History

Why history?

History is a way of understanding the whole of the human condition as it has unfolded in time. Without history, nothing makes sense: from the meaning of words to the formation of identities, to institutions, states, and societies. History straddles the boundary between the social sciences and humanities. Like the other social sciences, it has established methods of investigation and proof, but it differs from them in that it encompasses, potentially, every area of human culture from the beginning of recorded time. Like the other humanities, it uses ordinary language and established modes of telling its stories, but it is constrained by evidence left us from the past.

Majoring in history will help you develop valuable skills transferable beyond the classroom: critical thinking, interpretation, and persuasive writing, as well as analytical and research skills for tackling complex questions. These are all essential to doing a job well after you leave Wesleyan. History is inherently complex and requires the ability to acquire knowledge from large amounts of information and assess evidence and conflicting interpretations of the past. As a history major you will learn to make sense of complexity and to tell a good story.

HIST101F History and the Humanities (FYS)

This course offers first-year students an opportunity to explore the humanities from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives, traditionally Western as well as global, and to make connections between humanistic learning and history. The course is a small discussion seminar in which primary source materials, or classic texts, are used exclusively. An effort will be made to examine the interrelationship of ideas in the various disciplines and to compare history, literary analysis, philosophy, and theory as modes of inquiry and as ways of thinking about documents and texts. The course thereby aims to provide students with the critical tools by which to analyze texts produced in the remote or recent past. The course also serves a related purpose: to familiarize students with the heritage of Western historical tradition and to impart knowledge of the crucial role of history and the humanities as a component in general education. Students may take HIST101F without having to take HIST102F.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST102F History and the Humanities II (FYS)

This course offers first-year students an opportunity to explore the humanities from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives, traditionally Western as well as global, and to make connections between humanistic learning and history. The course is a small discussion seminar in which primary source materials, or classic texts, are used exclusively. An effort will be made to examine the interrelationship of ideas in the various disciplines and to compare history, literary analysis, philosophy, and theory as modes of inquiry and as ways of thinking about documents and texts. The course thereby aims to provide students with the critical tools by which to analyze texts produced in the remote or recent past. The course also serves a related purpose: to familiarize students with the heritage of Western historical tradition and to impart knowledge of the crucial role of history and the humanities as a component in general education. Students may take HIST102F without having taken HIST101F.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST103F From Protest to Revolution: A Middle Eastern History (FYS)

This seminar explores protests, rebellions, insurgencies, and revolutions that have shaped the history of the Middle East from the birth of the three monotheistic religions to this day. Why do people rebel? We will seek answers in the context of religion, ethnicity, language, and race in the long and political history of this wide-ranging human geography. The main focus will be the agency of those who strived for change and modes of resistance, finishing with the 21st-century activisms in labor, LGBTQ+, student, journalist, academic, and political Islamic mobilizations.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST104F Islam and Empire Through Fiction (FYS)

This first-year seminar will cover the three different empires of the Early Modern era (c. 1500-1800), encompassing much of the Muslim world: the Ottoman Empire in the core of the Middle East, Safavid Empire in Persia and beyond, and Mughal Empire in South Asia. Our aim is to analyze both common and divergent patterns and structures of imperial rule as well as shared imperial legacies and cultural resources. In addition to lectures and secondary background readings, students read and discuss fictional works, with a view to exploring "Islamic civilization" through literary voices of acclaimed authors. Reading fiction is to help us through the fragmentary nature of the sources used to reconstruct the major debates that surround the emergence and formation of Islamic empires in the Early Modern period. Questions of fictional narration, historical memory, and revisionist history will also be discussed.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST106F Black Reconstruction: The Origins of America's Racial Divide (FYS)

Voter intimidation, racial violence, an impeached president, an embattled Congress, threats of a civil war, and emboldened domestic terrorists are not a new phenomenon in American history. All have their roots in America's most violent, revolutionary, and contested era: Reconstruction. Beginning after the Civil War, Radical Republicans inside and outside Congress worked with free Black allies to found an American nation that lived up to its ideals. White domestic terrorists, backed by an increasingly recalcitrant Democratic Party, violently opposed the increased political power and civil rights of African Americans. In this first-year seminar, we will examine the contours of that contest, the world that it created, and the lasting influence of America's unfinished revolution.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST107F Life of the Modern Fact (FYS)

Facts aren't born; they are made. The challenge is to understand how people have come to think of facts as existing in the world independent of human intervention. This course explores the tools and techniques that people have used to craft facts in varied domains of applied science, such as agriculture, climate modeling, epidemiology, and pharmaceutical production. The course also examines how broader social structures, such as law and community, helped produce facts as people shared, defended, and used them. We consider examples from the 17th century through the present day, including practices of nature study, classification, quantification, and experiment.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST108 Time Machines: Bringing the Past to the Present and the Future to the Past

In the course we will explore how ghosts of the past and imaginaries of the future haunt the present. We will do so by looking at the temporal disjuncture in canonical and seemingly concrete evidentiary categories of disciplinary history. In essence, we will see how they serve as time machines to bring the past into the present and the present to the future. The course will be organized around a variety of themes from ghosts, haunting, trauma, and historical injustice, through heritage, memory, and presentism, to technological imaginaries and the Anthropocene. In addition, we will look at the ways such imaginary time travel occurs in seemingly everyday sites as well such as supermarkets, films, and amusement parks.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL199
Prereq: None

HIST109F With Bold Knife and Fork: An Introduction to Food History (FYS)

This first-year seminar is an introduction to food history and food studies, two linked fields in which we ask how people have satisfied their appetites, and what their choices mean. This encompasses everything from the question of how agriculture began, to the question of what it meant to eat a Korean taco in Los Angeles in, say, 2014. Food history and food studies are vast fields, and in this seminar we will sample many versions of them. Because this seminar is designed for students just beginning college, it introduces a variety of academic approaches to food, from chronological analyses of how specific ingredients became important for specific populations, to the anthropological treatment of food and identity, to cultural histories informed by primary sources--that is, documents written by historical actors. We even read contemporary "food writing," including restaurant reviews, which are themselves historical documents of a sort. This course also has a strong chronological through-line, winding from the establishment of agriculture to the modernization and industrialization of global food ways.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST110F Been in the Storm So Long: Grassroots Movements and the Black Freedom Struggle (FYS)

Most civil rights narratives focus on Martin Luther King, Jr. and other prominent leaders of the civil rights movements. This course seeks to shift that narrative to young activists working on the ground in the struggle for Black freedom. These college students used grassroots organizing tactics, embedding themselves in local Black communities, to drive local politics and draw attention to larger systemic issues. We will look specifically at the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), led by John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael, as they moved from the shock troops of the Southern freedom struggle to Black Power.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST111F Protest to Revolutions (FYS)

HIST112F Religion, Science, and Empire: Crucible of a Globalized World (FYS)

The development of modern science--and of modernity itself--not only coincided with the rise of European imperialism: it was abetted by it. Meanwhile, religion was integral to both the roots of European science and Western encounters with others. This class will explore how the intersections of religion, science, and empire have formed a globalized world with examples of European engagement with the Americas, Middle East, and, particularly, India from the age of Columbus through to the space race. We will examine how the disciplines we know today as biology, anthropology, archaeology, folklore, and the history of religions all crystallized in the crucible of imperial encounter and how non-Westerners have embraced, engaged, and resisted these epistemes.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI209F, EDST209F, GSAS209F, STS209F
Prereq: None

HIST116 Environmental History: Telling Stories in Place

This course introduces students to environmental history, the study of the changing relationships between humans and nature through time. We will consider how the natural world has shaped human history; how humans have transformed the environments they have moved through, made use of, and inhabited; and how ideas about nature have shaped people's interactions with the world around them and with one another. Focusing on both historiography and methods, we will read classic and recent work in the field and learn to conduct historical research. We will also pay attention to narrative and the writing of history, through reading, in-class workshops, peer editing, and trying different kinds of historical storytelling. The central assignment will be a short research paper in which students will practice environmental history through the study of a particular place.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST117 Chinese Cities

More than half of China's population now resides in cities. Within the next few years, China plans to accelerate the rate of urbanization by building sprawling cities and relocating more people into urban areas.

This course explores the history of Chinese cities from the imperial to modern age. Cities were centers of commerce, intellectual activity, and, in the words of historian and political scientist David Strand, "storehouses of political technique, strategy, and sentiment open to anyone with the understanding and the will to inventory to exploit them." We will study how cities supported massive populations with limited resources, inspired new forms of social organization, and transformed the political and social order of China.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CEAS269
Prereq: None

HIST118F History of U.S Social Movements (FYS)

This first year seminar course examines the long history of movements for social change in the United States from the 1830s to the 1970s. Movements we will explore will include abolitionism, women's rights, the black freedom struggle, modern feminism, and gay liberation. We will focus on the tactics used by social movements to achieve their goals, how social movements related to each other, how social movements changed over time, and how social movements interacted with the broader forces of American society, including politics, race, law, and religion. A major focus of this course will be how historians conduct research, use evidence, and write history. Students will be exposed to primary sources as well as selected secondary sources in the field.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST123F Cinema India: South Asia's Past on Film (FYS)

This first year seminar course examines the relationship of film and history in India. We will focus on how filmmakers represent the past and, alternatively, how films inform historical memory--especially in the context of the competing trajectories of nationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization. A central concern will be the historiographical challenges and opportunities of film. We will pay particular attention to Hindi cinema, including films produced by the Bombay/Mumbai ("Bollywood") film industry since the 1950s, though we will also consider the rise of "parallel" cinema. Feature films will range from classics like "Mughal-e Azam" (1960) and "Umraon Jaan" (1981), to lesser known works like "Shatranj ke Khiladi" (1977), "Mirch Masala" (1987), and "Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi" (2005). We will also probe the critical and box-office success of relatively recent blockbusters such as "Lagaan" (2001), "Rang de Basanti" (2005), and "Jodhaa Akbar" (2008), comparing them to the ambivalent domestic and diaspora response to period dramas like "Dil Se" (1998), "Mangal Pandey" (2005) and "Laal Kaptaan" (2019).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST129 Philosophy and the Movies: The Past on Film

This course examines how films represent the past and how they can help us understand crucial questions in the philosophy of history. We begin with three weeks on documentary cinema. How do documentary films achieve "the reality effect"? How has the contemporary documentary's use of reenactment changed our expectations of nonfiction film? Much of the course is devoted to classic narrative films that help us critically engage questions about the depiction of the past. We think about those films in relation to texts in this history of philosophy and contemporary film theory.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM360, PHIL160
Prereq: None

HIST130F North American Borderlands (FYS)

North American Borderlands explores the physical, social, political, cultural, and economic spaces that borders create and purport to divide. The course covers a long history and a wide variety of material - with subjects ranging from 17th-century contests between Algonquian peoples and Dutch traders along the saltwater frontier to the Gilded Age story of a Texas slave who reinvented himself as a Mexican millionaire, to the sulfur dioxide that blew up from U.S. power plants to fall as acid rain in Canada and sour relations between the two nations in the 1980s. By the end of the course, students will be able to recognize borderlands as distinctive spaces of conflict, exchange, dispossession, and opportunity.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST132 History of Energy

From fire to fossil fuels, humans are characterized by their ability to use more energy than other species. By capturing and releasing reservoirs of energy stored over the course of Earth's history, humans have increased their resource base, expanded global population, and modified the environments on which they have relied for subsistence.

This course introduces students to themes in the history of energy transitions, from photosynthesis to fire to the exploitation of fossil fuels beginning in the 19th and 20th centuries. By taking up the use of pre-industrial fuels, animal muscle, water, and wind, in addition to coal, oil, and gas, we will consider the ways humans have come to rely on cheap and abundant energy. In a broad survey of energy regimes, we will probe the effects of production and consumption of energy on politics, environment, economy, and society.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST135 American Food

This course investigates topics in the history of food production from the colonial period to the present, with emphasis on the American contribution to the development of world food systems and cultures of consumption. Topics to be addressed include the production of agricultural commodities, development of national markets, mass production of food, industrialization of agriculture, and the recent emergence of organics, slow food, and local movements.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: ENVS135
Prereq: None

HIST140 Virtue and Vice in History, Literature, and Philosophy

Examines the long, complex and sometimes contradictory associations of virtue with piety, salvation, righteousness, intensity, strength, and, more recently with vulnerability and suffering. Beginning with Confucius and Aristotle, and winding our way through Christianity, humanism, postmodernism until the present, we will explore the ethics, power, and politics of the ideas of virtue and vice.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL228, CHUM228, PHIL112
Prereq: None

HIST141 Theories and Models

This class will focus on how theories and models are designed and regarded across the university curriculum--in the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. This topic is particularly pertinent to intellectual history, a subject that regularly uses texts from across the modern university curriculum as its primary readings. Given the range of intellectual history, both in terms of chronology and subject matter, intellectual history could be argued to be the subject best positioned to consider the process of making theory.

Questions to be addressed include: What are some of the unexpected results of the increased use of mathematics and computers even in the humanities and social sciences, not just in the sciences, and how has this changed the relationship of theory and models for each of these disciplines? To what extent does the debate about the refutability, the falsifiability--or truth status--of models indicate an ongoing need for theory? The specific modern academic subjects to be examined will be philosophy, economics, and physics. Thomas Kuhn's THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS (1962) will serve as a starting point for this study; however, most of the readings during the semester will be much more recent.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST143F Jesus Chicken: Business and Religion in America (FYS)

Summary: Although many Americans are aware of the religious identity of the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A (earning it the moniker of "Jesus Chicken" in some communities), there is nothing new about businesses that project a religious ethos. This First Year Seminar explores the blurry boundary between business and religion in America, examining the ways in which businesses use religion and the ways in which religious entities often function as businesses. Although this course primarily focuses on the Christian tradition, it will also examine the ways in which other religious communities (such as Jewish and Buddhist) approach the marketplace. Chronologically, the course spans the 17th to 21st centuries, paying special attention to the emergence of the market economy in the U. S. from 1800-1850 and the growth of consumer culture in the second half of the 20th century. This course will provide students with an introduction to historical methods and the critical study of religion, while focusing on developing collegiate-level reading, writing, and critical thinking skills that will form a foundation for any major at Wesleyan.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RELI174
Prereq: None

HIST151 Introduction to History: The "Russian World" Past and Present

The "Russian World" has become a central--though deeply ambiguous and contested--theme in contemporary political discourse both within and beyond Russia. This course will offer a survey of how different conceptions of the "Russian World" have been articulated and deployed over time by following the history of Russian lands and peoples from the eighth century to the present day. This course is one of the gateways to the history major and is intended especially for first- and second-year students. As an introduction to history, the course will introduce students to the discipline of history by examining the historical sources, concepts, theories, and methods necessary for reading and writing history.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST154 Introduction to History: Twelve Medieval People

This course is one of the gateways to the history major. It is also an introduction to the Middle Ages through a study of 12 exemplary medieval lives and minds, spanning a thousand years of history. We focus on people--bodies, minds, and souls--coping with history and creating sense for their world. The course will typically feature one person or pair per week, and by examining their writings or stories and the contexts in which these were produced, the nature of medieval life, the pressure on the self, the articulation of gender and ethics for the entire period will come into view. Among the figures studied are likely to be St. Augustine, Queen Brunhild, St. Anselm, Abelard, Heloise, William Marshal, King Louis IX, Dante, Catherine of Siena, Christine de Pisan, Joan of Arc, Margery Kempe, and Pope Pius II.

As an introduction to history course, we will also offer an examination of the basic concepts, techniques, and skills for reading, understanding, and writing history: documents and archives, text and context, sceptical inquiry, argument construction, and an interest in good and expressive writing.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST155 Cold War Environmental History

War remakes the natural world to support organized violence. Pervasive militarism renders its transformations permanent. In the context of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union pursued competitive testing of nuclear weapons; engaged in proxy wars with devastating local effects; and embarked on extensive modernization projects in agriculture and public works. In many such projects, political antagonism masked commonality and collaboration in science and technology. In this course, we reckon with the persistent environmental effects of militarism by pursuing a global history removed from the ideological projections of its actors.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST156 Intro to History: Protest and Revolution in the Middle East: A Middle Eastern History

HIST156F Introduction to History: The Ottoman World (FYS)

This course treats some of the major themes of Ottoman state and society, one of the major empires of the world out of which many new polities in the Balkans, Anatolia, the Middle East, and North Africa emerged during the 20th century. At the center of the course is the transformation of the so-called classical Ottoman state to the early modern and modern through the many shapes and forms it has taken. We will be starting from the 15th century and end with the analysis of the making of the modern Ottoman society by the beginning of the 20th century before its imminent collapse. The late 16th-century transformations and the question of Ottoman "decline," on the one hand, and transformation to a modern state on the other, comprise the historiographical context to be addressed alongside basic historical patterns and events. A primary concern is to have students engage with critical issues not only in the study of Ottoman history, but also situating this history in the discussions on world history in general, and the history of the Middle East in particular.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST160 Intro to History: U.S. in the World Since 1776

Transcending the nation-state framework, this course foregrounds transnational and international frameworks to explore the United States' role in the world since 1776. We will explore the rise of the United States' vast settler colonial empire in North America, its vast overseas empire in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and the role of the United States in international and global affairs in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will look both at the policies created by U.S. presidents, diplomats, and military leaders, as well as the experiences of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and colonized peoples of the Global South who have been affected by the U.S. presence in the world. We will also underscore the importance of international organizations, non-state actors, and non-governmental organizations, such as the United Nations and the American Red Cross, that have shaped international society over the 20th century. Throughout the course, we will explore the themes of race and ethnicity, imperialism and colonialism, migration and immigration, nationalism and internationalism, self-determination and decolonization, militarism and development, and diplomacy and foreign policy.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST165 Introduction to History: Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World

Racial slavery was inextricably tied to the rise of both colonialism in the "New World" and global capitalism. It fueled a complete reorientation of world economic and political systems with consequences still evident today. Yet people on both sides of the Atlantic--Black and white--challenged the idea of racial slavery and its entrenched interests. The abolitionists succeeded in emancipating millions, but did not fully achieve their goals for human rights. In this course, we will examine the rise and fall of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, with particular attention paid to the North American mainland and Caribbean.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST167 Introduction to History: Yoga: A Global History

Yoga as a philosophical, religious, and ascetic discipline has shaped the lives of major world-historical figures, including the Buddha, the Mughal emperor Akbar, Mahatma Gandhi, and Steve Jobs. Though yoga is usually understood today as a timeless set of disciplines that inculcate spiritual and physical well-being, it has experienced dramatic change over the millennia--not least with the rise of "postural" yoga in India from about 1000 CE, its systematization as "hatha yoga" by about the sixteenth century, and its growing popularity in the West since the early twentieth century. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the rich global history of yoga, to foster an understanding of and appreciation for the philosophical and psycho-somatic dimensions of yoga, as well as the political and cultural transformations that shaped and were shaped by yoga (and prominent yogis and yoginis) as it spread from India to both the East and West.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GSAS167, RELI167
Prereq: None

HIST170 Introduction to History: American Material Culture

This course introduces students to the study of history through an investigation of American material culture and the built environment from the pre-colonial period to the present. The course is structured around Friday site visits in the New England and mid-Atlantic regions, including the Pequot Museum, Mystic Seaport, Central Park, New York City waterfront, Fresh Kills, and local suburbs. Students will consider theories and methods of studying history through objects, landscapes, and architecture. We will consider how changing patterns of settlement and land use shaped human and natural ecology, and how people fashioned cultures and communities through the fabrication, circulation, and use of a wide range of natural and human-made objects.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST171 Introduction to History: History of U.S. Social Movements

This Introduction to History course examines the long history of movements for social change in the United States from the 1830s to the 1970s. Movements we will explore will include abolitionism, women's rights, the black freedom struggle, modern feminism, and gay liberation. We will focus on the tactics used by social movements to achieve their goals, how social movements related to each other, how social movements changed over time, and how social movements interacted with the broader forces of American society, including politics, race, law, and religion. A major focus of this course will be how historians conduct research, use evidence, and write history. Students will be exposed to primary sources as well as selected secondary sources in the field.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST171Z Introduction to History: History of U.S. Social Movements

Online course: Monday through Friday 2-4pm with additional asynchronous lectures. This Introduction to History course examines the long history of movements for social change in the United States from the 1830s to the 1970s. Movements we explore will include abolitionism, women's rights, the black freedom struggle, modern feminism, and gay liberation. We will focus on the tactics used by social movements to achieve their goals, how social movements related to each other, how social movements changed over time, and how social movements interacted with the broader forces of American society, including politics, race, law, and religion. Students will be exposed to primary sources as well as selected secondary sources in the field. Given the winter sessions focus we will focus on 10 different U.S. social movements, with the first half of class devoted to the outline and history of each movement in a lecture format, and the second half based on a discussion of how the movement builds on and relates to other social movements and broader U.S. history.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST172 Introduction to History: Germany from Napoleon to the Berlin Republic

Germany witnessed more dramatic and radical changes in forms of government within the span of just 31 years (1918-1949) than any other modern society in history, yet today it is a model democracy and an anchor of peace and prosperity in the heart of Europe. Germans are credited for extraordinary achievements in the arts, sciences, and industry, yet they also produced some of history's darkest chapters. This introductory course surveys the fascinating and turbulent history of modern Germany to analyze the sources of these contradictions. We will begin by locating the birth of modern Germany in the massive social and political upheavals of the Napoleonic era that set the stage for the rise of German nationalism and rapid industrialization. We will study the unlikely processes that resulted in German unification in 1871 and how Germany's nationalism, growing industrial power, and its deep internal divisions led to a policy of aggressive imperialism that contributed to the outbreak of the World War I. The course will analyze the profound impact of that war and defeat on German society, situating both the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler in that context. We will subsequently study Nazism, the World War II, and the Holocaust, as well as the ultimate destruction of Germany as sovereign state with its surrender and military occupation in 1945. The remainder of the course explores the phoenixlike rebirth of two competing German states in the Cold War and the subsequent parallel development and divergence of two German societies. We will conclude the course by analyzing the process that led to German reunification in 1990 and the lines of development of the "Berlin Republic" since that time. The aims of the course are to introduce students to historical primary sources, the skills of historical analysis, and the questions of historiography through a coherent introductory survey of modern German history.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GRST272
Prereq: None

HIST173 Intro to History: Heretics on Trial: The Holy Inquisition and Its Enemies

The Inquisition was among the most feared institutions of the early modern West. In its efforts to impose religious orthodoxy, it persecuted minorities, prohibited behaviors it deemed heretical--like magic and unbelief--and censored intellectual inquiry. Yet despite its resoluteness, the ability of the Catholic Church to impose control varied widely across time and place and was often met with equally firm resistance. This introductory course examines how the Catholic Inquisition functioned, from its origins in the medieval period to its final demise in the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to geographic and temporal specificities. From Cartagena de Indias to Lima, Goa, Rome, and Toledo, inquisitorial tribunals spanned a significant portion of the Atlantic world. The records produced by its scribes are some of the richest sources of the social, cultural, religious, and economic history of the era, yet they are also some of the most challenging to deal with, both epistemologically and morally. Historians have relied on Inquisition archives to reconstruct the lives of individuals and communities who left no other written records, all the while seeking to acknowledge that the records were produced under duress by officials who suspected the accused of the terrible crime of heresy. Through a wide range of primary sources like trial transcriptions, Inquisition "autobiographies," written confessions, censored books, and literary sources, students will both survey the lives of people who faced the Inquisition's scrutiny, while considering the role of violence, persecution, and resistance in the creation of the very records that allow for historical reconstruction.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST126
Prereq: None

HIST174 Introduction to History: European Reformations

An introduction to history course, European Reformations will provide an introduction to the concepts and tools for reading, writing, and enjoying history by examining the ideas and people who developed the Protestant Reformation, one of the most explosive changes in world history that continues to reverberate and affect lives and politics today. Centering on the ideas and politics of the European Reformation age, we will examine thinkers and problems within Catholic Europe that led to the crisis of the Reformation from around 1500. A focus on the ideas and actions of figures such as Luther and Calvin and the religious martyrs of the 16th century will be central, but we will also examine Catholic responses and the changing political and legal ideas that the Reformation produced.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST175 Intro to History: Resistance and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1500-1850

The Atlantic Ocean created and destroyed empires. This course will explore those who fought against the expansion of imperial powers, including slaves who crossed the ocean involuntarily, Indigenous peoples defending their homelands, women who demanded equality, and pirates who constructed an alternative universe. The Atlantic revolutions (American, French, Haitian, and South American) set empires on fire and ushered in a new era of resistance to oppression.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST176 Introduction to History: Science in the Making: Thinking Historically About Science

This course introduces students to a range of perspectives--drawn from history, sociology, anthropology, geography, media studies, and literary studies, among others--on how to write about the history of science. Throughout, the emphasis is on understanding the relationship between the histories of science we can tell and the materials that our histories draw upon, from publications and archival documents to oral histories, material culture, and film. In addition to reading academic literature, students will gain practical experience working with historical sources and conducting original research. They will also familiarize themselves with new digital tools for presenting historical materials by developing a course website that showcases their research projects.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS276
Prereq: None

HIST177 Introduction to History: Yoga: A Global History

Yoga as a philosophical, religious, and ascetic discipline has informed the thinking of major world-historical figures as wide ranging as Siddhartha Gautama ("Buddha" or "wise one"); the Mughal emperor, Jalaluddin Muhammad ("Akbar" or "the great"); Mohandas K. Gandhi ("Mahatma" or "great soul"); and Apple Inc. founder, Steve Jobs. Though yoga is usually embraced as a timeless set of disciplines that inculcate spiritual and physical well-being, it has experienced dramatic change over the millennia. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the rich global history of yoga, to foster an understanding of and appreciation for the philosophical and psychosomatic dimensions of yoga, as well as the political and cultural transformations that shaped and were shaped by yoga (and prominent yogis and yoginis)--in the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GSAS177
Prereq: None

HIST179 Intro to History: Biodiversity and its Histories

Biodiversity loss may portend the next mass extinction, but what is biodiversity? Euro-American concepts of biodiversity have become a category of policy and politics at local, regional, national, and international levels. This course will track the development of these concepts from the 18th century to the present, paying special attention to the growth of natural history collections to document taxonomy, evolution, biogeography and ecology of species. How does the idea of living variation in genes, traits, species, and ecosystems relate to human and non-human beings?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: ENVS224
Prereq: None

HIST181 Introduction to History: Middle East and North Africa in Global Perspective

This course will introduce students to the history and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa with special attention to the formation of socio-political systems, artistic expressions, and religious ideas in connection with global developments and local responses. The organizing theme of the course is "Contact and Change," which will afford an opportunity to examine two of the principle challenges facing historians: accounting for change and understanding people and societies separated from us by space and time.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST186 The Raj: India and Britain (Introduction to History)

This course examines the linked history of India and Britain from the 18th to the 20th century. The focus will be on the rise and demise of the British Empire in South Asia, commonly referred to as "the Raj," and how the experience shaped what it meant to be both Indian and British. Along the way we will learn how merchants from a remote island nation in western Europe managed to take control of the wealth and manpower of the Indian subcontinent; how Indians helped to build the Raj but gradually turned against it; and how in rebelling against the Raj, and reshaping it, Indians crafted new forms of social protest and political belonging.

This is an Introduction to History course intended mainly for first- and second-year students who are interested in the past and, perhaps, are even (though not necessarily) contemplating the history major. As such, it will introduce students to the discipline by reflecting on the nature of historical evidence, how to use an archive, and how to craft a historical argument.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GSAS186
Prereq: None

HIST188 Introduction to History: Revolutionary Women

"I do not think the war would have been won without the women.... Now women have to liberate themselves." The fighter Maudy Muzenda's reflection on the role of women in Zimbabwe's liberation war speaks to a broader pattern in global history. Women have been central to the radical transformation of societies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas from the early modern era to the present. In this course we will examine revolutionary women who took up arms and others who protested for improved working conditions, voting rights, sexual liberty, and human rights. Our cases will include the history of political revolutions in France, Cuba, Russia, and China, as well as in Zimbabwe. We will also explore the critical role of women in the global Industrial Revolution, the Suffrage Movement, the rise of international feminisms, and the everyday struggles of women in multiple sexual revolutions.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: FGSS188
Prereq: None

HIST189 Introduction to History: History of the Present

In this course we explore history as a critical endeavor. The aim is twofold: to reflect on the role history plays in making categories of contemporary debate appear inevitable, natural, or culturally necessary; to question underlying assumptions about the relationship between past and present that are so often taken for granted. We will examine both history's influence on politics and the politics of history as a discipline.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL189
Prereq: None

HIST190 Introduction to History: Environment

Humans have profoundly altered the character of Earth's environment since the advent of agriculture and settled societies some 10,000 years ago. This course is a study of the historical relationship between human beings and their habitats, with additional attention to arid lands as places of settlement, cultivation, and development. We explore how global problems such as climate change, biodiversity attenuation, and depletion of fossil soils, fuels, and water are linked to social problems such as economic inequality, food insecurity, conflict, and declining public health. The course reviews evidence of major environmental problems; considers how varied academic disciplines address them; and models a historical approach to understanding environmental change.

The course is divided into two parts: "Environmental Concepts," and "Case Studies." In Spring 2022, the case studies will be devoted to biodiversity.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: ENVS237, STS190
Prereq: None

HIST191 Introduction to History: Pacific Worlds

This introductory course explores the Pacific Ocean as a region of historical inquiry. With a strong viewpoint from the Pacific Islands, this course interrogates long held notions of the Pacific as a vast empty space, emphasizes the Indigenous Pacific, charts the rise of imperial powers, and follows the paths of Indigenous peoples, labor migrants, merchants, scientists, militaries, and tourists, among other historical actors. This course will cover the topics of race and indigeneity, gender and sexuality, militarism and tourism, and the environment, as well as colonialism, imperialism, and decolonization. Taking an expansive definition of historical text to account for the ways Indigenous peoples and migrants understand history, this course will include poetry, song, fiction, film, art, objects, and oral and living histories, and will explore varied methods and frameworks in the discipline of history.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST192 Introduction to History: U.S. Political History, 1789-Present

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 has sparked a widespread reckoning--both inside and outside of universities--with the dismal state of American understandings of our political past. Despite handwringing to the contrary, polarized partisanship, voter suppression, and policy stagnation are not new phenomena. This course examines the elections and elected officials, policy and policy making, and parties and party politics that shaped American history from the founding to the present. The course will chart the ways that elites have structured the relationship of American citizens to the state and explore what might come next. This course is the "top-down" companion of the "bottom-up" political history covered in HIST171: Introduction to History: History of U.S. Social Movements.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST197 Introduction to History: Foundations of East Asian Cultures

This course introduces some of the cultural foundations of East Asia and how they have continued to resonate through history. We will be examining translated primary texts in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, mainly from China, Korea, and Japan. We will also be working with other media such as film and art. The course attempts to equip students with a basic fluency in interpreting ancient and modern materials from East Asia and identifying its cultural contexts.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CEAS
Identical With: CEAS207
Prereq: None

HIST200 The Historian as Detective

Whodunnit? In many ways, the craft of history is much like the art of detection. Historians arrive on the scene after the "crime" was committed. We look for traces, or clues, left behind. We try not to contaminate the crime scene. We pore over the evidence. We consider both motive and opportunity. We take note of silences. We keep an open mind. We seek the truth. And, as it happens, the professional historian and the professional detective--in fact as well as fiction--emerged roughly around the same time. We are like twins separated at birth. Perhaps if we are reunited, we might learn something new about each other, and ourselves. This course will draw upon classic (and not-so-classic) works of history, criminal detection, and detective fiction to better understand the importance of forensics and method in the discipline of history, as well as the importance of history in the art of detection. Each week will pair a work of literature with a work of history, supplemented by key essays in historical methodology.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST201 Medieval Europe

This introductory lecture course is a history of European politics, culture, and institutions from the end of the Roman Imperial era through 1520. Within a chronological framework we will focus on the creation of kingdoms and government; the growth and crises of papal-dominated Christianity, its crusades and its philosophy; the rise and role of the knight, lady, and aristocratic culture; masculinity and gender relations; the crises of the later Middle Ages, including the Black Death, heresy, mysticism, and war. These all contributed to the beginnings of the modern world, including the Renaissance and the Reformation, events that ended the medieval period. We will also at least glance at the borderlands of Europe, the edges of Islamic and Orthodox worlds.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: MDST204
Prereq: None

HIST202 Early Modern Europe

This introductory course surveys the history of Europe during the formative period of the modern era from 1500 to 1800. It focuses on the crucial episodes of religious and political conflicts and highlights key intellectual, cultural, and economic developments: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reformation, the English civil war, absolutism, enlightened despotism, the rise of capitalism and plantation slavery, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. Representing one of the required modules for the history major, this course also provides essential historical grounding for any student interested in study abroad and in modern culture and politics.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST203 Modern Europe

This course surveys the history of Europe since 1815 and is intended primarily as an introduction to decisive events and interpretation of central themes. Attention will be devoted to major political, social, economic, and cultural developments, beginning with the many dimensions of the political and industrial revolutions of the 19th century; continuing with the emergence of nation-states and nationalism, working-class movements, the consequences of imperialism and the World War I, and communism and fascism; and concluding with study of the World War II, the reassertion of Europe, the collapse of the Soviet system, and contemporary issues.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RL&L203
Prereq: None

HIST204 Greek History

Using primary sources wherever possible, this course will examine the development of Greek civilization from Mycenaean times through the death of Alexander the Great. Special attention will be given to the connection between political events and cultural and intellectual trends. No prior acquaintance with ancient history is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CLAS
Identical With: CLST231
Prereq: None

HIST205 Roman History

This course traces the history of Rome from its foundation, through its rise as an Italic and Mediterranean power, up to the transfer of the empire to Constantinople. It focuses on the political, military, and social achievements of the Roman people and the contributions of its principal historical figures, from the legendary kings of the regal period, to Republican leaders such as Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, through Augustus and the establishment of the principate and subsequent emperors such as Vespasian, Hadrian, and Diocletian. This course will fall under the History/Social Justice track.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CLAS
Identical With: CLST232
Prereq: None

HIST206 Classic Christian Texts

This course is designed to provide students, most of whom will have no background in this subject, with a solid grounding in some of the most influential texts of the Christian tradition, both Catholic and Protestant. This training is intended to make the students better readers in Western humanities and social sciences.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST207 Japan Since 1868: Society and Culture in Modern Japanese History

This course examines the history of Japan from roughly 1800 to the present. With a broad-ranging observation covering politics, economy, society, culture, and foreign relations, we will look at a variety of historical events that the Japanese people experienced. Our goal is not only to understand what happened when, but also to be concerned with how people at different historical stages saw the world around them. Major historical events, trends, ideas, and people will constitute the vital part of the course; however, we will also inquire into everyday life of ordinary people, whose names do not remain in historical records. We will use a wide range of materials including written sources available in the English language, films, literature, and comics.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CEAS265
Prereq: None

HIST208 Digital and Visual Storytelling

During this seminar, we will develop a digital group project that addresses the question of remembering and denying pasts through the historical and critical relationship between carcerality, race, and storytelling in Connecticut. By engaging with contemporary forms of digital and visual storytelling (ArcGIS StoryMaps), this group project will work with the modalities of archival studies and digital humanities, accompanied by readings in critical race studies, visual and literary theory, and decolonial theory. We will first explore "remembering the past" through two post-Civil War Connecticut landmarks: The Church of the Good Shepherd (1867-69), dedicated to Samuel Colt, and the Mark Twain House (1874), now a museum. Both architectures exist as pivotal markers for a new modern American narrative intertwined with legacies of slavery, manufacturing, firearms, and storytelling. We will then consider how to make visible denied "pasts" by conducting archival research on the formative period of the 1860s and 1870s and in respect of the Connecticut context. Centrally, valuable insights for the project development will be provided by the in-class meetings with scholars, artists, and archivists, whose work rethinks and challenges the bond between carcerality, race, and storytelling.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AFAM209, AMST277
Prereq: None

HIST209 Reenacting Justice: Guns in America

This seminar, developed in collaboration with visiting guest instructor Glenn LaVertu (Parsons), combines readings, discussion, archival research, storyboarding, project-based learning, legal analysis, and filmmaking in presenting new takes on an old genre: Westerns. We will read and watch Westerns alongside study of the development of the American legal system, considering the aesthetics of justice, narrative, and guns. Students will work on film and theater projects related to the manufacturing, use, and mythologization of "Old West" in popular culture, television, and film. Film projects will be screened and discussed at the Center for the Study of Guns and Society's annual undergraduate conference on Thursday, April 25, and Friday April 26, 2024, and at the presentation of "Stories of Carceral Connecticut," a celebration of student projects for the Mellon Foundation project, "Carceral Connecticut," on Friday, May 3, 2024. (Both events are required). The course will consider the aesthetics of storytelling, guns, and justice, as well as be a lab for creating and narrating new stories. Engaging with contemporary debates about Westerns as manifestations of American gun culture, the purpose of the project is to draw parallels between the way in which gun violence is portrayed in film, particularly period, Western movies, and the realities of gun violence today. The final project is an opportunity to expose multiple points of view regarding gun violence and justice and their socio-political effects, and to write and develop new scripts, storyboards, and film scenes, as well as study old ones.

Assignments and Grading System:

Grading is based on weekly assignments and participation, an in-class midterm on the readings, and a final project.

Requirements:

- Class Participation (20%): Regular attendance, submission of weekly 1-2 pg written critical reflections on assigned topics (e.g. a primary source, an advertisement or magazine article, a report about a field trip or movie, etc. ) Participation in the April 25 evening student mini-film festival and April 26 all-day undergraduate research conference is required.

- Midterm (40%): In-class midterm on the readings and discussions (in class; Thursday before break).

- Final project (40%): (20% for the project; 10% on the written artist's statement; 10% for the presentation at the April 25 mini-film festival night and April 26 panel).

Required Texts

(Available for purchase at the bookstore, and available for free reading on Olin e-reserve through the Course Moodle).

- *Joyce, Justin A. Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law (Manchester Univ. Press 2018).

- Densley, James ed. The Conversation on Guns (JHU Press, 2023).

- Light, Caroline E. Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press 2017).

- McKevitt, Andrew C. Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America (Univ of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2023).

Additional writings (e-reserve at Olin Library and on Moodle) are by Kelly I. Aliano, The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture through Play (2022); Vanessa Agnew et al, Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms (2023); and Priya Satia; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Richard Slotkin; Gillian Rose; Carol Anderson, Jennifer Carlson, Terrence H. Witkowski, Lindsay Livingston, Peter Boag, Joan Burbick, Jelani Cobb, and more.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST293, STS209
Prereq: None

HIST210 Saints, Dervishes and the Society in the Islamicate World

This course will introduce students to the history, culture, and basic tenets of Islamic Mysticism from its beginnings till the modern period. In addition to major concepts, institutions, and textual tradition of Sufism, the course will focus on the social and historical condition that gave rise to them. Chronological order will be followed when treating the evolution of Sufism from the origins of Sufism with extraordinary ascetics in 8th century to full-fledged Sufi institutions today.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST210Z Saints, Dervishes, and the Society in the Islamicate World

This course will introduce students to the history, culture, and basic tenets of Islamic Mysticism from its beginnings till the modern period. In addition to major concepts, institutions and textual tradition of Sufism, the course will focus on the social and historical condition that gave rise to them. Chronological order will be followed when treating the evolution of Sufism from the origins of Sufism with extraordinary ascetics in 8th century to full-fledged Sufi institutions today.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST211 U.S. Labor History

How does the history of labor in the United States of America compare to that of other highly industrialized nations? For example, how did the system of slavery shape industrialization in the United States? Why were the socialist and communist movements much weaker in the U.S. than in Germany, France, and Italy, and why was there no major labor party in the U.S. as there was in England and Australia? Why have American workers been extraordinarily militant in job actions compared to their counterparts elsewhere? How have the religious convictions of the American people affected industrial relations? And why do Americans flinch at the word "class?" It is not a problem for the English, French, or Germans--what explains the difference?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST212 Modern Africa

What is African Modernity? We will examine this question as we survey the major historical transformations in Africa since approximately 1800. Important themes include: African political innovations, the abolition of the slave trade and its effects, European colonialism, African adaptation and resistance, nationalism and decolonization, and Africa's role in shaping major global events. We will also study the impacts of religious and social transformations amid rapid economic and political change. Finally, we will examine African visions for post-colonial development and how to shape the future of the continent.

During the semester we will also cover some of the issues surrounding African history as a discipline. No single course can cover more than a sliver of the complexity and variety in the continent. For this reason, we approach the study of Modern Africa as comparative history. However, students satisfactorily completing this course will be able to write knowledgeably about African history and will have the foundation necessary to undertake further study about Africa with sensitivity to the complexity of its recent past.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AFAM212
Prereq: None

HIST213 History and the Turn to the Present

This course attempts to make sense of contemporary politics, economics, and society through an historical examination of the present. It will discuss contemporary topics such as neoliberalism, nationalism, COVID-19, critical race theory, the forever war, the New Cold War, etc. It will also raise methodological questions on the promises and perils of using history to understand the present.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CSS
Prereq: None

HIST213F History and the Turn to the Present (FYS)

HIST214 The Modern and the Postmodern

In this course we will examine how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last 200 years. Our readings will be drawn from a variety of areas--philosophy, novels, music, painting, and photography--and we will be concerned with the relations between culture and historical change. Finally, we shall try to determine what it means to be modern today and whether it makes sense to go beyond the modern to the postmodern.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-HIST
Identical With: COL214, CHUM214
Prereq: None

HIST215 European Intellectual History to the Renaissance

This class will examine some of the major texts in Western thought from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. Emphasis will be placed on close reading and analysis of the texts.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: MDST225, COL216
Prereq: None

HIST216 European Intellectual History since the Renaissance

This class will examine some of the major texts in Western thought since the Renaissance. Emphasis will be placed on close reading and analysis of the texts.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL332
Prereq: None

HIST216L European Intellectual History since the Renaissance- Service Learning

This class will examine some of the major texts in Western thought since the Renaissance. Emphasis will be placed on close reading and analysis of the texts.

This course is designed for Service Learning. Students in this course will read short selections about Aging, meet with a specific senior citizen to talk about the books we are reading for class (5 times in the semester), and write 2-page papers responding to those meetings. Otherwise, both History 216L and History 216 will have the same class requirements.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL332L
Prereq: None

HIST217 Empires, Slavery, and Revolution: Africa to 1800

In this course we will examine the dynamic political and social histories of precolonial Africa. We will study the rise of kingdoms and empires such as Mali and Kongo, as well as revolutions in society from the technological development of iron production, to the emergence of trade networks, the development of ancient cities, the spread of religious healing and reform movements such as Cwezi spirit possession, and the role of gender in early African societies. Over the course of the semester we will also consider the impact of slavery and the first African encounters with Europeans. The methods for studying the early African past are interdisciplinary. You will have the opportunity to explore how ancient Africa has been imagined in the past by Africans and early Arabic and European observers, and how contemporary scholars write these histories. As we trace a history of early Africa in the world, we will consider several methods: the study of myths and oral traditions, linguistic and archaeological data, as well as ecological and archival records.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AFAM217
Prereq: None

HIST218 Cities of Islam: Religion, Politics, and Urban Space

A survey of the history of major cities in the Middle East and North Africa. This course will trace the region's history through the foundation and development of the cities that served as the centers of significant political entities since 600 A.D. Each week will focus on the symbolism and functionality of urban space and architecture and the role of politics, religion, and global trade in the formation of one of the following cities: Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina, Baghdad, Cairo, Istanbul, Isfahan, Beirut, and Algiers. The course will seek an answer to the question of whether history shapes the cities or vice versa.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST219 Russian and Soviet History, 1881 to the Present

Reversals of fortune have defined Russian history perhaps more so than for any other nation. Though the Russian Empire began the 19th century as an emerging European superpower that defeated Napoleon, it ended that same century as a backward state plagued by political, economic, and social strife that ultimately brought the Romanov dynasty to a revolutionary collapse. A similar trajectory describes the "short" Soviet 20th century that began with the promise of a qualitatively new political order that sought to transform social relations and human nature and concluded with a spectacular implosion that some heralded as the end of history itself.

This course will follow the story of how the Soviet Union emerged from the ruins of the Russian imperial order to become the world's first socialist society, the most serious challenge to imperialism, liberalism, and capitalism, and, arguably, modernity's greatest political experiment. We will cover the following topics: the emergence and fate of Russian national identity; the origins and dynamics of Russia's revolutions; the political, economic, and cultural challenges of the Soviet project; the role of the party and ideology in politics and everyday life; the nationalities question and the challenges of governing a socialist empire; Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War and the rebirth of the nation (and nationalism); the emergence of the Soviet Union as a Cold War superpower; the country's historic attempts to reform (and the frequent failure of these attempts); and the dynamics of the system's collapse.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: REES219
Prereq: None

HIST220 Authority and Resistance: France Since 1870

Historians suggest it may be normal for France to be always on the verge of crisis owing to the persistence of irreconcilable conflicts and a celebration and practice of resistance. They conclude that France may be ungovernable, noting that five presidents since 1981, frustrated and resisted, have accomplished very little. This course studies France under three republics and a dictatorship, beginning with defeat in war and revolutionary upheaval in 1870-1871 and concluding with current, sustained challenges to state authority and liberal democracy. We will survey this 150-year history, emphasizing political forms, ideologies and movements, social change, the economy, and cultural developments. Particular consideration will be given to revolutionary ideas and activities, working-class organizations, socialism and communism, conservative thought and action, extreme rightist movements, the degradation of rural life, the experiences of three wars against Germany, imperialism and decolonization, key personalities, and styles of authority and resistance. Times of emergency and crisis will command attention, specifically the Paris Commune of 1871; the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s; the Great War of 1914-1918; the Popular Front of the 1930s; the military defeat of 1940; the drama of collaboration or resistance, 1940-1944; the early years of the Fifth Republic, 1958-1969; the extraordinary career of General de Gaulle; and the "yellow vests" in 2018-2019.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RL&L220
Prereq: None

HIST221 History of Ecology

The word "ecology" has come to have many meanings and connotations: a scientific field dealing with the relation of organisms and the environment, a way of thinking about the world emphasizing holism and interconnection, a handmaiden of the environmental movement, to name a few. This course covers the history of ecology as a scientific discipline from the 18th-century natural history tradition to the development of population, ecosystem, and evolutionary ecology in the 20th century, situating the science in its cultural, political, and social contexts. Along the way, it traces the connections between ecology and economic development, political theory, ideas about society, the management of natural resources, the preservation of wilderness, and environmental politics. How have scientists, citizens, and activists made use of ecological ideas, and to what ends? How have they understood and envisioned the human place in nature? How have the landscapes and places in which ecologists have done their work shaped their ideas? Other major themes include the relationship between theories of nature and theories of society, ecology and empire, the relationship between place and knowledge about nature, the development of ecology as a professional discipline, the role of ecologists as environmental experts, the relationship between the state and the development of ecological knowledge, and the relationships among ecology, conservation, agriculture, and environmentalism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS221, ENVS211
Prereq: None

HIST223 Chinese Eco-Civilization: History, Experience, and Myths

The course traces the historical roots of the ideas of eco-civilization, a policy platform that appeared in the twenty-first century by examining how Chinese agrarian civilizations and their nomadic neighbors transformed the bio-physical environment over the course of 3,000 years of history.

We will draw on translations of Chinese literary texts including poetry, classical prose, and novels to explore the relationship between power and social inequities as we explore the everyday politics of agrarian civilizations through China's transformation from feudal ages to the modern period. How did Confucian, Legalist, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings alter the dynamics of production and consumption? To what extent did traditional Chinese philosophies promote the ethos of ecojustice? Did competing regimes/dynasties create a sustainable political and economic system? Did bureaucrats improve the well-being of the population and maintain the balance of the ecosystem? Or did they deplete natural resources to meet their short-term needs?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CEAS223, ENVS223, STS284
Prereq: None

HIST224 Modern China: States, Transnations, Individuals, and Worlds

This course examines China's turbulent transition to modernity. It covers the Ming-Qing transition, Manchu conquest of central Eurasia, China's conflict and engagement with the West, birth of China's first republic, and the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and his successors.

The dramatic transformation of China spanning the late 19th century to the present day is the focus of this course. The Chinese people today continue to deal with the legacy of these reforms, wars, and revolutions, as China's leaders and people dealt with unprecedented challenges. The three central themes of this course are (1) the reconstitution of (a somewhat) unified China after decades of political upheaval, (2) China's vulnerabilities in the face of domestic troubles and threats from abroad, and (3) the challenges of maintaining a high-growth economy with scarce resources.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CEAS224
Prereq: None

HIST225 Pirates, Traders, and Colonial Settlers in Maritime East Asia

Why is Maritime East Asia so contentious? Why is it emerging as the next global flashpoint? This course examines the historical roots of political tensions in Maritime East Asia by exploring the history of Taiwan. As early as the sixteenth century, merchant-pirates who dominated coastal China and Japan recognized Taiwan's strategic importance. For centuries, Dutch, British, American, and imperial powers used Taiwan as a springboard to gain a foothold in the Asia-Pacific region. Migrants from coastal China, who settled in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, worked with these imperial powers to colonize new frontiers and displace the indigenous population. The territorial disputes, economic rivalry, and business empires that shape our global economic order arise from the centuries-long struggle for dominance over Maritime East Asia. These historical legacies served as the driving force for political change. Maritime East Asia and particularly Taiwan not only transformed into an economic powerhouse but also stand at the forefront in the struggle against authoritarianism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CEAS274
Prereq: None

HIST226 Queen Mothers, Unruly Women: Histories of Gender and Sexuality in Africa

The 1929 Women's War is a touchstone for women's history in Africa. By 'sitting on a man' women in Nigeria shocked colonial authorities and demanded economic rights and a public voice. These unruly women danced in protest and rioted (sometimes nude), but their actions were not uncommon sights for their African audience. African women across the continent had long wielded power as queen mothers, prophets, and traders. Others challenged the constraints of ordinary domestic life through their labor, dress, or spirit possession.

Gender and contested authority are central to everyday life and politics in Africa. In this course, we will study the history of political and domestic authority on the continent with special consideration for the ways in which gender, sexuality, and power intersect. These histories are diverse both in time and place. For this reason, this course will not present a single narrative of gender in African history. However, students who satisfactorily complete the course will be able to write knowledgeably about the major debates surrounding gender and sexuality in Africa. Major themes include: spiritual authority; domestic and sexual life; the division of labor; and the impact of colonial rule and post-colonial politics. We will examine how women (and also men) have grappled with these intricate social and political relations from the pre-colonial period into the post-colonial era.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: FGSS227
Prereq: None

HIST227 Finance, the Stock Market, and the History of Economic Thought

This class has two main purposes: first, to introduce students to the subject of finance--especially the stock market--and, second, to explore the connections between finance and the humanities, especially literature, as a means of understanding the crucial role of finance in society. Readings, class discussions set up as structured debates, news articles, video clips, guest speakers, and a group project will together reinforce the students' growing knowledge of this subject.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL212
Prereq: None

HIST228 The Memory of Slavery in Monuments, Museums, and Media

This course will examine how Americans have remembered and forgotten their nation's troublesome history of racial chattel slavery. Monuments, museums, historic sites, archives, burial grounds, genealogical societies, and films have all contributed to the contested legacy of slavery in America. We will consider how and why representations of slavery have changed over time and what those changes suggest about the larger society. We will ask how did representations of slavery and racism inform larger narratives of American identity? How did Black Americans respond to popular depictions of slavery, and create their own forms of public history? How did the memory of slavery inform the twentieth century Black freedom struggle? How does slavery continue to shape the contemporary United States, and how should we approach that legacy today? Students will also work with local museums and historic sites to produce projects focusing on the history of slavery in Connecticut.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST228S The Memory of Slavery in Monuments, Museums, and Media

HIST229 A Fair Country? Canadian Protests and Progress After 1900

From hockey to healthcare, Canadians define themselves by debates over what makes a fair country. This class will explore Canada's 20th century as episodes of resistance in the service of greater equality. From labor movements to protests against (and participation in) global conflict; from women's rights and the welfare state to social justice and environmentalism; from French nationalism and Quebec separatism to the Quiet Revolution and domestic terrorism; from racism to Indigenous resilience. Looming in the background is the American leviathan, a constant threat to Canadian social and political culture but also a foil against which the country can measure itself.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST230 Rome After Rome: Culture and Empire of Constantinople

Rome did not fall. Rome was swallowed by a new idea of what it means to be Roman when, in the fourth century, the empire left its own founding city behind and moved the capitol to the newly-minted city of Constantine, Constantinople. This course gives students a hands-on introduction to one of the most astounding sociopolitical transformations in human history, tracing out the cultural, political, and economic trajectories of the Roman empire of the Middle Ages.

In exploring the textual and material relics of this medieval metropolis on their own terms, students apply and publish their research interests on the collaborative place-based interactive teaching encyclopedia Constantinople as Palimpsest (https://arcg.is/0e4Lb4). For their final project students will design a unit for a high school history course, using Constantinople as Palimpsest to introduce the diversities and paradoxes of life in the city of New Rome.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL295, MDST128
Prereq: None

HIST231 Guns and Society

Students will discuss some of the key questions that animate the emerging interdisciplinary field of gun studies, considering guns as objects and symbols and as sites of both shared and contested meanings in everyday life. Readings will include recent scholarship about the evolution of gun technologies and the changing place of guns in U.S. society, from the colonial era through to the present day, exploring how the history of guns in U.S. history is relevant to other histories, including studies of race, gender, class, labor and capital, social movements, and military and civilian life. Special focus will be put on visual studies, museum studies and public history, science and technology studies, public health, and legal history. Assignments include four shorter (2-page) papers and a 15-page final research paper. Each student, working in small groups, will also deliver a 10-minute presentation and have opportunities for site visits to local museums and gun violence memorials such as the Coltsville National Historic Park (Hartford), Springfield Armory National Historic Site (Springfield, Massachusetts), and the Connecticut Gun Violence Memorial (New Haven).

(This course is a prerequisite for individualized humanities "labs" designed for students to delve into a particular aspect of the topic of guns and society in a more applied way in the spring semester, through special projects that can include an individually designed research paper, a museum/archives project, a theater sketch, a podcast, a high school teaching module, an art project, an exhibit in a local museum, an oral history project, or a syllabus, among other possibilities to be discussed with the instructor.)
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS231, FGSS252, AMST231
Prereq: None

HIST232 Your Revolutionary Life: Biography as Political Power from Antiquity to Modernity

Death is not enough to turn a life into a political movement. That translation requires a story. This course asks why, since Gandhi, few leaders have successfully drawn upon the power of adopting a revolutionary approach to living as a means of effecting political, social, and cultural change. A student-centered collaborative pedagogy equips students with the tools and concepts to collectively workshop principles drawn from a wide range of examples of revolutionary living from the period known as the middle ages; from well-known and widely imitated examples such as the Buddha, the Prophet, and the Christ, to lesser-known examples including cross-dressing nuns, hermits on pillars, desert mothers, begging collectives, and much more. Students will then apply the ways these past lives were remembered and transmitted to contemporary movements such as Occupy Wall Street or the Black Lives Matter CHOP in Seattle. Course assignments consist of short essays, presentations, and a self-designed final project that can be analytical, creative, or demonstrative.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL221, MDST241
Prereq: None

HIST233 LGBT History in the United States: 1940-Present

The emergence of a distinctive sexual minority in the United States following World War II had a tremendous impact on the society and culture of the modern United States. The push for LGBT recognition, rights, and acceptance intersected with larger discourses of race, sexuality, and class. This course will survey the history of sexual and gender minority communities in the United States from the emergence of the homophile movement through the movement for the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: FGSS253
Prereq: None

HIST234 The Making of the Modern Middle East

This course explores the modern history of the Middle East, from North Africa to Turkey to the Arabian peninsula, in order to provide students with a robust background in the making of each component of the historical Middle Eastern society, state, community, and individual. We begin with the Islamization of the region and move through various state formations, including the Ottoman Empire. The long 19th century of intense imperial modernization and nationalism sets the stage for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, independence, and European colonialism in the region. The course finishes with the post-Ottoman national and post-colonial states in the Cold War and post-Cold era, tackling themes such as regional conflict, Islamism and mass politics, and military interventions.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST235 Magic, Witchcraft, and Miracle, from Saints to Salem

Until the "disenchantment of the world" in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans lived in a universe shot through with hidden and awesome power. God's action in the world was possible, but puzzlingly he often operated through other agents, through the saints and by miracle. On the other hand, humans were often tempted to appeal to other powers to get what they wanted, and the use of magic--some pagan in origin, some not--was a pervasive influence. The world was full of demons and even devils, who used illusion and magic to entrap people by possessing them or turning them toward witchcraft in exchange for wealth and health. Surprisingly, the occult was not all bad, and Catholics and later Protestants too wrestled with the question of what to accept and what to suppress. Magical forces did not fade with the Renaissance but actually grew alongside the first developments toward modern natural science in the 16th and 17th centuries. The necromancer joined the saint, the priest, and the witch as the faces of occult power. This course will take a broad look at the people and powers that filled the place where science and a lot of religion sit today. The course will survey medieval developments and will end in New England in the 17th century. The instructor will provide background and narrative history in order to place the readings into their appropriate context. In surveying the long history of magic and miracle in Europe, we shall ask such questions as: What exactly do these terms mean and how have the meanings changed? How far away from such a worldview are we today and did magic really end in the 17th century? And, if so, why? Who controlled the use of magic and how was its misuse identified and punished? Were the processes of law, inquisition, and prosecution fair or effective? Were there really witches or just witch hunts? Why did people believe in miracles and magic? Who were the practitioners? Why did it all decline?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: MDST211
Prereq: None

HIST236 Dante in His World: Politics, Poetry, Religion

Dante Alighieri is one of the great figures of European history and culture. He has been famous since his life, especially for his poem "The Divine Comedy," including its depictions of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Heaven. It reveals his massive intellectual knowledge and his deep and complex commitments. It might be less well known that he was also an active politician and a political theorist, as well as a student of literature and style.

This course will examine the body of his work and use it to outline some of the great political, moral, and religious crises of Europe around the year 1300, a moment closely connected to the very idea of the Middle Ages. Important course themes will include the question of the political balance of church and state, the role of mysticism and philosophy in expressing ethics, and the uses of history, theory, and poetry in seeking the good life. Readings will focus on Dante's own writings, including "The Divine Comedy," "The New Life" (La Vita Nuova), and "On Monarchy."
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: MDST237, WLIT342
Prereq: None

HIST237 Making New Worlds: Encounters on Turtle Island

From before the arrival of the earliest fishing ships off the coast of Newfoundland to the fall of New France at the close of the Seven Years' War, Turtle Island (North America) was the site of entangled encounters. Overlapping imperial claims and the construction of new societies took place on Indigenous homelands with deep histories. This course will examine North America as a contested and negotiated territory in which imperial plans were subjected to local contexts and contingencies. Using primary and secondary sources, we will examine major events (explorations, encounters, and wars), the rise and fall of imperial powers (French, British, Dutch, and Spanish), and the daily realities that shaped experiences in North America (trade, religion, sex, forced migrations, and disease). Throughout, we will focus on the persistence and resistance of Indigenous nations who protected (and still protect) their homelands and lifeways.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST284, RL&L237
Prereq: None

HIST238 Unfinished Revolutions: Uprisings in North America, 1760-1815

While the American Revolution dominates the historical landscape of early American history, the "Age of Revolutions" was full of uprisings in North America. This course will explore resistance movements that began in the latter part of the 18th century, most of which remain unfinished. Students will learn about pan-Indigenous uprisings against settlers, labour revolts against capital, enslaved men and women fighting for freedom, and other resistance movements that shaped (and were shaped by) the American Revolution and the fracturing of the British Empire.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RL&L238
Prereq: None

HIST239 The United States in the Long 19th Century

This survey course will introduce important themes in the history of the United States during The Long 19th century (the early Republic to WWI), a period of rapid displacement, settlement, and migration. With a commitment to teaching and learning "history from below," we will examine topics such as territorial expansion; development of capitalist enterprises; African, African American, and Indigenous enslavement and freedoms; overlapping migrant diasporas; and contestations over the meanings of democracy, by uplifting the perspectives of historically marginalized peoples. In doing so, we will come to recognize how formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricable from the formation of the nation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST242
Prereq: None

HIST239Z The Long 19th Century

Please note: Some readings and assignments will be due during winter break, prior to arriving on campus for Winter Session. Please visit the Winter Session website for the full syllabus -- http://www.wesleyan.edu/wintersession.

In 1787, the ratification of the Constitution established the United States of America as a republic in which power rested with the people. But the slim document left many fundamental questions unanswered. Would the overwhelmingly agricultural country be one of small yeoman farmers or large-scale plantations? Would the new nation limit western expansion to honor treaties with American Indian nations? Would the growing ranks of wage laborers in the nation's burgeoning cities have the same political rights as property owners? Would a nation founded on the shores of the Atlantic World pursue closer integration into global trade or protect its craftsmen and nascent industrial manufacturers? Could women make a claim to civic participation in a nation whose liberty they had helped win? Would a nation dedicated to freedom be able to reconcile the bondage of one-fifth of its population?

The Long 19th Century explores the history of the United States from the Early Republic to the Progressive Era (1787 to 1913), as an array of different groups and competing interests attempted answers to those questions. The period witnessed an incredible expansion of the United States from one of several imperial claimants in North America to the dominant power on the continent. Simultaneous to this expansion in geographic scope, the 19th century saw a shift in the scale of governance from a limited government to a powerful federal state that abolished property rights in slavery and intervened in struggles between labor and capital. In following that expansion and shift, this course explains the evolution of the modern United States.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST240 The United States in the 20th Century and Beyond

In 1903, the scholar, educator, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Taking this prescient statement as a starting point, this survey course will introduce important themes in the history of the United States from the turn of the 20th century to today. By utilizing the constructs of race, class, gender, and sexuality (among others) as lenses through which to interpret events within and beyond national borders, we will come to understand the "modern" United States as a global archipelago, imperial war machine, and arbiter of political, social, and economic power. We will cover topics including, but not limited to: Jim Crow laws, immigration policy, the Civil Rights Era and Black Power movement, Indigenous self-determination and Red Power, mass incarceration, genealogies of feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and the acceleration of climate change.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST241 We Were Eight Years in Power: The Reconstruction Era

HIST242 World History

Using material culture, visual sources, primary texts, and articles, this course will give students a solid understanding of World History from the River Valley Civilizations, the Classical Period, and the Post-Classical Period, to the Early-Modern Period, the Long 19th Century, and the Contemporary Period. Emphasis will be placed on the development of major cultures around the world -- and there will also be discussion of how the major cultures fail to explain much of World History.

In practical terms, students will learn how to assess a broad range of historical sources from varied places and times; how to debate these works in class discussion; how to produce concise and precise reading notes based on an argument/counter-argument format; and how to work collaboratively on the group project.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL203
Prereq: None

HIST243 How to Make History, or the Art of History: Past, Present, & Future

History is one of the oldest of intellectual endeavors and through its many transitions and versions around the world it is unified generally by its literary and artistic character as much as by its research intensity. It is a study of finding out but also always about the telling. With the development of professional historiography in the 19th century, the imaginative and creative aspects of making history have been spoken about less, but they have remained crucial parts of history's success. Today especially, it is important to understand the versions of history-making that have existed and the possibilities for students and other historians to make well-shaped, moving, decisive history. The course will examine the history of history-making, looking through its long history around the world to understand historiographical developments but also to give ourselves examples now for ways of writing history more effectively. The course will pay unusual attention to the possibilities of making history today, not only in the academy, but in fiction, in film, on television--everywhere that history is, in fact, made.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST244 The Ottoman World

HIST245 Modern Latin America Since 1810

This lecture course explores some of the main themes of Latin America's modern history from the beginning of the independence movements in the 19th century until the present day. In particular, it traces the contentious processes of state-formation and the creation of national and regional identities. Governments, elites, and popular movements fought over questions of race, economic development, and inequality in their attempts to formulate a particular vision of the nation. We will contextualize these struggles in global economic transformations and pay particular attention to the rise of the United States as force in the region.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST245
Prereq: None

HIST246 France at War, 1934-1944

Beginning with a Parisian riot widely understood to be a fascist insurrection in 1934, followed immediately by massive popular protests from the Left, France entered a decade in which it was at war with itself, often characterized as a Franco-French civil war. These were years of uncommon political engagement, disappointments, struggle, and multiple disasters. A divided France encountered the menace of another European war, concluding with its astonishing defeat in 1940 by Nazi Germany. This seminar explores the ideological antagonisms that shaped French life during the Popular Front, a broad alliance of the Left, 1934-1938, and during the German occupation, 1940-1944, when French authorities collaborated with the occupier. We will consider interpretation and memory of these dark years and draw upon documents, films, memoirs, and journalistic accounts.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST247 The Fall of Rome and Other Stories

The fifth-century fall of Rome to barbarian invaders is an idea that slowly crystallized over time. This course will examine the birth and development of this "fall"--one of the most persistent stories in history--using the very texts in which it was first articulated. We will work with selections from a range of authors--Suetonius, Eusebius of Caesarea, Ammianus Marcellinus, Augustine of Hippo, Jordanes, Procopius of Caesarea and many other--to connect the fall of Rome with other attempts to explain catastrophe and change. The course will conclude by surveying the persistence of the fall of Rome as an idea, through the medieval, early modern, and modern periods, right into contemporary discourse.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL247, CLST118
Prereq: None

HIST248 Beyond the Vote: Race and American Democracy

The ideals of civic equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment have rarely applied to African Americans. Yet African Americans continue to challenge the United States to live up to its own ideals of civic equality. This course will explore the ways in which African Americans and the issue of race have shaped the twin concepts of American democracy and American citizenship from the U.S. Constitution to the present.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AFAM258
Prereq: None

HIST249 History of the End

How will it end? Scientific/political hubris, a nuclear event, an asteroid, environmental disaster, overpopulation, resource scarcity, commodity price spikes, riots, social chaos, social control? This course investigates how people have imagined apocalypse and post-apocalypse over time, on the premise that fantasies of the end provide a window into the anxieties of the societies that produce them. In spite of its orientation toward fictional scenarios, this is primarily a course about postwar American environmental and political thought, and the ways these inflect or are inflected by fantasy.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST250 World History since 1700

This class is a sequel to World History, History 242, which ends in 1700. It is not necessary to take the two semesters of World History in chronological order, or even to take both semesters.

Using material culture, visual sources, primary texts, and a textbook, this course will give students a solid understanding of World History from 1700 to the present. Emphasis will be placed on the development of major cultures around the world--and there will be extended discussion of how the major cultures fail to explain much of World History.

In practical terms, students will learn how to assess a broad range of historical sources from varied places and times; how to debate these works in class discussion; how to produce concise and precise reading notes based on an argument/counter-argument format; and how to work collaboratively on the group project.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST251 Empires in World History

Empires have dominated the political landscape across the globe for much of human history. But how did they come into being? More importantly, what strategies were used to maintain them? This course examines the history of five empires--Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Aztec, and British--to see whether patterns emerge that might explain why a particular imperial project was successful and why it ultimately failed. In reviewing the history of each empire, we will discuss its ideology, military technology, economy, gender roles, and treatment of subject peoples to create a comparative framework in which to place empires in a global context.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST252 Industrializations: Commodities in World History

This course defines "industrialization" broadly to encompass the development and application of systematic knowledge to agriculture and manufacturing in 18th- to 21st-century societies. Although special attention will be devoted to the British and American examples, the course will be organized by commodity rather than nationality, focusing on traffic in materials used in production of food, clothing, and medicines, for example, cotton, rubber, guano, wheat, bananas, and quinine.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: ENVS252
Prereq: None

HIST253 An Ordered Commonwealth: Race, Gender, and Power in Colonial New England

This course examines the intersection of gender and race and their role in creating social hierarchies in colonial New England. The course will explore the lived experiences of women and people of color and the central role that their presence played in the politics and economies of imperial encounters and nation-state formation within the local context of colonial New England. We will examine how Puritan anxieties regarding the place of women, Indigenous, and Black peoples within their godly commonwealth structured their worldview and fostered both violent Indian wars and dramatic witchcraft trials.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST229
Prereq: None

HIST254 Science in Western Culture

This course offers an introduction to the history of the sciences between the late 17th and early 20th centuries, with the aim of understanding the varied ways of knowing that have come to be called "science" and how they have attained such an important status in shaping modern Western culture. To do so, we will both investigate key intellectual developments--such as Newtonianism, theories of energy and matter, and the rise of evolutionary thought--and consider these ideas in the cultural contexts in which they developed to better understand how people have "done science" in different times and places.

Throughout, we will pay attention to the relationships between science and other knowledge systems, between scientists and nonscientists, and between science and state power by exploring the changing nature of scientific authority, the cultural status of the scientist, and the connections among science, commerce, technology, and empire.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS254
Prereq: None

HIST255 The Vikings and the Viking Age, 700-1243

The Vikings erupted from their isolated northern homelands throughout Europe from the eighth century, and arguably reoriented European history both in the West, where they were instrumental in the history of the British Isles and France, as well as the East, where they were founders of the Russian kingdom. By 1100, they and their descendants had also established themselves in the Mediterranean, Italy, Sicily, and the Holy Land. This course will examine the reasons the Vikings emerged, and will explain their role not only as warriors, but as important merchants, administrators, and contributors to a robust European literary culture. They provide the perfect avenue by which to understand the creation of European culture and politics. The course will also act as an introduction to the dark age history of England, France, and Northern Europe.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: MDST255
Prereq: None

HIST257 From Chocolate to Coca: Commodities and the Making of Latin America

Bananas, silver, and coffee connect Latin America to consumers across the globe. From the discovery of massive silver deposits in Potosí in the 16th century to the growth of the illegal drug industry in the 20th century, these commodities have shaped how people work and eat, not only in Latin America but worldwide. Everyday goods like sugar or rubber have also given rise to political revolutions, environmental destruction, scientific discovery, and new literary and artistic movements across the region. How do commodities shape the societies that produce or consume them? What commodities are shaping today's global economy? Is it possible to extract these goods in a sustainable way?

This course combines approaches from anthropology, history of science, and environmental history to study key commodities in the history of Latin America from the colonial period until the present day. It will examine the ways in which various material goods linked local actors to broad networks of production and consumption of an increasingly interconnected global economy. The course will pay particular attention to how these relationships irretrievably changed local communities and to the ways in which historical actors contested, adapted to, or transformed production and consumption regimes.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST218
Prereq: None

HIST258 Intimate Histories: Black Women's Sexuality

Black feminist theory teaches us that African American women have historically confronted racism and sexism in addition to other forms of oppression. How has this experience shaped the sexual lives of everyday black women and famous figures? This course places the sexual at the center of African American women's history. It will examine how regimes of violence have intervened in black women's sexual freedom, from intimate bonds to reproduction to same-sex desire. It will cover black women's resistance to these regimes; to their sexual agency in diverse spaces from the plantation to the porn industry. This course will also tackle the enduring impact of the Jezebel stereotype in the history of black women's sexuality. Using primary and secondary sources, this class will fundamentally investigate the significance of African American women's sexual history in the histories of American sexual, racial, gender, and class politics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM242, FGSS242
Prereq: None

HIST259 Asians and Pacific Islanders in U.S. Empire

This course forefronts the diversity of experiences between and within the Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the U.S. empire both on the North American continent and in the Pacific. While political and social categories place Asians and Pacific Islanders within the same group, the groups' vastly varied experiences under U.S. empire makes it necessary to challenge the historical narratives that gloss over key contexts that continue to influence Asian American and Pacific Islander American experiences today. Thus, we will engage in an integrated, not conflated, history of Asians and Pacific islanders, paying attention to the specificities of imperial experiences and their effects on race, class, gender, migration, and diasporic patterns. We will explore topics of immigration and migration, labor and trade, citizenship and belonging, race and indigeneity, gender and sexuality, war and militarism, religion and culture in various contexts, including cities such as San Francisco and New York, regions such as the Pacific Northwest and the American South, countries of the Pacific Rim including the Philippines and Vietnam, and the Pacific islands such as Guam, Hawai'i, and American Samoa.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST279
Prereq: None

HIST260 Seeking the Land of the Rising Sun: Introduction to Premodern Japanese History and Culture

A survey of Japanese civilization from prehistory to the mid-19th century. This course examines premodern Japanese history and culture in chronological order, introducing important events and individuals, prominent literary and artistic works, and recurring themes across the ages. It emphasizes the importance of understanding premodern history and culture in order to understand Japan's present. We will also explore the definition and boundaries of Japan itself, delving into how the peoples and cultures across the Japanese archipelago interacted and coalesced into the foundation of what we recognize today as the nation of Japan. In addition to the main textbook, the reading assignments incorporate a significant number of primary sources, ranging from official proclamations and religious texts to literature and private correspondence.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST261 Enlightenment and Science

This course will examine the positive and negative ways that 21st-century science and technology have been impacted by the Enlightenment. In this earlier time, without government or private sources of funding for science, the emphasis on immediate outcomes became common. Practitioners of science often had to be showmen to attract attention in order to get funding. Through the study of contemporary news articles, this class will also consider such ethical choices, many of them to do with resource allocation, that we are facing in science, medicine, and technology today. It has been assumed that the modern age was drawn from the scientific method and the scientific advances of the Enlightenment. It was Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire, both strong supporters of Isaac Newton, who, in the mid-18th century, chose the rational, scientific method as the marker of their intellectual age, the Enlightenment. This choice was adopted by their intellectual cohort, and in turn it was slowly accepted as the standard by European society overall. Thus Enlightenment science did not only lead to modern, 21st-century science, it also directly shaped modern attitudes toward the proper running of society and this continues until today. Yet, little work has been done on what it means to organize a society along scientific principles, especially given that this represented a sharp shift away from traditional decision-making on the state level, and a move towards secularization. How did this new, rational approach shift the priorities of European societies, particularly in terms of the distribution of resources? In the 18th century, there was also a desire by educated readers who were not themselves practicing science to learn more about both the history of science and contemporary scientific discoveries. In this century, emerging modern science was relatively open to new types of people, not just new ideas. During the Enlightenment, science and technology were being advanced by artisans as well as privileged practitioners of science. Talented young men from less privileged backgrounds were, for the first time, slowly able to gain access to the major scientific circles during the Enlightenment. A surprising number of women (in a time when women had virtually no legal rights apart from their male relatives) were also active in scientific circles, perhaps most notably Margaret Cavendish, Émilie du Châtelet, and Caroline Herschel. Women were also the organizers of the intellectual salons in Paris and the political salons in London. In both cases, science was discussed as a normal topic of discussion, not just a subject for specialists. However, the professionalization and specialization of the sciences in the 19th century led to mixed results--it certainly allowed for a substantial increase in the scale of modern scientific work. Nevertheless, it also led to a less open attitude toward those not trained as scientists in the newly established manner. It also resulted in the end of educated people outside of the sciences considering science to be an area that they should know in order to be proper citizens, not just intellectuals. For centuries it was assumed that the modern age was drawn from the scientific advances of the European Enlightenment in the 18th century. Then, in the last few decades, many scholars started to attack what has been called the Enlightenment Project with its wholesale emphasis on science and rationality. Others have found that there were also valuable nonscientific achievements in Europe during the Enlightenment. However, there is a need to bring the scientific method and the technological advances of the 18th century back into the conversation about the science of that time and then of our own time. Given that we now live in an age both bettered and dominated by science and technology, it is of paramount importance to understand the origins of modern science and technology.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL213
Prereq: None

HIST261Z Enlightenment and Science

This course will be a study of how we, as a society, have obtained our views on science. The class will concentrate on the positive and negative ways that twenty-first-century science and technology have been impacted by the Enlightenment. In general terms, the long-eighteenth-century European Enlightenment is taken to be the marker of the modern age--when modern science emerged. The time has now come for a reconsideration of the complexity of science and the scientific method during the Enlightenment as a means of comprehending its direct impact on the modern age in which we are living today. This class will focus overall on the strengths and weaknesses that modern science, technology, and thus society have inherited from the Enlightenment.

This is not wholly a story of science and technology in the West, but a World History story. This class will highlight test cases and ethical choices--to give two modern examples, decisions about resource allocation, that of fossil fuels and vaccines--that we are facing today. These choices are not made simply on scientific, logical lines but also according to the preferences of society. In order to understand our current situation, we must inform ourselves about how we arrived at this situation. Two centuries ago, without government or private sources of funding for science, the emphasis on immediate outcomes in science became common. Practitioners of science (the term "scientist" was not used until the nineteenth century) often had to be showmen to attract attention in order to get funding. Likewise, by the twenty-first century, it is now almost impossible for scientists to get grants for pure research; winning applications have to stress immediate public outcomes in order to get funded. This effectively puts a stopper into the very source of new scientific ideas--pure science--and of virtually all new scientific break throughs, and this is a world-wide trend in the sciences.

In this class, we will examine crucial examples of the key scientific subjects that emerged during the Enlightenment, and social and political responses to these same scientific discoveries, from both the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, which stressed religion over science. We will read responses from non-practitioners of science at the time--educated people trying to make sense of emerging modern science in the midst of politically and economic troubled times. There was, in the eighteenth century, no safety net--such as unemployment benefits--for those who wanted to practice science in a time that there were no jobs in science. There was certainly no safety net for rest of society either. The parallels to our own time are self-evident: political polarization, closely linked to radically different views toward science, in the midst of epidemics and widespread financial distress.

Emerging modern science in the long eighteenth century was relatively open to new types of people, not just new ideas. During the Enlightenment, science and technology were being advanced by artisans in addition to well-connected practitioners of science. Talented young men from less privileged backgrounds were, for the first time, slowly able to gain access to the major scientific circles during the Enlightenment. A surprising number of women (in a time when women had virtually no legal rights apart from their male relatives) were also active in scientific circles. Such accomplished women were rare during the Enlightenment but they should not be ignored. Margaret Cavendish, Emilie du Chatelet, and Caroline Herschel are prime examples of women practitioners of mathematics, physics, and astronomy respectively. Women were also the organizers of the intellectual salons in Paris and the political salons in London. In all these cases, even the political salons, science was discussed as a general topic of discussion, not just a subject for specialists. And those knowledgeable in the sciences were expected to make their work accessible to non-specialists. Later, however, the nineteenth-century professionalization of, and specialization in the sciences led to mixed results. It certainly allowed for a substantial increase in the scale of modern scientific work. Nevertheless, it also led to a less open attitude toward those not trained as scientists in the newly-established manner. Alas, it also resulted in the end of the belief that educated people outside of the sciences should know about it in order to be proper citizens. Overall, this class will address areas of commonality and difference between Enlightenment science and technology and modern science and technology, including lingering problems, as well as possible solutions suggested from past writings and experiences.

There will be many distinctive aspects of this class. One will be the intensive textual analysis of primary documents in class. Another will be the active participation of several guest speakers. There will also be a virtual visit to Special Collections, Olin Library, Wesleyan University.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS261Z
Prereq: None

HIST262 Atomic Africa: A Technological History of the Cold War

"Atomic Power Programme Moves Ahead: NUCLEAR REACTOR FOR GHANA" In 1962 the Ghanaian Times proclaimed Ghana's atomic ambitions. Strikingly, it was only two years after the West African nation raised the international alarm against France's nuclear testing in the Sahara. In the midst of the global Cold War, African activists, politicians and scientists called for an end to nuclear imperialism and struggled for political and scientific sovereignty. It was an era marked by the struggle for decolonization but also by the promise of a new technological age. As African politicians planned for an Africa of the future, they faced intense political pressures from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They also formed partnerships with China and Cuba, reshaping the international lines of Cold War cooperation and the nature of "development." Over the course of the semester, we will examine Cold War stories across the continent including the mining of uranium, the international Congo Crisis, the development of African radiation experts, the use of radio by liberation forces in Angola, the emergence of an African Jet Age, and the building of the Freedom Railway in Tanzania. In addition, we will examine how students, workers, and scientists negotiated the currents of the Cold War and responded in creative ways to produce their own Atomic Africa.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS263
Prereq: None

HIST263 Inside Nazi Germany, 1933--1945

This survey course seeks to give a firm historical grounding in the processes that led to Hitler's rise to power, the nature of the National Socialist regime, and the origins and implementation of policies of aggression and genocide. The basic premise of this course is that National Socialism was from the outset driven by a belligerent and genocidal logic. The course will therefore critically analyze the racial, eugenic, and geopolitical ideology of National Socialism and the policies of discrimination, conquest, economic exploitation, and extermination that followed from it. At the same time, the role of structural factors in explaining these outcomes will also be explored in great depth. We will analyze how German society was shaped by Nazism, considering conformity and opposition in the lives of ordinary people in both peacetime and war. The course seeks to impart an awareness of the complex of factors that produced a regime of unprecedented destructiveness and horror, and it aims to develop a critical understanding of the ongoing problems of interpretation that accompany its history. Just as importantly, we will consider the continued relevance of the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust to our evaluation of national and international affairs in the 21st century.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GRST263
Prereq: None

HIST264 Waterways: Maritime World History

Human history has been shaped by the sea. Whether as a source of food, a frontier, a boundary, or a bridge, the sea has represented a site of both opportunity and danger. This course will examine the way humans have responded to their marine and maritime environments, both in terms of the technologies they have developed to navigate and exploit them but also insofar as the sea has shaped the way humans think about themselves. While our inquiry will extend into the deep past and the early development of human culture and civilization, we will focus on maritime history over the past millennium, the development of oceanic worlds, the rise of the "age of sail" between the 16th and 19th centuries, and the transformation of global navigation and politics with the rise of steam, diesel, and nuclear power.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: ENVS264
Prereq: None

HIST265Z The History of Surveillance and Information in the United States

This course considers the history of surveillance and information in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. We will explore technologies and systems that evolved during this period to track, codify, and control people in the US and abroad, as well the many efforts to resist these processes. Readings and lectures will pay particular attention to how surveillance and control over information empowered both the state and private entities in novel ways. The course is built around supporting students as they undertake a research project that interrogates how information and surveillance have shaped contemporary life.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST266 Visions of World Order: From the French Revolution to the Present

This course offers a survey of how social scientists, philosophers, and statesmen have understood and imagined global order from the late 18th century until the present. The course first examines interpretations of global order that emerged during the late 18th and 19th centuries: Cosmopolitanism (Immanuel Kant), Positivism (August Comte, Saint Simon), Nationalism (Giuseppe Mazzini), and Marxism. The course then turns to the first half of the 20th century by examining the international thought of W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gandhi, while also discussing fascist and liberal internationalist views of world order that emerged after World War I. The third part of the course discusses visions of Cold War order connected to American modernization theory (W.W. Rostow), neoliberalism (Friedrich Hayek), post-colonialism (Franz Fanon), Third Worldism, Neoconservatism (Jeane Kirkpatrick), and Systems Theory. The course concludes with the Post-Cold War period and how it has been imagined by such thinkers as Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington along with a discussion of such topics as the global turn to nationalism, the Green New Deal, and the "New Cold War with China."
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST267 Development in Question: Conservation in Africa

"Why not plant trees?" In 1977 Wangari Maathai started the Green Belt Movement, a popular environmental revolution, in Kenya. Then in the 1990s Nigeria Ken Saro-Wiwa fought for the rights of local communities against the multi-national oil industry. Like many African activists, scientists, and farmers, they placed African experiences at the center of environmental policy and conservation. Yet, popular images of the continent's environment in perpetual crisis blame African practices or disregard African efforts. Such depictions of "desertification" or "over grazing" have impacted international and governmental policy. Recent scholarship suggests that such common perceptions of the environment in Africa and conservation policy are misleading. This course will allow students to critically study the history of environmental management on the continent and the development of the idea of conservation. We will examine game park politics, the history of resource extraction, climate change, and other pressing environmental concerns. We will also study diverse African environmental perspectives from the guardians of sacred forests to activists such as Wangari Maathai and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: ENVS267, STS267
Prereq: None

HIST268 The Origins of Global Capitalism: Economic History, 1400--1800

This course explores how the modern market economy came into being in Europe and why this system expanded outward to bring the rest of the world into its orbit by 1800. Among other things, it seeks to provide answers for why China's economy--perhaps the most sophisticated in the world before 1500--fell into relative stagnation and why Europe was the first region to develop mechanized industry and break out of a poverty trap that had restricted prosperity for millennia. The course begins by exploring late medieval European agriculture, market systems, institutions, and technology to reveal how the paths of economic development taken in Europe began to diverge fundamentally from those taken by societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It will explore the role of the spice trade in the expansion of European influence abroad, the significance of new food and cash crops in the development of plantation systems and long-haul trade, the impact of organized coercion in the development of monopolies and monopoly companies, and the role of proto-industrial methods of production and colonial economies in the birth of the Industrial Revolution. The course aims to be accessible, broad, and comparative, drawing insights from many fields to consider the environmental, geographical, cultural, institutional, and political factors shaping the economic changes that have created modern capitalism.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: MDST268
Prereq: None

HIST269 Modern British History, 1688 to Present

This course provides an introduction to general developments in British history from the late 17th century through to the current day. A variety of themes will be drawn from primary and archival sources and recent historical scholarship. We will look at realities and representations, considering how the British past is interpreted through both academic scholarship and popular culture/collective memory (e.g. film, television).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST270 On Evidence: Archives, Museums, and Prisons

This course introduces an interdisciplinary study of the idea of evidence in connection to the modern development of archives, museums, and prisons, by setting this in a contemporary dialog with the discourses on state violence, incarceration, and refugeetude. This course will firstly establish historical and theoretical connections between carcerality, Western archival record-keeping practices (e.g., scientific grids, mugshots, taxonomies, and forms of surveillance), and museological frameworks developed during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century.

Furthermore, it considers how records, artifacts, digital data, bones, sites of "memories," oral traditions, embodied knowledge, or intergenerational trauma can become evidentiary material. Such inquiries are central to decolonial archival studies as they are critical for historically marginalized, racialized, and gendered subjects, whose claims to social justice, human rights, and cultural heritage are tied to the aftermaths of slavery, genocides, and colonialism. Our readings and discussions will specifically draw upon decolonial archival studies, digital humanities, visual studies, human rights discourse, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Indigenous studies, which have continuously challenged what constitutes evidence.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST271, AFAM260
Prereq: None

HIST271 Free the Land: Histories of Environmental Racism

This course will introduce students to the study and discussion of environmental racism and environmental justice in the United States that centers the histories and experiences of communities of color. Environmental racism is defined by Dr. Robert Bullard ("the Father of Environmental Justice'') as "any policy, practice or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (where intended or unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race." This course expands and illuminates this definition through examinations of watershed moments--from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to struggles in the greater Connecticut River Valley today--in which communities of color in the United States bear the deadly brunt of toxic fumes, poisoned groundwater, nuclear waste, perilous disaster work, land theft, and the slow violence of biological extermination. Throughout the semester, we will read scholarly texts, engage primary sources, analyze popular and independent media, and study testimony and self-published materials from activists and eyewitnesses.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: ENVS266
Prereq: None

HIST272 Law, Court, and Crime in England, 600--1660

This course will discuss the nature and development of law, dispute resolution, custom, and rule in England from the arrival of the English on the island in the age of Arthur when feud and compensatory justice dominated. It will then examine the rise of royal power, local custom, and the common law in the 12th and 13th centuries, including the Magna Carta crisis. We will focus on the growing politicization of law and the development of courts and lawyers alongside new sorts of lawmaking in parliament and through the power of the king. The growth and challenge of royal and parliamentary power will frame the last parts of the course that anticipate the revolutionary crisis of the 17th century. Along the way, the course will ask, Who gets to make law, what is the role of writing in the development of custom and law, how did the English decide who was right and who wrong: calculation, testimony, jury, or ordeal? What were the forms of punishment and compensation employed, and what did this tell us of conceptions of the person: mutilation, execution, or incarceration? How did social status and gender shape expectations and outcomes in the legal process: Who could be a legal actor, a responsible malefactor, a property owner, or a slave; who could be judge and legislator? The course will be based on the examination both of recent scholarship and a wide array of primary sources such as law codes, court record books, advice manuals, literature, treatises on law, and the practical documents from lawyers in courts and judges that are plentiful in medieval, Tudor, and Stuart England. The course provides a background to the sources of law in early America as well as other common law countries around the world.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: MDST272
Prereq: None

HIST273 Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History: Gender, Sex, and Power in Colonial America

When Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote that "well-behaved women seldom make history," she meant that colonial women who conformed to gendered and sexual expectations rarely emerged in the historical record. As such, the women who feature most prominently as individuals in the historical record of the colonial period are those who acted outside proscribed social norms. We will, therefore, look at the ways that colonial Americans attempted to police those prescribed social boundaries from the persecution of Anne Hutchinson, to their fascination with witchcraft, to their reification of white womanhood. As we will see, many used intimacy to shape the world they lived in even as they were left out of the formal aspects of governing. Finally, this course seeks to understand how early Americans both constructed those gendered expectations and how they served to reinforce the patriarchal, racial, and colonial hierarchies of early America.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST274 Crisis, Constitution, and War: the U.S.'s Early Decades

It is common today for Americans to fight over how to interpret the U.S.'s early decades. Specifically, recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court (some guided by originalist jurisprudence) have sparked vigorous debate over the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. This course not only examines the Constitutional Convention of 1787, but also the preceding years of unrest and crises such as Shay's Rebellion. Military history is another important focus of the course, and students will discuss the technological, operational, and social dynamics of the Quasi-War, Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812. Finally, this course also investigates how the U.S. struggled to exercise power in North America, as free and enslaved peoples resisted its authority during the Whiskey Rebellion, Wars of the Northwest Territory, and Gabriel's Rebellion. One unique aspect of this course is its four-week long embodied learning exercise, as students "gather" in 1780s Philadelphia as constitutional convention delegates. What exactly they are gathering to accomplish is a matter of controversy, but ultimately the student-delegates will work through "sectional interests, backroom deal-making, personal rivalries, and foreign intrigue" as they attempt to approve a new constitution within the constraints of the era's historical context.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST275 Empires on Fire: Revolutions in the Atlantic World

This class will explore what historians have called the "Age of Revolutions." The ideas, ideologies, and actions that set empires aflame during the long 18th century formed an entangled revolutionary experience that spread from one part of the Atlantic world to the next. From England's "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 to the American, French, and Haitian revolutions at the end of the 18th century, and then on to the South American and Canadian uprisings in the early 19th century, this course will examine revolutions not as discrete events but as interrelated processes. By studying the perspectives of leading politicians, regular subjects and citizens, and marginalized groups, students will investigate the wide variety of revolutionary experiences.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST278 Visualizing Firearms History: An Applied Quantitative and Archival Approach for a Project-Based Expl

This project-based course provides a unique cross-disciplinary opportunity to study important historical questions surrounding firearms. Combining quantitative methodology in data science with qualitative research methods in history, students will answer questions they are passionate about based on existing datasets. Students will read, discuss, and write responses to the latest historical scholarship on the technological development of guns, firearms in media, gun violence statistics, and advertisements. Students will choose one of four datasets to research and analyze. These include data sets related to firearms patents since the 1820s, firearms in media (film, television, anime, games), firearms-related deaths, and advertisements of firearms. Students will develop skills in hypothesis testing and inferential statistical analysis alongside qualitative research methods used in history. The course offers one-on-one support and training in the skills required to complete a team-based final project. The final project will be hybrid between a research paper and also an exhibit (e.g., film, website, media, art installation). Students will present their work at the center's third annual undergraduate research conference (Spring 2025). Select students can apply to continue on as QAC summer apprentices and Baker Collabria Fellows in Data Analysis, and as CSGS NEH-funded summer history research fellows and as History thesis researchers.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: QAC204
Prereq: None

HIST279 The Making of Modern Japan, 1500 to Present

In a global context, Japan emerged as a major player on the world stage after 1500. While in the midst of what later was called the Warring States Period (sometimes dated 1468--1600), Japanese traders and others maintained a broad network of commerce that included not only Korea and China but spread to Southeast Asia. Europeans first reached Japan in 1543, and it was soon obvious that no European state had the military might to colonize Japan. These are the roots from which a modern Japan appeared that in the 19th and early 20th centuries militarized and set upon an imperial project until defeated at war in 1945. Since then, Japan has emerged as a postmodern, highly technological, pop culture-oriented, and aging country. One theme that will be examined across the semester is environmental change over the long term.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CEAS279
Prereq: None

HIST280 The Industrial Revolution in Global Context: Economic History Since 1800

With the development of mechanized industry in the late 18th century, a productivity revolution was unleashed that would soon spread from Britain to continental Europe, North America, and Japan. By the early 21st century, three successive industrial revolutions had profoundly transformed these societies as well as the rapidly developing economies of East and South Asia. This course analyzes the historical forces driving this process. It begins by studying the transformation of Europe's overwhelmingly rural and agricultural economy into a predominantly urban and industrial one, looking closely at entrepreneurs, technology, and changing trading patterns during various phases of this process. The focus will be on Britain, Germany, the United States, and Japan, considering not only industrial development but also its broader implications, including colonial empire, great power rivalry, protectionism, economic depressions, and warfare, to highlight the complex relationship between economic and political power. The course will also analyze how industrial capitalism survived the disasters of the 20th century to drive a process of regional and global economic integration in the late 20th century. It will conclude by considering the opportunities and challenges posed to the mature industrial economies by the newly emerging industrial powers China and India.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST281 Global Economy: Germany and the World in an Age of Extremes, 1870-1957 (CLAC.50)

This Center for Global Studies discussion course explores the experience of globalization in the German-speaking world from the war of German unification in 1870 to the emergence of the European Community in 1957. It will analyze German imperialism and overseas investment before 1914; the deglobalization of the German economy in the First World War; the problem of reparations and other economic challenges faced by the Weimar Republic; and the impact of global protectionism and the Great Depression, the economic forces allowing the rise of Hitler, the economics of war, and the Nazi "New Order." We will explore the reasons for the ultimate failure of the German war effort and the country's catastrophic destruction and defeat in 1945, as well as Germany's postwar division and occupation as well as the gradual reconstruction and reintegration of the West German economy into a European and global division of labor beginning with the Bizone Agreement and GATT (1947), the Marshall Plan (1948), and the London German External Debt Agreement (1953), culminating in the Treaty of Rome (1957) creating the European Economic Community. The course will be using select German-language historical primary sources to explore this topic, supported by short secondary source narratives in both German and English pitched to intermediate to advanced German speakers/readers. Unlike the parent History lecture class (HIST 280: The Origins of Global Capitalism, 1800-present), this is a discussion course aimed at expanding vocabulary and practicing fluent discussions in the fields of history, politics, and economics.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CGST
Identical With: CGST281, GRST350
Prereq: GRST213

HIST282 Histories of Ukraine

Over the course of its history, Ukraine has been a site of multiple political projects and diverse historical experiences. As a concept that encompasses a specific territory, it has also been a space where multiple communities--Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Poles--have histories. This course will look at how these histories have been shaped by and alongside one another, and the kind of political programs, obstacles, and possibilities that have emerged through these encounters. It will ask why Ukraine and its history have been the subject of so much confusion and controversy, and examine the concepts (nation, state, people, culture) that transform a space into a place, a land into a home.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: REES200
Prereq: None

HIST283 What Is Rationality?

What does it mean to be rational? Although this question has traditionally been the province of philosophy, reference to reason and rationality is also pervasive in the modern social and behavioral sciences. Humans are rational creatures--or, if they are not in practice, they should be. This course takes an expansive view of rationality and its history, tracing how the concept has changed over time, and critically examining its significance in the sciences and broader culture today. From the role of reason in human flourishing and civic discourse in the ancient world, to early modern conceptions of logic as "the art of thinking," to Cold War attempts to build machines that might reason more reliably than frail humans, this exploration of reasoning and rationality explores several interlocking themes: the relationship between reason and other facets of the mind, especially emotion; conceptions of reason as an evaluative vs. a calculating faculty; the role of reason in human judgment; the relationship between rationality and rules; the relationship between choosing rationally and choosing ethically; and the fraught history of attempts to formulate universally valid principles of rationality.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS283, PHIL154
Prereq: None

HIST284 Death and the Limits of Representation

The disciplines of history, philosophy, and literature all hinge on the issue of representation. The ability to communicate ideas, visions, or arguments all depend on the ability to represent these abstract notions in a concrete and recognizable form. In this course we will problematize the basis of all three disciplines by exploring Death as the limit of representation: as that which is ultimately unknowable (or knowable only second-hand) and thus beyond representation. Indeed, what is the concept of the "ghost" but an attempt to represent someone who is dead in the recognizable form of the body that once lived. Yet, the ghost appears and disappears, is not bound by the laws of time or space, and is largely present in its absence. By exploring texts by such authors as Plato, Shakespeare, Poe, Derrida, Levinas, Mbembe, and Hartman, and studying historical events such as the "black death," the Middle Passage, and the Shoah, we will attempt to understand the project of representation and its limits.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL282
Prereq: None

HIST285 Modern South Asia

This course examines the history of South Asia since the 1940s. Using a combination of memoir, history, and film, we examine the forces that have shaped South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We begin with the trauma of Partition in 1947 and then work backwards and forwards in time to explore key themes like religious nationalism, popular media, caste, language politics, war, separatism, policing, the logistics of democracy, and economic development.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GSAS285
Prereq: None

HIST286 Photography and Law: Mugshots, Privacy and Publicity, Obscenity, Copyright, and Evidence

This seminar is designed as an introduction to the major developments in the legal history of photography in transatlantic (US-UK especially) society from the first law cases involving photography in 1840 through to contemporary legal debates about such topics as cameras in the courtroom, sexting, surveillance, photographing police, dash cam and body cam videos, admissibility of photographs as evidence, obscenity and moral boundaries of subject matter, and copyright. A range of secondary historical and theoretical writings will anchor the discussions, but the course will focus primarily on student analysis and interpretation of primary and archival sources (texts of legal cases, law reviews and dissertation, news articles, and documentary and video footage). Students will gain knowledge of how legal history has shaped the history of photography, and new perspectives on the historical origins of contemporary issues in photography and digital imaging. This course should be of interest especially to history majors and non-majors who are interested in law, photography, and culture and will also contribute to the "Visual and Material Studies" module in History.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: ARHA264
Prereq: None

HIST287 Science in Modernity and After: 20th-Century Science and Technology

The 20th century was a time of dramatic achievements in science, from nuclear physics to space exploration to gene sequencing. It also saw the emergence of many of the technologies that underpin our world today: atomic weapons, electronic digital computers, synthetic fertilizers, and high-yield crop varieties, to name a few examples. This course surveys these developments, focusing not only on the histories of specific ideas and techniques, but more broadly exploring the complex relationship between science and technology; the relationship between science, the military, and state power; the changing cultural and political influence of scientists and engineers; the institutions and places where science and innovation gets done; the globalization of science and technology; and the emergence of critiques of science and technology.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: STS287
Prereq: None

HIST288 Delhi: The Past in the Present

This seminar examines the history of Delhi, one of the largest and oldest cities on the planet. Our focus will be on the ways the layers of Delhi's past protrude into and inform Delhi's present. We will combine a chronological and thematic approach, paying particular attention to material culture, memory, public history, and the environment.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST289 God & Guns: The History of Faith and Firearms in America

This course examines the history of firearms and religion in the United States, ultimately seeking to understand the significance of gun culture within American Christianity and the powerful "God & Guns" story at the core of many Americans' identity. Beginning with an overview of colonial and revolutionary-era views of firearms and violence, the course examines the influence of slavery, gender, and the wars of the 20th century, paying special attention to the emergence of a masculine, warrior Jesus within evangelical and fundamentalist communities during the Cold War. Students will be challenged to consider the ways in which this story helps explain one facet of popular support for Donald Trump and to reflect on how firearms are central to the identity of many conservative American Christians.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RELI263, AMST276
Prereq: None

HIST291 Gender and History: Global Feminist Theories and Narratives of the Past (FGSS Gateway)

What is a female husband? In the 1980s an increasing number of feminist scholars posed questions about the relationship between biological sex and gender roles. The African scholar Ifi Amadiume, who studied the history of female husbands in West Africa, asserted that such relationships between sex and gender needed to be studied in a global context. More than two decades after Amadiume's influential book "Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society" (1987) was published, the scholarship on global gender and sexuality is vibrant and dynamic. These works have shown gender to be central to understanding society at different periods and geographical locations, but it is far from a universally understood category.

This seminar will introduce first- and second-year students to the history of gender, sex, labor, and feminist activism from a global and comparative perspective with readings from the history of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. We will also cover the development of influential theories in the field and how they apply to the writing of history. This course is especially appropriate for prospective history and feminist, gender and sexuality majors, though all students interested in using gender as category of historical analysis for their scholarly work in other fields are welcome.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL323, FGSS269
Prereq: None

HIST293 The U.S. Civil War

This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War through an overview of U.S. history from roughly 1845 to 1877. Students will learn about one of the most transformative periods in U.S. history in all of its drama, complexity, and lasting implications. Topics will include the antebellum worlds of slavery and free labor; the rise of abolitionism; the U.S.-Mexican War and the problem of western expansion; the breakdown of the U.S. political system in the 1850s; southern secession; the course of the Civil War from Fort Sumter to Appomattox; the international context of the Civil War; the dynamics of slave emancipation; Reconstruction; and the place of the Civil War era in popular memory and culture.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST293Z The U.S. Civil War, 1861--1865

This course surveys United States history from the early national period to the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era at the end of the 19th century. Central themes to be addressed will include the struggle over the meanings of democracy and constitutionalism, the transformations resulting from industrialization, as well as continental expansion and expropriation of Indigenous lands. We will also examine the series of reform crusades dedicated to religion, abolition and the changing roles of women. Particular attention will be paid to the formation and consolidation of the United States as both a nation state and as an emergent global imperial power.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST294 Political Fiction

Attitudes toward politics, economics, society, and history will be examined from works of fiction that directly criticize an existing society or that present an alternative, sometimes fantastic, reality.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST296 Colonial Latin America

This course studies the history of Latin America and the Caribbean from pre-conquest times to the emergence of independence movements in the early 19th century. Lectures will explore the key environmental, cultural, economic, political, and religious transformations that shaped colonial societies throughout the region. Beginning with the formation of indigenous and Iberian polities before 1492, we will consider how early modern colonial governance functioned and evolved throughout the period of Spanish and Portuguese rule in the Americas. Through an array of primary and secondary sources we will reconstruct the lived experiences of a diversity of actors across the colonial world. We will pay particular attention to the methods and approaches that scholars have used to understand the history of the region.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST296
Prereq: None

HIST297 Mexican History and Visual Culture from Conquest to the Present

This course offers an introduction to Mexico's history from the conquest of indigenous empires to the present, paying special attention to how images and visual culture--from the Virgin of Guadalupe to patriotic parades to lucha libre--not only reflected, but also shaped, Mexican society and its political development. Through this lens, we explore the construction and unraveling of the colonial system, the emergence of the nation, the upheaval of the first major social revolution of the 20th century and its aftermath, and contemporary events. In addition to providing an introduction to major historical phenomena and debates, this course also familiarizes students with methods for using visual materials to understand and interpret the past.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST257
Prereq: None

HIST298 Oh Canada: Indigenous Resistance and Settler Colonialism, 1776--1896

This course will help answer a pressing question: Why does Canada exist? As a settler state built on Indigenous homelands, Canada developed in unique ways when compared to the United States. With its deep Indigenous heritage, long history of British-French rivalries, and constant influence from the United States, Canada was (and is) defined in no small part by its inability to define itself.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST299 Mapping The Borderlands: The U.S./Mexico Border and Digital Storytelling

The U.S./Mexico border is not only a geographical boundary, but a complex mapping project, where governments and corporations project their visions of the landscape into policies and boundaries, only to run afoul of people, terrain, and climate. Therefore, this course will serve two interrelated functions: 1) to explore borderlands as a concept and spatial relations, particularly at the U.S./Mexico border 2) to use digital tools to tell spatial stories about the border. While the current location of the border is often naturalized as an ahistorical and timeless dividing line between the United States and Mexico, this course acquaints students with a long historical approach and competing perspectives on issues arising from the presence of the U.S./Mexico border/lands. Using monographs, first-hand accounts, film, and music, we will trace the recent history, politics, and culture of the borderlands, exploring topics like racialization, immigration, gender, place-making, and cultural exchange. At the same time, we will examine and apply digital methods that complement our understanding of the U.S./Mexico border.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST300 Issues in Contemporary Historiography

This course is designed to introduce history majors to a range of problems, debates, and critical practices in the discipline of history. Part I explores the ethical and public dimensions of history; Part II focuses on key schools of historical thought; Part III examines historical interpretation and primary sources; and Part IV samples varieties of evidence.

This course should be taken in the student's junior year.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST301 The Spanish Civil War, 1936--1939

The Spanish Civil War erupted during a decade in Europe marked by ideological tensions, economic and social crises, the weakness of democracies contrasted to the dynamism of dictatorial regimes, and an international climate that culminated in the outbreak of World War II. The ideological character of the civil war in Spain, which appeared to pit left vs. right, or democracy vs. fascism, or nation and religious faith vs. communism and revolution, captured the imagination of Europeans and spurred their involvement in the war. All of Europe's dangers seemed to have exploded in Spain, whatever the specifically Spanish factors that unleashed and defined the struggle. This seminar will examine the events in Spain and Europe's response to them through contemporary writings, such as journalistic and participants' accounts, diplomatic documents, memoirs, films, biographies, and general and specific studies from the 1930s to the present.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST302 Reproductive Politics and the Family in Africa

This course will introduce students to broad discourses and issues related to reproduction and the family in modern Africa. We will study maternal and sexual health and technologies of reproduction, but for us reproduction will be an object of historical inquiry. One of the driving questions for this course will be how reproduction has been given meaning socially. How have African societies understood abortion, infanticide, or other medical means of controlling fertility and childbirth? What has been the relationship between the family and the state? We will also examine ideas about sexuality and love, changing notions of parenthood, childhood health, and what constitutes an ideal family. Finally, we will interrogate how these ideas influenced health policy and political ideologies which, in turn, changed conceptions of motherhood, fatherhood, and the family.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: FGSS303, STS302
Prereq: None

HIST303 Policing and Power

This course examines the history of American policing by considering the contexts and conflicts that birthed and shaped the modern carceral state, focused primarily on the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. Moving through five modules, it considers the origins of policing and imprisonment in Europe and the United States, policing as social control or social order, the role of police in constructing the state, policing in a transnational context, and the modern era of mass incarceration. These modules ask what police power is, what histories have shaped the limits or excesses of that power, and how law enforcement shaped American society, culture, and politics.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST304 Middle East Intellectuals and Modernity

How have Middle Eastern intellectuals conceived and discussed modernity? We will use this question to analyze the variety in the history of thought in Middle Eastern societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernization, formation of the modern state and issues of nationalism, imperialism and colonialism, main intellectual questions of the time, will form the framework as we analyze their political, social, and cultural impact on the production of knowledge in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman lands. As such it is NOT a history of the Middle East but rather a history of mentalities, organized around four thematic/chronological modules (Reform, Modern State and Constitutionalism/Panislamism, Nationalisms and Colonialisms) each representing a set of concepts, ideas, and movements as well as facts and problems, all of which will be compared to the larger world of modern state formation both in thought and practice. The principal aim is to familiarize students with the processes of modernization in the making of the modern Middle East.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST305 Coexistence and Violence in Europe: Jews, Muslims, Roma and their Neighbors

From the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 21st century, the territories of Central and Eastern Europe were transformed from imperial borderlands with religiously and ethnically diverse populations into homogenous nation-states. This course will examine the processes that remade these borderlands, along with the changing relations between the various ethnic and religious communities that dwelled within them. Students will consider examples of both peaceful coexistence and violent conflict among these populations, as well as the impact of the modern state, its institutions, and ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism, socialism, and fascism on these regions. Throughout the course, students will consider especially the history of Jewish, Muslim, and Romani minorities in light of major themes.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST306 We Were Eight Years in Power: Reconstruction and the Politics of Black Inequality

We Were Eight Years in Power examines the crucible of American democracy by looking at the struggle of African American rights following the Civil War. Debates in the period on the rights of African Americans continue to structure American ideas of race and citizenship to the present day. The foundations of American racial animus and systemic racism date to Reconstruction. We will explore both the periods of Reconstruction (1863-1877) and Redemption (1877-1910), its dark successor that saw the establishment of Jim Crow. We will discuss readings on the promise of interracial rule, Reconstruction in the north, the violent overthrow of racial equality, and the establishment of the color line in American law.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST307 The Economy of Nature and Nations

On many of the key environmental problems of the 21st century, from climate change to biodiversity conservation, the perspectives of ecology and economics often seem poles apart. Ecology is typically associated with a skeptical stance toward economic growth and human intervention in the environment, while economics focuses on understanding (and often, celebrating) human activities of production, consumption, and growth. At the same time, ecology and economics share a common etymology: both words spring from the Greek oikos, or household. They also share much common history. This course thus explores the parallel histories of economics and ecology from the 18th century to the present, focusing on changing conceptions of the oikos over this period, from cameralism's vision of the household as a princely estate or kingdom, continuing through the emergence of ideas about national or imperial economic development, and culminating in the dominant 20th-century recasting of economics as being centrally concerned with problems of resource allocation. Simultaneously, the course explores connections between changes in economics and the emergence of ecological science over this period, from Enlightenment natural history and early musings on the "economy of nature," to the design of markets for carbon credits today.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS307, ENVS307
Prereq: None

HIST308 Trump-Evangelicals: the History of Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism in America

This course examines the history of American evangelicalism, seeking to understand the nature of its support for the presidency of Donald Trump. Beginning with a brief overview of religion in the colonial and revolutionary eras, the course examines revivalism, slavery, and the emergence of fundamentalism during the 19th century. Special attention is paid to the re-emergence of evangelicalism after World War II, the establishment of the religious right, global evangelicalism, and the core evangelical support for the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump. Students will be challenged to consider the ways issues of gender, race, and economics have shaped 21st-century evangelicalism, and reflect on how the movement's view of American history contributes to its own sense of identity and purpose.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST246, CSPL308, RELI308
Prereq: None

HIST309 The Idea of Nature: Theory and Practice

What is nature, that our minds are so full of it? Aristotle, the first naturalist in European intellectual history, called it an inner principle of change, and wove his observations of the natural world into the fabric of his philosophy; Darwin inherited a millennia-old tradition of thinking about change in nature and produced the theory of evolution we live with today. This seminar charts the long history of the idea of nature in European thought, moving between the histories of philosophy and what was once called "natural philosophy" and is now called "science." Along the way, we will meet the constituent parts of living "nature": animals (what are they, anyway? And are we them?), plants, and then, with the advent of microscopy, the cell itself. This course also explores the cultural life of the idea of nature, by devoting substantial time to a specific case study: the natural history museum, a creation of the Victorian period that has, for more than a hundred years, offered many people their first glimpse of the idea that nature is the kind of thing that has a meaningful past, and possibly a future as well. How did natural history museums explore evolutionary theory for the general public? How did they expand people's sense of time, and of the variety of species in nature? How did they court, and deal with, political and religious controversy? And how were they sometimes the beneficiaries of, and complicit in, the political and intellectual project of colonialism? We explore all these questions. Readings include Aristotle, Hans Blumenberg, Georges Canguilhem, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Pierre Hadot, Donna Haraway, Ursula LeGuin, Harriet Ritvo, Sophia Roosth, and Steven Shapin.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST311 The History of the Samurai

This course examines the history of Japanese warriors, known among other things as samurai and bushi, from their origins in ancient Japan to the dismantling of the samurai class after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Through a combination of primary and secondary sources, we will trace the development of warrior power and identity, the rise of warrior power in medieval Japan, the domestication and bureaucratization of warriors during the Edo Period (1600--1868), and warrior discontent with socioeconomic change as one of the driving forces behind the Meiji Restoration. Other themes include the relationship between warrior government and adjudication, the use of Buddhism for legitimation, and male-male intimacy and sexual relations.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CEAS311
Prereq: None

HIST312 Diggers and Discontents: Doing History from Below

History looks different when told from the perspective of those without power. This course will introduce students to the practice of "doing history from below," which includes finding the voices of the marginalized and illuminating the actions of those who fought against established power structures. Each week, we'll read about the discontented from the 17th to 19th centuries, including the poor, criminals, women, the enslaved, pirates, Indigenous nations, and workers. We will discuss how the very institutions of historical practice reify the status quo and elide the experiences of those who fought for alternate (and better) futures.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST313 Schemers and Redeemers: Capitalism and Christianity in the Early Republic

This course examines the intersection of two of the most significant themes in U.S. history: Capitalism and Christianity. Beginning with the Early Republic (1790s) and continuing through the mid-19th century, this course asks students to explore how Americans used their religious identities to negotiate and shape market activity and institutions (and in turn, how the marketplace shaped their religion). Students will investigate the varied ways in which religious women and men resolved tensions between gender, class, slavery, moral dogma, and market imperatives. Finally, this course will require students to reflect on how the early 19th-century U.S. experience informs our understanding of the relationship between capitalism and Christianity in 21st-century America.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RELI320
Prereq: None

HIST314 The Political Ascetic

This seminar will examine the historical significance of the ascetic, both as a figure in politics as well as an ideal that has radically transformed the way politics is understood. A key goal of the seminar is to examine the dialogue between Indian and European theories of asceticism over the longue durée. Readings will include reflections on asceticism by well-known figures like the Buddha, Krishna (in the Bhagavad Gita), Plato, Sankara, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Weber, and Foucault, alongside lesser-known writers like Kautilya, Bankim, Savarkar, and Sahajanand Saraswati.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GSAS316
Prereq: None

HIST315 Global Histories: Problems in Scale, Scope, Depth, and Time

How big is too big? How far back in time can historians go? How best to understand the relationship between science and history? What counts as evidence? What accounts for the rise (or return, some would argue) of macro-history? What does it portend for the future of microhistory? This advanced seminar will examine the history and historiographical implications of macro-historical frameworks, including comparative history, world history, global history, deep history, and big history.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CHUM341
Prereq: None

HIST316 History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Islamicate World

A survey of major turning points, debates, and socio-political context of the history of science, medicine, and technology in the Islamicate World. The course will provide samples from the contributions of the Islamicate world to the following scientific fields: astronomy, mathematics, geography, cartography, medicine, optics, and mechanics. In addition, the course will probe into the relationship between scientific production and other fields of knowledge such as religion, occult sciences, art, and Sufism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS314
Prereq: None

HIST317 The Great Game

The "Great Game" was first popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his classic novel "Kim" (1901), where it referred to spycraft in the service of empire. The term gradually came to refer to the struggle for "mastery" of Asia during the 19th century, mainly between the British and Russian Empires. Nowhere were the effects of this imperial rivalry more pronounced than in Pakistan and Afghanistan. More recently the term has been applied to grand strategy, global geopolitics, and espionage, more broadly in scenarios as wide-ranging as Cold War "containment," the global "War on Terror," the current US "pivot" to Asia, and China's "Belt and Road Initiative."

This seminar will examine the history of the Great Game--as both spycraft and great power rivalry--and its wider geopolitical reverberations. We will also examine an array of Great Game manifestations in popular culture. Readings will combine historical narrative and analysis with film, literature, art, and (yes) games.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GSAS317
Prereq: None

HIST318 The Politics of Death: The Living, the Dead, and the State

This course will explore the intersections between the living, the dead, and the state, focusing on the ways that death and the dead body raise particular questions and problems for different kinds of political regimes. The course will examine the collisions between the state and the dead, both symbolic and material, by investigating spaces where the state and death intersect in revealing ways: cemeteries, cremation, monuments, rituals, and religious institutions and cultures. The course will also follow, borrowing anthropologist Katherine Verdery's term, "the political lives of dead bodies," the ways in which states mobilize dead bodies to reconfigure the political order.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENVS318, REES318
Prereq: None

HIST319 Crisis, Creativity, and Modernity in the Weimar Republic, 1918--1933

Born in defeat and national bankruptcy; beset by disastrous inflation, unemployment, and frequent changes of government; and nearly toppled by coup attempts, the Weimar Republic (1918--1933) produced some of the most influential and enduring examples of modernism. Whether in music, theater, film, painting, photography, design, or architecture, the Weimar years marked an extraordinary explosion of artistic creativity. New approaches were likewise taken in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, medicine, science, and technology, and new ideas about sexuality, the body, and the role of women were introduced. Nevertheless, Weimar modernism was controversial and generated a backlash that caused forces on the political right to mobilize to ultimately bring down the republic. This advanced seminar explores these developments and seeks to understand them within their political, social, and economic contexts to allow for a deeper understanding of Weimar culture and its place within the longer-term historical trajectory of Germany and Europe. This perspective allows for an appreciation of the important links between Weimar modernism and Imperial Germany, as well as an awareness of some of the important continuities between the Weimar and Nazi years.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: GRST264, CJST319
Prereq: None

HIST320 Visions of World Order: From the French Revolution to the Present

This course offers a survey of how social scientists, philosophers and statesmen have understood and imagined global order from the late 18th century until the present. The course first examines interpretations of global order that emerged during the late 18th and 19th centuries: Cosmopolitanism (Immanuel Kant), Positivism (August Comte, Saint Simon), Nationalism, (Giuseppe Mazzini) and Marxism. The course then turns to the first half of the twentieth century by examining the international thought of W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Rosa Luxemburg and Gandhi, while also discussing fascist and liberal internationalist views of world order that emerged after World War I. The third part of the course discusses visions of Cold War order connected to American modernization theory (W.W. Rostow), neoliberalism (Friedrich Hayek), post-colonialism (Franz Fanon), Third Worldism, Neoconservatism (Jeane Kirkpatrick) and Systems Theory. The course concludes with the Post-Cold War period and how it has been imagined by such thinkers as Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington along with a discussion of such topics as the global turn to nationalism, the Green New Deal and the "New Cold War with China."
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST321 Media and Power in Latin America: From Quipus to Twitter

This interdisciplinary seminar explores how media technologies have shaped Latin American societies and politics from the colonial encounter to the dawn of the digital age. Investigating the local histories of indigenous forms such as the Andean knotted quipu and scribal texts, along with newspapers, radio, photography and social media, we examine how Latin Americans made and used these technologies to assert power, claim status, and launch protests. Through brief theoretical readings and historical case studies, we explore such themes as the relationship between colonialism and the written word, the enduring legacy of alternative indigenous literacies, the importance of rumor and oral communication in societies with low literacy rates, and the role of mass media in identity formation and contemporary social movements.

Structured in part as a lab, the class will be organized around producing a physical and digital exhibition of Latin American media materials available in Wesleyan's collections, to be displayed for the broader university community and beyond. We will produce this exhibition over the course of the semester, integrating individual research projects into our broader collective project that will be conducted as a collaborative/team effort. Along the way we will experiment with hands-on activities that might include making quill pens, setting type, and operating a printing press, take field trips to examine rare media materials first hand, and learn from on-campus experts as we develop our public exhibition.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST320
Prereq: None

HIST322 Exploration, Conquest, and Insurrection: The History of the Amazon 1542 to Present

Dark, wild, primitive, Edenic and infinitely wealthy: the Amazon has been many things in many times and places. From the disgruntled Spanish conquistadors who first traversed the jungle's rivers in search of cinnamon, to the 19th-century scientific expeditions of enlightened explorers, to contemporary environmentalists, the Amazon remains a mysterious object of inquiry. It still incites the imagination of travelers, filmmakers, and politicians alike.

This seminar investigates the multiple ways in which the Amazon and its peoples have been portrayed in chronicles, scientific writings, and film. We will confront the historical circumstances, motives and ideologies that prompted each of these depictions and how, in turn, they shaped the colonization of the region. We will pay close attention to genre, and to themes such as cross-cultural encounter, imperialism, and the representation of indigenous societies. We begin in 1542 with the chronicle of Francisco de Orellana. As the first Spaniard to navigate the entire length of the Amazon River, Orellana influenced how Europeans imagined the jungle well into the 19th century. Subsequently, we apply readings in history of science and anthropological theory to Claude Lévi-Strauss account of Amazonian tribes in Tristes Tropiques (1955). Students will then conduct independent research into a representation of their interest. Possible topics include scientific expeditions in the region, the jungle and modernization, global warming, or human rights. Finally, we will reflect on the Amazon as a metaphor for the human condition with Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo (1982).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST322
Prereq: None

HIST323 No Day But Today: United States Queer History

Queer history, as a subfield, has flourished in the more than five decades since the Stonewall Riots. What began as an attempt by activists involved in the liberation era to reclaim the lost and erased historical memory for queer people has developed into a vibrant field of interdisciplinary scholarly interrogation. This seminar will introduce students to the historiographic contours of queer history and help them develop independent research projects. We will take advantage of the extensive queer periodicals collection assembled by Wesleyan University's Department of Special Collections and University Archives.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST324 Homelands: Indigenous Worlds in North America

This class will investigate the story of Indigenous peoples discovering Europeans. It is a difficult story to tell, because few Indigenous inhabitants left written records describing what it was like when ships arrived on the shores and the men and women disembarked, established settlements, and began the process of expanding across the continent. Some encounters were peaceful, while others were violent. Every encounter, however, can be understood by studying Indigenous societies and their worldviews. Far from static and unchanging groups, Indigenous nations were constantly adapting to their physical and spiritual world. This class will use primary and secondary sources to explore North America from the Indigenous perspective, including the rise and fall of great societies before the arrival of Europeans, strategies of contact and exchange after 1500, and the quest to maintain authority and independence during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST325 Fugitives and Freedman: The Politics of Slavery in the Civil War Era

The actions of fugitive slaves and newly-freed people turned the crisis of American union into a war for emancipation. Questions of slavery's expansion, permanence, and end dominated the political discourse of the United States from 1848 through 1877. This course will examine the ways in which political actors, especially African Americans, kept the twin issues of slavery and emancipation in the public sphere to restructure American society in the middle of the 19th century.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AFAM335
Prereq: None

HIST326 Radical Mapping: History, Praxis, and Grounded Theory

From Indigenous trade routes in precolonial Louisiana to 21st-century digital commemorations of lynching sites, this advanced seminar will examine at the craft of mapping as a site of historiographical study and an opportunity to propose new ways of understanding time and space that center communities of color. We situate the rise of the professionalized fields of Western geography and cartography as a colonial practice, engage critical and resistant readings of historical maps, and convene in a collaborative studio model. Some questions we will explore include: What is a map, and what kind of power does the object and practice wield? How have communities of color been both enclosed and liberated by spatial arrangements of earth, sea, and sky? What would it mean, in the words of David Harvey, to develop a "People's Geography?" What interventions are cutting-edge scholars making, and what methods are they using to articulate original historical research?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST328 History as Tragedy: Genre, Gender, and Power in the Alexiad of Anna Komnena

Why did it take until the 11th century for a woman to write a work in the genre of history? What did it take for Anna Komnena--a renowned student of ancient literature, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, and a princess of the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire--to finally break into this most gendered of genres? And, how has Anna Komnena's accomplishment been received? This course will spend an entire semester delving into this deeply literary history, and its influence from the Middle Ages to the present. Students will engage with "The Alexiad" through close intertextual readings, critical scholarship in history, relevant work in theory, and digital research methods.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL350, MDST350
Prereq: None

HIST329 Race Discourse in the Americas

This course examines the belief system of race as it intersects with contemporary social and political concerns. These include: gender, sexuality, AI and technology, animal studies, Obama and black politics, mass incarceration, and questions of environmental sustainability. Moving beyond the national borders of the United States, the class will also explore the functioning of race in South Africa as well as conduct a comparative inquiry of the idea of caste that has been used to analyze the social structure of several South Asian societies. The course seeks to understand the transformations and persistence of racial hierarchy as a constitutive element of our present global order.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST330 Introduction to Public History: Working with Museums, Archives, and Historic Sites

This course will introduce students to the history, ideas, and best practices that shape the world of "public history." How do institutions like museums, archives, and historic sites balance the standards of formal academic scholarship with the demands of interpreting history for a larger public audience? What role do these cultural organizations play in the construction of larger historical narratives? What responsibilities do they have to their audience, stakeholders, and society? The course will turn on six key concepts that shape the world of public history: History and Memory, Inclusivity and Accessibility, Shared Authority/Inquiry, Agendas and Audiences, Legal and Ethical Frameworks, and Economics and Entrepreneurship. Through class readings, discussions, and field work, students will develop an understanding of not only the theories and ideas behind public history, but also the practical daily concerns public historians encounter on the ground. The course will help prepare students who are considering a career in museums, archives, historic sites, historic preservation, and the nonprofit sector. Students will also work with the Wesleyan University Special Collections staff to complete exhibits to be displayed in the Olin Library
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST332 Race, Capital, and Sexual Consent

Race, Capital, and Sexual Consent will focus on the early 19th century through to the Progressive Era. It will explore racialized sexual markets, from what Black feminist historian Adrienne Davis has called "The Sexual Economy of American Slavery," to the Victorian-era marriage market, to continuing and emerging sex work and pleasure economies. This course will focus on areas of overlap, tension, and reinforcement within and between these racialized sexual markets. Fundamental to this class will be the question of if/how sexual consent is configured within these markets, and what this means in the broader evolution of American liberalism in the 19th- and early 20th-century U.S.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM385, FGSS385, AFAM385
Prereq: None

HIST333 Appeasement and the Origins of the Second World War

In this study of Europe's crisis, 1933-1939, from Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany to the outbreak of the Second World War, attention will focus upon the reassertion of German power and its effects upon the diplomacy and politics of Great Britain and France. Specific topics will include Hitler's aims and actions; critical events concerning the Rhineland, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and Poland; pacifism and the French Left; Neville Chamberlain and British conservatism; and the debate over the immediate origins of the war in 1939. Readings will include memoirs and contemporary diplomatic documents, newspapers, and journals.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RL&L333
Prereq: None

HIST334 Social History of Islam in Africa

The history of Islam in Africa spans 14 centuries, and Islam continues to play a central role in shaping contemporary African societies. In this course, we will examine the long social history of Islam on the continent. Islamic expression in Africa is diverse. We will explore the dynamic ways in which Islam has influenced local cultures and politics as well as the various ways in which individual Africans and African communities have made Islam their own. Topics of discussion include early trade and state formation; Islamic education, literacy, and conversion; the role of women in Muslim societies; Islamic cultural productions; Muslim responses to colonialism; and the contemporary development of political Islam. We will end the course by reflecting on the responses of Africans to contemporary changes in the wider Muslim world.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST335 Nature, Science, and Empire in Early Latin America

This seminar will introduce students to a diversity of scientific practices that flourished in the Hispanic World between 1400 and 1800. We will begin by analyzing how a debate known as the "polemic of Spanish Science," together with the Black Legend conditioned the ways in which colonial Latin American science was traditionally approached. From available studies we will then survey some of the significant contributions to botany, astronomy, medicine, and metallurgy of Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations. From there we will read an array of primary and secondary sources in order to reconstruct the varied, and often eclectic knowledge gathering and knowledge making practices that missionaries, humanists, and crown-officials devised to understand the natural world. We will pay close attention to their particular goals and methods and the manner in which they were influenced by the encounter with foreign peoples, the dynamics of conquest and colonization, the movement of books and commodities, and institutions of censorship and patronage.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST335
Prereq: None

HIST336 Development

This course is a history of economic development, understood as a series of ideas about how countries progress toward greater prosperity, higher standards of living, and greater quality of life. We will question the origins of these ideas during the colonial period and after World War II; discuss liberal, socialist, and imperial variations on a theme; and pay special attention to modernization, technical assistance, the Green Revolution, and the role of international organizations in shaping the world order. The course draws on recent histories of human rights, empire, and liberalism, and surveys feminist and environmentalist critiques to development approaches.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST337 Missionary Mysteries: the Objects and Archives of Wesleyan's Missionary Past

This course examines the history of Wesleyan University's connections to missionary work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as seen through the university's archival and object collections. Students will spend the bulk of classroom time in hands-on learning as they engage with the archives of the Wesleyan Missionary Lyceum and cultural heritage collections obtained by missionaries and brought back to the University. Beginning with an overview of historical, archival, and museum methods, the course then will examine objects and written records from the Americas, West Africa, East Asia and the South Pacific. Students will be challenged to consider the ways in which Wesleyan has been engaged in colonialism, imperialism, and global evangelism. Topics of investigation will include: gender, linguistics, museum ethics and repatriation, the use of objects as educational tools.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST337, RELI337, ANTH337
Prereq: None

HIST338 History and Theory

This seminar will explore the contemporary theory and philosophy of history, giving special attention to the publications of "History and Theory," the academic journal owned and edited by Wesleyan University faculty for the past 60 years. We might discuss such topics as the nature of historical truth; history as a science, with laws, and as an art, with style; the nature of historical time; gender history; agency and causation; history of the emotions; of animals, and history's moral imperatives; as well as the ramifications of the postmodern turn. We will give special attention to recent arguments about the theory of history and the nature of the past.

Key figures are likely to include Walter Benjamin, R. G. Collingwood, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Nancy Partner, Joan Scott, Reinhart Koselleck and Gabrielle Spiegel.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL328
Prereq: None

HIST340 Policing and Power

This course examines the history of policing in the United States by considering the contexts and conflicts that birthed and shaped the modern carceral state, focused primarily on the late nineteenth century through the 1980s. Moving through five modules, it considers the origins of policing and imprisonment in Europe and the United States, policing as social control or social order, the role of police in constructing state power, policing in a transnational context, and the modern era of mass incarceration. These modules ask what police power is, what histories have shaped the limits or excesses of that power, and how law enforcement shaped American society, culture, and politics. We will pay considerable attention to how these histories can help us navigate contemporary debates around law enforcement and crime.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST341 Body Histories in Africa

African bodies have long generated intrigue and misunderstanding. Outside observers, such as missionaries, travelers, colonial administrators, and anthropologists, have documented practices such as scarification and spirit possession as they simultaneously rendered their African practitioners "other." All too often the body as an instrument for creative expression, ritual healing, or social action was lost in translation. More recently Western feminists have focused their attentions on female circumcision. The persistence of circumcision (for both girls and boys) and other bodily practices speaks to their enduring social value and symbolic meaning. What can we learned from these and other body histories in Africa? In this course we will examine embodied rituals such as spirit possession, which marks the body as a site for human engagement with the supernatural. The widespread practice is also a gendered technique of healing documenting shifting understandings of health and illness. In addition, we will study the practice of "sitting on a man" by which women addressed the body politic through dance and collective nudity. The revealed body in motion shamed men into action and has been employed in the 21st century to shame oil companies for their greed and environmental destruction. In this and other examples, we will approach the body as an archive: it is an archive in motion and subject to social renewal. Our embodied evidence will allow us to explore shifting histories of religion, art, sexuality, the economy, and politics from the precolonial era to the contemporary moment. By taking the body as our lens we will also learn new ways to examine the African past through histories of aesthetics, value, labor, hierarchy, and knowledge production.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM349
Prereq: None

HIST342 The Rise of the Conservative Movement in the United States Since 1945

"So inevitable, yet so unexpected," Alexis de Tocqueville declared, referring to the French Revolution of 1789. The same is true of the conservative movement that developed in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. What is the nature of modern American conservatism? How and why did it emerge? What are its social bases? How has conservatism evolved in America since the 1930s? What sort of varieties and conflicts exist within the movement? How did mid- and late-20th-century American conservatives compare to earlier sorts of conservatism in America in the early Republic, the antebellum South, modern American liberalism, and political conservative parties in Europe and Britain? What is the historical significance of the movement?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST345 Media Revolutions: Color Television and the Humanities in the 1960s and 1970s

This course visits some of the groundbreaking TV series that presented humanities and sciences to global mass audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Television emerged as a powerful cultural presence and with remarkable speed. From the late 1960s, the British Broadcasting Company, in partnership with PBS in America, created a series of television programs (partly to widen the audience market for new color television programming). This course focuses on the role of television as a still new, and potentially disruptive, medium. We will look at and discuss a range of British TV series from Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (both 1969) to Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" (1973) and Alistair Cooke's "America" (1972), John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty" (1977), and David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" (first aired in 1979). We will read and discuss works of art and media criticism around this time that laid the groundwork for major conceptual and theoretical remappings of the fields of cultural and visual studies. We also will explore the impact of television on art worlds and museums, looking at how 1960s' color television documentaries influenced the way that humanities are presented televisually up to today. This course satisfies requirements for the "Visual and Material Culture" module in history and major requirements for the Science in Society Program.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM353, STS352
Prereq: None

HIST348 Urban Histories of Latin America

Cities have occupied Latin American writers, artists, and scholars since the early decades of the sixteenth century. Mapped on to preexisting settlements of indigenous importance, colonial cities became the center of Iberian administration in the New World. They imparted justice, granted citizenship rights, set the standard of civility and religious orthodoxy, and held the promise of economic improvement. The preeminence of cities in Latin America continued into the modern period. Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro became opulent and unequal metropolitan centers in the nineteenth century. Unconstrained growth brought about the megalopolises of our current day.

This seminar will explore Latin America's major urban centers in significant moments from the pre-Hispanic period until the present day. Through chronicles, travel narratives, photography, legal writings, newspaper archives, maps, and film we will reconstruct the many dimensions of urban culture in the region. The course will be organized thematically and geographically. We will begin by studying the ways in which Latin American writers have understood the role of the city, and its dwellers, in shaping the trajectory of their various nations. We will pay particular attention to themes like the city and modernity, the every-day experiences of urban residents, racial, gender, and social inequality, the city as a site of historical memory and violent contestation, the environmental challenges of urban growth, and the rise and fall of counter-cultural and protest movements.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST348
Prereq: None

HIST350 Black New Orleans

New Orleans is a location on a map, a collective memory, and a metaphor. But most of all, New Orleans is and has been a site of Black cultural production for centuries. While the name often conjures images of Mardi Gras beads and Bourbon Street revelers, this intermediate level seminar unpacks the complex histories of Black communities beyond stereotypes popularized by mass media and tourism marketing. We will discuss topics such as airboat tours, so-called post-Katrina "resilience," voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, and more. Drawing inspiration from historian Jessica Marie Johnson's statement that "Black New Orleans Is The Center of The World," we will come to understand the Crescent City as a crucible and incubator of Black culture. The materials used in this course are as multifaceted as the city itself and include scholarly texts, primary sources, fiction, spoken word, music, and documentary film.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST351 Beyond 1619: Enslavement in the United States, 1619-1860

The recent publication of the New York Times' "1619 Project" has refocused attention on the history and lasting effects of enslavement in the United States. Discussion of slavery as America's "original sin," however, oversimplifies the complex, multifaceted, and adaptable nature of enslavement in American history. This seminar will provide students with a grounding in the extensive literature of slavery in the United States from 1619 to the outbreak of the Civil War. We will examine slavery as an economic system of labor exploitation, a racialized hierarchy that legitimized white supremacy, and as a site of resistance and cultural formation. We will explore, additionally, the lives of enslaved individuals alongside our study of the institution of slavery.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST352 The Communist Experience in the Soviet Union (CLAC.50)

Like the parent course, HIST353: The Communist Experience in the 20th Century, this CLAC course will engage with the problem of experience through a series of themes: subjectivity; engaging in the political process of building socialism; aesthetics; travel and tourism; East and West; race and ethnicity; production and consumption; time and space; political engagement and disengagement; science and technology; and emotions. We will work with sources from oral histories, diaries, film, television, and the press. The final project would involve a close reading and paper on a theme covered in class using both primary and preapproved secondary sources in Russian. The student language background appropriate for this class is (preferably advanced) intermediate to native.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CGST352, REES352
Prereq: None

HIST353 The Communist Experience in the 20th Century

Two decades have passed since the collapse of Communism, its empire, and its utopian vision of the kingdom of heaven on Earth. Indeed, the Communist collapse was heralded as not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history itself. Yet how do we understand the nature of the communist way of life, the causes of its decline, and the meaning of its demise? This course will trace the development of Communism's answer to capitalist modernity from the 1917 Revolution through the Soviet collapse. It will seek to shed light on the birth, life, and death of Communist modernity through history, literature, and art, by exploring the world socialism created as an ideological model and a way of life. The emphasis of the course will be on the lived experience of Communism, primarily within the Soviet Union, but also beyond it (in Eastern Europe and Asia). In the global conflict between capitalism and Communism, how did people understand the competing demands of ideology and reality, individual and society, private and public, production and consumption, labor and leisure? How did the state manage the contradictions that arose when lofty ideologies encountered everyday life, and how did citizens make sense of these ideological transformations? What killed Communism: bombs and diplomacy, or refrigerators and Finnish shoes?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: REES353
Prereq: None

HIST353Z The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century

More than thirty years have passed since the collapse of Communism, its empire, and its utopian vision of the kingdom of heaven on Earth. Indeed, the Communist collapse was heralded as not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history itself. Yet how do we understand the nature of the Communist way of life, the causes of its decline, and the meaning of its demise? This course will trace the development of Communism's answer to capitalist modernity from the 1917 revolution through the Soviet collapse. It will seek to shed light on the birth, life, and death of Communist modernity through history, literature, and art, by exploring the world socialism created as an ideological model and a way of life. The emphasis of the course will be on the lived experience of Communism, primarily within the Soviet Union but also beyond it (in Eastern Europe and Asia). In the global conflict between Capitalism and Communism, how did people understand the competing demands of ideology and reality, individual and society, private and public, production and consumption, labor and leisure? How did the state manage the contradictions that arose when lofty ideologies encountered everyday life, and how did citizens make sense of these ideological transformations? What killed Communism: bombs and diplomacy, or refrigerators and Finnish shoes? This course is an intensive reading, research, and writing seminar.

- This course is held entirely online and is a hybrid synchronous and asynchronous format.

- You should be prepared to spend at least 4-6 hours/day on class work.

- There is a class every day: on Mondays and Thursdays we will meet synchronously on Zoom at our regular class time (3:30-5:10 pm); on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the format will be asynchronous (meaning you can engage with the day's materials at your own pace within a 24-hour window).

- You are expected to participate in each class having read the assigned material and reflected on them in your forum comments. Each day's online discussion will cover the topic and materials of the day.

- Each day you are expected to post at least one original comment of your own, and to respond to at least one comment by a classmate.

- The questions will be posted by 12 pm the day of the class, and the forum will be open for 24 hours, until 12 pm the following day.

- Be prepared to engage with the sources critically--to raise important issues, ask for clarification, and/or propose alternative interpretations, and to bring your own questions into the discussion. When possible, point to specific examples in the text and reference sources/page numbers to make the discussion easier to navigate for the class.

- Your active engagement in the seminar--both on the forum and in the synchronous sessions--is absolutely essential.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: REES353Z
Prereq: None

HIST354Z Self and Text in Roman North Africa: Augustine's Confessions

The native North African Augustine of Hippo wrote the most influential autobiographical text in (so-called) Western literature. It remains the most brilliant text I have ever read: a mind-bendingly complex and yet fully coherent literary self. Let's read it together. Set between Carthage and Rome in 400, Augustine wrote just 10 years before the Eternal City would be sacked by the disaffected former legions of the empire (the Goths). Split between conqueror and conquered, civilization and apocalypse, Augustine wove humanity's existential and epistemological questions into a literary tapestry for the ages: Who am I? How do you speak? Who are you? How do I listen? Who are we? How do we know? At once memoir, critique of empire, philosophy, psychology, theology, personal history, criticism, and a letter, these CONFESSIONS require close, careful, focused, attentive readings from a diverse group of interpreters. Join our learning community and spend two snowbound weeks at Wesleyan with a book you will never forget.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL354Z, MDST354Z
Prereq: None

HIST356 Between Worlds: Change and Continuity in Early Latin America

The conquest and colonization of the Americas challenged long-held assumptions about geography, time, history, nature, theology, and humanity for both indigenous societies and Europeans. Modern scholars have described the encounter either as an earth-shattering moment of revolutionary intellectual reverberations or, alternatively, as one of limited and slower impact.

This course examines the ways in which diverse actors in the Iberian colonial world confronted change and continuity in their societies. In particular, it seeks to understand how they approached the conquest and its environmental, political, religious, legal, and social repercussions. Through the study of chronicles, graphic materials, poetry, omens, grammars, and maps, we will look at how missionaries, indigenous scholars, scientists, and nuns interpreted the forces transforming their communities. We will pay particular attention to the traditions and practices that they mobilized to explain the past and convey its present and future significance. Major themes include religious conversion and its consequences, the emergence of new social and ethnic identities under colonial institutions, linguistic change, and the writing of history.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST229
Prereq: None

HIST357 Regulators: The Administrative State in Modern America

How much arsenic is permissible in drinking water? Should financial firms be required to hold on to some of the risky securities they issue? Can a company sell a jar of peanut butter that contains only 90% peanuts? In the modern United States, the answers to these questions are determined by the administrative state - a collection of dozens of regulatory agencies, bureaus, and commissions comprising millions of officials and staff. Historians, political scientists, and other scholars have long recognized the administrative state as an important site of governance. But unlike Congress, the courts, or the Presidency, most of us have little idea about what exactly the administrative state does, much less how these regulatory bodies came to have so much power and responsibility. EPA G-Men banging down doors in Springfield might get a laugh on "The Simpsons," but why do EPA special agents carry guns?

This course approaches the making of the administrative state as a central component in the history of the modern United States. The seminar begins in the late 19th century, when elected officials created commissions of experts in an attempt to govern an increasingly complex economy, and continues through the 20th century, with its bursts of new state authorities and responsibilities, before concluding in the present, asking what a long history of the administrative state can teach us about contemporary policy. To understand the context in which the administrative state emerged and evolved, we cast a wide net. Among other subjects, students will consider popular movements for environmental protection and worker safety, intellectual transformations in understandings of risk and public welfare, political fights over the scale and scope of the government, and biographies of regulators and the powerful institutions that they make up. Readings include classic texts and new scholarship across different disciplines, alongside contemporary journalism and novel approaches like podcasts - returning throughout the semester to the question of how we can tell an engaging and vital history of the administrative state. Toward that end, students will also explore a variety of different primary source materials throughout the semester before embarking on their own original research projects.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST358 The "Self" in Self-Determination: Personhood & Peoplehood in Empire & Decolonization

This seminar course will explore the historical literature on self-determination and decolonization movements in the twentieth century across the globe. Combining the fields of US imperial history, international history, global indigenous studies, and diasporic studies, this course will delve deep into the historical development of right of self-determination within and outside of imperial regimes. It interrogates how peoples articulated their sense of "personhood" and "peoplehood" to claim political rights within the borders of nations and empires, as well as on the international stage. The course will also explore how decolonization as a concept transformed beyond the realm of law and personhood and encompassed culture, the environment, and lifeways.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM303
Prereq: None

HIST362 Issues in Contemporary Historiography

HIST364 Thinking with Objects: Processing a Museum Collection from Southern Africa

In Thinking with Objects, students will gain hands-on experience processing a collection of Namibian artifacts in Wesleyan's care. The course will introduce students to many of the ethical and practical challenges facing museum collections today, providing an opportunity to apply the ideas we discuss all semester by processing a collection of decorative and everyday objects made from diverse materials (wood, beads, animal hide, and shells). Part of the course will be the investigation of the origins and function of these objects. Learning how to handle, label, store, and potentially exhibit objects from the collection will enable students to reflect on Wesleyan's relationship to the African continent, and to think more generally about university and museum collections and methodologies
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: ENGL396
Prereq: None

HIST366 A History of Incarceration in the United States

This course examines the history of incarceration in the United States from the 18th century to the late 20th century. It begins with history of indentured servitude in the colonial era and then considers the intensification of the enslavement of blacks in the 19th century as well as the expansion of prisons in the 20th century. The course seeks to engage how systems of confinement accompanied the development of a political system based on the languages of liberty.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: CSPL366
Prereq: None

HIST367 Life of Modern Fact

Facts aren't born; they are made. The challenge is to understand how people have come to think of facts as existing in the world independent of human intervention. This seminar explores the tools and techniques that people have used to craft facts. We consider examples from the 18th century through the present day, such as training manuals, films, and instruments. We also examine how broader structures such as social networks and the law help produce facts as people share, defend, and use them. Finally, this course encourages skepticism and creativity in the use of primary sources and the formulation of original research, questioning the givens of human knowledge.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS367
Prereq: None

HIST371 Fascism

This seminar aims to identify varieties and components of fascist ideologies and to undertake comparative analysis of European fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century. The initial focus will be on the several ways fascism has been defined and understood, including examples of how the term has been utilized to characterize certain governments and personalities. Specific attention then will be devoted to Italy, Germany, Spain, and France, with emphasis on Mussolini and Hitler and their regimes. Additionally, apparent linkages of fascism to post-1945 politics, such as the National Front in France, will be explored. Other fascist movements may be chosen as the subject of a major research paper. Materials for the seminar will include documentary sources, films, interpretive studies, and biographies.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST373 Language and Power in Latin America

What is a perfect language? Societies across the globe, in different times and places, have sought to answer this question. In the process they have posited a diversity of theories about the relationships among language, individual and group identity, social harmony, religious devotion, and political power. This seminar investigates the ways in which Latin American societies, from the colonial period until the present, grappled with the problem of language and its ability to shape their communities. From Indigenous polities, to the imperial monarchies that conquered and colonized the Americas, to the nation-states that emerged in the 19th century, all have had to confront the realities of a diverse and profoundly multilingual region. The course will be organized around representative case studies. It will draw from a variety of fields (e.g., linguistics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and history of science) to consider how language served as either a resource or an obstacle to be surmounted in the creation of ideal religious, political, and intellectual communities in Latin America. Significant themes include the role of language in conquest and colonization, the development of cultural institutions to regulate and standardize language usage, the prevalence of bilingualism in many regions, the proliferation of literacy campaigns as a hallmark of the revolutionary governments of the mid-20th century, and the emergence of Indigenous peoples as social and political actors in contemporary Latin America.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: LAST373
Prereq: None

HIST374 Food Security: History of an Idea

The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations has held that "food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life." This course is a history of food insecurity as a material condition and a geopolitical concept for explaining uneven access to provisions. Although we begin with the emergence of food security as a concept during World War II, we will spend the majority of the course studying other ways of organizing access to the means of subsistence. Topics discussed will include why human beings share food, the invention of agriculture, transportation infrastructure, international trade, food aid, agricultural research and development, poverty, conflict, and famine.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS374, ENVS374
Prereq: None

HIST376 Travel and Communication in Europe

This course will explore the character of travel and communication networks, patterns, technologies, and ideas in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. Students will therefore learn the concept of travel and mobility, whether commercial, cultural, or bureaucratic, and the concept of notable reconfigurations and acceleration of exchange in this period. Beyond ideas, the networks they linked to will be prominent. These include technologies such as the bridge, road, and wayfinding, as well as cybernetic creations like the riding horse (with iron shoes and complex needs); the development of institutions of hospitality, like the monastery, the hostel and the inn; and the adaptation of writing to facilitate motion and communication. Due attention will be paid to exotic travel such as crusading, pilgrimage and warfare; however, routine business travel will be key, such as the trips required by law, by trade, by the search for money, and the desire to see family.

Methodologically, the course will focus on the idea of networks and the techniques of the digital humanities. Thus, text mining for information; mapping in GIS (Geographic Information Systems); and analyzing network relations will be important additions to the usual historical skills of reading and writing essays.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: MDST376
Prereq: None

HIST377 Comparative French Revolutions

This course makes a systematic, comparative analysis of the causes, patterns, and consequences of revolutionary activities in France, examining the revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1870. The course will emphasize revolutionary movement organizations, political and social goals, ideology, and industrialization.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RL&L377
Prereq: None

HIST378 LAND BACK! Indigenous Sovereignty Politics

This advanced research seminar will feature a look at the contemporary LAND BACK movement through current case studies with a focus on tracing the historical and legal genealogies of settler colonial land dispossession, indigenous land title, and self-governance issues bounded to territory (recognized and otherwise). We will examine different historical periods, moments, geographical sites, and case studies to explore the complexities of life for Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Islands and North America subject to the authority of the United States in relation to land as a central part of exercising sovereignty. In relation to these themes, the course will also examine: Indigenous peoples' varied political statuses in settler colonial context; self-determination; structures of domination and resistance; Indigenous agency; Native nationalism and decolonization. Readings will focus on the recognition and assertion of collective land rights, treaty rights, as well as land claims, land recovery, and land reclamation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST379 The Fire Next Time: The Modern Black Freedom Struggle

The Fire Next Time explores the spectrum of African American politics in the mid-20th century United States. It will examine not only the nonviolent social movement against the Jim Crow South but will scrutinize expanding notions of black militancy against racial oppression in modern America. We will complete and discuss readings on the "short" and "long" civil rights movements; the position of women in movements for black equality; the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X; the work of civil rights activists in the urban North; and the movement for Black Power. This course seeks to provide students with an understanding of the major themes and contexts of the most important social movement of the 20th-century United States.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AFAM379
Prereq: None

HIST380 Transforming Bodies: Movement and Agency in West Africa

Dancers in West Africa embody human agency and transform historical worlds. As one elder farmer proclaimed: "Our ciwara have power[!]" Masked ciwara dancers on the Mande Pleateau call upon the collective labor of farmers to produce rural life, and more recently, have responded to transformations of the agricultural landscape. They emphasize the power of the human body over agricultural machines. Elsewhere in West Africa, the Atsiagbekor dance energized and celebrated Ewe male soldiers by acting out scenes from the battlefield. The dance movements were also secret codes used during battle to give instructions. How and when to fight, defend, or retreat depended on this embodied communication. The accompanying loud drum music served an added purpose of instilling fear in enemy ranks because it created the impression of a mighty army on the march. Still performed, the dance now symbolizes Ghanaian cultural heritage and helps to shape local historical memory.

In this course we will examine the body as an active agent in West African social and political life. We will study the historical and contemporary meanings of laboring bodies through dance and everyday movement, such as women's pounding of fufu or stirring of toh daily meals. We will also reflect on the ritual enactment of enslavement or colonial rule as a means to subvert old power structures. The body in these cases was a tool for resistance. We will also unpack multiple interpretations for specific women's embodied protests such as "sitting on a man." Collective body movement was powerful, but individual bodies might also enact healing or express religious devotion. Spirit possession, for example, marked the body as a site for human interaction with the supernatural. In this and other examples, the body is an archive in motion and subject to social renewal. By taking the body and movement as a lens, we will explore shifting histories of labor, performance, gender, politics, aesthetics, and religion from the pre-colonial era to the contemporary moment. We will also learn new ways to creatively move and narrate the African past and present.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-HIST, SBS-HIST
Identical With: DANC380
Prereq: None

HIST382 Anthropocene as Modern Grand Narrative

The Anthropocene refers to the new age in which humankind started to have a significant impact in altering or rupturing the Earth's systems, where the Earth is now moving out of its current geological epoch (the Holocene) and into "a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state." (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007, Sciences Module, 614). This course begins by examining the debates on the definition and periodization. It then explores precursors to the concept of the Anthropocene, such as Confucian and Daoist writings on the taming of the natural environment for human needs, the catastrophism versus uniformitarianism debate, and contesting definitions of sustainability. Finally, it looks at how recent works of environmental history engaged with the concept of the Anthropocene and brought our attention to the impact of the transition from organic economy to carbon economy. Is the Anthropocene a new meta-narrative that professes to be the theory that explains all human activity? Is the Anthropocene a call to arms for environmental justice? Is the Anthropocene just a declensionist fairy tale--one that leads us down a dead end, throwing up our arms in resignation over the irreversible destruction of the natural environment?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS382, ENVS383
Prereq: None

HIST383 French Existentialism and Marxism

This course is a study of French thinkers of the 20th century who challenged and reevaluated the principles upon which Western society was based, with an emphasis on the problems and theories concerning the standards of moral action, the nature of political knowledge, political engagement, ethical relativity, free will, and determination.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: RL&L383
Prereq: None

HIST385 Science and the State

Over the past two centuries, states have been among the most prodigious producers and consumers of scientific information. Broad areas of scientific inquiry--such as demography, economics, geography, and ecology--substantially developed in response to the need of states to manage their populations, their economies, and their natural resources. State-directed scientific and technological innovation has also played a critical role in the pursuit of national security and infrastructural development, most notably through the development of nuclear weapons, missiles, and an array of military technologies. Finally, states have turned to scientific experts to enhance the credibility and legitimacy of policy decisions. This course introduces students to literature in the history of science that explores the connections between systems of knowledge and state power. Themes developed include the tensions between expertise and democracy, secrecy and scientific openness; the relationship between political culture and scientific and technological development; and the role of quantification, standardization, and classification in producing political order.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS375
Prereq: None

HIST386 China as Scientific Powerhouse

Science, technology, and medicine played an integral role in the China's transition to modernity and inspired dramatic economic, social, and political transformations. As scholars of modern China developed a keen interest in transnational histories and comparative methodologies, they have paid closer attention to the histories of science, technology, and medicine. This course introduces students to this emerging field of study. It examines broad philosophical questions that motivate the research in history of those areas. We will learn to explore science, technology, and medicine in China on "its own terms" by understanding how the unique political and social challenges of modern China shaped Chinese science.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS285, CEAS222
Prereq: None

HIST387 History of the End

How will it end? Scientific hubris, a nuclear event, an asteroid, environmental disaster, overpollution, resource scarcity, commodity price spikes, riots, social chaos, social control? This seminar investigates how people have imagined apocalypse and post-apocalypse over time, on the premise that fantasies of the end provide a window into the anxieties of the societies that produce them.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS387, ENVS387
Prereq: None

HIST389 Sachem School: Indigenous Lifeways and Settler Radicalism After 1600

In the 21st century, we face a series of interconnected reckonings: environmental collapse, economic disparity, racial inequality, and more. There were, and still are, alternative ways of organizing our economies, reframing our relationships with the land, and creating kinship networks that mitigate against inequality and enmity. This class will explore what settlers learned--and refused to learn--from the Indigenous societies they encountered after contact in northern North America. From Roger Williams's ideas of religious toleration in the 1640s to #landback today, settlers have at times demonstrated a willingness to learn from Indigenous lifeways and employ those lessons in ways deemed "radical" by Western standards. Understanding this history illuminates a path toward a future in which we continue learning from Indigenous nations and work to repair the damage settler societies have inflicted on each other and our world.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM394, AMST394
Prereq: None

HIST390 The Redeemed Narrative: Microhistories in Early America

This course will guide students in thinking about American social history, the efforts by historians to recover the lived experiences of those who did not leave substantial archival documentation, through a close examination of examples of microhistory in early America. Microhistory, situated between the New Social History, influenced by the Annalistes and British Marxists, and the Cultural Turn, influenced by critical and linguistic theory, offers a unique opportunity to analyze the ways that early American historians creatively utilize evidence. We will pay particular attention to the ways that microhistory recovers histories of race and gender despite the paucity and problematic nature of archival sources. While students will receive a grounding in the theories of archival source interpretation, emphasis will be placed on the ways that historians have put those theories into practice. The course is designed to be an upper-level seminar, preparing students with the research tools to write their senior thesis or major capstone paper.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST390
Prereq: None

HIST391 The Treason of the Intellectuals: Power, Ethics, and Cultural Production

In his 1928 essay Julien Benda railed against the "treason" of the European intellectual establishment who abandoned disinterested intellectual activity in favor of political and nationalist engagement. In this course we will explore the relation of intellectuals to politics and the ethical ramifications thereof. Beginning with the Dreyfus Affair, the course will emphasize political involvement in France to focus on the vexed relationship between political action and intellectual production. We will examine figures such as Zola, Benda, Breton, Celine, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Aron, Fanon, Foucault, Mbembe, Derrida, Kristeva, and Cixous.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: COL355
Prereq: None

HIST392 The Acceleration of Europe: Mobility and Communication, 1000--1700

This research course explores the thesis that during the Middle Ages, Europeans began to move faster, to move more often, and, by doing so, transformed the nature of social life, cultural life, and the character of selves and minds in the world. The course will explore the material aspects of this, such as the nature and development of roads and bridges, ships and canals, inns and hospitality that sustained and encouraged advancing travel. Thematic importance will be given to the place of horses and horseriding in these developments. The course is about the history of communication and the idea that a particular sort of traveler was created through later medieval travel and became the means of cultural and psychological acceleration. The social and cognitive networks established through travel, including the exchange of letters and messages, linked the local to the national. Merchants, pilgrims, soldiers, judges, students, preachers, and bureaucrats became the means of spreading news, changing views, and speeding up the world. This course will expose students to methods and skills in the digital humanities such as network analysis, geographic information systems, and database analysis.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST393 Materia Medica: Drugs and Medicines in America

This course investigates the identification, preparation, and application of drugs and medicines in the United States, emphasizing the period before the 20th-century institutionalization of corporate research and development. Topics include early modern European prospecting for medicinal plants, the development of an international drug trade, and the formation of national pharmaceutical markets in the Untied States in the 19th century. Participants will explore the production, circulation, and restriction of medical knowledge through local practice, public and private institutions, trade and commerce, and regulation. In addition to knowledge of the social history of drugs and medicines in the United States, students are expected to develop competencies in historical research using primary and secondary sources. The final weeks of the course are devoted to applying historical knowledge to contemporary debates in global public health, including international pharmaceutical research, drug development, and epidemic disease.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: STS393
Prereq: None

HIST394 Seminar: Topics in the History of Europe Since 1945

This seminar is devoted to study of selected topics in the history of Europe after the Second World War. These will include the end of the war in 1945; the origins and developments of the Cold War, 1945--1962; France and the war in Algeria; de Gaulle's Fifth Republic and the events of 1968; Spain since 1975; Germany's ascendancy; the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union; the European Union; and contemporary Europe.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST395 "If there is no God, then everything is permitted?" Moral Life in a Secular World

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov famously poses the question of what would happen to mankind "without God and immortal life," asking whether this means that "all things are permitted." Made famous by Dostoevsky, the question of whether we can be moral without God has always haunted secularism and has consistently been the most vocal criticism of unbelief. From papal condemnations of secularism and "godless Soviets," to the contemporary consensus that belief in God is evidence of moral goodness and its absence a sign of a broken ethical barometer, the assumption has been that transcendental authority is all that stands between us and moral abyss. When the atrocities committed by "totalitarian" regimes are cited as evidence of this, it is only the most radical articulation of a broader narrative of secular modernity.

One of modernity's master narratives is that people go from being under the care of the church to being under the care of the state, and our focus will be on historical cases where the question of secular values was explicitly engaged by the state. We will examine individual and collective articulations of morality in three prominent models of secularism: American civil religion, French laïcité, and Communist official atheism. What constitutes the moral foundation of a world without God? Can religion's moral and spiritual function be performed by a different kind of belief system?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: REES344, RELI393
Prereq: None

HIST395Z "If there is no God, then everything is permitted?" Moral Life in a Secular World

Please note: Students should expect some readings and assignments to be due during winter break, prior to beginning Winter Session. Please visit the Winter Session website for the full syllabus -- http://www.wesleyan.edu/wintersession.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov famously poses the question of what would happen to mankind "without God and immortal life," asking whether this means that "all things are permitted." Made famous by Dostoevsky, the question of whether we can be moral without God has always haunted secularism and has consistently been the most vocal criticism of unbelief. From papal condemnations of secularism and "godless Soviets," to the contemporary consensus that belief in God is evidence of moral goodness and its absence a sign of a broken ethical barometer, the assumption has been that transcendental authority is all that stands between us and moral abyss. When the atrocities committed by "totalitarian" regimes are cited as evidence of this, it is only the most radical articulation of a broader narrative of secular modernity.

One of modernity's master narratives is that people go from being under the care of the church to being under the care of the state, and our focus will be on historical cases where the question of secular values was explicitly engaged by the state. We will examine individual and collective articulations of morality in three prominent models of secularism: American civil religion, French laïcité, and Communist official atheism. What constitutes the moral foundation of a world without God? Can religion's moral and spiritual function be performed by a different kind of belief system?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: REES344Z, RELI393Z
Prereq: None

HIST396 The U.S. South: A Global History

When people think of the U.S. South, they often think of a place that's isolated and insular--a region cut off from the rest of the United States and the wider world. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout its history, the South has been deeply entangled in the world and in the larger processes of globalization. Few regions of the United States have been more connected or more cosmopolitan. This seminar explores the global history of the U.S. South from the early 1800s to the present. By tracing the transnational movement of people, ideas, and commodities, it seeks to understand how the world has shaped the South, and also how the South has shaped the world.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Prereq: None

HIST397 United States Overseas Empire

The United States is an empire: an empire that expands beyond the North American continent into many islands across the globe. From Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Atlantic to American Samoa and Guam in the Pacific, the US remains an imperial power with unincorporated island territories, a euphemism for replacing the anachronistic term "colonies." The residents of these territories have truncated political rights; they do not have voting representation in U.S. Congress, and they cannot vote in U.S. Presidential elections. Though U.S. territories are usually footnotes in the grand narrative of U.S. history, this course argues that they are integral to understanding the United States as a whole.

We will examine the history of how the U.S. acquired and governed the territories from the perspective of the islands themselves, emphasizing the local effects of U.S. colonial policies. We will analyze how U.S. foreign policy split indigenous peoples into separate political entities, how economic interests changed native political systems, how U.S. militarism affected the ecology of whole islands and the culture of territorial residents, and how public health policies racialized island peoples. We will also explore how self-determination and decolonization movements were stymied by the U.S. government, and how a whole host of other colonial policies and actions has affected and continues to affect the territories.

The course will cover islands currently under U.S. control, including American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, and Hawaii. It will also examine former territories, Trust Territories of the Pacific, and occupied islands including the Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, among others. With the changing nature of U.S. imperialism, we will also consider the United States expansive military base presence throughout the globe. The history of these islands can tell us much about limits of U.S. citizenship, about the growth of U.S. commerce and militarism globally, about patterns of migration and immigration, and about the changing discourse of race and indigeneity.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: AMST397
Prereq: None

HIST398 Visions of the Future: Capitalism and Colonialism in the World's Fairs

This course will explore the history of the world's fairs from the 1851 Great Exhibition in London to the 1939 New York World's Fair. These events showcased the newest technologies that would revolutionize life and labor for millions of human beings around the world. They also presented to the public new consumer goods and forms of entertainment such as music, dances, and sports. Moreover, they were sites of competition for rising nations and empires. Each participant country brought artifacts that demonstrated their (often idealized) national characteristics and development. Western powers displayed colonial products and peoples to show how they had been advancing in their expansionist enterprises. The students will read works on the humanities and social sciences that delve into the meanings of the world's fairs. They will also analyze primary sources (texts, paintings, film, songs, cartoons, and more) which will allow them to ask their own questions about these events.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM322, AMST322
Prereq: None

HIST401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

HIST404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

HIST407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

HIST408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

HIST409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST419 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

HIST420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

HIST423 Advanced Research Seminar, Undergraduate

Advanced research tutorial; project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST424 Advanced Research Seminar, Undergraduate

Advanced research tutorial; project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

HIST467 Independent Study, Undergraduate

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 2.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

HIST469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

HIST491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

HIST496 Research Apprentice, Undergraduate

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

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