The American past is crowded with ghosts. In this seminar, we will trace the evolution of supernatural belief in America and analyze some of its most famous ghost stories. What about the nation’s history makes it such fertile terrain for ghosts? What happens when the dead refuse to stay in the past, relegated to history? Why, in short, is the American historical imagination so haunted? We’ll dig deeply into selected hauntings, drawn from across historical North America, and encounter the spirits of French Detroit, the Gettysburg battlefield, and colonial Jamaica, among others.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: None. Open to First-Years only.
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Other Categories: FYS - First Year Seminar
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
With Russian military forces surging through Ukraine in an unprovoked and catastrophic war that few in Russia or the West had predicted, as President Vladimir Putin threatens the annihilation of Ukraine’s statehood and the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, now is the time to plunge into a study of that authoritarian leader of the world’s largest country. What are the causes and consequences of this catastrophic conflict? How did Putin accumulate so much power? What have been his goals, values and operating principles? A product of Leningrad’s “mean streets,” the young Putin sought glory in the KGB, and after the demise of the Soviet Union—a collapse he rues to this day—moved into the heights of power. We will explore Vladimir Putin’s life path, political strategies and policies, ideas about Russia’s identity and place in the world, and his image as the epitome of both potent masculinity and the devil incarnate. We will also delve into Russian politics and society in the era of this enigmatic, potent, and murderous leader.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: None. Open to First-Years only.
Instructor: Tumarkin
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Other Categories: FYS - First Year Seminar
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes: Mandatory Credit/Non Credit
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Rogers
Distribution Requirements: HS or REP - Historical Studies or Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
An introduction to American life, politics, and culture, from the colonial period through the aftermath of the Civil War. Surveys the perspectives of the many peoples converging on North America during this era, and explores the shifting fault lines of "liberty" among them. Because Early America was not inevitably bound toward the creation of the "United States of America," we will ask how such an unlikely thing, in fact, happened. How did a nation emerge from such a diverse array of communities? And how did various peoples come to claim citizenship in this new nation? Emphasis, too, on the issues that convulsed the American colonies and early republic: African slavery, revolutionary politics, immigration, westward expansion, and the coming of the Civil War.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
The United States' past is one of making and remaking the nation—as a government, a place, and a concept. This course surveys that dynamic process from the Reconstruction period through 9/11. Examining the people, practices, and politics behind U.S. nation building, we will consider questions of how different groups have defined and adopted "American" identities, and how definitions of the nation and citizenship shifted in relation to domestic and global happenings. This will include considering how ideas of gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship intersected within projects of nation building. We will cover topics that include domestic race relations, U.S. imperialism, mass consumption, globalization, and terrorism, and developments such as legalized segregation, the Depression, World Wars I and II, and modern social progressive and conservative movements.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Osorio (Fall), Giersch (Spring)
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: LAST 20 7
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
This course examines life in medieval Europe c. 750-1250 in all its manifestations: political, religious, social, cultural, and economic. Topics to be studied include the political life of France, Germany, and Italy, economic structures and their transformations, monks and monastic culture, the growth of papal power, the crusading movement, intellectual life and theological debates, heresy and religious minorities, love and sex, and the varied roles of women in medieval life. Students will learn to analyze and interpret primary sources from the period, as well as to evaluate critically historiographical debates related to medieval history.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Ramseyer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
The Empire of the Indies or New World was part of the larger Spanish Empire, and comprised the American continent, the Philippine and the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. At the height of its power in the seventeenth century, the Spanish Empire was a global enterprise in which Portuguese, Aztec, Genoese, Chinese, Japanese, Flemish, Inka and Romans played essential roles in its daily functioning and constitution. This course traces the making and consolidation of the Empire of the Indies by examining the resources, peoples, and ideas that it contributed to Spain’s overwhelming power ca. 1500s-1780s. It interrogates evolving meanings and understandings of empire, colonialism, and modernity, and the cultural transformations of native populations and Europeans in historic and geographical context.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: LAST 211
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course deals with the momentous social, political, and cultural transformations that characterized the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American Revolutions (the "Atlantic Revolutions"). Straddling the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (the "Age of Revolutions"), these social and political movements constituted a watershed of violent change that ushered in the (many) problems and possibilities of the modern world: the birth of the Nation, nationalism, and democracy, among others. We will seek answers to questions such as, How did nationalism and universalism shape the nature and strategies of revolt and counter-revolution? What were the roles of slavery, race, women, religion, and geography in defining citizenship? How did historical writing and revolution work to create the foundational myths of the modern nation?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course examines Mediterranean history from the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries through the Latin Crusades of the Holy Land in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with a focus on the religious, political, and cultural diversity of the medieval Mediterranean and the relationship between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities. Topics of discussion include warfare and empire, the emergence and development of Christianity and Islam, asceticism and the relationship between religion and philosophy, Christian and Muslim concepts of holy war, conversion and the status of religious minorities, and the crusades from both a Christian and Muslim perspective.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Ramseyer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This course provides an overview of Italian history from the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the fifth century through the rise of urban communes in the thirteenth century. Topics of discussion include the birth and development of the Catholic Church, the volatile relationship between popes and emperors, the history of monasticism and other forms of popular piety, the rise of heresy and dissent, the emergence of a multicultural society in southern Italy, and the development and transformation of cities and commerce in the north that made Italy one of the most economically advanced states in late medieval Europe. This course will also draw attention to the important role of women as both political and religious leaders.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Ramseyer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Since their invention in the early nineteenth century, nations and states in Latin America have been conceived of in gendered terms. This has played a key role in producing and reproducing masculine and feminine identities in society. This course examines the powerful relationship between gender and nation in modern Latin America. Topics include patriarchal discourses of state and feminized representations of nation; the national project to define the family as a male-centered nuclear institution; the idealization of motherhood as a national and Christian virtue; the role of military regimes in promoting masculine ideologies; state regulations of sexuality and prostitution; changing definitions of the feminine and masculine in relation to the emergence of "public" and "private" spheres; and struggles over the definition of citizenship and nationality.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
In the twentieth century, democracies in Spain and Latin America fell under the authoritarian boot of dictatorial rule. In the 1930s a democratic republican government in Spain led to a devastating civil war and to the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). In Latin America, strong democracies fell to authoritarian rule in Brazil (1964-1985), Chile (1973-1989), and Argentina (1976-1980). By examining the social, political and cultural conditions that led to these dictatorial regimes, this course considers how political ideologies, parties and their agendas aided their rise; the role of Catholicism, the Catholic Church, foreign intervention, and social movements in their rise, consolidation, ultimate end, and resistance to such regimes; the challenges and conditions of their post-dictatorial transitions back to democracy and the lessons for democratic rule more generally.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This interdisciplinary survey of Europe between 1300 and 1600 focuses on aspects of politics, literature, philosophy, religion, economics, and the arts that have prompted scholars for the past seven hundred years to regard it as an age of cultural rebirth. These include the revival of classical learning; new fashions in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and prose; the politics of the Italian city-states and Europe’s “new monarchies”; religious reform; literacy and printing; the emerging public theater; new modes of representing selfhood; and the contentious history of Renaissance as a concept. Authors include Petrarch, Vasari, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Castiglione, Rabelais, Montaigne, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Lectures and discussions will be enriched by guest speakers and visits to Wellesley’s art and rare book collections.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 20
Crosslisted Courses: ENG 221
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Grote and Wall-Randell (English)
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course examines the Barbarian successor states established in the fifth and sixth centuries after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West, including a long discussion about the varying opinions on how and why the western Roman empire fell. It will focus primarily on the Frankish kingdom of Gaul, but will also make forays into Lombard Italy, Visigothic Spain, and Vandal North Africa. In particular, the course will look in depth at the Carolingian empire established c. 800 by Charlemagne, who is often seen as the founder of Europe, and whose empire is often regarded as the precursor of today's European Union. Political, cultural, religious, and economic developments will be given equal time.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Ramseyer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Cooking, eating, growing—Food has always been a driving force in American history. Well before the hapless colonists at Jamestown endured 1610’s horrific “starving time,” food—and the drive to eat—had begun shaping the continent’s fate. This course investigates the place of food in American history and culture, from reputed cannibalism in the American colonies to the rise of fast food in the twentieth century. In following the evolution of American foodways, we will visit eighteenth-century coffee houses, antebellum slave quarters, campfires of the American West, the slaughterhouses of the Chicago meat market, and—of course—McDonald’s. Meetings may find us eating, as well as reading; course participants will take turns introducing the group to a particular food or drink, situated historically. Each student will complete an original research project on a topic of their choice.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken HIST 320.
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes: This course is also offered at the 300 level as HIST 320.
Films such as Gladiator, The Passion of the Christ, and 300, documentaries such as The Last Stand of the 300, and Internet courses such as Alexander Online perhaps influence how the majority of people now understand antiquity. But are these visual media historically reliable representations of the past? Or do they rather primarily reflect changing artistic and societal concerns? How have the use of digital backlots, blue screens, and other technical innovations affected how the past is being represented and understood? In this course we will examine the representation of the ancient world in films, documentaries, and online media from the "Sword and Sandal" classics of the past such as Ben-Hur to the present, within the scholarly frameworks of ancient history and modern historiography.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 30
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Rogers
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken HIST 329.
Instructor: Rogers
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as HIST 329 with additional assignments.
The origins, development, and geographical spread of Greek culture from the Bronze Age to the death of Philip II of Macedon. Greek colonization, the Persian Wars, the Athenian democracy, and the rise of Macedon will be examined in relation to the social, economic, and religious history of the Greek polis.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Rogers
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Rome's cultural development from its origins as a small city state in the eighth century B.C.E. to its rule over a vast empire extending from Scotland to Iraq. Topics include the Etruscan influence on the formation of early Rome, the causes of Roman expansion throughout the Mediterranean during the Republic, the Hellenization of Roman society, the urbanization and Romanization of Western Europe, the spread of "mystery" religions, the persecution and expansion of Christianity, and the economy and society of the Empire.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Rogers
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This course surveys the transformation of medieval Europe into a powerful civilization whose norms, institutions, and technology reached across the globe. Along the way, we use original sources, including Wellesley's museum collections, to investigate major landmarks in Europe's political, cultural, social, intellectual, and environmental history. These include the Black Death, the Renaissance, the creation of seaborne empires and the discovery of new worlds, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the coming of capitalism, a multitude of devastating wars, and changes in urban and rural landscapes—all set against the backdrop of European people's ongoing efforts to define their relationships to their own medieval and ancient forerunners and to the world's other peoples.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Grote
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
What was the Enlightenment? Of all eras, it has probably the greatest parental claim to the values, politics, and sciences of the modern West. It witnessed the triumph of Newtonian physics and the demise of miracles; devalued the authority of the Bible; legitimized democratic, nationalist, and feminist politics; dealt devastating blows to the political prerogatives of monarchs, aristocrats and the clergy; attacked torture and the death penalty; and powerfully defended religious toleration, freedom of the press, and human rights. To understand these and other alleged accomplishments of the Enlightenment, we will study the works of the greatest luminaries to frequent the coffeehouses, salons, and secret societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Locke, Diderot, Herder, Beccaria, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Spinoza.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Grote
Distribution Requirements: HS or REP - Historical Studies or Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This course traces the tumultuous history of Europe's German lands in the three centuries between the Middle Ages and the modern era, long identified with the origins of twentieth-century German militarism and anti-Semitism. We focus on what makes this fascinating period distinctive: Germany's uniquely persistent political diversity and the religious schism that gave Germany multiple national religions. Topics include the Protestant Reformation, the Great Witch Panic, the devastating Thirty Years War that destroyed 150 years of economic growth, Prussia and Frederick the Great, the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Wars, and the demise of the extraordinarily complex political system known as the Holy Roman Empire. Sources include treaties, treatises, literature, autobiographical texts, visual art, and music, by, among others, Luther, Bach, Lessing, Mozart, and Goethe.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Grote
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
With its sweeping landscapes, grand myths, and oversized egos, the American West has loomed large within U.S. history. Since the nation's birth, Americans looked toward the horizon and imagined their destinies, a gaze, since copied by historians, novelists, and filmmakers. Nevertheless, the history of this vast region is much more fractured and complex. This course explores the West-as an idea and place-from the early nineteenth century through World War I. While we will engage the ways that Americans conjured and conquered the region, we will also look beyond their gaze toward the varied empires, peoples, and forces that created the West. Topics covered include: Northern New Spain and Mexico; American Indians and U.S. expansionism; transcontinental and trans-Pacific trade and (im)migration; race, gender, and identity.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Quintana
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Quintana
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
A multicultural journey through the turbulent waters of medieval and early modern Russia, from the Viking incursions of the ninth century and the entrance of the East Slavs into the splendid and mighty Byzantine world, to the Mongol overlordship of Russia, the rise of Moscow, and the legendary reign of Ivan the Terrible. We move eastward as the Muscovite state conquers the immense reaches of Siberia by the end of the turbulent seventeenth century, when the young and restless Tsar Peter the Great travels to Western Europe to change Russia forever. We will focus on khans, princes, tsars, nobles, peasants, and monks; social norms and gender roles; icons and church architecture; and a host of Russian saints and sinners.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Tumarkin
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
An exploration of Imperial Russia over the course of two tumultuous centuries from the astonishing reign of Peter the Great at the start of the eighteenth century, to the implosion of the Russian monarchy under the unfortunate Nicholas II early in the twentieth, as Russia plunged toward revolution. St. Petersburg-the stunning and ghostly birthplace of Russia's modern history and the symbol of Russia's attempt to impose order on a vast, multiethnic empire-is a focus of this course. We will also emphasize the everyday lives of peasants and nobles; the vision and ideology of autocracy; Russia's brilliant intelligentsia; and the glory of her literary canon.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Tumarkin
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
The Soviet Union, the most immense empire in the world, hurtled through the twentieth century, shaping major world events. This course will follow the grand, extravagant, and often brutal socialist experiment from its fragile inception in 1917 through the rule of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev, after which the vast Soviet empire broke apart with astonishing speed. We will contrast utopian constructivist visions of the glorious communist future with Soviet reality. Special emphasis on Soviet political culture, the trauma of the Stalin years and World War II, and the travails and triumphs of everyday life.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Tumarkin
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
The Cold War was an era, a culture, and a set of policies defining U.S. domestic and foreign relations. This course examines Cold War politics, culture, and foreign policies in relation to various national developments—including the rise of social movements, changes in city landscapes, and the “birth of the cool"—and international events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and conflicts concerning Vietnam. Bearing on these developments were opportunities and limitations that accompanied ideological struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union, the rise of new cultural industries, and demographic shifts in the United States. Broad topic areas include: U.S. foreign policies; conformity and deviation along lines of gender, race, and sexuality; and domestic and foreign perceptions of the United States in a Cold War context.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Open to First-Years and Sophomores.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
Units: 0.5
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Open to First-Years and Sophomores.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
19th Century North American History revolves around the radical, and often violent transformation of space. It is, in other words, the story of infrastructures—roads, canals, and railroads--imagined and built; of borders, between and within nations, mapped and brutally maintained; of urban and rural spaces, conceived and constructed; and, of indigenous lands expropriated and altered into a species of property through violence and the law. This course examines that transformation of space, closely interrogating: the various means by which governments and individuals asserted differential claims to territory; the evolving technologies of property, cartography, construction, and transportation that were deployed to assert and maintain claims to space; and, the various ways that seemingly marginalized peoples participated in, and challenged these spatial claims. The course covers the era between the American Revolution and World War I.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Quintana
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: EDUC 252
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
An introduction to the history of Native American peoples, from precontact to the present. Through a survey of scholarly works, primary documents, objects, films, and Indian autobiographies, students will grapple with enduring questions concerning the Native past. How should we define "Native America"? How interconnected were Native peoples, and when? Can we pinpoint the emergence of "Indian" identity and understand how it developed? This course confronts those questions and other issues in Native American history, through such topics as the "discovery" of Europe and its effects, cultural and commercial exchange with Europeans, removal, the struggle for the West, the "Indian New Deal," and the Red Power movement of the 1970s. Special attention to the Native northeast.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
World War II was a uniquely defining moment in U.S. history, its sweeping influence forever altering the nation's culture, economics, and global position. This course examines events surrounding U.S. involvement in the Second World War from the Depression era through the early Cold War years. Our focus will be political, social, and cultural developments on the "home front," which we will contextualize within broader world dynamics. Topics include: domestic attitudes toward the war, the political and cultural significance of FDR's "four freedoms," shifts in foreign policy, a reshaped workforce ("Rosie the Riveter," Bracero programs, desegregation), sex and sexuality in the military, military personnel's experiences, wartime consumer trends, scientific advances, and the nation's geopolitical concerns and objectives.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
"The history of black liberation movements in the United States could be characterized as a struggle over images,” claimed activist and scholar bell hooks. In this course, students study how, throughout U.S. history, Black people – and their allies – have produced images of Black people and Black experiences as part of their liberation and survival campaigns. Inherent to this exercise is the analysis of print materials in which these pictures circulated. Therefore, in addition to learning how to analyze pictures as both images and historical sources, students will draw on book studies practices, which treat books as objects, the physicality of which holds clues to the past. The “books” – or material objects – of this course include newspapers, slave narratives, pamphlets, magazines, photographs, and even iPhone videos. Whenever possible, we will do hands-on analysis, using materials in Wellesley’s special collections and from the instructor’s personal archive. Students will learn to read visuals and print objects for evidence of Black people’s circumstances and resources, and for how existing materials and technologies enabled and limited Black freedom demands.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 20
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course considers America's colonial past. It is a bloody but fascinating history, with plenty of twists and turns. We will investigate colonial American culture and ordinary life (including gender, family life, ecology, the material world, religion, and magical belief), as well as the struggles experienced by the earliest colonists and the imperial competition that characterized the colonial period. Between 1607 and 1763, a florid variety of cultures bloomed on the North American continent. We will explore these, with an eye toward understanding how the English colonies emerged from very uncertain beginnings to become-by the mid-eighteenth century-the prevailing power on the continent.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Investigates the origins and aftermath of one of the most improbable events in American history: the American Revolution. What pushed colonists to rebel, rather suddenly, against Britain? And what social struggles followed in the war's wake? We will explore the experiences of ordinary Americans, including women and slaves; examine the material culture of Revolutionary America; trace the intellectual histories of the founders; and witness the creation of a national identity and constitution. Those who lived through the rebellion left behind plenty of material: letters; pamphlets; teapots; runaway slave advertisements; diaries. We will consider these and more. Visits to Boston historic sites will take you back in time and space to the besieged, volatile city that led the colonies into war.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This course examines the American Civil War, one of the central conflicts in US history, by placing it within the broader context of the making of the modern world. The course will explore the roots, consequences, and experiences of the war—the long history of slavery and emancipation, territorial expansion and industrialization, and the everyday experience of modern warfare. The class will do so by considering those events through the lens of global history. We scrutinize the political upheavals around the world that gave broader meaning to the Civil War; the emergence of modern weaponry and tactics and their consequences; and the development of the nation-state and colonialism, which resulted in new forms of governance and coercion that emerged in the wake of emancipation.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 261
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Quintana
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
South Africa’s new constitution and dynamic forms of social activism and cultural expression represent powerful forces for democracy and equality. However, the legacy of Apartheid and the constraints on the transition to majority rule in 1991-1994 still negatively affect people’s living conditions along the lines of race, class, and gender. This course traces South Africa’s history from 1652 to the present, with themes including: the establishment of colonial rule; the destruction of pre-colonial polities; slavery and emancipation; White nationalism and the establishment of Apartheid; African nationalist movements and other forms of resistance; the fraught transition to majority rule, including the Truth and Reconciliation process; South Africa’s dynamic popular and public culture, and ongoing efforts to counter poverty, public corruption, HIV-AIDS, gender-based violence, and “xenophobia”.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 224
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Kapteijns
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Pre-colonial Africa encompasses ancient agrarian kingdoms (such as Egypt, Merowe, and Ghana), city-states on the shores of sea and desert, and "nations without kings," with their own, unique social and political institutions. Students will learn about the material bases of these societies, as well as their social relations and cultural production, all the while familiarizing themselves with the rich array of written, oral, linguistic, and archeological sources available to the historian of Africa. After 1500, in the era of the European expansion, large parts of Africa were incorporated into the Atlantic tropical plantation complex through the trade in enslaved people. The enormous impact on Africa of this unprecedented forced migration of Africans to the Americas from 1500 to the 1880s will constitute the concluding theme.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Kapteijns
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Many of Africa's current characteristics are the legacy of colonial domination. We will therefore first study different kinds of colonies, from those settled by White settlers to the "Cinderellas" in which colonial economic intervention was (by comparison) minimal and the struggle for independence less bloody. For the post-independence period, we will focus on the historical roots of such major themes as neocolonialism, economic underdevelopment, ethnic conflict and genocide, HIV/AIDS, and the problems of the African state. However, Africa's enormous natural and human resources, its resilient and youthful population, and its vibrant popular culture-a strong antidote against Afro-pessimism-will help us reflect on the future of this vast continent.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Kapteijns
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course examines the history of interaction of Africans, Arabs, Persians, and South Asians in the coastal regions of East Africa, the Arabian/Persian Gulf, and India, which together enclose the western Indian Ocean. In the period under study (1500 to the present), European imperial expansion and a globalizing economy played an increasingly transformative role. We will read about the port cities connecting these shores; the movements and networks of people; the objects and patterns of trade; the intensifying slave trade; shared environmental and health hazards, and the exchange of legal and commercial practices, and religious and political ideas.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: SAS 266
Prerequisites: Open to students with at least one course in either History or African, Middle Eastern, or South Asian studies.
Instructor: Kapteijns and Rao
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as HIST 367/SAS 367 with additional assignments.
Perhaps no other region in the United States conjures up more powerful imagery than the American South-stately mansions with live oak avenues are juxtaposed with the brutal reality of slavery. Yet this same region gave birth to other, perhaps more powerful, cultural legacies-jazz and the blues, the freedom struggle and Jim Crow-a heritage both uniquely Southern and yet deeply American. To better understand this region that has always seemed to stand apart, this course will examine the early history of the American South from the Revolutionary War through the beginning of the twentieth century. Topics covered will include: African American slavery and emancipation, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the spread of evangelical Christianity, Indian Removal, African American culture, and the rise of Jim Crow segregation.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Quintana
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This history of Islamic Africa from the seventh to the twentieth century will focus especially on the Saharan and Sudanic belts stretching across the continent from west to east and on the Swahili coast of East Africa. We will study how Islam inspired religious, legal, and political reform (including state-formation) in the precolonial era and shaped responses (including armed resistance) to the establishment of European colonial rule. Other themes include: how Islam influenced African understandings of gender and race; the agency of women and enslaved people in shaping everyday “lived” Islam; and African Muslim men and women’s contributions to a long tradition of knowledge production as well as their diverse, often passionate and artistically accomplished, expressions of faith.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Kapteijns
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
The Mughal Empire in late seventeenth-century India was recognized as one of the richest and strongest powers in the world. Yet by the early nineteenth-century, the British ruled the subcontinent. This course begins by examining the colonization of India. Colonial rule meant important changes to Indian life, spurred by British attempts to create private property, introduce social reforms, and spread English education. However, colonial rule also led to nationalism and efforts to imagine India as a unified nation-state. The course considers leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah's struggles against the British, culminating in Independence but also Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. We consider a wide range of sources including films, literature, and primary documents.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Rao
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
In 1947, India was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Since then, these countries have wrestled with issues of governance and development, but colonial rule casts a long shadow over their efforts. This course introduces students to the complex politico-economic landscape of the subcontinent by examining how the idea of development changes in modern South Asian history. How are developmental efforts embedded in contexts of politics, society, and culture? How do political systems affect decisions? This course considers these questions by examining themes such as the colonial state's construction of railway and irrigation networks; Gandhi's critique of industrialization; Nehru's vision of an industrial economy; the challenges posed by Partition and militarization of Pakistan; the Green Revolution; and the onset of economic deregulation.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Rao
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
South Asian cultures posit that food serves to mediate between ourselves and the world around us. This course examines connections between diet and physical activity in South Asia’s modern history. Topics include: the connection between the body and the spiritual world as mediated by diet in pre-modern South Asia; assumptions about food and colonial rule’s underlying opposition between a “manly” Europe and an “effeminate” India; articulations of anti-colonial nationalism in sporting performance and experimentation with diet; connections between anxieties about sexual performance, considerations of what one eats, and conceptualizations of modern South Asian identities; the roles played by food politics and sports play in the international relations of postcolonial South Asia.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Rao
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Overview of each political/cultural community and their interactions from ancient times to 1912. Topics from earlier periods include ancient mytho-histories and archaeological records, the rise of China's Han and Tang empires, selective adaptations of Chinese patterns by indigenous polities and societies in Korea and Japan, commercial and technological revolution in China and its international impact, Mongol "globalization," Japan in the age of the samurai, and Korea in the heyday of the yangban. Topics from later periods include the growth of international trade in East Asia and early modern developments in Ming-Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and Late Joseon Korea. Coverage extends through the first decade of the twentieth century to examine Europe's expansion and the divergent trajectories of modern transformation in each society.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Giersch
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
South Asian society has long been represented by rigid systems of hierarchy. Caste, most famously, has been represented as an inexorable determinant of social possibility. Yet, what are the ways in which people actually identify themselves, and to what extent is hierarchical identification a product of South Asia's modern history? This course explores the problems of social and cultural difference in South Asia. How do modern institutions such as the census and electoral politics shape the way in which these problems are perceived today? What are the effects of the introduction of English education? How does migration and diaspora impinge upon identity? In addition to caste, we also consider religion, class, gender, and migration in seeking to unravel the complex notion of ethnicity.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Rao
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Rao
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Giersch
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Giersch
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None. Not open to students who have taken HIST 379.
Instructor: Ramseyer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes: This course is also offered at the 300-level as HIST 379 with additional assignments.
China's stunning economic growth and the increasing visibility of transnational businesses run by entrepreneurs of Chinese descent have produced many efforts to explain the successes of “Chinese capitalism” and the “Chinese model.” Central to many arguments are debatable approaches to culture and history. Is there a uniquely Chinese way of doing business? Has mainland China developed a revolutionary new path of economic development? This course engages these debates through influential works on Chinese business and economic history, from the nineteenth century through the reform period (1978 to the present). Topics include corporate governance and the financing of firms; the role of kinship and networking (guanxi); changing political contexts of development; competition with foreign firms; the impact of globalization; and debates over China's remarkable economic rise.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Giersch
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course provides a survey of Middle Eastern history from c.1900 to the present, with an emphasis on the Arab Middle East. It will focus on the historical developments of the 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 of Palestinians in 1948; the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990; the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Islamist political movements elsewhere; the regime of Saddam Hussein; the occupation of Kuwait and the Gulf War of 1990-1991; the failure of the Oslo peace process, Israeli settlements, and the increasing political power of HAMAS and Hizbullah; the war in Iraq; the challenge of a potentially nuclear Iran, and the impact of the war in Syria.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Kapteijns
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course explores the emergence of the Ottoman state from a frontier principality into a world empire. Topics include pre-Ottoman Anatolia; frontier society; methods of conquest; centralization and organization of power; religion, architecture, and literature; land regime and peasantry; urbanization; and relations with European Empires as well as other Islamic states. Particular attention will be given to the institutionalization of religion in Ottoman state and society, including the employment of Sharia in political decision-making and legal judgments, and to the treatment of religious minorities in the empire. Readings from primary source texts (in English) and their recent interpretations.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: HIST 285
Prerequisites:
Instructor: Staff
Distribution Requirements: HS or REP - Historical Studies or Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Intertwined with the political history of the modern Middle East are the dramatic cultural and social changes that have shaped how many Middle Easterners live their lives and imagine their futures. This course explores the historical contexts of the changing constructions of femininity and masculinity in different Middle Eastern settings from World War I to the present. Such contexts include nationalist and Islamist movements; economic, ecological, and demographic change; changing conceptions of modernity and tradition, individual and family, and public and private space; and state violence and civil war. Primary sources will focus on the self-representations of Middle Eastern men and women as they engaged with what they considered the major issues of their times.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: MES 293
Prerequisites: None.
Instructor: Kapteijns
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This course examines the relationship between nature and society in American history. The course will consider topics such as the decimation of the bison, the rise of Chicago, the history of natural disasters, and the environmental consequences of war. There are three goals for this course: First, we will examine how humans have interacted with nature over time and how nature, in turn, has shaped human society. Second, we will examine how attitudes toward nature have differed among peoples, places, and times, and we will consider how the meanings people give to nature inform their cultural and political activities. Third, we will study how these historical forces have combined to shape the American landscape and the human and natural communities to which it is home. While this course focuses on the past, an important goal is to understand the ways in which history shapes how we understand and value the environment as we do today.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Crosslisted Courses: HIST 299
Prerequisites: None
Instructor: Turner
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: Wendy Judge Paulson '69 Ecology of Place Living Laboratory course. This course does not satisfy the Natural and Physical Sciences Laboratory requirement.
This seminar explores the many ways that victors and vanquished, victims and perpetrators, governments, political groups, and individuals have remembered, celebrated, commemorated, idealized, condemned, condoned, forgotten, ignored, and grappled with the vastly complex history and legacy of World War II in the eight decades since the war's end. Our primary focus is the war in Europe, including Poland and Russia, although we will also consider the United States and Japan. We will investigate the construction of individual and collective memories about World War II and the creation and subsequent transformation of set myths about the war experience. In addition to books and articles, sources will include memoirs, primary documents, and films. We will also study the impact of war memories on international relations and analyze the "monumental politics" of war memorials.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Tumarkin
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Quintana
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This seminar explores the history of race from the American Revolution through the First World War. In this seminar we will explore what race means in the United States by examining the varied ways that it has shaped-and was shaped by-key moments in nineteenth century American history. Topics covered will include: slavery, the conquest of the American West, immigration, citizenship and the nation-state, Social Darwinism, the Great Migration, and American imperialism. Throughout the course we will seek to understand race in the United States by exploring the following questions: What is "race"? If it is but a concept or idea, how and why has it affected so many lives and dictated so much of our past?
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Quintana
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course explores the history of fashion in U.S. social and political movements. How have people used clothing and style to define themselves, demand recognition, challenge power, publicize injustice, and deflect or attract attention? We will examine how ideologies and experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood shaped uses of and reactions to fashion politics. Topics include the end of slavery, the rise of the “New Woman,” the Second World War, the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, the rise of hip hop, and the war on terror. Through these events, we will consider the political significance of hair, uniforms, campaign fashion, and religious dress. We will also consider how authenticity, imitation, appropriation, and commodification figure into this history.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This seminar explores the terrors that stalked the inhabitants of colonial and early national America. How did early Americans describe their fears? What did they find frightening? And what roles did fear and violence play in shaping American society? In this seminar, we will first explore the language and psychology of fear, and then study the many ways that terror intruded on early American lives. Topics include: the role of terror in early American warfare; fear of the supernatural; domestic violence and murder; the specter of slave rebellion; and fear and violence as entertainment in public executions and in early American literature.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This seminar investigates the place of food in American history and culture, from reputed cannibalism in the American colonies to the rise of fast food in the twentieth century. Through selected episodes and commodities, we will explore the role of taste, competition for food, and capitalism in recasting American lives and identities. Topics include: colonial hunger and violence; the development of taste and "refined" eating; the role of food in defining race, class, and regional culture; the rise of mass production and its environmental effects and the reshaping of American bodies. In following the evolution of American food ways, we will visit eighteenth-century coffeehouses, antebellum slave quarters, campfires of the American West, the slaughterhouses of the Chicago meat market, and, of course, McDonald's.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: This course is also offered at the 200 level as HIST 223.
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Grandjean
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
C. Iulius Caesar was descended from the goddess Venus and the Roman King Ancus Marcius. He was one of Rome’s greatest orators and Cicero said that every writer of sense steered clear of the subjects Caesar had written about. His life was both scandalous and unprecedented in Roman History: Curio called him every woman’s man and every man’s woman; Cato remarked that Caesar was the only sober man who tried to wreck the constitution. After conquering Gaul Caesar became Rome’s first dictator for life, and finally a god, after his assassination on the Ides of March of 44 BCE. This 300 level course will examine the life, death, and legacies of the greatest Roman against the backdrop of the destruction of the Res Publica.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Normally open to Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Rogers
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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 against the background of the Hellenistic world.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Not open to students who have taken HIST 229.
Instructor: Rogers
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes: This course is also offered at the 200-level as HIST 229.
This course will examine the revolutionary changes that occurred in all facets of life in twelfth-century Europe. The twelfth century represents one of the most important eras of European history, characterized by many historians as the period that gave birth to Europe as both idea and place. It was a time of economic growth, religious reformation, political and legal reorganization, cultural flowering, intellectual innovation, and outward expansion. Yet the twelfth century had a dark side, too. Crusades and colonization, heresy and religious disputes, town uprisings and mob violence also marked the century. Students will study the internal changes to European society as well as the expansion of Europe into the Mediterranean and beyond, paying close attention to the key people behind the transformations.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Ramseyer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course explores black Americans' relationship to visual culture in the twentieth-century United States. We will examine how African Americans have produced, used, and appeared in the visual media of news, entertainment, and marketing industries, and evaluate the significance of their representation to both black and non-black political and social agendas. Areas of inquiry will include the intersections between U.S. visual culture and race relations, African Americans' use of visual culture as a means of self- and group-expression, and the state's use of black media images. This exploration will take us through a study of Jim Crow politics, black migrations and artistic movement, U.S. foreign relations and conflicts, and the development of marketing and advertising.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors or seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Greer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Open to juniors and seniors.
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
Units: 0.5
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Open to juniors and seniors.
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
What is mental health? This seminar examines the diversity of answers to this question across a variety of European cultures and subcultures from the end of the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. Our focus will be on how particular communities’ conceptions of mental health informed their ethical principles, behavioral norms, and modes of social control. Topics include meditation, confession of sins, journal-keeping, and other spiritual practices; historical representations of mental illness as foolishness, madness, and melancholy; the demise of humoral medicine and the rise of experimental psychology and neuroscience; the emergence of asylums and social engineering; and the history of controversy over psychoanalytic, electric, pharmaceutical, and other therapeutic techniques.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Grote
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Popular fascination with kings and queens is alive and well, but European monarchs once enjoyed a mystical, superhuman prestige far beyond mere celebrity. Why did they lose it? To find an answer, this seminar investigates their enigmatic killers: perpetrators of cosmic cataclysm in the name of liberation from tyranny. After examining the medieval legal foundations and ceremonial glamor of sacred kingship, we will analyze the most sensational modern cases of king-killing: Charles I in the English Civil War and Louis XVI in the French Revolution. Our analyses will encompass political maneuverings by individuals; bitter conflicts of class, religion, and party; the subversive power of satirical literature; utopian yearnings for a more egalitarian society; and the philosophical battles that produced modern concepts of the state.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Grote
Distribution Requirements: HS or REP - Historical Studies or Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
In the sixteenth century for the first time the world became linked through networks of global trade. From Lisbon to Calicut to Macao to Manila to Potosi to Antwerp, peoples and places became increasingly integrated through labor systems, migration, and new economic and political relationships. Through the lens of the trade in pepper, the circulation of silver, and the manufacture of silk from the 1480s to 1700, this course examines the development of these relationships and their political and cultural implications. Rather than focusing on the purely economic aspects of trade, we will examine the new technologies and knowledge(s) that made global integration possible; the social and cultural revolutions fashioned by the production, consumption, and circulation of these commodities; and the political transformations that accompanied such circulations.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This seminar examines the role of ruins (as both metaphors and material structures representative of antiquity) in the construction of an urban Modern Spanish World from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. We will look at how architects, urban planners, imperial officials, philosophers, political writers and historians looked to classical and American antiquity (Rome, Inka, Aztec) as sources for the construction and legitimation of imperial and national histories (a deep past) and rule. And how ruins, as physical artifacts, became central in the creation of the modern (a future) Spanish World. The Spanish Philippines will be a test case for understanding the place of classical antiquity in American and Spanish European modernity.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: By permission of the department. See Academic Distinctions.
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.
Filmmakers in the modern Middle East and North Africa have been at the forefront of intellectual engagement with their societies’ major challenges. By narrating the lives of individuals caught in historical circumstances not of their choosing, they have addressed issues such as incomplete decolonization and economic exploitation, cultural and political dogmatisms, the politicization and policing of religious, gender and sexual identities, foreign intervention and occupation, and dictatorship, civil war, and displacement. We will engage with the form, content, and historical contexts of a range of films and analyze how they leverage aesthetic, affective, and effective image, speech, and sound to persuade their audiences.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: MES 364,CPLT 364
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructors. At least one course in Middle Eastern Studies (apart from Arabic language) will be required and preference will be given to Seniors and Juniors.
Instructor: Aadnani (Middle Eastern Studies), Kapteijns (History)
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: MES 368
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor required. Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Kapteijns and Aadnani (Middle Eastern Studies)
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This is a research seminar about the history of “Greater Syria” (modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel/Palestinian Authority) from the perspective of its cities, especially Aleppo, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, Haifa, and Jerusalem. Focus on the impact of the Ottoman Empire's mid-nineteenth-century Tanzimat (or modernization) reforms; the Empire's demise after World War One, and European Mandate rule (French in Lebanon and Syria, and British in Trans-Jordan and Palestine). Themes include: changes in governance and the administration of Islamic law; localism, Arab nationalism, sectarianism, and changes in communal identities and inter-communal relations; migration, urban and demographic growth, and the transformation of urban space; Jewish nationalism and immigration, and the impact of World War Two.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: MES 366
Prerequisites: By permission of the instructor to students with some background in History and the Middle East.
Instructor: Kapteijns
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course examines the history of interaction of Africans, Arabs, Persians, and South Asians in the coastal regions of East Africa, the Arabian/Persian Gulf, and India, which together enclose the western Indian Ocean. In the period under study (1500 to the present), European imperial expansion and a globalizing economy played an increasingly transformative role. We will read about the port cities connecting these shores; the movements and networks of people; the objects and patterns of trade; the intensifying slave trade; shared environmental and health hazards, and the exchange of legal and commercial practices, and religious and political ideas.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 20
Crosslisted Courses: SAS 367
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Not open to students who have taken HIST 266/SAS 266.
Instructor: Kapteijns and Rao
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes: This course is also offered at the 200 level as HIST 266/SAS 266. At the 300-level, student writing assignments will encompass a wider set of readings than at the 200-level of this course and include a short research paper.
A crucial aspect of modern and contemporary international history is the large-scale violence against civilians that has marked recent civil wars throughout the world, from former Yugoslavia to Rwanda, and from Ireland to Sri Lanka and China. Though such violence is often labeled “ethnic” or “religious,” its causes are much broader. This research seminar will focus on: the causes and consequences of both state-perpetrated and communal violence; the scholarly (and legal) debates about how to approach political/social reconstruction in the aftermath of such large-scale violence, and the ethics of the representation of violence by historians and other authors/creators. Drawing on the conceptual readings and case studies of the syllabus, students will design a research paper about a particular conflict chosen by them.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: MES 369
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Instructor: Kapteijns
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes: For IR-History students, this course will fulfill the HIST 395 capstone requirement.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: HIST 360 and permission of the department.
Instructor:
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.
This course introduces in-depth study of powerful empires and their legacies. We focus on Qing-era China (1644-1912) asking how its leaders built China’s most expansive, durable, and ethnically diverse empire. We then consider the still incomplete efforts to reconfigure the empire as a Chinese nation, a process challenged by Tibetan, Uyghur, and Hong Kong citizens. Topics include institutions for segregating and representing diverse communities; the role of international commerce and technologies; the challenges of modern nationalism and European colonialism; methods for envisioning a new, multiethnic China led by a Han majority; and ways that Hong Kong, Islam, and Tibetan Buddhism are perceived as challenges. Readings in Ottoman, American, and South Asian history bring comparative perspectives and prepare students for research on world regions of their choice.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject. Not open to students who have taken this course as a topic of HIST 395.
Instructor: Giersch
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
This course traces the rise and fall of the first modern European Empire, the Spanish Empire. This first global empire ca. 1500 ruled over parts of Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia. This course provides a historical understanding of early modern ideologies, the institutions and the cultural practices that enabled Spain to rule over such vast territories. To this end we will examine the medieval precedents of early modern imperialism; theories of empire and monarchy; ideologies of conquest and colonization; theories of modernity and empire; models of conquest and colonial exploitation; the role of race and slavery in empire building abroad and at home; the various ways in which the "conquered" colonized Europe and Europeans; and the long-term consequences of these exchanges.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
No one history reflects the multiple paths followed by “Latin American” countries to develop medical and public health national infrastructures. New public health programs in nineteenth-century Latin America transformed debates about national culture, the state, and the role of the environment, race and disease in achieving modernity and progress. Among others, this course examines: the professionalization of medical practices; how foreign immigration and internal migration shaped health-related institutions and understandings of disease, race and modernity; the role of local innovative research in parasitology, herpetology, and tropical disorders in countering assumptions about racial and cultural inferiority; how a foreign funding institution (i.e. Rockefeller Foundation) and U.S. health officials facilitated U.S. intervention; how Cuba’s national health system today exports scientists, doctors, and epidemiologists to a world in crisis.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Open to Juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
Urbanity has long been central to Latin American cultures. This seminar examines the historical development of Latin American cities from the Roman principles governing the grid pattern imposed by the Spanish in the sixteenth century through the development of the twentieth-century, postmodern megalopolis. The seminar's three main objectives are to develop a theoretical framework within which to analyze and interpret the history, and historical study of Latin American cities; to provide a basic overview of the historical development of cities in the context of Latin American law, society, and culture; and to subject to critical analysis some of the theoretical "models" (i.e., Baroque, Classical, Dependency, Modernism, and so on) developed to interpret the evolution and workings of Latin American cities.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Osorio
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
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.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: Normally open to Juniors or Seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject. Not open to students who have taken HIST 279.
Instructor: Ramseyer
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes: This course is also offered at the 200-level as HIST 279.
In the years leading to 1947, nationalist activism against the British and tensions between Hindus and Muslims escalated in the Indian subcontinent. This culminated in Partition and the emergence of the nations of India and Pakistan. Independence was marred, however, by the bloodshed accompanying the mass movements of Muslims into Pakistan and Hindus into India. What were the factors leading to this juxtaposition of triumphal Independence with shameful Partition? How have memories of Partition continued to affect powerfully politics and culture in the subcontinent? This seminar investigates such questions using a wide variety of materials, including novels, such as Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India; feature films, such as Deepa Mehta's 1947; and documentary films, such as Sabiha Sumar's Silent Waters.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor: Rao
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Normally open to juniors and seniors who have taken a 200-level unit in history and/or a 200-level unit in a relevant area/subject.
Instructor:
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: Students who need to fulfill the IR capstone requirement must register in the spring for HIST 369 in place of HIST 395 [not offered in 2024-2025].This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.