In this problem-centered survey of the contemporary history of Latin America we will critique and go beyond the many stereotypes that have inhibited understandings between Anglo and Latin America, cultivating instead a healthy respect for complexity and contradiction. Over the course of the semester we will examine key themes in current history, including the dilemmas of uneven national development in dependent economies; the emergence of anti-imperialism and various forms of political and cultural nationalism; the richness and variety of revolution; ethnic, religious, feminist, literary, artistic, and social movements; the imposing social problems of the sprawling Latin American megalopolis; the political heterodoxies of leftism, populism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism; the patterns of peace, violence, and the drug trade; the considerable U.S. influence in the region, and finally, transnational migration and globalization.

As popularly narrated, African Americans' modern freedom struggle is a social movement beginning in the mid-1950s and ending in the late-1960s, characterized by the nonviolent protest of southern blacks and facilitated by sympathetic (non-southern) whites. In this course, we explore the multiple ways-beyond protest and resistance-that blacks in the twentieth-century United States struggled for their rights and equality using resources at their disposal. This exploration will take us out of the South and consider actors and activities often neglected in the narrations of the struggle. Throughout, we will return to the following questions: What defines a movement? What constitutes civil rights versus Black Power activity? How and why are people and institutions-then and now-invested in particular narratives of the black freedom struggle?

From shattering nineteenth-century rebellions that fragmented the old empire to its emergence as a twenty-first century superpower, few places have experienced tumult and triumph in the same massive measures as modern China. To understand China today, one must come to terms with this turbulent history. This course surveys China's major cultural, political, social, and economic transformations, including failed reforms under the last dynasty; the revolutions of 1911 and 1949; the rise of the Communist Party and Mao's transformation of society and politics; the remarkable market reforms of recent decades; the contentious issue of Taiwan's democratic transition; and China's ongoing effort to define its position within East Asia and the world.

This seminar explores how crime was defined, imagined, and punished, in colonial and early national America. The origins of many current American attitudes and practices, regarding crime, lie here—in the earliest years of settlement and state-making. In readings that visit the cobbled streets and cramped bedrooms of early America, as well as courtrooms and the gallows, we will meet thieves, counterfeiters, murderers, legislators, governors, vigilantes, and even America’s first policemen. Topics include: early theories of violence and criminality; domestic violence and murder; the history of public execution; the role of race and slavery in shaping criminal law; the evolution of American attitudes toward capital punishment; and the rise of the penitentiary.

This course looks at popular religious beliefs and practices in medieval Europe, including martyrdom and asceticism, saints and relics, shrines, miracles, and pilgrimage.  It seeks to understand popular religion both on its own terms, as well as in relationship to the church hierarchy. It also examines the varied and changing roles of women in Christianity, Christian ideas regarding gender and asexuality, passionate same sex relations in monastic culture, and saints associated with LGBTQ communities.  It ends by examining the growth of religious dissent in the 11th and 12th centuries, which led to religious repression and the emergence of what some historians refer to as a persecuting society in 13th-century Europe. This course may be taken as HIST 279 or, with additional assignments, as HIST 379.

In this introductory survey, we will examine how the religious, political, and scientific traditions of Western civilization originated in Mesopotamia and Egypt from 3500 B.C.E. and were developed by Greeks and Romans until the Islamic invasions of the seventh century C.E. The course will help students to understand the emergence of polytheism and the great monotheistic religions, the development of democracy and republicanism, and the birth of Western science and the scientific method.

The "discovery" by Christopher Columbus in 1492 of the "New World" unleashed a process of dramatic changes in what we now call Latin America. Spanning roughly from the fifteenth through the late-eighteenth centuries, this course examines the ideological underpinnings of the Spanish Conquest, the place of the Americas in a universal Spanish empire,  the role of urban centers, and the transformation of indigenous communities and culture in the consolidation of Spanish rule. Emphasis is placed on Indigenous narratives of their societies and the transformation and interactions with Africans and Europeans under colonial rule; the role of Indian labor and African slavery in the imperial economy; the creation, consolidation, and decline of colonial political institutions; and, finally, the role of religion and baroque ritual in the creation of new hybrid colonial cultures and identities.

We are a nation organized around an ethos of buying things. Throughout the twentieth century, the government, media, big business, and the public increasingly linked politics and consumerism, and the formulation has been a route to empowerment and exclusion. In this course, we study how and why people in the United States theorized about, practiced, and promoted mass material consumption from the turn of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Topics will include: the rise of consumer culture; the innovations of department stores, malls, freeways, and suburbs; developments in advertising and marketing; the global position of the American consumer in the post-World War II United States; and the political utility of consumption to various agendas, including promoting free enterprise, combating racism, and battling terrorism.

A tour of early American politics and political culture, through the life of Alexander Hamilton. Using Hamilton as our guide, we will study electoral politics, campaigning and electioneering, the politics of finance, social movements and rebellion, federalism, and the rise of the party system. Beginning in the Caribbean, where Hamilton was born, and visiting revolutionary New York and early national Philadelphia, among other places, we will consider how Hamilton’s generation defined an American politics. Special attention to the presidencies of Washington and Adams.

South Asian cities are currently undergoing massive demographic and spatial transformations. These cannot be understood without a consideration of both the specific history of South Asia and a broader account of urban change. This course examines these changes in historical perspective and situates urban South Asia within a global context. How did colonial rule transform old cities such as Delhi and Lahore? How were the differing ideologies of India and Pakistan mapped onto new capitals such as Chandigarh and Islamabad? How are ethnic pasts and techno futures reconciled in booming cities such as Bangalore and Mumbai? What are the connections between the urban environment and political mobilization? We consider a range of sources, including scholarly literature, films, and short stories.

When it comes to the modern black freedom movement, narration of “the struggle” bears heavily on African Americans’ pursuits of civil rights, racial and economic equality, and national belonging. Popularly, the history of “the struggle” is a story of good Americans triumphing over bad racists. The simplicity of this narrative makes it ripe for appropriation; and individuals and institutions have put it to multiple uses, including: elevating certain forms of protest, mobilizing political support, selling material goods, and rolling back civil rights reforms. This seminar explores how historians have complicated the history of African Americans’ freedom campaigns and considers how their interpretations shape perceptions of black activism, past and present. Topics will include: Emmett Till, black funeral homes, the Black Panther Breakfast program, and #BlackLivesMatter.