later ages as the Punic Wars. We will consider the roles both of the leaders of each side, such as Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, and of the armies and peoples who participated in this life-and-death struggle, for what some would say was the fate of the west. In doing so, we will read the Roman and Greek sources that preserve the record of the conflict, and examine the archaeological evidence that supplements the written record, in the hope of recovering the lost Carthaginian perspective on the struggle that resulted in the death of their civilization.

 

EUH 6936 12461 Sem: The Waning of the Middle Ages?: Europe in the long Fifteenth Century – David Sheffler.  6-8:45 R

Johan Huizinga famously described the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Latin Europe as an age of decline, decay, and deterioration.  “It was,” as he so eloquently wrote “a time of overripeness and the falling of blossoms.” The scholarly brilliance and sublime prose of Huizinga’s masterpiece shaped scholarly and popular perceptions of the late Middle Ages for generations.  This research seminar will reexamine Huizinga’s Middle Ages, focusing especially on the long fifteenth century.  How useful are such organic metaphors? Was late medieval religious experience characterized by pessimism and an obsession with death? Did the late Middle Ages really experience a failure of imagination? Can sharp distinctions be drawn between the mentalities of modern (presumably more sophisticated men) and the “the violent and impulsive spirits” of Huizinga’s Middle Ages? 

 

LAH 5934 12460 Rebellion and Revolution in Latin America – Alison Bruey. 6-8:45 R

This reading and research seminar offers the opportunity for in-depth study of rebellion and revolution in 20th-century Latin America. From the Mexican Revolution to the revolutionary movements of the Cold War era, including especially the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions, this course provides a strong base for further study of the political and social processes that profoundly marked the history of Latin America and the world.