Nazi Germany occupied much of Europe between 1938 and 1945. In this seminar we will explore the varied responses to an always brutal and evolving occupation. What constituted resistance or collaboration under Nazi rule, and what forms did it take in different national contexts? We will focus on the motivations of individuals who resisted or collaborated, as well as on the ways in which social, cultural, religious, and ideological identities informed individual choices.

This foundational course in international history explores the evolution of trade, competition, and cultural interaction among the world's diverse communities, from the Mongol conquests of the late thirteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Themes include: the centrality of Asia to the earliest global networks of trade and interaction; the rise of European wealth and power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; empires; imperialism and its impact; the evolution of the nation-state; scientific and industrial revolutions; and "modernization" and the new patterns of globalization during the late twentieth century. Attention to agents of global integration, including trade, technology, migration, dissemination of ideas, conquest, war, and disease.

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.

Alexander the Great murdered the man who saved his life, married a Bactrian princess, and dressed like Dionysus. He also conquered the known world by the age of 33, fused the Eastern and Western populations of his empire, and became a god. This course will examine the personality, career, and achievements of the greatest warrior in history.

There is perhaps no better time than the present to study the history of American capitalism, as political leaders, pundits, bank and business executives, and workers across the world struggle to understand our current economic situation. This course will explore the development of American capitalism from its birth in the mercantile world of imperial Great Britain through the financial ruin of the Great Depression. This course will closely examine the relationship between government, business, and society by engaging key moments in nineteenth-century American economic history: the rise of the corporation, transportation and communication innovations, industrialization, American slavery and commodity production, financial speculation and panics, the development of American banking, immigration policy, and labor relations.

A survey of China's economic, cultural, and political interactions with the United States from 1784 to present with a focus on developments since 1940. Principal themes include: post-imperial China's pursuit of wealth and power, changing international conditions, military strategy, the influence of domestic politics and ideology, and the basic misunderstandings and prejudices that have long plagued this critical relationship. Topics include: trade throughout the centuries; American treatment of Chinese immigrants; World War II and the Chinese Revolution; the Cold War; Taiwan; and the ongoing instability of relations since 1979. Sources include the ever-increasing number of declassified U.S. documents as well as critical materials translated from the Chinese.

This course provides a survey of Middle Eastern history from c. 1900 to the present, with an emphasis on the Arab Middle East. Its main objective is to help you gain insight into the historical backgrounds and contexts of the broad political developments of this period: the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I; the Armenian genocide; the establishment of European “Mandates” in most of the Arab world and the nationalist struggles for independence that ensued; the establishment of Israel and the expulsion and exodus of Palestinians in 1948; the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990; the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the emergence of Islamist political movements in other parts of the Middle East; the regime of Saddam Hussein, the first Gulf War of 1991; the failure of the Oslo peace process of 1993-1995, the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories except Gaza, the rise of HAMAS; the U.S. invasion and the ensuing civil war in Iraq; the devastation of war and oppression in Syria, and deepening autocracy in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War the United States experienced dramatic change: rapid geographic expansion, the growth and transformation of the market economy, the extension and evolution of slavery and the movement for abolition, and a Civil War that nearly destroyed the nation. These topics and others are long familiar to students of US history, but we will re-frame our analysis of this period: examining expansion by re-centering Native Americans and competing imperial powers, considering the rise of the state within the broader framework of world history, and re-imagining slavery in the context of global capitalism. In considering these topics and others from a variety of perspectives, we will explore the continued significance of the early national era in American History.

This research seminar purposefully brings Africa north and south of the Sahara into a unified frame of study. It focuses on African cultural expressions such as music, song, literature, fashion, photography and film, digital creations, museums, and architecture in the period 1900 to the present. The themes structuring the syllabus are: colonialism, nationalism, and modernity; constructions of gender; identities, and the changing environment. You will learn about important concepts and themes in African historiography and cultural studies, and a wide range of relevant texts. Explorations of African subjectivities and narrative agency in all their complexity are central to the intellectual trajectory of this class. Research papers will engage with a particular kind of text or form of African culture across regions.