History (HIST)
HIST 0001 Making of the Modern World
This course examines the political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual foundations of the world in which we live. We will cover the full scope of the human experience—empire, war, religion, revolution, industrialization, climate, globalization—over a vast geographic range, exploring key parallels and contrasts: in power and access to resources; modes of production and value systems; religious and ethnic traditions; identities and cultural practice, and in political systems and social formations. We will examine both human and non-human actors and personal and systemic changes and explore trajectories that are never predetermined. This course serves as a gateway to the discipline of History and to the Department of History at Penn. It fulfills both the Sector II (History and Tradition) and Cross-Cultural Analysis requirement and, depending on the faculty member in charge, may examine the world through ONE specific theme or highlight developments over two hundred or over two thousand years.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0012 Why College? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
This course will explore controversies and dilemmas surrounding American colleges, from their birth into the present. What is the purpose of “college”? How have these goals and objectives changed, across time and space? What should college do, and for whom? And how can colleges be reformed to meet their diverse purposes and constituencies? Topics of discussion will include affirmative action, “political correctness,” fraternities and sororities, sexual assault and safety, online education, and the recent trend towards “college for all.” For first-year students only.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0013 American Pasts in American Places
All around you are traces of America’s past. Some of them, like Independence Hall, are easy to see. Others are more obscure. The long-disappeared Philadelphia house where Cyrus Bustill, a free Black baker of the Revolutionary era, opened his school for Black children is visible only because of a recently erected historic marker. This course introduces you to the skills and techniques necessary to read America’s past in the landscape around you. Even a place like Independence Hall has had many meanings and uses since it was built in 1732 as each generation has projected their understanding of its significance onto its bricks and mortar. We will explore a variety of places – extant and long gone, local and farther afield – to uncover what they can tell us about the American past and its connections to the American present. Meetings will include field trips to places discussed in the course.
1 Course Unit
HIST 0014 A History of America's Children
How have Americans historically regarded children and childhood? Were they consistently seen as the cornerstone and future of society? The roles and perceptions of children and childhood have continually evolved, reflecting broader historical shifts. Viewing American history from the vantage point of children opens up a novel understanding of industrialization, education, and social reform. This approach also reveals the diverse experiences of children from varied cultural, racial, and economic backgrounds, highlighting the significant yet often overlooked impact of children and childhood on shaping the nation. Engage with this history not only through conventional historical research but also through experiential learning, utilizing archival materials including memoirs, images, and various media forms.
1 Course Unit
HIST 0020 Reading the Classics
In this seminar we will study the early roots of Western culture -the Biblical, Greek and Roman traditions- as well as how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans reproduced, rethought and reshaped these early traditions. We will focus our attention on a few themes that were central concerns to those living in Classic and early modern times and that continue to influence modern ways of thinking and acting in Western societies: conceptions of God and place of religion in society; nature of power and authority, and individuals’ rights and duties; good and evil; views on women, their nature and roles in society; ethnography and the perception of other cultures and societies.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0021 First-Year Seminar: Inquisitors, Heretics and Witches
When and why did medieval European Christians develop anxieties about the beliefs of others, and what did they do to grapple with this anxiety? This course will explore the development of ideas of right and wrong belief in medieval Europe, and the various concerns and practical reactions that developed in response. We will begin by examining how notions of orthodoxy and its concomitant deviations developed from late Antiquity to the medieval period. We will then turn to the criminalization of the latter and development of the “inquisitors of heretical depravity," individuals assigned by the pope to inquire into heresy, and the various methods they used to identify and punish those they considered to hold wrong belief. Combining the zeal of faith with the power of law, inquisition was Europe's most infamous institution and co-opted judicial procedure in the fight against heresy. Ultimately the course aims to provide a deeper understanding of the development of orthodoxy, dissent, intolerance and persecution.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0023 Life and Death in the Age of Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is an epic tale of passion, intrigue, tragedy and redemption. It is also a penetrating portrayal of Russian life and society in the period following the Great Reforms of the 1860s. This period, the third quarter of the nineteenth century, was both the time of the flowering of the Russian novel as well as the age of Russia 's imperial glory. In this course we will use Anna Karenina as the starting point for a multifaceted exploration of nineteenth century Russian history and culture. Among the topics we will discuss are family life, social relations, modernization and industrialization, gender and sexuality, revolutionary movements, imperialism, and political power. We will enhance our reading of the novel with a wide range of supplementary materials including memoirs, travel accounts, historical analysis, and art. This course will be organized in a seminar format. No prior knowledge of Russian history or literature is required. All readings are in English.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0024 Capitalism and Democracy: Crisis and Co-Existence, 1873-Present
What is capitalism? What is democracy? And what is the relationship between the two? Socialist critics, including revolutionaries like the German communist Rosa Luxemburg and reformists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, have long argued that capitalism is a despotic regime. But by the 1940s, new defenders of capitalism—known as “neoliberals”—began to tie political freedoms to free markets. Then in the crucible of the Cold War, modernization theorists began to argue that the democratization of Europe and the U.S. had been caused by rising levels of wealth. The U.S. then mobilized this historical logic to defend free-markets abroad, in its fight to make the world safe for democracy against the Communist East. Ever since the 2008 crisis, however, the continued co-existence of democracy and capitalism no longer seems to be a given in a world fractured by growing inequalities and the rise of far-right populist politics. Rather than approaching the question of democracy and capitalism’s potential (in)compatibility from a theoretical angle, we will look at the question historically: when have democracy and capitalism been at odds? What historical conditions have underpinned their mutual destruction? We will pay special attention to the case of the first global depression of the 1870s-1890s and the rise of the new right in Western Europe, as well as the rise of fascism during the 1930s. On the other hand, when and how have democracy and capitalism mutually co-existed—and even flourished? We will take a good hard look at the institutions and ideas undergirding the post-World War II golden age of “democratic capitalism” and the expansion of welfare-states. This first-year seminar will introduce students to major thinkers, texts, and debates in the history of political economy and the social sciences during the long 20th century, including Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, W. E. B. Dubois, Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.
1 Course Unit
HIST 0025 Building Utopia: Radical Politics in Modern Europe
How did Europe transition from an old continent of aristocratic monarchies and empires to a region of democratic nation-states boasting some of the most generous welfare regimes in the world? Much of this transformation was fueled by utopian dreamers, from the Chartists in England during the 1830s and 1840s calling for universal suffrage, to trade-unionists inspired by various socialist writings demanding the right to work under the Paris Commune of 1871, to revolutionary nationalists demanding the end of empire and monarchy after 1918 in Ireland and Central Europe, to labor or social-democratic parties demanding the nationalization of basic industries, to land reformers demanding a redistribution of inherited wealth, all the way to more conservative, often Christian or business social reformers who worked for the adoption of health insurance and pensions schemes. Which utopias succeeded, which failed, how, and why? How did the pursuit of these utopian ideas propel and shape the democratization of European society and politics in the age of industrial capitalism? This course charts the radical political history of modern Europe, from the industrial revolution at the dawn of the 19th century all the way to the construction of post-World War II democratic welfare states which still characterize the continent today—even in a post-industrial age. Together, we will come to grips with what democratization has meant historically in Europe: who pushed for it, and under the auspices of which ideas and which institutions did they birth. Ultimately, the course aims to plot the relationship between the history of radical, utopian ideals with the history of real, political reform.
1 Course Unit
HIST 0030 First-Year Seminar: Africa in World History
This seminar examines Africa's connections--economic, political, intellectual and cultural--with the wider world from ancient times to the 21st century, drawing on a diverse sample of historical sources. It also explores Africa's place in the imaginations of outsiders, from ancient Greeks to modern-day development "experts." Whether you know a lot or almost nothing about the continent, the course will get you to rethink your stereotypes and to question your assumptions about the importance of Africa in world history. First-year students only.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 0030
1 Course Unit
HIST 0031 Gender, Sexuality, and Social Change in the Middle East
This first year seminar introduces basic concepts, debates, and narratives pertaining to the histories of gender and sexuality in the Middle East by covering the period from the late eighteenth century until the present day. In an engagement with global historical contexts, the course aims to engage students with the history of women, gender, and sexuality as they informed and shaped political and social change in the Middle East and vice versa. This course will concentrate on selected themes such as modernity, nationalism, and colonization to encourage students to challenge preconceived assumptions about Middle Eastern women, discuss some of the many roles they have played in social change, and think comparatively and transnationally about gender, history, and social life. In doing so, the class provides a historical context pertaining to the region's history by presenting a chronologically and thematically organized analysis to scrutinize the decline of the Ottomans, the rise of nationalisms, the implications of Islamist reformism, colonial rules before and after World War I and their impact on shaping women's lives, gender dynamics and sexual politics, the age of decolonization and rise of state feminisms under colonial and authoritarian regimes, an historical inquiry of same-sex desire and the political activism organized around LGBTQI+ movements, and finally contemporary political movements such as the Iranian Revolution and Arab Uprisings in shaping present discourses and practices informing individual and collective social and political status along with gendered and sexual politics in contemporary Middle Eastern societies.
Also Offered As: GSWS 0031
1 Course Unit
HIST 0032 First Year Seminar - Bacteria, Bodies, and Empires: A Global History of Medicine and Healing
Bacteria, Bodies, and Empires: A Global History of Medicine and Healing is a seminar on the history of medicine from the early modern period to the present. It addresses major issues and questions about bodies, diseases, epidemics, and medical institutions in the context of major historical developments in world history, with a focus on the Global South. The course examines how medicine, knowledge, and practices about diseases and bodies influenced political and social conditions, as well as how sociopolitical changes shaped and transformed people's perceptions of health, life, and the environment. Scholars have frequently examined the history of medicine as a Western practice and with a focus on Western medical traditions. And, medical and healing practices in the history of the Global South are frequently examined through the lens of religion, culture, and race, or, more recently, in relation to modernization and colonization. By situating the history of medical knowledge and practices in world history with an emphasis on Global South, this course introduces readings and research methods to challenge these fixed paradigms and shed light on questions and research agendas that will unearth the encounters, connections, and mobility of bacteria, bodies, and medical methods among various communities across time from Black Death to contemporary pandemics.
Also Offered As: HSOC 0362
1 Course Unit
HIST 0040 First-Year Seminar: Coca and Cocaine
This seminar compares a set of practices that center on coca leaf production in indigenous communities, where coca cultivation has been sustained over long centuries, on the one hand, with a set of unsustainable practices linked to the “drug war” in the Americas, on the other. Participants will read scholarly work in history and anthropology, support one another through a research process, and explore what historians and other scholars might contribute to discussions about drug policy. First-year students only.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 0040
1 Course Unit
HIST 0050 Religion and Politics in South Asia
This course will examine the relationship between religion and politics in South Asia from circa 1000 to 2000 C.E. This course is not designed to provide a comprehensive survey of every significant political conflict about religion over the last millennium. Instead, we will focus on key issues that have generated such contests repeatedly. The emphasis will be on political patronage of religious shrines and its converse, iconoclasm; on religious conversions; on clashes that were perceived as clashes between religious communities; and on popular religious movements and their appeal at particular historical moments. We will explore the politics of religion and of religious affiliation from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries by reviewing the rich historiography. No prior knowledge of South Asia is expected.
Also Offered As: SAST 0053
1 Course Unit
HIST 0059 India, South Asia, and the American University (First-Year Seminar)
This interdisciplinary course uses intersections between India/South Asia, the region's peoples, and the American university (including Penn specifically) to introduce students to archival, anthropological, and oral history research methods. Students will engage with a range of textual, archival, visual, and material collections and databases available at Penn and in Philadelphia, with particular attention to India and South Asia, and will have opportunities to practice using a range of historical and anthropological research methods and materials. Class activities may include visits to the University Archives; the Penn Musuem’s object collections and archives; the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts; the Fisher Fine Arts Library; Penn’s Architecture Archives; other special collections on campus; the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF); the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). Topics may include the history of Elihu Yale, East India Company trade, and the founding of Yale University; W. Norman Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and the history of Indian and South Asian Area Studies in the United States; Anandibai Joshee and the history of women’s medical education in Philadelphia; Stella Kramrisch, the history of Indian art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Kanji Dwarkadas and Indian labor movements; the history of U.S. immigration policy as it has impacted South Asians; the history of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the United States; architects Muzharul Islam and Penn professor Louis Kahn and the building of the Bangladeshi National Assembly Building; A. K. Ramanujan and the study of Indian epics and folklore; the Amar Chitra Katha comic books and Indian historical narratives; and South Asian Americans and debates over affirmative action in American universities. Students will also design an archival, anthropological, or oral history project on a topic of their choice as a final project. The course is ideal as an introduction to the excellent libraries and research collections housed at Penn and in Philadelphia, and as an introduction to a wide range of methods and intellectual frameworks for engaging with these collections - a great way to kick off your undergraduate experience at Penn!
Fall
Also Offered As: ANTH 0059, SAST 0059
1 Course Unit
HIST 0061 First-Year Seminar: Of Horses, Bows and Fermented Milk: The Silk Roads in 10 Objects
The empires of the Turkic and Turkish peoples have stretched across much of Eurasia since before the Common Era until the twentieth century. We first hear of them in Chinese chroniclers’ tales of a powerful people in the wilderness. Greek historians, Byzantine writers, and Arab polymaths write about the empires of the steppes. Centuries later, the heirs of the heroes of these empires move south and west, establishing empires and tribal confederations beyond the steppe, in Central Asia, Anatolia, and the Middle East. The Turkic empires seem to appear in the periphery of many civilizations, challenging, and, one could say, enriching their borders. But looking at a map, is really more than a half of Eurasia a periphery? If we flip the map, could we say these historians were writing from the margins of the Turkish empires? This course introduces the student to the history of empire by following the various histories of Turkic and Turkish people through 15 objects. It discusses the questions of periphery, borders, and the divide between agrarian, pastoral, and nomadic societies. The student will learn to derive historical questions and hypothesis through the intensive study of material culture, literature, and historical writing tracing the long and diverse history of the bow, the saddle, dumplings, and fermented milk (among others) across Eurasia.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: MELC 0460, NELC 0460
1 Course Unit
HIST 0065 Histories of Religion and Violence
Can religious fervor coexist with good citizenship? The American political project was designed, according to many of its original activists as well as contemporary theorists across the political spectrum, both to establish a safe haven for free religious practice *and* at the same time to protect the public from religious violence. But has it ever been possible to advance both goals together, or does one always swallow the other? As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, this Spirited Debate course welcomes first year students to re-examine the different stories about religion and violence that have structured our modern politics. While this class will prioritize the exploration of accounts of medieval and early modern religious violence that were pivotal to highly influential frameworks for American democratic government (like inquisitions, crusades, and the Wars of Religion), it will also consider both more ancient and more contemporary histories, such as religious origin stories, 19th century histories of "the warfare between religion and science”, and 20th century accounts of religious terror as well as totalitarian violence against religious communities. It will also lead students to reflect both critically and constructively about fundamental theories of religion and violence as they engage in an interdisciplinary and collaborative investigation of primary sources and artifacts, sacred texts, influential histories, and contemporary controversies. In the process, students will develop vital capacities for civic engagement within our religiously (and non-religiously) pluralistic polity.
1 Course Unit
HIST 0066 Scriptures in World History
How do books shape history? How does history re-shape books? This seminar examines how the sacred texts of Jewish and Christian religious traditions have been compiled, authorized, represented, manufactured, adjusted, restricted, rejected, reproduced, and consumed from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Smart Phone. It will study how revelation was textualized through a variety of media (e.g., papyrus roll, stone monument, manuscript codex, printed broadside, ritualized speech, digital screen) in order to uncover its historical functions: under what circumstances were the scriptures used to fortify institutional authority? To ignite revolutions? To create communities? To marginalize others? How do all these functions relate to fundamental beliefs in sacred scripture as divinely-revealed truth? These are hotly contested questions among scholars as well as the general public, and in this Spirited Debate First Year Seminar students will be invited both to analyze and engage in these debates.
1 Course Unit
HIST 0067 Histories of Science and Religion
Must religion and science be in conflict? How do different histories of this fraught relationship continue to shape how we judge the pursuit of knowledge in contemporary society? Co-led by a historian of the early modern world and a renowned paleontologist, this course will explore competing stories about a series of highly influential events and eras – including, for example, medieval engagements with Aristotle and magic, early modern colonialisms and Galileo’s scientific revolutions, modern monkey trials and quantum theories of everything -- that have shaped modern notions of how “science” and “religion” have and should relate to each other. Students will examine and compare primary sources with historical accounts, past and present, and visit local museum exhibitions in order to develop their capacities to discuss and debate existing stories and craft new ones that are both responsible and compelling.
1 Course Unit
HIST 0100 Deciphering America
This course examines American history from the first contacts of the indigenous peoples of North America with European settlers to our own times by focusing on several telling moments in this history. The course treats thirteen of these moments and each unit begins with a specific primary document, historical figure, image, or cultural artifact to commence the delving into the American past. Some of these icons are familiar, but the ensuing deciphering will render them as more complicated; some are unfamiliar, but they will emerge as absolutely telling. The course meets for two in-person lectures each week and a required recitation. Course requirements include: student’s choice of ten “before” journal entries (1-2 sentences) and ten end of the week “after” journal entries (300-word maximum per entry); a take home mid-term exam; a part take home and part in-class final exam; and recitation attendance and participation.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0108 American Origins
The United States was not inevitable. With that assumption as its starting point, this course surveys North American history from about 1500 to about 1850, with the continent's many peoples and cultures in view. The unpredictable emergence of the U.S. as a nation is a focus, but always in the context of wider developments: global struggles among European empires; conflicts between indigenous peoples and settler-colonists; exploitation of enslaved African labor; evolution of distinctive colonial societies; and, finally, independence movements inspired by a transatlantic revolutionary age.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0200 The Emergence of Modern Europe
This course examines the period in European history from the Black Death until the French Revolution (roughly 1348 to 1789). During this period of Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, early modern Europe experienced a series of crises in authority that ushered in the modern world. The course will explore how new discoveries (both geographical and intellectual) challenged existing worldviews; movements of religious reform challenged the authority of the Church and the unity of Europe; and new political doctrines, accompanied by a series of striking rebellions, challenged the foundations of traditional rule. Our aim will be to excavate the changing social, political, intellectual, and cultural experiences of men and women during this time of renaissance, reformation, enlightenment, and revolution. We will follow the encounter between Europeans and the peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, as well as the “discovery” of new ways to read old books, the “discovery” of new technologies in communications and combat, and the “discovery” of new sciences, arts, and philosophies as they impacted the way Europeans related to the wider world and their place within it.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0205 Europe: From Fall of Rome to Age of Exploration
This course offers a broad introduction to the history of Europe from around the fourth to sixteenth century CE. We begin with Roman civilization facing a series of crises that led to its eventual fall in the West and the great migrations that resulted in ‘barbarian’ kingdoms. We then explore European history as it developed afterwards through key questions that capture its essence: what was ‘barbarian’ about these kingdoms and what exactly were the ‘dark ages’? How did political power transform throughout the period to produce nascent nation states in the end? What did it mean to be a medieval knight? In what ways were women powerless or powerful? What was city life like as these began to be rebuilt? What roles did faith and knowledge play in this world? What were the first universities like? How did European culture in this period handle difference, and how is this similar or different to modern approaches? How do we even know this history from centuries to over a millennium ago? Students will discover a Europe that is fascinating in its contradictions: both dark and bright, both closed and open, both strikingly different and yet often surprisingly familiar.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0220 England and the British Isles to 1707
The subject of this course is the history of the British Isles from the Roman Conquest in 43AD to the creation of the United Kingdom in 1707. Between these two dates the various societies and cultures in the British Isles were brought into the orbit of the Roman Empire, converted to latin Christianity, and developed distinctive cultures and strong ties with the Continent. From the twelfth century on, the kingdom of England began to exert its power over Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, although English power waxed and waned in these areas between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. The Anglo-Norman continental empire of the Plantagenet dynasty also played a large part in shaping the English monarchy, as did the playing out of the Hundred Years War, the internal divisions in fifteenth-century English society, and the rise of the Tudor-Stuart dynasty.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HIST 0240 The Rise and Fall of the Russian Empire, 1552-1917
How and why did Russia become the center of the world's largest empire, a single state covering one-sixth of the world’s land surface, encompassing eleven time zones and over a hundred ethnic groups? To answer this question, we will explore the rise of a distinct political culture beginning in medieval Muscovy, its transformation under the impact of a prolonged encounter with European civilization, and the various attempts to re-form Russia from above and below prior to the Revolution of 1917. Main themes include the facade vs. the reality of central authority, the intersection of foreign and domestic issues, the development of a radical intelligentsia, and the tension between empire and nation.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: REES 0310
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 5240
1 Course Unit
HIST 0250 Modern Europe
This course will trace the dramatic rise and fall of Europe's global hegemony during the period roughly from 1450 to 1950. Among the major themes we will examine are: states and power, borders and resistance, race and genocide, economies and oppression, ideas and revolution, the building and change of hierarchies of gender and power. Truly, a dramatic story. The objectives of the course are: 1) To serve as an introduction to the study of history for majors and non-majors alike, and to teach the critical analysis of historical sources; 2) to teach substantive knowledge of European history; 3) to provide a foundation for further study of the European past. No previous background in European or World history is required.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 0290 The Soviet Century, 1917-1991
Out of an obscure, backward empire, the Soviet Union emerged to become the great political laboratory of the twentieth century. This course will trace the roots of the world's first socialist society and its attempts to recast human relations and human nature itself. Topics include the origins of the Revolution of 1917, the role of ideology in state policy and everyday life, the Soviet Union as the center of world communism, the challenge of ethnic diversity, and the reasons for the USSR's sudden implosion at the end of the century.Focusing on politics, society, culture, and their interaction, we will examine the rulers (from Lenin to Gorbachev) as well as the ruled (peasants, workers, and intellectuals; Russians and non-Russians). The course will feature discussions of selected texts, including primary sources in translation.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: REES 0311
1 Course Unit
HIST 0300 Africa Before 1800
Survey of major themes and issues in African history before 1800. Topics include: early civilizations, African kingdoms and empires, population movements, the spread of Islam, and the slave trade. Also, emphasis on how historians use archaeology, linguistics, and oral traditions to reconstruct Africa's early history.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 0300
1 Course Unit
HIST 0310 Warriors, Concubines & Converts: the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East & Europe
For almost six hundred years, the Ottomans ruled most of the Balkans and the Middle East. From their bases in Anatolia, Ottoman armies advanced into the Balkans, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, constantly challenging the borders of neighboring European and Islamicate empires. By the end of the seventeenth century, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, Sarajevo, Budapest, and nearly Vienna came under Ottoman rule. As the empire expanded into Europe and the Middle East, the balance of imperial power shifted from warriors to converts, concubines, and intellectuals. This course examines the expansion of the Ottoman sultanate from a local principality into a sprawling empire with a sophisticated bureaucracy; it also investigates the social, cultural, and intellectual developments that accompanied the long arc of the empire's rise and fall. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and discuss major currents of change in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. The student will have a better understanding of the roles of power, ideology, diplomacy, and gender in the construction of empire and a refined appreciation for diverse techniques of historical analysis.
Fall
Also Offered As: MELC 0450, NELC 0450
1 Course Unit
HIST 0350 Africa Since 1800
Survey of major themes, events, and personalities in African history from the early nineteenth century through the 1960s. Topics include abolition of the slave trade, European imperialism, impact of colonial rule, African resistance, religious and cultural movements, rise of naturalism and pan-Africanism, issues of ethnicity and "tribalism" in modern Africa.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 0350
1 Course Unit
HIST 0360 History of the Middle East Since 1800
A survey of the modern Middle East with special emphasis on the experiences of ordinary men and women as articulated in biographies, novels, and regional case studies. Issues covered include the collapse of empires and the rise of a new state system following WWI, and the roots and consequences of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Iranian revolution and the U.S.-Iraq War. Themes include: the colonial encounter with Europe and the emergence of nationalist movements, the relationship between state and society, economic development and international relations, and religion and cultural identity.
Fall
Also Offered As: MELC 0650, NELC 0650
1 Course Unit
HIST 0400 Colonial Latin America
The colonial period (1492- 1800) saw huge population movements (many of them involuntary) within the Americas and across the Atlantic. As a result, Latin America was created from the entanglement of technologies, institutions, knowledge systems, and cosmologies from Indigenous, European, and African cultures. We will learn about colonial institutions such as slavery and encomienda. We will also explore the different strategies pursued by individuals and communities to build meaningful lives in the face of often dire social and environmental circumstances. Class readings are primary sources and the focus of discussions, papers, and exams will be their interpretation.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 0400, LALS 0400
1 Course Unit
HIST 0450 Modern Latin America 1808-Present
This course examines central themes of Latin American history, from independence to the present. It engages a hemispheric and global approach to understand the economic and social transformations of the region. We will explore the anti-imperial struggles, revolutions, social movements, and global economic crises that have given rise to new national projects for development, or have frustrated the realization of such goals. Taking a historical perspective, we will ask: What triggers imperial breakdown? How did slaves navigate the boundary between freedom and bondage? Was the Mexican Revolution revolutionary? How did the Great Depression lead to the rise of state-led development? In what ways have citizens mobilized for equality, a decent standard of living, and cultural inclusion? And what future paths will the region take given uneasy export markets and current political uncertainty?
Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 0450
1 Course Unit
HIST 0500 Late Imperial China
This lecture course -- the first of a two-part sequence -- examines the history of late imperial China through the early 19th century. We begin with the Song dynasty transformation: the rise of gentry society and imperial absolutism, the institution of Confucian orthodoxy, the shift of the population and the economic center of gravity to the south, the commercialization of the economy, and change in the relative status of women and men. We then trace China's subsequent political and social history, including the following themes: inner vs. outer court politics; law, government, and society; intellectuals and political dissent; gender, family, and kinship practices; patterns of peasant life and rebellion; traditional foreign relations and first contacts with the West; internal sources of the decline of imperial order.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 1720
1 Course Unit
HIST 0550 History of Modern China
From an empire to a republic, from communism to socialist-style capitalism, few countries have ever witnessed so much change in a hundred year period as China during the twentieth century. How are we to make sense out of this seeming chaos? This course will offer an overview of the upheavals that China has experienced from the late Qing to the Post-Mao era, interspersed with personal perspectives revealed in primary source readings such as memoirs, novels, and oral accounts. We will start with an analysis of the painful transition from the last empire, the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), to a modern nation state, followed by exploration of a century-long tale of incessant reform and revolution. The survey will focus on three main themes: 1) the repositioning of China in the new East Asian and world orders; 2) the emergence of a modern Chinese state and nationalistic identity shaped and reshaped by a series of cultural crises; and finally, 3) the development and transformation of Chinese modernity. Major historical developments include: the Opium War and drug trade in the age of imperialism, reform and revolution, the Nationalist regime, Mao's China, the Cultural Revolution, and the ongoing efforts of post-Mao China to move beyond Communism. We will conclude with a critical review of the concept of "Greater China" that takes into account Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora in order to attain a more comprehensive understanding of modern China, however defined, at the end of the last century.
Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 0730
1 Course Unit
HIST 0560 Modern Japanese History
This course will survey the major political, economic, social and intellectual trends in the making of modern Japan. Special emphasis will be given to the turbulent relationship between state and society from 1800 to the present.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 0750
1 Course Unit
HIST 0570 Colonial South Asia, 1700 - 1950
The East India Company established its first trading outpost in India in 1612 and by 1765, was granted the right to collect revenue in eastern India on behalf of the Mughal Emperor. By 1858, Queen Victoria was Empress of India and by 1947, two independent nation states had emerged upon decolonization, India and Pakistan. The course will familiarize students with the outlines of the history of colonial South Asia, while exploring the following themes: How do we know what we know as historians, about the colonial era? What new institutions emerged in India under the British and, more importantly, what older institutions did they replace or modify? What kinds of modernity did South Asians begin to embrace, and what was the role of colonial rule in shaping and constraining these changes? How did different groups of South Asians perceive and respond to colonial rule, and how did this shape the emergence of new political movements in the early twentieth century?
Also Offered As: SAST 0570
1 Course Unit
HIST 0600 The Foundations of the Early Modern Atlantic World 1450-1800
The purpose of this course is to provide students with a solid knowledge of Atlantic history during the early modern period (XV-XVIII centuries). Through readings of primary and secondary texts we will discuss the cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic developments of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as well as the connections, struggles, and mutual influences between the peoples of these three continents. Throughout the semester we will study several important topics: medieval precedents of early modern expansion; theories of empire; ideologies and systems of conquest and colonialization; the relevance of race and slavery to the understanding of the early modern Atlantic world; how different peoples perceived others and themselves; how European imperialism and colonialization affected the internal development of Africa and America; the role played by religion in the Atlantic world; persistence and continuity of Native cultures and beliefs during an age of expansion; the creation of new identities; the role played by African nations in the creation of the Atlantic world; and the creation of an Atlantic economy.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: LALS 0600
1 Course Unit
HIST 0710 African American Life and Culture in Slavery
This course will examine the lives of enslaved African Americans in the United States, both in the North and the South. We will engage historiographical debates, and tackle questions that have long concerned historians. For example, if slaves were wrenched from families and traded, could they sustain family relationships? If slaves worked from sun-up until sun-down, how could they create music? We will engage with primary and secondary sources to expand our understandings of values, cultural practices, and daily life among enslaved people. Topics will include: literacy, family, labor, food, music and dance, hair and clothing, religion, material culture, resistance, and memories of slavery. Several disciplines including History, Archaeology, Literature, and Music, will help us in our explorations. Written, oral, and artistic texts for the course will provide us with rich sources for exploring the nuances of slave life, and students will have opportunities to delve deeply into topics that are of particular interest to them.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2760
1 Course Unit
HIST 0718 Black Women’s Activism in the United States
This advanced undergraduate course examines African-American women’s history in the U.S., with an emphasis on social activism, politics, and cultural production. This course will use first-hand narratives as well as monographs to provide an overview of African-American women’s lives from slavery to the contemporary period. Through writing assignments, students will have an opportunity to strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 2548
1 Course Unit
HIST 0720 Strife: A History of the Greeks
The Greeks enjoy a special place in the construction of western culture and identity, and yet many of us have only the vaguest notion of what their culture was like. A few Greek myths at bedtime when we are kids, maybe a Greek tragedy like Sophokles' Oidipous when we are at school: these are often the only contact we have with the world of the ancient Mediterranean. The story of the Greeks, however, deserves a wider audience, because so much of what we esteem in our own culture derives from them: democracy, epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, history writing, philosophy, aesthetic taste, all of these and many other features of cultural life enter the West from Greece. The oracle of Apollo at Delphi had inscribed over the temple, "Know Thyself." For us, that also means knowing the Greeks. We will cover the period from the Late Bronze Age, c. 1500 BC, down to the time of Alexander the Great, concentrating on the two hundred year interval from 600-400 BC.
Fall
Also Offered As: ANCH 0101, CLST 0101
1 Course Unit
HIST 0721 Ancient Rome
At its furthest extent during the second century CE, the Roman Empire was truly a "world empire", stretching from northern Britain to North Africa and Egypt, encompassing the whole of Asia Minor, and bordering the Danube in its route from the Black Forest region of Germany to the Black Sea. But in its earliest history it comprised a few small hamlets on a collection of hills adjacent to the Tiber river in central Italy. Over a period of nearly 1500 years, the Roman state transformed from a mythical Kingdom to a Republic dominated by a heterogeneous, competitive aristocracy to an Empire ruled, at least notionally, by one man. It developed complex legal and administrative structures, supported a sophisticated and highly successful military machine, and sustained elaborate systems of economic production and exchange. It was, above all, a society characterized both by a willingness to include newly conquered peoples in the project of empire, and by fundamental, deep-seated practices of social exclusion and domination. This course focuses in particular upon the history of the Roman state between the fifth century BCE and the third century CE, exploring its religious and cultural practices, political, social and economic structures. It also scrutinizes the fundamental tensions and enduring conflicts that characterized this society throughout this 800-year period.
Spring
Also Offered As: ANCH 0102, CLST 0102
1 Course Unit
HIST 0722 The Novel and Marriage
The content of the course will vary from semester to semester. All works read in English. Please check the department's website for a description. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2500, ENGL 0575, ENGL 2799, FREN 2500
1 Course Unit
HIST 0723 The Enlightenment
Topics vary. For current course description, please see the department's webpage: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: FREN 3600
1 Course Unit
HIST 0724 Portraits of Old Rus: Myth, Icon, Chronicle
Three modern-day nation-states – Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus – share and dispute the cultural heritage of Old Rus, and their political relationships revolve around interpretations of the past. Has the medieval Rus state been established by the Vikings or by the local Slavs? Is early Rus a mother state of Russia or of Ukraine, and, therefore, should it be spelled ‘Kyivan Rus,’ or ‘Kievan Rus’ in English? Has the culture of Russian political despotism been inherited from the Mongols, or is it an autochthonous ideology? The constructed past has a continuing importance in modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and it is keenly referenced, often manipulatively, in contemporary social and political discourse. For example, President Putin invaded Ukraine under a pretense that its territory has “always” been an integral part of Russia and its history. The course covers eight centuries of cultural, political, and social history of the lands that are now within the borders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, from early historical records through the 18th century, a period that laid the foundation for the Russian Empire and the formation of modern nations. Students gain knowledge about formative events and prominent figures, as well as social and cultural developments during this period. The course takes multidisciplinary approach by combining the study of textual sources, objects of art and architecture, music, ritual, and film in their social and historical contexts. Students learn to analyze and interpret primary sources (historical documents and literary texts), identify their intellectual issues, and understand the historical, cultural, and social contexts in which these sources emerged. While working with these primary sources students learn to pose questions about their value and reliability as historical evidence. By exposing students to the critical examination of “the uses of the past,” the course aims to teach them to appreciate the authoritative nature of historical interpretation and its practical application in contemporary social and political rhetoric. The study of pre-modern cultural and political history through the prism of nationalism theories explains many aspects of modern Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian societies, as well as political aspirations of their leaders. At the end of the course, students should develop understanding of the continuity and change in the history of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, their belief systems, and nationalistic ideologies, and will be able to speak and write about these issues with competence and confidence.
Fall
Also Offered As: REES 0100
Mutually Exclusive: REES 6100
1 Course Unit
HIST 0725 National Antiquities: Genealogies, Hagiographies, Holy Objects
Human societies have always wanted to know about their origins, the reasons for their customs, the foundations of their social institutions and religious beliefs, and the justification of their power structures. They have conceived of creation myths and of origins stories for their communities in order to position themselves within the past and present of the natural and human worlds. The newly Christianized kingdoms of Medieval Europe faced the challenge of securing a place in the new vision of universal Providential history, and they inscribed their own histories into the narratives they knew from the authoritative sources of the time - biblical genealogies and heroic stories inherited from the poets of classical antiquity. The deeds and virtues of saintly kings and church hierarchs provided a continuity of historical narrative on the sacred map of time and space. In the 19th century, while interest in medieval antiquity as a source of inspiration for political and cultural renewal brought about a critical study of evidence, it also effected reinterpretation and repurposing of this evidence vis-a-vis a new political concept - that of a nation. This seminar will focus on central, eastern and southeast European nations and explore three categories of "national antiquities" that have been prominent in the workings of their modern nationalisms: (1) stories of ethnogenesis (so-called, origo gentis) that narrate and explain the beginnings and genealogy of peoples and states, as they are recorded in medieval and early modern chronicles, (2) narratives about holy people, who are seen as national patron-saints, and (3) material objects of sacred significance (manuscripts, religious ceremony objects, crowns, icons) that act as symbols of political, cultural and national identities. Our approach will be two-fold: On the one hand, we will read medieval sources and ask the question of what they tell us about the mindset of the authors and societies that created them. We will think about how the knowledge of the past helped medieval societies legitimize the present and provide a model for the future. On the other hand, we will observe how medieval narratives and artifacts have been interpreted in modern times and how they became repurposed - first, during the "Romantic" stage of national awakening, then in the post-imperial era of independent nation-states, and, finally, in the post-Soviet context of reimagined Europe. We will observe how the study of nationalistic mentality enhances our understanding of how the past is represented and repurposed in scholarship and politics.
Also Offered As: REES 1174
1 Course Unit
HIST 0730 Introduction to the Ancient Middle East
The great pyramids and mysterious mummies of Egypt, the fabled Tower of Babel, and the laws of the Babylonian king Hammurabi are some of the things that might come to mind when you think of the ancient Middle East. Yet these are only a very few of the many fascinating -- and at time perplexing -- aspects of the civilizations that flourished there c. 3300-300 BCE. This is where writing first developed, where people thought that the gods wrote down what would happen in the future on the lungs and livers of sacrificed sheep, and where people knew how to determine the length of hypotenuse a thousand years before the Greek Pythagoras was born. During this course, we will learn more about these other matters and discover their place in the cultures and civilizations of that area. This is an interdisciplinary survey of the history, society and culture of the ancient Middle East, in particular Egypt and Mesopotamia, utilizing extensive readings from ancient texts in translation (including the Epic of Gilgamesh, "one of the great masterpieces of world literature"), but also making use of archaeological and art historical materials. The goal of the course is to gain an appreciation of the various societies of the time, to understand some of their great achievements, to become acquainted with some of the fascinating individuals of the time (such as Hatshepsut, "the women pharaoh," and Akhenaten, "the heretic king"), and to appreciate the rich heritage that they have left us.
Fall
Also Offered As: ANCH 0100, MELC 0001, NELC 0001
1 Course Unit
HIST 0750 From Shamans to Shoguns: The Texts that Made Pre-Modern Japanese History
This course tackles about a millennium of pre-modern Japanese political, social, and cultural history (roughly, 700-1700). Instead of attempting to cover the period chronologically, as an introductory survey might, this class is structured as a series of case studies. Each of these will take a primary source as its point of departure and explore one or more facets of Japanese history and writing. In the course of each case study, lectures and discussions will branch out from the main source to examine its historical context as well as the (political, cultural, textual) traditions that informed that source s composition. In general, students will read the entire texts of the main sources (or significant portions of them), along with scholarly articles and shorter excerpts from other sources, composed at the same time or in the same vein/genre. During lectures and discussions alike, students will be asked to engage the readings, so as to grasp the specifics of Japanese history and practice the analytical skills required of historical discourse.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 1742
1 Course Unit
HIST 0751 Japan: The Age of the Samurai
Who (or what) where the samurai? What does it mean to say that Japan had an "Age of the Samurai"? In popular imagination, pre-modern Japan has long been associated with its hereditary warrior class. Countless movies have explored the character and martial prowess of these men. Yet warriors constituted but a tiny portion of the societies they inhabited and ruled, and historians researching medieval Japan have turned their attentions to a great range of subjects and to other classes (elite and commoner alike). This class is designed to acquaint students with the complex and diverse centuries that have been called the "Age of the Samurai"-roughly, the years between ca. 1110 and 1850. In the course of the semester, we will explore the central themes in the historiography of warrior society, while introducing some of the defining texts that have shaped our imagination of this age (from laws to epic poems, from codes of conduct to autobiographies).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 1746
1 Course Unit
HIST 0752 Knights with Katanas: Medieval Japan and Europe Compared
This course aims to provide an overview of some of the main themes and problemsin the history and historiography of medieval Japan by drawing on comparisons with European counterparts and interpretive models. To this end, each week's readings on Japan are paired with one or more works on medieval Europe dealing with a similar theme. The primary purpose is not only to draw comparisons between the two civilizations and their development but also to use the great riches of scholarship on the European Middle Ages to shed light on possible new avenues of inquiry and perspectives on Japan.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 2711
1 Course Unit
HIST 0753 City & Citizenship: Samurai Politics and Commoner Culture in Early Modern Japan
In the early modern period (1600-1867), Japan underwent a staggering urban transformation. Edo, the shogunal capital, grew in barely a century from a new settlement to a sprawling metropolis of over a million. Indeed, most of Japan's current urban centers descend directly from the castle towns built by regional warlords in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in an effort keep the peace after over a hundred years of civil war. As a result, Japanese cities in the early modern period became a central component of what historians have called a "re-feudalization" of society, and retained strong vestiges of their military origins. At the same time the samurai-centered space of the new cities created opportunities for the development of alternative cultural practices and values by urban commoners. The juxtaposition of the regimented, honor-driven society designed and longed for by samurai and the fluid, money-driven society that grew out of the burgeoning cities' commoner quarters is one of the animating forces of the early modern period. Through study of scholarship and contemporary sources (laws and sumptuary regulations, codes of conducts, but also diaries, novels, plays), this course will explore the many facets of early modern urban society, its medieval antecedents, and its legacies in contemporary Japan.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 3742
Mutually Exclusive: EALC 7742
1 Course Unit
HIST 0754 Law and Violence in Pre-Modern Japan
This course will be an exploration of premodern Japanese history through the lens of violence. The centuries under consideration (roughly, the eighth thought nineteenth) were characterized by greatly varying levels of violence, both of the state-sanctioned variety (war, punishments for law-breakers and political losers) and of the non-sanctioned variety (piracy, banditry, warrior and peasant rebellions). Examining a wide variety of translated sources, from diaries to chronicles, from legal codes to fiction, we shall examine the changing social, political, economic, and cultural contexts of violence, in order to interrogate not only why certain periods were remarkably peaceful while others were not, but also why violence took different forms in relation to different circumstances. We shall consider how contempories made sense of the violence that surrounded them (or didn't) and how they divided the acceptable use of force from the wanton and society-threatening abuse of it. The course will feature presentations and severl (very short) papers.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 3744
Mutually Exclusive: EALC 7744
1 Course Unit
HIST 0755 History, Culture, and Religion in Early India
This course surveys the culture, religion and history of India from 2500 BCE to 1200 CE. The course examines the major cultural, religious and social factors that shaped the course of early Indian history. The following themes will be covered: the rise and fall of Harappan civilization, the "Aryan Invasion" and Vedic India, the rise of cities, states and the religions of Buddhism and Jainism, the historical context of the growth of classical Hinduism, including the Mahabharata, Ramayana and the development of the theistic temple cults of Saivism and Vaisnavism, processes of medieval agrarian expansion and cultic incorporation as well as the spread of early Indian cultural ideas in Southeast Asia. In addition to assigned secondary readings students will read select primary sources on the history of religion and culture of early India, including Vedic and Buddhist texts, Puranas and medieval temple inscriptions. Major objectives of the course will be to draw attention to India's early cultural and religious past and to assess contemporary concerns and ideologies in influencing our understanding and representation of that past.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: RELS 0003, SAST 0003
1 Course Unit
HIST 0756 Gender and Sexuality in Chinese History
This course examines gender and sexuality in Chinese history from ancient to contemporary times. It focuses on historiographical developments and methods of studying gender and sexuality in history as well as in Chinese history. The readings will include, but not be limited to, works by Robin Wang, Paul Goldin, Jen-der Lee, Patricia Ebrey, Beverly Bossler, Charlotte Furth, Susan Mann, Dorothy Ko, Francesca Bray, Yi-Li Wu, Matthew Sommer, Janet Theiss, Siyen Fei, Judith Zeitlin, Keith McMahon, Nicole Barnes, Gail Hershatter, Tani Barlow, and Lisa Rofel.
Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 3424
1 Course Unit
HIST 0757 Mongolian Civilization: Nomadic and Sedentary
This course will explore how two intertwined ways of life - pastoral nomadism and settling down for religious, educational, and economic reasons - have shaped the cultural, artistic, and intellectual traditions of Mongolia. In this course students will learn about Mongolian pastoral nomadism, and how the Mongolian economy, literature, and steppe empires were built on grass and livestock. We will also explore how Mongolians have also just as consistently used the foundations of empire to build sedentary monuments and buildings, whether funerary complexes, Buddhist monasteries, socialist boarding schools, and modern capitals. Over time, these cities have changed shape, location, and ideology, all the while remaining linked to the mobile pastoralists in the countryside. We will also explore how these traditions of mobile pastoralism and urbanism were transformed in the 20th century, by urbanization, communist ideology, and the new reality of free-market democracy, ideological pluralism, and a new mining dependent economy. We will meet modern painters and musicians who interweave Mongolian nomadic traditions with contemporary world trends, and consider the future of rural traditions in a modern world.
Spring, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: EALC 0080
1 Course Unit
HIST 0781 Empires of the Steppe: Scythians, Huns, Turks, and Mongols
Attila, Chinggis (“Genghis”) Khan, Temur (“Tamerlane”) – these names have stirred European imagination long after the facts have been forgotten. And the Scythians, Huns, Turks, and Mongols left similar impressions in Middle Eastern and East Asian history. This class will trace the history of the Central Eurasian steppes from the origins of nomadism to the newly independent nations of the present. We will focus on the great empires of the steppe, but also the cultural icons they left behind: horse riding, trousers, Excalibur, Mulan, the Silk Roads, the Great Wall of China, the Dalai Lama, and throat singing. Through a mix of selections from primary sources and modern articles we will explore both how great empire builders like Genghis Khan presented themselves, as well as how they were perceived by travelers, and how their historical and cultural impact has lasted to the present. Students will understand how central the impact of steppe nomads have been on civilizations all over Eurasia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: EALC 0081
1 Course Unit
HIST 0811 Faculty-Student Collaborative Action Seminar in Urban University-Community Rltn
This seminar helps students develop their capacity to solve strategic, real-world problems by working collaboratively in the classroom, on campus, and in the West Philadelphia community. Students develop proposals that demonstrate how a Penn undergraduate education might better empower students to produce, not simply "consume," societally-useful knowledge, as well as to function as caring, contributing citizens of a democratic society. Their proposals help contribute to the improvement of education on campus and in the community, as well as to the improvement of university-community relations. Additionally, students provide college access support at Paul Robeson High School for one hour each week. This is an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1780, URBS 1780
1 Course Unit
HIST 0812 Perspectives on Urban Poverty
This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to 20th century urban poverty, and 20th century urban poverty knowledge. In addition to providing an historical overview of American poverty, the course is primarily concerned with the ways in which historical, cultural, political, racial, social, spatial/geographical, and economic forces have either shaped or been left out of contemporary debates on urban poverty. Of great importance, the course will evaluate competing analytic trends in the social sciences and their respective implications in terms of the question of what can be known about urban poverty in the contexts of social policy and practice, academic research, and the broader social imaginary. We will critically analyze a wide body of literature that theorizes and explains urban poverty. Course readings span the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, urban studies, history, and social welfare. Primacy will be granted to critical analysis and deconstruction of course texts, particularly with regard to the ways in which poverty knowledge creates, sustains, and constricts meaningful channels of action in urban poverty policy and practice interventions.
Fall
Also Offered As: SOCI 2944, URBS 4200
1 Course Unit
HIST 0814 American Slavery and the Law
In this course, we will work both chronologically and thematically to examine laws, constitutional provisions, and local and federal court decisions that established, regulated, and perpetuated slavery in the American colonies and states. We will concern ourselves both with change over time in the construction and application of the law, and the persistence of the desire to control and sublimate enslaved people. Our work will include engagement with secondary sources as well as immersion in the actual legal documents. Students will spend some time working with Mississippi murder cases from the 19th century. They will decipher and transcribe handwritten trial transcripts, and will historicize and analyze the cases with attention to procedural due process as well as what the testimony can tell us about the social history of the counties in which the murders occurred. The course will end with an examination of Black Codes that southern states enacted when slavery ended.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3500
1 Course Unit
HIST 0816 Undergraduate Research Seminar: The 1963 March on Washington
In this course, students will examine the origins of the March on Washington movement in the 1940s, biographies of the March organizers, and the ways the March has been memorialized over the past six decades. By exploring the dynamics that contributed to the demonstrations, students will delve into primary source documents, read secondary literature, and write their own article-length research papers based on the course material. The course will also examine the ways documentary film footage, photography, music, and media coverage of the March has contributed to understandings and misreadings of this moment in Civil Rights history.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 3455
1 Course Unit
HIST 0817 Black Feminist Approaches to History and Memory
Topics vary: Black Feminist Approaches to History & Memory - The term black feminism emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of black feminism, however, are much older, easily reaching back to the work of black women abolitionists and social critics of the nineteenth century. The concept continued to grow and evolve in the work of twentieth century black women writers, journalists, activists, and educators as they sought to document black women's lives. Collectively, their work established black feminism as a political practice dedicated to the equality of all people. More recently, black feminism has been deployed as a tool for theoretical and scholarly analysis that is characterized by an understanding that race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricably interconnected. Using materials such as slave narratives, social criticism, and archival sources, this course will explore the theoretical and practical applications of black feminist thought in nineteenth and twentieth century North American culture and politics. In particular, we will consider the symbols and practices (storytelling, myth-making, art, archival research) that black women use to document lives. We will ask: how do these methods of documentation inform our understanding of the past and the production of historical knowledge? How can we understand black feminism as both theory and practice? And what are the implications of black feminist approaches for current research and scholarship? We will give particular attention to concepts such as gender, race, memory, the archive, and embodied knowledge to complicate our understanding of historical documentation, epistemology, and authenticity. The course material will include scholarship by Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Hazel Carby, Hershini Young, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Toni Morrison, and others. (Image: From In Praise of Shadows, Kara Walker (2009). See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 4387, GSWS 4387, LALS 4387
1 Course Unit
HIST 0818 Sex, Love, and Race in African American Life and History
This course discusses the political and social implications of sex, race and personal relationships in U.S. political and social history. In this class, we examine how so-called ‘emotional,’ human experiences such as falling in love, engaging in a sexual relationship, marriage, coming out of the closet, and other deeply personal events over the course of a lifetime are shaped by political, legal and historical forces. This course will examine the history of marriage rights, claims to ethnic and racial identity, activism among multiracial people in the United States, sex education in public schools, and debates about marriage and family rights in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 2545, GSWS 2545
1 Course Unit
HIST 0819 Queer Life in U.S. History
Queerness has held a variety of meanings and queer life has looked different over the past several centuries of United States history, but it certainly isn’t new. This course traces queer existence—in terms of both gender and sexuality—from the seventeenth century through the present, and foregrounds lived experience, identity formation, community development, and political consciousness. We will attend closely to how race, class, immigration status, and ability shape and are shaped by queer life, and engage with current topics of concern in the field of queer history, like the rural/urban divide, capitalism and neoliberalism, and queer memory.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2320
1 Course Unit
HIST 0820 Freud: The Invention of Psychoanalysis
No other person of the twentieth century has probably influenced scientific thought, humanistic scholarship, medical therapy, and popular culture as much as Sigmund Freud. This course will study his work, its cultural background, and its impact on us today. In the first part of the course, we will learn about Freud's life and the Viennese culture of his time. We will then move to a discussion of seminal texts, such as excerpts from his Interpretation of Dreams, case studies, as well as essays on psychoanalytic practice, human development, definitions of gender and sex, neuroses, and culture in general. In the final part of the course, we will discuss the impact of Freud's work. Guest lectureres from the medical field, history of science, psychology, and the humnities will offer insights into the reception of Freud's work, and its consequences for various fields of study and therapy.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1010, GRMN 1010, GSWS 1010
1 Course Unit
HIST 0821 Berlin: History, Politics, Culture
What do you know about Berlin's history, architecture, culture, and political life? The present course will offer a survey of the history of Prussia, beginning with the seventeenth century, and the unification of the small towns of Berlin and Koelln to establish a new capital for this country. It will tell the story of Berlin's rising political prominence in the eighteenth century, and its position as a center of the German and Jewish Enlightenment. It will follow Berlin's transformation into an industrial city in the nineteenth century, its rise to metropolis in the early twentieth century, its history during the Third Reich, and the post-war cold war period. The course will conclude its historical survey with a consideration of Berlin's position as a capital in reunified Germany. The historical survey will be supplemented by a study of Berlin's urban structure, its significant architecture from the eighteenth century (i.e. Schinkel) to the nineteenth (new worker's housing, garden suburbs) and twentieth centuries (Bauhaus, Speer designs, postwar rebuilding, GDR housing projects, post-unification building boom). In addition, we will read literary texts about the city, and consider the visual art and music created in and about Berlin, and focus on Berlin's Jewish history. The course will be interdisciplinary with the fields of German Studies, history, history of art, urban studies, and German-Jewish studies. It is also designed as a preparation for undergraduate students who are considering spending a junior semester with the Penn Abroad Program in Berlin.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2370, COML 1040, GRMN 1040, URBS 1070
1 Course Unit
HIST 0822 Universal Language: From the Tower of Babel to Artifical Intelligence
This is a course in European intellectual history. It explores the historical trajectory, from antiquity to the present day, of the idea that there once was, and again could be, a universal and perfect language among the human race. If recovered, it can explain the origins and meaning of human experience, and can enable universal understanding and world peace. The tantalizing question of the possibility of a universal language have been vital and thought-provoking throughout the history of humanity. The idea that the language spoken by Adam and Eve was a language which perfectly expressed the nature of all earthly objects and concepts has occupied the minds of intellectuals for almost two millennia. In defiance of the Christian biblical myth of the confusion of languages and nations at the Tower of Babel, they have over and over tried to overcome divine punishment and discover the path back to harmonious existence. By recovering or recreating a universal language, theologians hoped to be able to experience the divine; philosophers believed that it would enable apprehension of the laws of nature, while mystic cabbalists saw in it direct access to hidden knowledge. In reconstructing a proto-language, 19th-century Indo-Europeanist philologists saw the means to study the early stages of human development. Even in the 20th century, romantic idealists, such as the inventor of Esperanto Ludwik Zamenhof, strived to construct languages to enable understanding among estranged nations. For writers and poets of all times, from Cyrano de Bergerac to Velimir Khlebnikov, the idea of a universal and perfect language has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Today, this idea echoes in theories of universal and generative grammars, in approaching English as a global tongue, and in various attempts to create artificial languages, even a language for cosmic communication. Each week we address a particular period and set of theories to learn about universal language projects, but above all, the course examines fundamental questions of what language is and how it functions in human society.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 0095, ENGL 1445, REES 1177
1 Course Unit
HIST 0823 Portraits of Russian Society: Art, Fiction, Drama
This course covers 19C Russian cultural and social history. Each week-long unit is organized around a single medium-length text (novella, play, memoir) which opens up a single scene of social history birth, death, duel, courtship, tsar, and so on. Each of these main texts is accompanied by a set of supplementary materials paintings, historical readings, cultural-analytical readings, excerpts from other literary works, etc. The object of the course is to understand the social codes and rituals that informed nineteenth-century Russian life, and to apply this knowledge in interpreting literary texts, other cultural objects, and even historical and social documents (letters, memoranda, etc.). We will attempt to understand social history and literary interpretation as separate disciplines yet also as disciplines that can inform one another. In short: we will read the social history through the text, and read the text against the social history.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: REES 0110
1 Course Unit
HIST 0824 Russia and the West
This course will explore the representations of the West in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Russian literature and philosophy. We will consider the Russian visions of various events and aspects of Western political and social life Revolutions, educational system, public executions, resorts, etc. within the context of Russian intellectual history. We will examine how images of the West reflect Russia's own cultural concerns, anticipations, and biases, as well as aesthetic preoccupations and interests of Russian writers. The discussion will include literary works by Karamzin, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Leskov, and Tolstoy, as well as non-fictional documents, such as travelers' letters, diaries, and historiosophical treatises of Russian Freemasons, Romantic and Positivist thinkers, and Russian social philosophers of the late Nineteenth century. A basic knowledge of nineteenth-century European history is desirable. The class will consist of lectures, discussion, short writing assignments, and two in-class tests.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 2020, REES 0190
1 Course Unit
HIST 0825 Portraits of Soviet Society: Literature, Film, Drama
How can art and literature open a window on Russian lives lived over the course of the tumultuous twentieth century? This course adopts a unique approach to questions of cultural and social history. Each week-long unit is organized around a medium-length film, text or set of texts by some of the most important cultural figures of the era (novella, play, memoir, film, short stories) which opens up a single scene of social history: work, village, avant-garde, war, Gulag, and so on. Each cultural work is accompanied by a set of supplementary materials: historical readings, paintings, cultural-analytical readings, excerpts from other literary works, etc. We will read social history through culture and culture through history.
Spring
Also Offered As: REES 0130
1 Course Unit
HIST 0830 The Making of the Middle East
This is the second half of MELC's Middle East sequence, but past enrollment in MELC 0001 is not required to take this course. This course surveys Islamic civilization from circa 600 (the rise of Islam) to the start of the modern era and concentrates on political, social, and cultural trends. Although the emphasis will be on Middle Eastern societies, we will occasionally consider developments in other parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and Spain, where Islamic civilization was or has been influential. Our goal is to understand the shared features that have distinguished Islamic civilization as well as the varieties of experience that have endowed it with so much diversity.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 0002, NELC 0002
1 Course Unit
HIST 0835 North Africa: History, Culture, Society
This interdisciplinary seminar aims to introduce students to the countries of North Africa, with a focus on the Maghreb and Libya (1830-present). It does so while examining the region's close economic and cultural connections to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Readings will include histories, political analyses, anthropological studies, and novels, and will cover a wide range of topics such as colonial and postcolonial experiences, developments in Islamic thought and practice, and labor migration. This class is intended for juniors, seniors, and graduate students.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1600, MELC 1600
1 Course Unit
HIST 0836 Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East: Historical Perspectives
A reading- and discussion-intensive seminar that addresses several recurring questions with regard to the Middle East and North Africa. How have Islam, Judaism, and Christianity influenced each other in these regions historically? How have Jews, Christians, and Muslims fared as religious minorities? To what extent have communal relations been characterized by harmony and cooperation, or by strife and discord, and how have these relations changed in different contexts over time? To what extent and under what circumstances have members of these communities converted, intermarried, formed business alliances, and adopted or developed similar customs? How has the emergence of the modern nation-state system affected communal relations as well as the legal or social status of religious minorities in particular countries? How important has religion been as one variable in social identity (along with sect, ethnicity, class, gender, etc.), and to what extent has religious identity figured into regional conflicts and wars? The focus of the class will be on the modern period (c. 1800-present) although we will read about some relevant trends in the early and middle Islamic periods as well. Students will also pursue individually tailored research to produce final papers. Prior background in Islamic studies and Middle Eastern history is required. Middle Eastern history is required.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: JWST 1605, MELC 1605, NELC 1605, RELS 1605
Mutually Exclusive: MELC 6605
1 Course Unit
HIST 0837 Religion and Society in Africa
In recent decades, many African countries have perennially ranked very high among the most religious. This course serves as an introduction to major forms of religiosity in sub-Saharan Africa. Emphasis will be devoted to the indigenous religious traditions, Christianity and Islam, as they are practiced on the continent. We will examine how these religious traditions intersect with various aspects of life on the continent. The aim of this class is to help students to better understand various aspects of African cultures by dismantling stereotypes and assumptions that have long characterized the study of religions in Africa. The readings and lectures are will be drawn from historical and a few anthropological, and literary sources.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2870, RELS 2870
1 Course Unit
HIST 0838 Medicine, Health and Healing in Africa
This seminar course will examine how sub-Saharan Africans have interpreted and dealt with issues of health, healing, and medicine under colonial and postcolonial regimes. It will also look at how various social, economic, religious, and political factors have impacted health and healing on the continent and shaped African responses. Class discussions will center around both general themes affecting health and healing in Africa as well as case studies drawn from historical and anthropological works.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3110
1 Course Unit
HIST 0840 Love, Anger, Madness: History and Silences in Modern Haiti
On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3510, GSWS 3510, LALS 3510
1 Course Unit
HIST 0850 Introduction to Modern India
This introductory course will provide an outline of major events and themes in Indian history, from the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the re-emergence of India as a global player in the 21st century. The course will discuss the following themes: society and economy in Mughal India; global trade between India and the West in the 17th century; the rise of the English East India Company's control over Indian subcontinent in the 18th century; its emergence and transformation of India into a colonial economy; social and religious reform movements in the 19th century; the emergence of elite and popular anti-colonial nationalisms; independence and the partition of the subcontinent; the emergence of the world's largest democracy; the making of an Indian middle class; and the nuclearization of South Asia.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: SAST 0001
1 Course Unit
HIST 0851 India: Culture and Society
What makes India INDIA? Religion and Philosophy? Architectural splendor? Kingdoms? Caste? The position of women? This course will introduce students to India by studying a range of social and cultural institutions that have historically assumed to be definitive India. Through primary texts, novels and historical sociological analysis, we will ask how these institutions have been reproduced and transformed, and assess their significance for contemporary Indian society.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: RELS 0008, SAST 0008
1 Course Unit
HIST 0860 Introduction to East Asia: Korea
This course will take you on a whirlwind journey of Korean history and culture, beginning in prehistory and going up to the present. We will examine key historical events, social structures, and cultural developments that have shaped Korea over time. This course is not about memorizing names and dates but about understanding how and why Korea has changed the way it did. The course is structured into four parts: (1) the formation of Korean civilization, (2) Chosŏn Korea, (3) Korea under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), and (4) modern Korea from 1945 onward. Readings will include textbook chapters, scholarly articles, and translated excerpts from primary sources, complemented by artwork, films, and music. Throughout the semester, you will (1) gain a foundational understanding of Korean history, (2) become familiar with key terms and concepts used in historical analysis, (3) learn to use course materials to construct well-supported explanations of historical events, and (4) distinguish between primary and secondary sources. Additionally, you will learn to question arguments about history and determine whether conclusions drawn from historical sources are logical and well-founded. Class meetings will combine lectures and occasional short videos to help visualize historical developments, and discussions of assigned readings. Be prepared to engage actively in discussions and answer questions about the readings—completing them before class will be essential. The guiding questions outlined in the syllabus for each week will help you focus on key themes and prepare for meaningful discussions. No prior knowledge of Korea or the Korean language is required.
Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 0060
1 Course Unit
HIST 0863 East & West: Commodities and Culture in Global History
Sugar and Spices. Tea and Coffee. Opium and Cocaine. Hop aboard the Indian Ocean dhows, Chinese junks, Dutch schooners, and British and American clipper ships that made possible the rise of global capitalism, new colonial relationships, and the intensified forms of cultural change. How have the desires to possess and consume particular commodities shaped cultures and the course of modern history? This class introduces students to the cultural history of the modern world through an interdisciplinary analysis of connections between East and West, South and North. Following the circulation of commodities and the development of modern capitalism, the course examines the impact of global exchange on interactions and relationships between regions, nations, cultures, and peoples and the influences on cultural practices and meanings. The role of slavery and labor migrations, colonial and imperial relations, and struggles for economic and political independence are also considered. From the role of spices in the formation of European joint stock companies circa 1600 to the contemporary cocaine trade, the course's use of both original primary sources and secondary readings written by historians and anthropologists will enable particular attention to the ways that global trade has impacted social, cultural, and political formations and practices throughout the world.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ANTH 0063, SAST 0063
1 Course Unit
HIST 0867 Divinities, Diviners and Divinations: Religions of the African Diaspora
This undergraduate course is designed to provide students with a broad introduction to major themes within African Diasporic Religions. This is an interdisciplinary course. We will be drawing upon various theoretical methods, i.e. historical, ethnographical, and autobiographical. Additionally, we will be examining visual media to understand the presence and value of African Diasporic Religions in the 20th/21st century. Special attention will be given to Vodou, Santeria, and Candomble in the Americas. Thematically, we will work through concepts of the diaspora; memory, myth and authenticity; ritual and material practices; borders, migration, gender and sexuality, religious commodities and exchange. As we traverse through these various religious traditions, it is through the readings, lectures, invited speakers, films and class discussions that we will develop a complex understanding of integrative religious worldviews that impacts every aspect of life: family structure, gender relations, education, healing, economics, politics, arts, and so on. It is with the hopes that we can apprehend how these traditions are indeed an American Religion.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1201, GSWS 1202
1 Course Unit
HIST 0870 Introduction to Digital Humanities
This course provides an introduction to foundational skills common in digital humanities (DH). It covers a range of new technologies and methods and will empower scholars in literary studies and across humanities disciplines to take advantage of established and emerging digital research tools. Students will learn basic coding techniques that will enable them to work with a range data including literary texts and utilize techniques such as text mining, network analysis, and other computational approaches. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1650, ENGL 1650
1 Course Unit
HIST 0871 The Material Past in a Digital World
The material remains of the human past -objects and spaces- provide tangible evidence of past people's lives. Today's information technologies improve our ability to document, study, and present these materials. But what does it mean to deal with material evidence in a virtual context? In this class, students will learn basic digital methods for studying the past while working with objects, including those in the collections of the Penn Museum. This class will teach relational database design and 3D object modeling. As we learn about acquiring and managing data, we will gain valuable experience in the evaluation and use of digital tools. The digital humanities are a platform both for learning the basic digital literacy students need to succeed in today's world and for discussing the human consequences of these new technologies and data. We will discuss information technology's impact on the study and presentation of the past, including topics such as public participation in archaeological projects, educational technologies in museum galleries, and the issues raised by digitizing and disseminating historic texts and objects. Finally, we will touch on technology's role in the preservation of the past in today's turbulent world. No prior technical experience is required, but we hope students will share an enthusiasm for the past.
Also Offered As: ANTH 1303, ARTH 0127, CLST 1303
1 Course Unit
HIST 0872 Liquid Histories and Floating Archives
Climate change transforms the natural and built environments, and it is re-shaping how we understand, make sense, and care for our past. Climate changes history. This course explores the Anthropocene, the age when humans are remaking earth's systems, from an on-water perspective. In on-line dialogue and video conferences with research teams in port cities on four continents, this undergraduate course focuses on Philadelphia as one case study of how rising waters are transfiguring urban history, as well as its present and future. Students projects take them into the archives at the Independence Seaport Museum and at Bartram's Garden. Field trips by boat on the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers and on land to the Port of Philadelphia and to the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge invite transhistorical dialogues about how colonial and then industrial-era energy and port infrastructure transformed the region's vast tidal marshlands wetlands. Excursions also help document how extreme rain events, storms, and rising waters are re-making the built environment, redrawing lines that had demarcated land from water. In dialogue with one another and invited guest artists, writers, and landscape architects, students final projects consider how our waters might themselves be read and investigated as archives. What do rising seas subsume and hold? Whose stories do they tell? What floats to the surface?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 1440, COML 1140, ENGL 1589, ENVS 1440, GRMN 1140
1 Course Unit
HIST 0873 Existence in Black
Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 4406, PHIL 4515
1 Course Unit
HIST 0876 Medicine in History
This course surveys the history of medical knowledge and practice from antiquity to the present. No prior background in the history of science or medicine is required. The course has two principal goals: (1)to give students a practical introduction to the fundamental questions and methods of the history of medicine, and (2)to foster a nuanced, critical understanding of medicine's complex role in contemporary society. The couse takes a broadly chronological approach, blending the perspectives of the patient,the physician,and society as a whole--recognizing that medicine has always aspired to "treat" healthy people as well as the sick and infirm. Rather than history "from the top down"or "from the bottom up,"this course sets its sights on history from the inside out. This means, first, that medical knowledge and practice is understood through the personal experiences of patients and caregivers. It also means that lectures and discussions will take the long-discredited knowledge and treatments of the past seriously,on their own terms, rather than judging them by todays's standards. Required readings consist largely of primary sources, from elite medical texts to patient diaries. Short research assignments will encourge students to adopt the perspectives of a range of actors in various historical eras.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 0400, STSC 0400
1 Course Unit
HIST 0877 Modern Biology and Social Implications
This course covers the history of biology in the 19th and 20th centuries, giving equal consideration to three dominant themes: evolutionary biology, classical genetics, and molecular biology. The course is intended for students with some background in the history of science as well as in biology, although no specific knowledge of either subject in required. We will have three main goals: first, to delineate the content of the leading biological theories and experimental practices of the past two centuries; second, to situate these theories and practices in their historical context, noting the complex interplay between them and the dominant social, political, and economic trends; and, third, to critically evaluate various methodological approaches to the history of science.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: STSC 1151
1 Course Unit
HIST 0878 Science, Labor and Capital
This course looks at the intertwined history of science, labor and capital since the fifteenth century. Starting with the surge of patents for labor-saving devices in fifteenth century Italy and coming all the way down to the contemporary neoliberal university, the culture of science and the cultures of labor and capital have always remained in intense conversation. The first half of the course will focus on the early relations between science, labor and capital. We will discuss patterns of employment for scientists, the relationship between manual work and intellectual work, the scientific aspects of commercial capitalism as well as the debates on the transition to capitalism. The second half of the course will focus on the period from the nineteenth century to the present. We will talk about colonialism and science, the social ascendance of the scientist in relation to the technician, as well as the political economy of contemporary science and of the contemporary university. This is a seminar course and will require regular participation. Some knowledge of the existing literature on capitalism, especially the writings of Ellen Wood and E.P Thompson, are recommended but not required.
Also Offered As: STSC 3088
1 Course Unit
HIST 0879 Global Queer History
This course surveys the history of queer sexualities in a global context. Sexuality has a history that is geographically and culturally specific. For this reason, this course aims to destabilize familiar sexual categories and identities by exploring how it was (and is) to be queer in other parts of the world. We will historicize sexual orientationm as a category anchored in Western medical and legal discourses; we will link the history of sexuality with that of capitalism, colonialism, and racism; and we will evaluate “Gay Globalization” and how it is embraced and resisted around the world. The course is not comprehensive either chronologically or geographically. Instead, it addresses some key topics in the history of queer sexualities; it provides a general historiographical background for different areas; and it introduces a toolbox for doing critical queer history around the world. Finally, we will address how contemporary social issues regarding queer sexualities around the world can be put into historical perspective, and why queer history is essential for achieving the goals of social justice.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2879
1 Course Unit
HIST 1110 Hamilton's America: US History 1754-1804
In this course, students will learn about the political, constitutional, and social history of the American colonies and the United States from 1754-55 (the outbreak of the Seven Years War and the year of Alexander Hamilton’s birth) to 1804 (the year Hamilton died and Thomas Jefferson, one of his chief rivals, won re-election to the presidency). Hamilton will be our guide to the many events and transformations that occurred during this period. The course is not, however, a narrowly-focused biographical course about Hamilton. Students will read a wide range of primary sources, exploring the ideas and experiences of both famous and ordinary people. These sources will allow students to consider multiple perspectives on historical moments and transformations. Topics covered include: the Seven Years War and other events leading up to the American Revolution, the politics of American independence, the Revolutionary War, the development of state and national republics, the creation and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the role of ordinary people in the politics of the time period, the problem of slavery in the new nation, Native American power and loss, diplomatic affairs, the impact of revolutions in France and Haiti, the rise of partisan politics in expected and unexpected places, and the expansion of American sovereignty and settlement on the North American continent.
Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 1112 The American Revolution
How and why did thirteen small colonies break away from one of the world’s most powerful empires, and what kind of nation did they build in the process? This course introduces students to the history of the American Revolution, from the Seven Years’ War through the ratification of the Constitution. We will explore how imperial conflict, political ideas, economic change, warfare, and social upheaval combined to transform thirteen British colonies into an independent United States. We will pay particular attention to the diverse experiences of revolution: not only those of famous leaders, but also of ordinary men and women, Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and Loyalists. Students will consider the Revolution as both a struggle for independence and a civil war; as a story of democratic promise and profound exclusion; and as part of a wider age of revolutions that reshaped the Atlantic world. As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, the course also invites students to reflect on how Americans and others have remembered, commemorated, and contested the Revolution across four centuries.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1119 History of American Law to 1877
This course is designed to explore major themes and events in early American legal history. Because of the richness of the subject matter and the wealth of sources available, we will be selective in our focus. The course will emphasize several core areas of legal development that run throughout colonial and early national history: 1) the state: including topics such as war and other military or police action, insurrection, revolution, regulation, courts, economic policy, and public health; 2) labor: including race and racially-based slavery, varied forms of servitude and labor coercion, household labor, industrialization, unionization, and market development; 3) property: including property in persons, land, and business, and the role of lawyers in promoting the creation of wealth; 4) private spaces: including family, individual rights, sexuality, gender, and private relations of authority; 5) constitutionalism: various methods of setting norms (rules, principles, values) that create, structure, and define the limits of government power and authority in colonial/imperial, state, and national contexts; 6) democracy and belonging: including questions of citizenship, voting rights, and participation in public life. By placing primary sources within historical context, the course will expose students to the ways that legal change has affected the course of American history and contemporary life. The course will be conducted primarily in lecture format, but I invite student questions and participation. In the end, the central aim of this course is to acquaint students with a keen sense of the ways that law has operated to liberate, constrain, and organize Americans. Ideally, students will come away with sharper critical thinking and reading skills, as well. *This course is a core requirement for the Legal Studies and History Minor (LSHS).*
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 1119
1 Course Unit
HIST 1120 Yellow Peril, Red Scare: Cold War Asia in America
This course explores how the Cold War in Asia has shaped dominant ideas about race, militarism, and citizenship, with particular consequences for both Asians and Asian Americans. As decolonization movements in Asia confronted a growing US empire, Cold War paranoia became linked to longstanding tropes of Asian invasion—merging the so-called “Yellow Peril” and “Red Scare” in the American imagination. Taking a cultural history approach, students will draw on both archival sources and popular media to examine the Cold War emergence of lingering tropes such as the communist spy, the war bride, the peasant insurgent, and the model minority. Topics covered include the Korean and Vietnam Wars, McCarthyism, the Third World movement, Asian/American military service, Cold War refugee policy, anti-imperialist activism, and the legacy of Cold War geopolitics in Asia today.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ASAM 2110
1 Course Unit
HIST 1121 The American South
Southern culture and history from 1607-1860, from Jamestown to seccession. Traces the rise of slavery and plantation society, the growth of Southern sectionalism and its explosion into Civil War.
Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either
Also Offered As: AFRC 1121
1 Course Unit
HIST 1122 Witches, Rebels, and Prophets: People on the Margins in Early America
This course explores the lost worlds of witches, sexual offenders, rebellious enslaved people, rebellious colonists, and Native American leaders from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the troublemakers, the criminals, the rebels, and other non-conformists, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century. The lives of these unique “movers and shakers” help us to understand the issues that Americans debated in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 1122, GSWS 1122
1 Course Unit
HIST 1125 Native American History
This course will introduce the history of North America’s Indigenous nations from the continent’s first peopling through the close of the twentieth century. We will analyze the basic sequence and consequence of events such as: pre-Columbian migrations; the development of settled North American societies; the establishment and spread of European colonies; the contestation of and alliance with imperial projects by Indigenous nations; the emergence of Indian racial and cultural identity; the formation of the United States, the process of “Indian Removal”; the creation of reservations; the growth of assimilative programs through residential schooling; and the rise of modern tribal bureaucracy. Particular attention will be paid to the various strategies employed by Indigenous nations across time to establish and uphold government-to-government relationships with Western powers. Throughout, we will assess the history of Native America as flowing through its own channels—ones now intertwined with, but discrete from, those of the United States.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1127 African American History 1550-1876
This course examines the experiences of Africans and African Americans in colonial America and in the United States to 1865. We will explore a variety of themes through the use of primary and secondary sources. Topics include: the development of racial slavery, labor, identity, gender, religion, education, law, protest, resistance, and abolition.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 1176
1 Course Unit
HIST 1150 American Jewish Experience
This course offers a comprehensive survey of American Jewish history from the colonial period to the present. It will cover the different waves of Jewish immigration to the United States and examine the construction of Jewish political, cultural, and religious life in America. Topics will include: American Judaism, the Jewish labor movement, Jewish politics and popular culture, and the responses of American Jews to the Holocaust and the State of Israel.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: JWST 1150, RELS 1150
1 Course Unit
HIST 1153 Transformations of Urban America: Making the Unequal Metropolis, 1945 to Today
The course traces the economic, social, and political history of American cities after World War II. It focuses on how the economic problems of the industrial city were compounded by the racial conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s and the fiscal crises of the 1970s. The last part of the course examines the forces that have led to the revitalization and stark inequality of cities in recent years.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: URBS 1153
1 Course Unit
HIST 1155 Introduction to Asian American History
This course will provide an introduction to the history of Asian Pacific Americans, focusing on the wide diversity of migrant experiences, as well as the continuing legacies of Orientalism on American-born APA's. Issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality will also be examined.
Spring
Also Offered As: ASAM 0102
1 Course Unit
HIST 1162 The American West
This lecture course surveys that vast and varied region now known as the American West, and the earlier “wests” that preceded it. The U.S. West contains a distinctive mixture of mountains and deserts; wide-open spaces and sprawling cities; Natives and newcomers. This region functions as an emblematic space in U.S. pop culture and national mythology (think “cowboys and Indians,” Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, Hollywood and Vegas). It also figures prominently in environmental history, political history, and the histories of religion, race, war, and diplomacy. Today, the West is where the United States faces China across the Pacific; and where the republic meets its neighbor Mexico along a 2,000-mile border, some of it barricaded. From Great Plains Indigenous equestrian innovators in the eighteenth century to Bay Area tech entrepreneurs in the contemporary moment, this course gives the West and all its peoples their due.
Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 1164 American Monuments: The Politics of Historical Memory (SNF Paideia Program Course)
The 2020 protests about monuments in Philadelphia and across the nation exposed this truth: Arguments over history are political arguments about the future. The subsequent countermovement to restore monuments, memorials, statues, and place-names, as well as “classical” and “traditional” architecture, has further politicized the landscape of memory. In this place-based, Philadelphia-centric course (including campus walking tours and local field trips), we will examine how the built environment communicates ideas about—and creates connections to—the past. These ideas and these landscapes can be inclusive or exclusive, or both. The goal of this course is to inspire greater dialogue about national history and public space, two kinds of shared projects in a democracy. Students will learn about the making of the US memorial landscape in the long nineteenth century, its remaking in the twentieth century, and its possible futures now in the (re)making. The course will also put Philadelphia and the US in global context, for the politics of historical memory exist everywhere there are monuments.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1165 History of American Education
This course will examine the growth and development of American schools, from the birth of the republic into the present. By 1850, the United States sent a greater fraction of its children to school than any other nation on earth. Why? What did young people learn there? And, most of all, how did these institutions both reflect and shape our evolving conceptions of "America" itself? In an irreducibly diverse society, the answers were never simple. Americans have always defined their nation in a myriad of contrasting and often contradictory ways. So they have also clashed vehemently over their schools, which remain our central public vehicle for deliberating and disseminating the values that we wish to transmit to our young. Our course will pay close attention to these education-related debates, especially in the realms of race, class, and religion. When immigrants came here from other shores, would they have to relinquish their old cultures and languages? When African-Americans won their freedom from bondage, what status would they assume? And as different religious denominations fanned out across the country, how would they balance the uncompromising demands of faith with the pluralistic imperatives of democracy? All of these questions came into relief at school, where the answers changed dramatically over time. Early American teachers blithely assumed that newcomers would abandon their old-world habits and tongues; today, "multicultural education" seeks to preserve or even to celebrate these distinctive patterns. Post-emancipation white philanthropists designed vocational curricula for freed African-Americans, imagining blacks as loyal serfs; but blacks themselves demanded a more academic education, which would set them on the road to equality. Protestants and Catholics both used the public schools to teach their faith systems until the early 1960s, when the courts barred them from doing so; but religious controversies continue to hound the schools, especially on matters like evolution and sex education. How should our public schools address such dilemmas? How can the schools provide a "common" educaiton, as Horace Mann called it, melding us into an integrated whole while still respecting our inevitable differences?
Spring
Mutually Exclusive: EDUC 5453
1 Course Unit
HIST 1166 A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered (SNF Paideia Program Course)
Many Americans widely accept the notion that the United States is a nation of immigrants despite the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past. This course explores the United States’ development of immigration and border enforcement during the twentieth century through an intersectional lens. It roots the structures of modern immigration and border enforcement in Native dispossession and histories of slavery, and interrogates how Asian, Black, and Latinx immigration has shaped and expanded immigration controls on, within, and beyond US territorial borders. In addition to historicizing the rise and expansion of major institutions of immigration control such as the US Border Patrol and Bureau of Naturalization, we explore how immigration controls were enforced on the ground and impacted the lives of everyday people.
Also Offered As: AFRC 1166, ASAM 1166, LALS 1166
1 Course Unit
HIST 1168 The Civil War and the Legacy of American Democracy
The Civil War and Reconstruction fundamentally transformed the nature of American democracy, including who could participate in it, what its processes were, and what legislation was possible. This course will explore the legacy of that change in American history and culture. Through primary and scholarly secondary sources we will trace the meaning and practice of democracy from the establishment of the United States of America through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and their continued echoes to the present day. We will examine how historical actors defined terms we often take for granted, like citizen, franchise, and representation, but we will also delve into the nitty gritty history of voter intimidation methods, coercion, fraud, and demagoguery that marked democracy at many points in this era.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1169 History of American Law Since 1877
This course introduces students to major themes in U.S. legal history from 1877 to the present. Topics include (but are not limited to) citizenship and immigration, federalism, public regulation of economic activity, lawyers and the legal profession, criminalization, social welfare provision, and rights-claiming. Prominent through-lines include the relationship between law and politics; the struggles of marginalized groups for recognition and inclusion; and shifting, competing understandings of liberty, equality, and justice. Judicial decisions figure prominently in this course, but so, too, do other sources of law, including statutes, administrative decisions, and provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Students will leave this course with a better grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates and how it has channeled power, resources, and opportunity over time.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1169
1 Course Unit
HIST 1170 The American Civil War and Reconstruction
This course will cover the nature of American slavery, the causes of the Civil War, how the aims of the war changed over time, and the emergence and destruction of bi-racial democracy during Reconstruction. This is not a military history course, but we will discuss the course of the war and explore why Americans in the mid-nineteenth century came to believe that they could only settle their political disagreements through violence. We will examine how the revolutionary social and political changes that the war made possible were undermined and how the promise and shortcomings of Reconstruction continue to shape the nation today. Students will be graded on class participation in lecture and three written assignments. No prior knowledge required.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1171 The American South 1865-Present
This course will trace the history of the American South from the end of the Civil War to the present. Charting its course out of the smoldering aftermath of the post-Civil War South, it will track a narrative of politics, economics, and culture across more than 150 years of life in the modern American South. The course will include deep examinations of race, gender, and culture, including a broad set of Southern stories and voices in an interdisciplinary journey across what is perhaps America’s most storied region.
Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either
Also Offered As: AFRC 1171
1 Course Unit
HIST 1172 Bodies, Race and Rights: Sex and Citizenship in Modern American History
What did it mean to be a man or woman in the post-Civil War United States? Was being a man the same as being a citizen? If African-American men were to be fully embraced as both men and citizens in the aftermath of slavery, where did that leave women, white and black? Why did a nation built on immigration become so hostile to certain groups of immigrants during this period? In this course, we consider how the meanings and experiences of womanhood, manhood, citizenship, and equality before the law changed from the period immediately after the Civil War until the present day. We look at political battles over the meaning of citizenship, the use of terror to subdue African Americans politically and economically, and the fears of white Americans that they would lose their political and economic dominance to immigrant groups they deemed irreconcilably different from themselves. We also consider the repercussions of these conflicts for medical, legal, and economic efforts to regulate the bodies of women, children, poor people, immigrants, working class laborers, military men, and African Americans. Throughout the course, we will follow the state's changing use of racial, sexual, and economic categories to assess the bodily and intellectual capacities of different groups of citizens. We will also note some of the popular cultural expressions of manhood, womanhood, and citizenship. The lectures and reading assignments are organized around a series of historical problems, dynamic leaders, and controversies that illuminate these issues.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1172, GSWS 1172
1 Course Unit
HIST 1177 African American History 1876 to Present
This course provides a study of the major events, issues, and personalities in African American history from Reconstruction to the present. It introduces the freedom-oriented practices for Black progress, social transformation, and well-being that African Americans have pursued through varieties of advocacy, organizing, and cultural creativity in the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and early-twenty-first centuries. Students will explore this history while maintaining an analytical focus on intersecting factors in the pursuit of Black freedom in the United States, including class, (dis)ability, gender, generation, orientation, race, region, and religion.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1177
1 Course Unit
HIST 1179 America in the Sixties
The Sixties are mythologized in American memory. From social movements to hippies, the Sixties are often portrayed as a decade of unfettered idealism, chaos, and revolution. The Sixties were indeed a dramatic era of conflict and change, but the experiences of Americans who lived during the Sixties were also remarkably diverse and complex in ways that transcend stereotypes of the decade. More than merely a series of conflicts between activists and racists or hawks and doves, the Sixties represented a turning point in American life. The society that emerged in the wake of this profound decade was completely different than anything that had ever existed before. Through a variety of themes—especially gender, race, foreign policy, and consumer culture—this class will move beyond generic Sixties narratives to offer a multi-faceted examination of American life during the Sixties and explore how the decade has shaped the contemporary United States.
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 1178
1 Course Unit
HIST 1180 U.S. Politics and Society since the 1960s
This course explores significant political and social developments that shaped the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States, an era of declining faith in political institutions, ideological and partisan polarization, and accelerating inequality. The course will consider a variety of perspectives, developments, and movements across the political spectrum as well as others that defy easy ideological or partisan categorization. Topics will include the evolution of the post-1960s civil rights movement and the rise of mass incarceration; the rise and transformation of the religious right and the emergence of the populist right from the 1970s through the Tea Party and MAGA movements; the evolution of liberalism and the Democratic Party and its relationship to the left; the AIDS crisis and the LGBTQ movement; 9/11 and the war on terror; the financialization of the global economy and the causes and effects of the mortgage crisis of 2008; and bipartisan paths toward the emergence of “neoliberalism” and the concept of the "free market" as ways of reordering not just social and political commitments but perhaps even society itself.
Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 1190 American Diplomatic History Since 1776
Survey course tracing the origins and evolution of the great traditions of U.S. foreign policy, including Exceptionalism, Unilateralism, Manifest Destiny, Wilsonianism, etc., by which Americans have tried to define their place in the world.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 1191 US Empire in the Twentieth Century
This class examines the emergence of the U.S. as a world power since 1898, and considers both the international and domestic consequences of U.S. foreign relations. In one respect, the twentieth century was a strange time to become a global empire: it was the period when colonial systems centered in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Turkey collapsed, and new nations emerged throughout Africa and Asia. This class explores the changing strategies of military, economic, and political intervention that the US pursued as colonization lost legitimacy. Within that framework, the class invites students to think about four questions: How did the idea and practice of empire change over the twentieth century? How did the United States and people within the US relate to new visions of independence emerging in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? How did global interactions both inform and reflect racial ideology in the United States? Finally, how did anti-imperialist arguments and movements change over the twentieth century?
Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 1191
1 Course Unit
HIST 1200 Foundations of European Thought: from Rome to the Renaissance
This course offers an introduction to the world of thought and learning at the heart of European culture, from the Romans through the Renaissance. We begin with the ancient Mediterranean and the formation of Christianity and trace its transformation into European society. Along the way we will examine the rise of universities and institutions for learning, and follow the humanist movement in rediscovering and redefining the ancients in the modern world.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1201, ITAL 1201
1 Course Unit
HIST 1201 Foundations of Law
This course explores the history and conceptual underpinnings of modern law in the West. What exactly is law? What is its relationship with politics and religion? Where do our notions of constitutionalism come from? How have we come to think in terms of rights? Using a historical and comparative approach, we will examine legal thought and culture in the European West from the Greek concept of nomos to the main categories of law developed in Roman antiquity, concepts of constitutionalism and rights crafted in medieval Europe, the development of the two main legal traditions of Europe (Common Law and Civil Law), and the emergence of intellectual property, human rights discourse and modern international law. The course will blend intellectual, political and social history. We will study concepts and intellectual categories such as crime, proof, punishment and the public/private distinction alongside illustrative cases that either exemplified the law or pushed it forward, foundational documents such as Magna Carta, and political developments such as the Peace of Westphalia, credited with the birth of modern state sovereignty and modern international law. Together, these subjects form core foundations of how we think and do law today.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1205 Reading the Classics
In this course we will study the early roots of Western culture--the Biblical, Greek and Roman traditions--as well as how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European authors reproduced, rethought and reshaped these early traditions. Instead of reading and discussing the required texts according to the date when they were written (first the early traditions and ending with the Renaissance views), we will focus our attention on a few themes that were central concerns to those living in Classic and Renaissance times, and that continue to influence modern ways of thinking and acting in Western societies: conceptions of God and the place of religion in society; nature of power and authority, and individuals' rights and duties; good, evil, and ethical philosophy; views on women, their nature and roles in society; ethnography and the perception of other cultures and societies. In addition to reading and discussing several of the biblical books--Genesis, Exodus, the Book on Revelation--we will study other seminal classical works--Sophocles' Antigone, Aristotle's Politics and Ethics, Herodotus' The Histories; Plato's Apology-- and works by Michel de Montaigne, Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, Marie de Gournay, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and several others. We will also work with books published in the last decades, analyzing the classics and and their reception in various periods of history, but also books that analyze what the classics tell us today--Dreyfus and Kelly's All things shining, Reading the Western Classics to find meaning in a secular Age; Anthony Grafton's Bring Out Your Dead: the Past as Revelation; James Miller, Examined Lives, from Socrates to Nietzsche; and Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1210 The Vikings
The Vikings were the terror of Europe from the late eight to the eleventh century. Norwegians, Danes and Swedes left their homeland to trade, raid and pillage; leaving survivors praying "Oh Lord, deliver us from the fury of the Norsemen!" While commonly associated with violent barbarism, the Norse were also farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. As their dragon ships sailed the waterways of Europe and beyond, they also transformed from raiders to explorers, discoverers and settlers of found and conquered lands. This course will introduce students to various facets of the culture and society of the Viking world ranging from honor culture, gender roles, political culture, mythology, and burial practices. We will also explore the range of Viking activity abroad from Kiev and Constantinople to Greenland and Vineland, the Viking settlement in North America. We will use material and archeological sources as well as literary and historical ones in order to think about how we know history and what questions we can ask from different sorts of sources. Notably, we will be reading Icelandic sagas that relate oral histories of heroes, outlaws, raiders and sailors that will lead us to question the lines between fact and fiction, and myth and history.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GRMN 1305
1 Course Unit
HIST 1212 Food, History and Culture in Europe, 100-1600
Before the age of mass transportation, was all food locally sourced? In an era when most medicines were plant based, what did it mean to eat a balanced diet? “Feed a cold, starve a fever.” Why? This course focuses on food, diet, and cuisine in European culture, thought, and society with a focus on the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. In it, we will examine a variety of primary sources ranging from food in art, health handbooks, and cookbooks, some of which we will consult in the original at the Kislak Center at Penn. By the end of the semester, students will understand the roles played by climate, culture, religion, the economy, and medicine in shaping the “foodways” of Europe.
Also Offered As: ITAL 1940
1 Course Unit
HIST 1215 Love, Lust and Violence in The Middle Ages
Medieval Europe was undoubtedly gruff and violent but it also gave birth to courtly culture - raw worries transformed into knights who performed heroic deeds, troubadours wrote epics in their honor and love songs about their ladies, women of the elite carved out a place in public discourse as patrons of the arts, and princely courts were increasingly defined by pageantry from jousting tournaments to royal coronations. This course will trace the development of this courtly culture from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, from its roots in Southern France to its spread to Northern France and then to various kingdoms in Europe. Central themes will include the transformation of the warrior into the knight, the relationship between violence and courtliness, courtly love, cultural production and the patronage, and the development of court pageantry and ceremonial. This is a class cultural history and, as such, will rely on the interpretation of objects of art and material culture, literature as well as historical accounts.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1215, GSWS 1215
1 Course Unit
HIST 1222 Ireland and the Atlantic World
This course examines Ireland before 1800. It considers it in relation to Europe and the Atlantic world — including the expanding English and later British empire — of which it was sometimes part. We will examine Ireland as a site of colonization (or "plantation") and its involvement in colonial settlement, trade, and empire around the Atlantic from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth centuries.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1225 The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment is popularly seen as an “Age of Reason” that ended an early modern era marked by famine, plague, persecution, and superstition, and paved the way for a modern age of secular politics, commercial wealth, intellectual freedom, scientific progress and the inklings of liberal government. Yet the Enlightenment’s meaning, unity, extent, and significance have been debated from the eighteenth century to today: What was it? How did it begin? What did it do, and for whom? How did its ideas relate to action, in Europe or beyond? Is there an ongoing Enlightenment “project”? Rather than taking the Enlightenment as either a narrow movement or a synonym for eighteenth-century ideas, this course looks at what Enlightenment has meant thematically and as a complex historical phenomenon – exploring its origins in responses to seventeenth-century social, political, and intellectual challenges; examining the social and geographical contexts in which it took place; surveying key developments in political ideas, social thought, history, and natural science through readings of primary sources; finally, looking at the social, geographical and political limits of Enlightenment, at its ends and its legacies.
Also Offered As: COML 1225
1 Course Unit
HIST 1230 The French Revolution and the Origins of Modern Politics
This course will examine the social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and especially political history of France and its Empire from the end of the Old Regime through the Napoleonic period. The origins, development, and outcome of the French Revolution, followed by the Haitian Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, will be our main focus. Particular attention will be paid to the global legacy of these late 18th and early 19th century revolutions in terms of such key modern political concepts as human rights, nationalism, social welfare, feminism, democracy, terrorism, abolitionism, capitalism, and revolution itself. Throughout the course, we will also emphasize the different and often conflicting ways in which historians have interpreted the meaning and consequences of this critical moment of upheaval.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
HIST 1250 Belief and Unbelief in Modern Thought
"God is dead," declared Friedrich Nietzsche, "and we have killed him." Nietzche's words came as a climax of a longer history of criticism of, and dissent toward, the religious foundations of European society and politics. The critique of religion had vast implications for the meaning of human life, the nature of the person, and the conception of political and social existence. The course will explore the intensifying debate over religion in the intellectual history of Europe, reaching from the Renaissance, through the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, to the twentieth century. Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These thinkers allow us to trace the varieties of irreligious experience that have emerged in modern European thought and their implications for both historical and philosophical understanding. Rather than drawing a straight line from belief to non-belief, however, we will consider how religion may linger even in “secular” thought and culture; and we will develop something of an “encounter” between critics and defenders of religion, such as Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber, to see how religious discourse evolved in response to the challenges of skepticism.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1250
1 Course Unit
HIST 1255 Governing the World: A History of International Relations, 1884-present
"Mankind's desire for peace can be realized only by the creation of a world government,” declared the New York Times in September 1945. This lecture course traces the origins of our contemporary ideas and institutions of global governance, by charting the history of international relations from the run-up to the First World War through to the fall-out of the Cold War. Together, we will uncover how various international orders have been built, challenged, and refashioned: from the pacifist dreams to banish war from the world and the emergence of international law and arbitration courts in the 1890s, to the shock of World War I, and the consequent rise of the League of Nations as the first embodiment of a truly international government after 1918, to the fascist revolt against this order, onto the emergence of international human rights following the cataclysm of the Nazi Holocaust, followed by the creation of the United Nations and the triumph of a free-trade liberal international order for over seventy years, followed by its gradual breakdown which is shacking our world today. This is a history that provides us with crucial resources to be thoughtful and engaged citizens of an ever-changing world, where so many problems span national borders.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1260 Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the Age of Napoleon
In this course we will read what many consider to be the greatest book in world literature. This work, Tolstoy's War and Peace, is devoted to one of the most momentous periods in world history, the Napoleonic Era (1789-1815). We will study both the book and the era of the Napoleonic Wars: the military campaigns of Napoleon and his opponents, the grand strategies of the age, political intrigues and diplomatic betrayals, the ideologies and human dramas, the relationship between art and history. How does literature help us to understand this era? How does history help us to understand this great book? Because we will read War and Peace over the course of the entire semester, readings will be manageable and very enjoyable.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 1262, REES 1380
1 Course Unit
HIST 1270 World War I
This survey course examines the outbreak, conduct, and aftermath of the First World War. The First World War put an end to the world of the 19th century and laid the foundations of the 20th century, the age of destruction and devastation. This course will examine the war in three components: the long-term and immediate causes of the First World War; the war's catastrophic conduct, on the battlefield and on the home front; and the war's devastating aftermath. While we will discuss military operations and certain battles, this course is not a military history of the war; it covers the social, economic, political and diplomatic aspects that contributed to the war's outbreak and made possible its execution over four devastating years. No preliminary knowledge or coursework is required.
Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either
1 Course Unit
HIST 1280 Origins of Nazism: From Democracy to Race War and Genocide
Where did the Nazis come from? Was the Weimar Republic bound to fail? Did the Treaty of Versailles or the Great Depression catapult the Nazis into power? What was the role of racism, of antisemitism? How did the regime consolidate itself? What was the role of ordinary people? How do we explain the Holocaust and what kind of a war was the Second World War? Grappling with these and more questions, the first half of the course focuses on Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic and its vibrant political culture. In the second half, we study the Nazi regime, how it consolidated its power and remade society based on the concepts of race and struggle. Discussions of race and race-making are crucial throughout the course. In the name of “racial purity,” the Nazi state moved ruthlessly against Germany’s Jewish population, cleansed German society of all “undesirable” elements, and waged a brutal war of extermination that aimed to racially reorder all of Europe. Thinking about Nazi racism and genocide, their origins and trajectories, in both its particular specifics and in a larger historical context is the main goal of this course.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GRMN 1306
1 Course Unit
HIST 1300 Gunpowder, Art and Diplomacy: Islamic Empires in the Early Modern World
In the sixteenth century, the political landscape of the Middle East, Central Asia, and India changed with the expansion and consolidation of new Islamic empires. Gunpowder had transformed the modes of warfare. Diplomacy followed new rules and forms of legitimation. The widespread use of Persian, Arabic and Turkish languages across the region allowed for an interconnected world of scholars, merchants, and diplomats. And each imperial court, those of the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals, found innovative and original forms of expression in art and literature. The expansion of these Islamic empires, each of them military giants and behemoths of bureaucracy, marked a new phase in world history. The course is divided in four sections. The first section introduces the student to major debates about the so-called gunpowder empires of the Islamic world as well as to comparative approaches to study them. The second section focuses on the transformations of modes of warfare and military organization. The third section considers the cultural history and artistic production of the imperial courts of the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Safavids. The fourth and final section investigates the social histories of these empires, their subjects, and the configuration of a world both connected and divided by commerce, expansion, and diplomacy.
Spring
Also Offered As: MELC 3560, NELC 3560
1 Course Unit
HIST 1310 Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
This course focuses on the history of selected African societies from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. The primary goal is to study the political, economic, social, and cultural history of a number of peoples who participated in the Atlantic slave trade or were touched by it during the era of their involvement. The course is designed to serve as an introduction to the history and culture of African peoples who entered the diaspora during the era of the slave trade. Its audience is students interested in the history of Africa, the African diaspora, and the Atlantic world, as well as those who want to learn about the history of the slave trade. Case studies will include the Yoruba, Akan, and Fon, as well as Senegambian and West-central African peoples.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1310, LALS 1310
1 Course Unit
HIST 1350 Faces of Jihad in African Islam
This course is designed to provide the students with a broad understanding of the history of Islam in Africa. The focus will be mostly on West Africa, but we will also look at developments in other regions of the continent. We will explore Islam not only as religious practice but also as ideology and an instrument of social change. We will examine the process of islamization in Africa and the different uses of Jihad. Topics include prophetic jihad, jihad of the pen and the different varieties of jihad of the sword throughout the history in Islam in sub-Saharan Africa.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1350
1 Course Unit
HIST 1358 Histories of Egypt
This course will explore Egypt’s impact on the world in several historical eras – the ancient past and its unparalleled legacy; the nineteenth century and nationalism; the twentieth century’s wars, peace and music and the twenty-first centuries lessons in revolution. We will examine European Egyptomania and Orientalism in the 19th century, Afrocentrism’s ambitions for Egypt, and Egypt’s centrality to pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. And we will explore the history as Egypt’s writers, filmmakers, musicians and poets have imagined it from the nineteenth century to the present.
Also Offered As: AFRC 1358, CIMS 1358
1 Course Unit
HIST 1359 Filming the Middle East
This course will take us through the history of the modern Middle East as told by the region's many film-makers. We will explore how cinema developed and grew throughout countries like Egypt, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Unusually for a typical course on the Middle East, we will also pay close attention to North Africa's film industry, with a deep exploration of the cinema of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Sudanese films will be an important part of our study as well. What does it mean to have a national cinema? Many of these countries' film industries grew under European occupation and colonialism. With independence, were more markets available to Middle Eastern films? Where did directors and screenwriters train? Who were the intended audiences for these films? We will watch canonical films from the region, many of which focus on or reflect the political turmoil and aftermath of wars. But we will also examine the lightness of comedies, which were usually much more popular with Middle Eastern audiences, and which reveal every bit as much about the region's histories. And we will watch and discuss a phenomenon not found in Western cinema - the Ramadan soap operas and historical reenactments that are unique to the Middle East.
Also Offered As: CIMS 1359, MELC 1970, NELC 1970
1 Course Unit
HIST 1360 Arab/Israeli Conflict in Literature and Film
This course will explore the origins, the history and, most importantly, the literary and cinematic art of the struggle that has endured for a century over the region that some call the Holy Land, some call Eretz Israel and others call Palestine. We will also consider religious motivations and interpretations that have inspired many involved in this conflict as well as the political consequences of world wars that contributed so greatly to the reconfiguration of the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and after the revelations of the Holocaust in Western Europe. While we will rely on a textbook for historical grounding. the most significant material we will use to learn this history will be films, novels, and short stories. Can the arts lead us to a different understanding of the lives lived through what seems like unending crisis?
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 1360, MELC 0675, NELC 0675
1 Course Unit
HIST 1361 Sex Matters: Politics of Sex in the Modern Middle East
The course concentrates on the history of sexuality as it informed and shaped political and social change in the Middle East, and vice versa, in an engagement with global historical contexts. What does sexuality have to do with power, political rule, and mass movements in the modern Middle East? What can the study of sexuality and body politics teach us about colonialism and state formation over centuries of imperial rules and colonial regimes, as well as in the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism? What is the relationship between studying LGBTQIA+ movements alongside with feminism and the use of sex and sexuality as an analytical category? This course will investigate selected themes such as modernity, nationalism, and colonization and connect them to harem lives, politics of veiling/unveiling, reproductive rights, race, polygamy, masculinity, and early modern concepts of same-sex desire in connection with modern queer thought and activism to ask questions about the preconceived notions about "Middle Eastern sexualities." The course focuses on discussing on some of the many roles that sex and gender politics have played in social and political change in the Middle East, while thinking about gender, history, and society comparatively and transnationally.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 1361
1 Course Unit
HIST 1362 The Making of Modern Israel and Palestine
This course analyzes the making of a modern Jewish state in the land of Israel/Palestine and the role of Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, and global politics in that process. Beginning in 19th-century Europe and the Middle East, we will study the ideas, movements, and people that shaped what has come to be known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Students will explore the impact of international factors on the struggles that resulted from the Zionist project in Israel/Palestine and Arab reactions to it across three periods: imperialism and world wars (1860s-1940s), cold war (late 1940s-1990), and multi-polarity (1990s-present).
Also Offered As: JWST 1362, PSCI 1141
1 Course Unit
HIST 1365 Bacteria, Bodies, and Empires: Medicine and Healing in the Eastern Mediterranean (15th-21st c.)
Bacteria, Bodies, and Empires is a survey course about the history of medicine in the Eastern Mediterranean from early modern period to the present. It addresses the major issues and questions concerning bodies, diseases, and medical institutions within the context of major historical developments in the world and region’s history. The course looks at how medicine, knowledge, and practices about diseases and bodies changed political and social conditions, as well as how socio-political changes defined and transformed people's perceptions of health, life, and the environment. Scholars have frequently examined the history of medicine in Eastern Mediterranean societies, either in relation to Islamic culture in the early modern period or, more recently, in relation to Westernization and modernization. By situating the history of medical knowledge and practices in the Eastern Mediterranean within global history, this course seeks to challenge these fixed paradigms and shed light on questions and research agendas that will unearth the encounters, connections, and mobility of bacteria, bodies, and medical methods among various communities.
Also Offered As: HSOC 1362
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 2365
1 Course Unit
HIST 1382 Modern Iran
“Iran” acquired its current appellation through a process of national and international negotiation. To understand its modern history requires a retrospective analysis of international processes, which have guided Iran’s political and cultural transformations in the contemporary period. Iran’s engagement with its neighbors and with other transnational communities, from the nineteenth to the 21st century, has remained a source of conflict and cultural flux, especially along its volatile boundaries. Its past has become embedded in the broad histories of the Middle East and thus cannot be studied in isolation. This course will traverse the history of Iran from the monarchic era to the Islamic Republic. It will offer readings of primary accounts, historical newspapers, archival documents, and unpublished manuscript sources to show the breadth of the Persianate world and the significance of Iran’s involvement in the contemporary Middle East, from social issues to arms build-up.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1388 From Oil Fields to Soccer Fields: The Middle East in the 20th Century
How did the Middle East become modern? Life changed in spectacular ways for the people of the Middle East in the span of a century. Oil -- once considered a scarce natural commodity -- was discovered in many countries and exported in substantial quantities that altered the economic landscape of the world. Movie theaters, sewage systems, and public housing projects changed the urban backdrop of Middle Eastern cities and towns. Soccer, swimming, and volleyball became some of the new-fangled sports embraced by Middle Eastern communities. This course will traverse these fascinating and fraught cultural transformations of the Middle East in the twentieth century. Although inclusive of the military battles and conflicts that have affected the region, this class will move beyond the cliches of war to show the range of issues and ideas with which intellectuals and communities grappled. The cultural politics and economic value of oil as well as the formation of a vibrant cultural life will be among the topics covered. By considering illustrative moments that shed light on the political history of the period, this course will develop a nuanced framework to approach the history of the U.S. involvement in the region, the Iran-Iraq war, the Arab/Israeli conflict, and the current crises in the Persian Gulf. Students are required to participate in every lecture and/or recitation, as on Thursdays, part of the class time will be devoted to discussing select documents provided by the instructor. Please keep in mind that lectures do not duplicate readings, but rather supplement them. We will also watch video clips during some lectures. In addition, students are expected to complete each week's readings before class. Course requirements include satisfactory performance on a Powerpoint presentation related to the weekly readings, 2 short factual quizzes, and 7-page paper. The paper can be on a topic of contemporary interest that is placed in the proper historical context.
Also Offered As: MELC 0690, NELC 0690
1 Course Unit
HIST 1400 Silver and Gold in the Americas from pre-history to the present
Precious metals have shaped pre-Colombian economies and socio-cultural processes in the Americas for thousands of years. After 1492, gold and silver sent from the "New World" to the "Old World" played a key role in changing economies all over the world. Locally, mining centers were places marked by forced labor, conspicuous consumption, and the destruction of ecosystems. Internationally, gold and silver prices have long had outsized effects on monetary and trade policies. This course uses case studies to delve into the fascinating history of precious metals and mining in North and South America. We will analyze documents describing the gold objects ransacked by Spanish conquistadors, examine 17th Century proto-industrial silver mining at Potosi, trace the impact and human cost of the huge gold strikes in Minas Gerais, in colonial Brazil, read new work on the California and Yukon moments of "rush" and their long-term impact on US monetary policy, and follow new reports about the conflicts at the heart of transnational gold mining in the present. Students will gain experience working with primary sources and will produce an in-depth research paper.
Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 1400
1 Course Unit
HIST 1475 Brazil: The Long Struggle for Democracy, 1500-Present
In the past decade, Brazil has emerged a leading global power. As the world's fifth-largest country, by size and population, and the ninth-largest by GDP, Brazil exerts tremendous influence on international politics and the global economy, seen in its position as an emerging BRIC nation and a regional heavyweight in South America. Brazil is often in the news for its strides in social welfare, leading investments in the Global South, as host of the World Cup and Olympics, and, most recently, for its political instability. It is also a nation of deep contradictions, in which myth of racial democracy -- the longstanding creed that Brazilian society has escaped racial discrimination -- functions alongside pervasive social inequality, state violence, political corruption, and an unforgiving penal system. This course examines six centuries of Brazilian history. It highlights the interplay between global events -- colonialism, slavery and emancipation, capitalism, and democratization -- and the local geographies, popular cultures, and social movements that have shaped this multi-ethnic and expansive nation. In particular, the readings will highlight Brazil's place in Latin America and the Lusophone World, as well as the ways in which Brazil stands as a counterpoint to the United States, especially in terms of the legacy of slavery and race relation. In this lecture, we will also follow the current political and economic crises unfolding in Brazil, at a moment when it has become all the more important to evaluate just how South America's largest nation has shaped and been shaped by global events.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1475, LALS 1475
1 Course Unit
HIST 1540 Religion and Politics in South Asia, c. 1000-2000
This lecture course will examine the relationship between religion and politics in a region which has seen renewed conflicts in the name of religious communities over the past thirty years: South Asia. The course will cover the history of such conflicts between 1000 and 2000 C.E., and the genealogy of present-day conflicts, whether rooted in the recent past or in the distant past. The emphasis will be on political patronage of religious shrines and its converse, iconoclasm; on religious conversions; on clashes that were perceived as clashes between religious communities; on doctrinal and legal reforms of religious traditions and on popular religious movements and their appeal at particular historical moments. We will explore the politics of religion and of religious affiliation from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries by reading primary sources and reviewing the rich historiography. No prior knowledge of South Asia is expected.
Also Offered As: SAST 1540
1 Course Unit
HIST 1550 East Asian Diplomacy
Home to four of the five most populous states and four of the five largest economies, the Asia/Pacific is arguably the most dynamic region in the twenty-first century. At the same time, Cold War remnants (a divided Korea and China) and major geopolitical shifts (the rise of China and India, decline of the US and Japan) contribute significantly to the volatility of our world. This course will examine the political, economic, and geopolitical dynamism of the region through a survey of relations among the great powers in Asia from the sixteenth century to the present. Special emphasis will be given to regional and global developments from the perspective of the three principal East Asian states--China, Japan and Korea. We will explore the many informal, as well as formal, means of intercourse that have made East Asia what it is today. Graduate students should consult graduate syllabus for graduate reading list, special recitation time and graduate requirements.
Fall
Also Offered As: EALC 1711
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 5550
1 Course Unit
HIST 1551 History of US-China Relations
The list of issues shaping the US-China relationship is extensive. Trade and investment, the status and future of Taiwan, China’s expansion into the South China Sea and its relationships with East and Southeast Asian neighbors, the Belt and Road Initiative and China’s expanding influence in the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, human rights, the status of Hong Kong, concerns about Xinjiang, technology transfer, intellectual property and cyberespionage, the status of people-to-people engagement in fields like education, health and cultural exchange and many others are all ongoing points of discussion between the two great powers. Understanding these issues in the present day requires exploring how these issues evolved over the decades and even centuries of engagement between the United States and China. Are there similarities between America’s Open-Door policy of the late 19th century and its position on trade with China today? What are the prospects for Taiwan policy given the complicated diplomatic history surrounding the recognition of the People’s Republic in the 1970s? When and why did human rights come to be a defining issue in the US-China relationship and how has it evolved over time? How have people-to-people exchanges been understood to undergird the relationship? How are 21st c. flashpoints, such as technology competition and cyberespionage, impacting the traditional list of tensions, such as Taiwan, maritime conflicts, and geopolitics in East Asia? What are the consistent through lines in America’s policies toward China and what has changed? This course will look at a series of issues that are at the center of the US-China relationship through an historical lens, providing students with insight into the forces that have shaped positions on both sides. Students will develop an understanding of key issues in the diplomatic relationship the United States and China today and their deep historical roots. No previous study of Chinese history is required for this course, but students will be expected to engage enthusiastically with the course material.
Also Offered As: EALC 1734
1 Course Unit
HIST 1553 Modern Chinese Legal History
This course examines modern Chinese history through the lens of law and legal development. We will begin by considering the imperial legal tradition, and then look closely at the successive waves of rupture and reform wrought upon Chinese law and legal institutions by each of the dramatic turns of modern Chinese history from the late Qing dynasty onward — including the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, 1949 CCP Revolution, 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, post-1978 Reform and Opening — through to the “new era” announced in 2017. Law at once shapes and is shaped by its social, economic, and political environment. As such, focusing on its evolution over time can be especially useful for tracking historical continuity and change more broadly. Throughout, the course will include a series of theoretical inquiries, reflecting upon how modern Chinese legal history sheds light inter alia on the relationship between law and culture, law and development, law and political order.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1560 Economic Histories of Modern South Asia, c. 1600 - Present
Courses on the economic history of South Asia typically begin circa 1750, when European Company produced data series legible to economic historians first become available. This course departs from that trend, by beginning with the expansion of the Mughal empire and its deeply bureaucratized revenue system, along with the arrival of the British and Dutch East India Companies in the early seventeenth century. The course ends not in 1947 (with the decolonization of the subcontinent), but rather with the liberalization of independent national economies in the late twentieth century, which significantly altered the commercial landscape by permitting the entrance of foreign direct investment. We will analyze numerous economic and socio-political phenomena that played into commercial development and change across the subcontinent during this period, including: the organization and influence of colonial joint-stock companies; systems of land tenure; the role of ecology in affecting economic production and consumption; industrial growth and the rise of economic urbanism; labor organization and the significance of kinship and patronage; and the immense influence of the informal (i.e. “shadow” or “black”) economy, comprising some three-fourths of the South Asian labor force. The course will also introduce students to some of the theoretical literature in economic history scholarship. No prior knowledge of south Asia or economic history is required.
Also Offered As: SAST 1560
1 Course Unit
HIST 1561 Contemporary South Asia
This course provides an overview of the history of contemporary South Asia from 1900 to 2000. The course will explore the impact of colonialism and diverse responses to colonial rule in the region. We will then cover the emergence of nationalism(s), the Partition of the subcontinent, and the contemporary political dynamics of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Special attention will be given to issues of gender, religion, and caste. Readings will incorporate both scholarly articles, as well as sections from important memoirs, lectures, novels, short stories and other primary sources. This course has no prerequisites, and assumes no prior knowledge of the topic
Also Offered As: SAST 1561
1 Course Unit
HIST 1600 Jews and Judaism in Antiquity
A broad introduction to the history of Jewish civilization from its Biblical beginnings to the Middle Ages, with the main focus on the formative period of classical rabbinic Judaism and on the symbiotic relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Spring
Also Offered As: JWST 1600, MELC 0350, NELC 0350, RELS 1600
1 Course Unit
HIST 1610 Medieval and Early Modern Jewry
Exploration of intellectual, social, and cultural developments in Jewish civilization from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the assault on established conceptions of faith and religious authority in 17th century Europe, that is, from the age of Mohammed to that of Spinoza. Particular attention will be paid to the interaction of Jewish culture with those of Christianity and Islam.
Fall
Also Offered As: JWST 1610, MELC 0355, NELC 0355, RELS 1610
1 Course Unit
HIST 1620 The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire 1450-1700
This course will provide students with a solid knowledge of the history of early modern Spain (1450-1700). Through readings of primary and secondary texts that offer a complex vision of the cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic contexts and processes, students will be able to appreciate the intricacies of Spain's historical evolution. The course focuses on the rise and decline of the Spanish monarchy: the conditions that enabled Spain to become the most powerful monarchy in early modern times, and the conditions that led to its decline. This course also touches upon other important aspects critical to understanding early modern Spain: relationships among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula; the conquest and colonization of the New World; and early modern debates about Spain's rights to occupy America and the so-called "destruction of the Indies."
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 1620
1 Course Unit
HIST 1625 Era of Revolutions in the Atlantic World
This class examines the global ramifications of the era of Atlantic revolutions from the 1770s through the 1820s. With a particular focus on French Saint Domingue and Latin America, it provides an overview of key events and individuals from the period. Along the way, it assesses the impact of the American and French revolutions on the breakdown of colonial regimes across the Americas. Students will learn how to think critically about citizenship, constitutional power, and independence movements throughout the Atlantic world. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were seriously challenged in places such as Haiti, and the class investigates the appropriation and circulation of revolutionary ideas by enslaved people and other subaltern groups.
Also Offered As: AFRC 1625, LALS 1625
1 Course Unit
HIST 1650 Human-Animal Relationships in Historical Perspective
We live in a paradoxical moment in the history of people's relationships with animals. Certain species suffer today more than ever due to environmental degradation and modern food production practices. Yet other mammalian species are subject to a degree of sentimental attention (perhaps) unprecedented in history. This paradox is related to an unresolved tension in Western cultures: do the commonalities that bind humans to other animals unite them more or less than the differences that divide them? The course is organized around three main segments: animal domestication; modes of interaction (hunting, husbandry, pets, science) in early modern Europe; and contemporary science. We will conclude with a consideration of current philosophical and ethical perspectives of our treatment of non-human animals. By considering a variety of disciplinary approaches but with an emphasis on historians' methodologies, we will investigate these questions through careful reading of primary sources as well as secondary sources.
Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 1700 The African Diaspora: Global Dimensions
This class examines the cultural and social ramifications of the African diaspora on a global level. It is divided into two major sections. The first section provides the historical background to the African diaspora by focusing on the forced migration of Africans to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. We will then delve into the black experience in French and British colonial spaces. In this section, we will also endeavor to move beyond the Atlantic-centric paradigm in studies of the African diaspora by examining free and unfree migrations of African people across the Indian Ocean to places as far away as India and the Philippines. The second half of the class devotes significant attention to the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism in places like Brazil, Cuba and the United States. In this section, we will discuss such issues as race relations, the struggle for civil rights for African-descent people as well as the emergence and the implementation of affirmative action policies in places like Brazil and the US.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1700, LALS 1700
1 Course Unit
HIST 1702 Introduction to Latin American and Latinx Studies
Designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American and Latinx Studies, this is a seminar oriented toward first and second year students. Readings will range widely, from scholarly work on the colonial world that followed from and pushed back against the "conquest"; to literary and artistic explorations of Latin American identities; to social scientists' explorations of how Latinxs are changing the United States in the current generation.
Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 0720
1 Course Unit
HIST 1706 Global Environmental History from the Paleolithic to the Present
This course explores the changing relationships between human beings and the natural world from early history to the present. We will consider the various ways humans across the globe have interacted with and modified the natural world by using fire, domesticating plants and animals, extracting minerals and energy, designing petro-chemicals, splitting atoms and leaving behind wastes of all sorts. Together we consider the impacts, ranging from population expansion to species extinctions and climate change. We examine how human interactions with the natural world relate to broader cultural processes such as religion, colonialism and capitalism, and why it is important to understand the past, even the deep past, in order to rise to the challenges of the present.
Also Offered As: ENVS 1400
1 Course Unit
HIST 1708 Revolutionary Ideas, Ideologies of Revolution
Ideas play an intangible role in defining culture and politics. Mass movements and revolutions have become a familiar feature of modern social activism and political life. This course surveys some of the major revolutions and ideologies that have caused significant change, beginning with revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries (American, French, Haitian) and then the rise of modern revolutions in Russia (Bolshevik), South Asia and Africa (anti-racist, decolonizing), and the Middle East (constitutional, anti-establishment, Islamic, gender). We will read and critique the writings of theorists of revolution (ex: John Locke, Karl Marx, Crane Brinton, Francois Furet). In addition, we will examine the icons of imperialism and consider varying sources of conflict within and between revolutionary states. Finally, we will assess artistic revolutions and determine how revolutionary changes in cinema, literature, and communication contribute to the realization of social upheavals. Novels, essays, films, classic texts, social media, and secondary works will comprise the bulk of the readings. The weekly assignments will focus on themes that show the nature of political change in various geographic settings to help students put the ideas of revolt and protest in the proper historical context.
1 Course Unit
HIST 1710 Jews in the Modern World
This course offers an intensive survey of the major currents in Jewish culture and society from the late middle ages to the present. Focusing upon the different societies in which Jews have lived, the course explores Jewish responses to the political, socio-economic, and cultural challenges of modernity. Topics to be covered include the political emancipation of Jews, the creation of new religious movements within Judaism, Jewish socialism, antisemitism, Zionism, the Holocaust, and the emergence of new Jewish communities in Israel and the United States. No prior background in Jewish history is expected.
Spring
Also Offered As: JWST 1710, MELC 0360, NELC 0360, RELS 1710
1 Course Unit
HIST 1711 Remembering the Holocaust
This course explores how the Holocaust has been constructed as an event in popular memory. Beginning in the mid-1940s, with the first attempts to narrate what had transpired during the Nazi era, this seminar traces the ways that the Holocaust became codified as a distinct episode in history. Taking a chronological approach, the course follows the evolution of historical and popular ideas about the Holocaust. We will examine works produced in the United States, Europe, and Israel, and explore an array of forms, including documentary and fictional film, radio and television broadcasting, museum displays, tourist practices, and monuments. Students will be introduced to unfamiliar sources and also asked to reconsider some well-known Holocaust documents and institutions.
Also Offered As: JWST 1711
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 3704
1 Course Unit
HIST 1731 Financial Meltdown, Past and Present
Economic history is increasingly recognized as a crucial source of policy advice and is invoked with growing frequency in public debates. In particular, the subprime crisis in 2008 and after has generated a demand for "historical perspective" that would improve the understanding of the causes of financial turmoil and facilitate the prevention of comparable catastrophes. This course begins with a review of the principal features of the subprime crisis of 2008 and asks, so to speak, "how did we get there?" It answers by providing historical insights that shed light on crucial aspects of financial disasters. This is a history course, engaging with topics pertaining to economics, law and politics (national and international). Students with diverse backgrounds are expected to benefit from this course through acquiring a concrete knowledge of the historical evolution of fundamental institutions of financial capitalism. Ultimately, students enrolling in this course are expected to achieve proficiency in historically informed discussion of the mechanisms that were played out in the subprime crisis and beyond.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ECON 0620
1 Course Unit
HIST 1733 Free Speech and Censorship
This course will explore the idea of free speech - its justification, its relationship to various forms of censorship, and its proper limits - as a historical, philosophical, legal, and ultimately, political question. In the first half of the course, we will explore the long history across the West of the regulation of various kinds of ideas and their expression, from malicious gossip to heresies, and read classic arguments for and against censorship, copyright protections, and standards of taste and decency and of truth. In the second part of the seminar, after looking at how the idea of freedom of speech came to seem an existential prerequisite for democracy as well as individual liberty, we will take up the historical and philosophical questions posed by such recent dilemmas as whether or not hate speech deserves the protection of the First Amendment, the distinction between art and pornography from the perspective of freedom of expression, speech during wartime, and the transformative effects of the internet on the circulation and regulation of ideas. We will end the semester by thinking about the globalization of the idea of free speech as a human right and its implications, both positive and negative. Readings will range from Robert Darnton's The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, to documents concerning the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo and law review articles about Citizens United v. FEC. We will also make considerable use of local resources, from museums to the library.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 1735 Cold War: Global History
The Cold War was more than simply a military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union; it was the frame within which the entire world developed (for better or worse) for nearly five decades. This course will examine the cold War as a global phenomenon, covering not only the military and diplomatic history of the period, but also examining the social and cultural impact of the superpower confrontation. We will cover the origins of the conflict, the interplay between periods of tension and detente, the relative significance of disagreements within the opposing blocs, and the relationship between the "center" of the conflict in the North Atlantic/European area and the global "periphery".
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: REES 1370
1 Course Unit
HIST 1740 Capitalism, Socialism, and Crisis in the 20th Century Americas
From the crisis of the Great Depression through the 1970s, the United States and Latin America produced remarkable efforts to remake society and political economy. This course analyzes the Cuban and Guatemalan revolutions, as well as social movements that transformed the United States: the black freedom movement, the labor movement, and changing forms of Latinx politics. In all three countries, Americans looked for ways to reform capitalism or build socialism; address entrenched patterns of racism; define and realize democracy; and achieve national independence. They conceived of these challenges in dramatically different ways. Together, we’ll compare national histories and analyze the relationships between national upheavals.
Fall
Also Offered As: LALS 1740
1 Course Unit
HIST 1755 Democracy and Capitalism in a Global World, 1873-present (SNF Paideia Program Course)
What is capitalism? What is democracy? And what is the relationship between the two? Socialist critics, including revolutionaries like the German communist Rosa Luxemburg and reformists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, have long argued that capitalism is a despotic regime. But by the 1940s, new defenders of capitalism—known as “neoliberals”—began to tie political freedoms to free markets. Then in the crucible of the Cold War, modernization theorists began to argue that the democratization of Europe and the U.S. had been caused by rising levels of wealth. The U.S. then mobilized this historical logic to defend free markets abroad, in its fight to make the world safe for democracy against the Communist East. Ever since the 2008 crisis, however, the continued co-existence of democracy and capitalism no longer seems to be a given in a world fractured by growing inequalities and the rise of far-right populist politics. Rather than approaching the question of democracy and capitalism’s potential (in)compatibility from a theoretical angle, we will look at the question historically: when have democracy and capitalism been at odds? What historical conditions have underpinned their mutual destruction? We will pay special attention to the case of the first global depression of the 1870s-1890s and the rise of the new right in Western Europe, as well as the rise of fascism during the 1930s. On the other hand, when and how have democracy and capitalism mutually co-existed—and even flourished? We will take a good hard look at the institutions and ideas undergirding the post-World War II golden age of “democratic capitalism” and the expansion of welfare states. This course will introduce students to major thinkers, texts, and debates in the history of political economy and the social sciences during the long 20th century, including Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, W. E. B. Dubois, Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 0024
1 Course Unit
HIST 1761 Sex and Empire
This course explores the historical narratives surrounding modern empires and colonialism, with a specific focus on the role of sex and gender. Modern empires as complex political and social structures built upon and operated on the basis of difference—racial, religious, sexual. Colonial encounters not only produced unequal and uneven conditions for the colonized, but also in the construction of racialized and gendered structures in the formation of modern capitalism, market economies, political regimes, citizenship, everyday violence and so on. This course examines the historical literature on the intersections of power and historical experience in the framework of a variety of themes including modern family, marriage, slavery, property, labor, incarceration, sex trafficking, science of sex, displacement, and reproduction as they relate to sexuality, race, and religion categories in imperial contexts. The course spans the early nineteenth century to the present and is framed around global and cross-cultural perspective to analyze how scholars have engaged with sexuality and gender to explore broader themes pertaining to formation of modern empires and colonialism.
Also Offered As: GSWS 1761
1 Course Unit
HIST 1765 Human, Humanity, Humanitarianism: A Global History from Abolitionism to USAID
This course examines the formation of the modern notions of human, humanity, and human rights as well as the emergence of institutions of humanitarianism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course begins with a theoretical study of religious and secular implications of human and humanitarianism as well as social relief and charity in diverse historical settings from the pre-modern and modern times around the world. Following the conceptual analysis, it delves into the historical and social circumstances of humanitarian politics and discourses that shaped human (and environmental) stories of conflict and survival in the contexts of modern war-making, displacement, public health and epidemic diseases as well as natural disasters. It moves from the “long” nineteenth century into twentieth-century political, social, medical, and natural events by analyzing the emergence of a new and global vocabulary of humanitarianism such as refugee, asylum, settlement, and trafficking. Students explore the connections and distinctions between national and supra-national, colonial and postcolonial, metropole and colony. The course will cover the humanitarian role of Red Cross/Crescent, League of Nations, missionary networks as well as Cold War initiatives such as USAID, PathFinder Fund, UNHCR, Rockefeller Foundation, as well as post-Cold War initiatives such as Physicians without Borders and their impact on local practices of education, medical assistance, and public health networks, gender dynamics as well as natural resources and refugee settlement architecture.
Also Offered As: GSWS 1765
1 Course Unit
HIST 1785 American Expansion in the Pacific
This course examines America's expansion into the Pacific with a focus on the colonization of Hawai'i and the Philippines. The class deals with various issues, including the meaning of "frontier," imperialism, development of capitalist economies and trade relations in the region, diplomacy and militarism, migration and racism, and colonial histories of the US West, the Pacific Islands, and East Asia.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ASAM 3100
1 Course Unit
HIST 1788 Civilizations at Odds? The United States and the Middle East
America has often been depicted in the Middle East either as a benevolent superpower or an ill-meaning enemy – in other words, foe or friend, Satan or saint. In America, too, stereotypes of the Middle East abound as home to the uber-wealthy, tyrants, and fanatics. This course will explore the relationship between the United States and the Middle East by moving beyond such facile depictions. We will read works of history and political analysis to shape our understanding of this relationship and to explore cross-cultural perspectives. Our goal is to understand why a century of interaction has sometimes done little to bring peace and greater understanding between these two intertwined communities. By reading a range of historical accounts, we will consider the origins of this cultural and diplomatic encounter. The readings will shed light on the extent of America’s involvement in the Middle East in the twentieth century. We will consider the impact of oil diplomacy on U.S.-Middle East relations, as well as the role of ideology and culture, in an effort to comprehend the antagonism that exists on a state-to-state level in some contexts. Most importantly, we will grapple with the ways in which international politics disrupts the lives of citizens trapped in the throes of political turmoil.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: MELC 0680, NELC 0680
1 Course Unit
HIST 2000 History Workshop
This course introduces newly declared History Majors to the History Department and lays the foundation for future coursework, including research seminars, in History. Students will be introduced to various methods used to reconstruct and explain the past in different eras and places. Drawing on the rich resources available at Penn and in the Philadelphia region, students will also learn how to research and write history themselves. Throughout the semester, small research and writing assignments will allow students to try out different approaches and hone their skills as both analysts and writers of history.
1 Course Unit
HIST 2104 American Books/Books in America
This course investigates book histories and the worlds of readers, printers, publishers, and libraries in the Americas, from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ENGL 2604
1 Course Unit
HIST 2151 History of Baseball, 1840 to the present
This course explores the history of baseball in the United States. It covers, among other topics, the first amateur clubs in the urban North, the professionalization and nationalization of the sport during and after the Civil War era, the rise of fandom, baseball’s relationship to anxieties about manhood and democracy, tensions between labor and management, the Negro Leagues, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Nisei baseball during World War Two, Jackie Robinson and desegregation, and the Latinization of baseball. The history of baseball is, in many respects, the history of the United States writ large as well as the history of the myths that Americans tell about themselves.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2153 History Behind the Headlines: Contemporary U.S. Politics and Policy
History Behind the Headlines offers students the opportunity to explore the historical roots and development of current, pressing questions of U.S. politics and public policy. Drawing upon historical methodologies and scholarship as well recent work in political science and sociology, this reading seminar offers deep context for understanding some of the most important contemporary issues in American public life. Topics will likely include political polarization, the incarceration crisis, immigration, lobbying (that is, the role of money in democracy), and, perhaps, impeachment. In addition to a number of short response and op-ed style writing assignments, students will write and present a final project on a contemporary political or policy issue of their choosing. These final projects might take a variety of forms, including traditional historical research essays, policy white papers, long form investigative journalism, or projects using digital media.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2154 The State of the Union is not Good: The US in Crisis in the 1970s
Vietnam. Watergate. Deindustrialization. Inflation. Disco. These events and forces only begin to scratch the surface of the social, cultural, political, and economic transformations that remade American life in the 1970s and which, by 1975, forced President Gerald Ford to concede “that the state of the union is not good.” Beyond these familiar topics, this reading seminar will explore a range of developments that are crucial for understanding why the 1970s was perhaps the pivotal decade in making modern American politics, economics, and culture. Topics will include the fate of the Civil Rights movement and the war on crime; the rise and impact of second wave feminism; the rise of the modern conservative coalition (e.g., its religious, economic, and white working-class components); the emergence of the finance economy; the reorientation of organized labor and the remaking of the Democratic Party; the explosion of “therapeutic” cultures of self-help, individualism, and entrepreneurialism; and the rise of the Sunbelt as the nation’s dominant cultural, political, and economic region.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2157 Petrosylvania: Fossil Fuel and Environmental Justice in Philadelphia
Fossil fuel powered the making--now the unmaking--of the modern world. As the first fossil fuel state, Pennsylvania led the United States toward an energy-intensive economy, a technological pathway with planetary consequences. The purpose of this seminar is to perform a historical accounting--and an ethical reckoning--of coal, oil, and natural gas. Specifically, students will investigate the histories and legacies of fossil fuel in connection to three entities: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Under instructor guidance, students will do original research, some of it online, much the rest of it in archives, on and off campus, in and around Philadelphia. Philly-based research may also involve fieldwork. While based in historical sources and methods, this course intersects with business, finance, policy, environmental science, environmental engineering, urban and regional planning, public health, and social justice. Student projects may take multiple forms, individual and collaborative, from traditional papers to data visualizations prepared with assistance from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. Through their research, students will contribute to a multi-year project that will ultimately be made available to the public.
Also Offered As: ENVS 2400
1 Course Unit
HIST 2158 News, Media and American Democracy
At separate moments, Thomas Jefferson famously declared both that newspapers were crucial to sustain a nation and that a person who never looked at a newspaper was better informed than a regular reader of the press. The ideal of an informed citizenry occupies a central spot in our understanding of the democratic project in the United States, and, consequently, the news and the media play a vital role. But the news can manipulate and distort as well as inform. As Americans on both the Left and Right wonder today, how does media support or imperil our democratic prospects? In this course we will consider how the changing ways Americans have learned about the world have shaped how they have engaged with it. We will explore the shape, role and impact of media in the United States from the 18th to the 21st centuries. As we examine evolving forms of print, film, radio, television and internet we will consider how Americans have integrated media into their lives, and the contested nature of news, citizenship and democracy. Throughout, we will explore the importance of the different media that conveyed news in the past – and think about what that means for us in the present moment as news travels through new channels.
1 Course Unit
HIST 2159 The History of Family Separation
This course examines the socio-legal history of family separation in the United States. From the period of slavery to the present-day, the United States has a long history of separating and remaking families. Black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, and immigrant communities have navigated the precarious nature of family separation and the legal regime of local, state, and federal law that substantiated it. In this course, we will trace how families have navigated domains of family separation and the reasoning that compelled such separation in the first place. Through an intersectional focus that embraces race, class, disability, and gender, we will underline who has endured family separation and how such separation has remade the very definition of family in the United States.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2159, ASAM 2159, GSWS 2159
1 Course Unit
HIST 2161 The Civil Rights Movement
This course will examine the classical phase of the African American Civil Rights Movement between the years 1954 and 1968. Focusing primarily on the American South, this class will explore the nature of Jim Crow-era racial segregation and the origins and effects of the massive rise in social protests that fundamentally reshaped race in the United States of America and influenced social and political movements across the world. We will study iconic civil rights campaigns and legendary figures, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1964 Freedom Summer, and Fannie Lou Hamer, while also closely examining the activism of lesser-known actors and analyzing how dramatic racial alterations affected the lives of everyday people.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2161
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 3151
1 Course Unit
HIST 2200 Florence in History
Florence is justly famous for its art and learning, especially during the era of the Renaissance. It was also one of the most literate states in Europe during this era; thanks to the city’s 3 abundant records, it is one of the best-studied cities in Europe from the later Middle Ages through the early modern era. Our course readings present a mix of major primary sources, synthetic summaries, and important modern scholarship. Most of our class time will focus on the information and issues they raise.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ITAL 2200
1 Course Unit
HIST 2201 The City of Rome: From Constantine to the Borgias
The great city of Rome outlived its empire and its emperors. What happened to the Eternal City after “the fall of the Roman Empire in the West?” In this course, we will follow the story of this great city, its people, its buildings old and new, and its legacy across Italy, Europe, and beyond. Rome rebuilt and reshaped itself through the Middle Ages: home for popes, destination for pilgrims, power broker for Italy. It became a great Renaissance and early modern city, a center of art and architecture, of religion, and of politics. We will be reading a mix of primary sources and modern scholarship. All required texts are in English, though students who take this course for Italian Studies credit may choose to read some works in Italian.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ITAL 2201
1 Course Unit
HIST 2202 Taking Things: A History of Property and Law
This class looks at the history of the idea of property from antiquity to contemporary society though various specific themes and problems. We will begin with early development of the idea of property in Roman law. How was the idea of property explained, and what were the basic legal concepts associated with taking, using and owning? How did people lay claim to things wild or unowned? We will then move through medieval, early modern and modern periods to examine specific questions. How were people made into things? How do we create rights in intangibles? What are the limits of rights in property? Property is in many ways a central concept in relations between people in their everyday life. It is also a cornerstone of political ideology. This class will explore the history behind how we make and distinguish between ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2203 Introduction to Print Culture
This course examines the writing, printing, dissemination, interpretation, and censorship of specific works in Early modern England, France, Italy, Spain and America. The course is an introduction to the history of authorship, publishing, and reading at the age of print culture from Gutenberg to Franklin. All the texts analyzed in the course (the Bible, Montaigne's Essays, Shakespeare's plays, Don Quixote, Pamela among them) are available in English but the course pays particular attention to the massive range of translations in early modern period. its main focus are the relation between the "printing revolution" and scribal culture, censorship and transgression, the birth of the author and collaborative writing, and reading practices from humanist techniques to reading of the novels. The course is based on the exceptional collections of rare books and manuscripts at Penn and in Philadelphia and it is taught in the Van Pelt Library.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ENGL 1609
1 Course Unit
HIST 2204 Food and Diet in Early Europe: Farm to Table in the Renaissance
What did medieval and Renaissance Europeans choose to eat? What did they have to eat? Before the age of mass transportation, was all food locally sourced? In an era when most medicines were plant based, what did it mean to eat a balanced diet? “Feed a cold, starve a fever.” Why? In this course we will examine food, foodways, and diet in European culture, thought, and society with a focus on the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, and with a mix of primary sources and modern scholarship on food, cuisine, religion, and diet.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ITAL 2204
1 Course Unit
HIST 2205 Religious Conflict and Coexistence in Early Modern Europe
Europe’s early modern period (roughly 1450-1750) has been described an “age of religious wars,” with the Reformation and contact with the New World prompting the formation of new fault lines, new collectives, and the reshaping of old animosities in new expressions. It was a period of bloody riots between Catholics and Protestants, expulsions of Jews and Muslims, prosecution of heretics, martyrdoms of saints, and inquisitions of witches. But it was also an age of living together, of pragmatism, and of coexistence. This seminar explores the complexities and curiosities of religious intellectual, political, social, and daily life as people across religious lines clashed, cooperated, communicated, and carried-on. We will explore the experiences both of influential thinkers but also ordinary people, and ask how and why people were willing, in the name of religion, to persecute, prosecute, fight, kill, and die, and how others traded and traveled together, defended each other, and even married across religious lines.
Also Offered As: JWST 2225
1 Course Unit
HIST 2206 Neighbors and Strangers: Jews and Christians in Premodern Europe
The history of Christians and Jews—and of Judaism and Christianity—is an entangled one. From antiquity the two groups gained understandings of themselves in relation to the other, and that story defined much of the lives of each throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period. At times this relationship was a hostile one, but it was also a force for creativity and a basic fact of life. This course approaches the history of relations between Christians and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (ca. 1000-1800), exploring both the bases of hatred and the possibilities of coexistence. We will look at episodes of crusader violence, mass expulsion, and religious polemic alongside exchanges in taverns, shared child-rearing, and sexual encounters. We will examine sources from both Christians and Jews, recovering voices from across this seeming divide, encountering both the ideals imagined by elites and intellectuals, and the messy—and more interesting!—realities of living side-by-side for centuries. Class meetings will involve dedicated discussion of a combination of primary and secondary sources, and assessment will be based on writing assignments.
Also Offered As: JWST 2206
1 Course Unit
HIST 2251 Machiavelli and Modern Political Thought
Niccolò Machiavelli, the Renaissance author best known for The Prince, is frequently regarded as a consummate cynic. Yet he has been not only a provocation but an inspiration throughout the subsequent history of political thought. This was true for the entire twentieth century, which witnessed an ever-growing interest in the Florentine thinker among historians and philosophers alike. One of the most surprising dimensions of this modern engagement with Machiavelli is surely his recurring presence as figure and motif within left-wing philosophical discourse. In light of the failure of the twentieth-century’s revolutionary experiments, as well as its own entanglements with those experiments, how could radical theory understand its past and imagine its future? What vision could supplant the dimming of utopia? Such questions have frequently led recent theorists into melancholic resignation, but they have also provoked innovative and rigorous attempts to rethink the project of radical politics as radical democracy. How is it that Machiavelli, a thinker indelibly associated with the cynical and amoral manipulation of politics, could become an inspiration for theorists of a robust democratic life? This course will examine this curious history of influence and transformation. Starting with an examination of key texts by Machiavelli himself, we will then trace his reception in European intellectual history, focusing upon the twentieth century. Among authors we will consider will be Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, John McCormick, and Antonio Negri.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 2251
1 Course Unit
HIST 2252 European Intellectual History since 1945
This course concentrates on French intellectual history after 1945, with some excursions into Germany. We will explore changing conceptions of the intellectual, from Sartre's concept of the 'engagement' to Foucault's idea of the 'specific intellectual'; the rise and fall of existentialism; structuralism and poststructuralism; and the debate over 'postmodernity.'
Spring
Also Offered As: COML 2252
1 Course Unit
HIST 2253 Human Rights and History
The idea of universal, inalienable rights--once dismissed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham as "nonsense upon stilts"--has become the dominant moral language of our time, the self-evident truth par excellence of our age. Human rights have become a source of inspiration to oppressed individuals and groups across the world, the rallying cry for a global civil society, and not least, a controversial source of legitimation for American foreign policy. This seminar asks: how did all this come to be? We will investigate human rights not only as theories embodied in texts, but as practices embedded in specific historical contexts. Are human rights the product of a peculiarly European heritage, of the Enlightenment and protestantism? How did Americans reconcile inalienable rights with the reality of slavery? Did human rights serve as a "civilizing" mask for colonialism? Can universal rights be reconciled with genuine cultural diversity? Through case studies and close readings, the seminar will work toward a genealogy of human rights.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2254 World War I
The First World War marks a watershed in European and world history. We will examine the preconditions for the war--such as European imperialism, the arms race, and the rise of international law. We then move to study the outbreak of the war, and the debate over "war guilt." Our seminar covers the key battles and the course of the war on the various fronts (Western Europe, Italian Front, the Eastern Front, the Middle East), and the war on sea and in the air. We close with an examination of the war's outcome--fascism, communism, revolution, the mandate system and postwar European and colonial order. We will read classics and recent works on what many consider to be the foundational moment for the twentieth century. No prior knowledge is assumed.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2255 Modern Spain From Civil War to Democracy, 1930-1977
This course will examine the social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and political history of Spain from the 1890s loss of the colonial empire through the end of the Francoist regime (1970s). The history of 20th-century Spain offers the opportunity to study events, processes and ideologies that were and are central to the history of the West in the modern period: imperialism, the rise of communism and fascism, civil war, dictatorship, post-war reconstruction, and wars over cultural memory to control how societies remember their pasts. This course is divided into four parts. Introduction: the loss of the last colonies (1898) and the effect in Spain, and on Spain’s participation in the scramble for Africa. First Part: the Spanish Republic and Civil War (1931-1939), focuses on the rise of a democratic system and its demise after three years of violent civil war. Second Part: Post-war Reconstruction (1939-1975), focuses on the reconstruction of Spain led by an authoritarian and anti-democratic dictator, General Franco, the winner of the Civil War. Third Part: Memory Wars, focuses on the period after 1975 with the restoration of a democratic system. In this section, we will study the different and often conflicting ways Spaniards remembered the origins and causes of the Civil War, the victims of the Civil War, and the characteristics of Franco’s regime. Course readings will be a mixture of primary and secondary sources, and classes will combine short lectures by the instructor and discussion. Requirements: weekly short papers (reactions to weekly readings), oral presentations, and a final paper of 15 pages. Students can opt to write a research paper (20 pages) using original primary sources, to fulfill the department research requirement.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2256 The Russian Revolutions, 1905-1924: Brave New World?
Many believe that the 1917 Russian Revolution was the most significant event in the twentieth century, both as a rupture from the past and as a precursor of much that was to come in the twentieth century. The February Revolution of 1917 made the Russian Republic—at one stroke, in the midst of the world war—the world’s most democratic state. The October Revolution of 1917, following it, was the world’s first socialist revolution, and it established the world’s first socialist state—the Soviet Union. Throughout the twentieth century and beyond, people have looked to it with either fear or with hope. It generated great dreams of equality and liberation—and great misery. This course will examine the causes, course and consequences of this crucial period, for the peoples of the Soviet Union and for the world. In some ways, the term “Russian Revolution” is in fact not entirely correct. First, there was not one Russian Revolution--were a series of overlapping revolutions in this period—labor, rural, nationalist, liberationist. And second, it was a revolution that was not limited to European Russia, but encompassed the entire space of Russian empire (the Caucasus, the Baltics, Poland, Central Asia), and had worldwide and global significance. How do programs for liberation produce both new possibilities and great misery?
Also Offered As: REES 2770
1 Course Unit
HIST 2257 Russia's 20th-Century: History Through Literature
To study Russia’s twentieth-century history through its literature is to come face-to-face with a country for which works of fiction have often served, as the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, as “a second government.” Russia is a society that takes literature seriously—one in which the pen is assumed to have direct historical consequences. In this course, we will study how twentieth-century Russian literature actively participated in war, revolution, totalitarian dictatorship, and resistance. The masterworks we will study open windows into worlds of revolutionary rapture and moral uplift in the face of tyranny, of history as a gigantic wheel that lifts some people up even as it crushes others. Our readings will range from an avant-garde play intended to rewire your mind, to an epic representation of revolutionary social transformation, to surreal and absurdist representations of a world gone mad. In other words: fasten your seatbelts low and tight; turbulence ahead!
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: REES 2730
1 Course Unit
HIST 2258 Existentialism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism: French Thought Since 1945
In no other period, with the possible exception of the European Enlightenment, did French thought enjoy greater international influence than in the decades after the Second World War. From Existentialism, through Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Postmodernism, French thinkers played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual history of the second half of the twentieth century. This seminar surveys the intellectual movements and some of the key figures of this period. While our discussion will touch on many themes, the core of our inquiry will be the status of the human subject. If late nineteenth and early twentieth-century thinkers were preoccupied by the question of the “death of God,” French philosophical discourse in the late twentieth century was famously obsessed by the death of “Man”. Jean-Paul Sartre opened the post-war era by declaring that the death of God heralded an unprecedented age of Man; soon that proclamation came under attack as rival thinkers of the post-war period subjected the idea of the human “subject” -- the “self” or “ego” -- to unprecedented criticism. With the waning of Sartrean Existentialism, the unfolding dynamics of that critique came to drive the most creative and influential figures in French intellectual life.
Also Offered As: COML 2258
1 Course Unit
HIST 2260 Connected Histories: Spain and the Americas, 1890-1960
This seminar is divided into three parts: Part I focuses on the Spanish-Cuban-Philippine-American War and its consequences (1880-1910). We will examine how the United States, Spain, and Latin American nations interpreted the war and explore its social, political, and international ramifications. Topics include empires and imperialism, the definitive fall of the Spanish Empire following the loss of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and the rise of the American Empire. Additionally, we will analyze common challenges faced by both sides, such as slavery and racism. Part II centers on the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and how it was perceived and experienced by Americans and Spaniards. We will read and discuss personal accounts of the war and debate the roles and responsibilities of American nations’ governments regarding the conflict. Part III addresses the consequences of the Spanish Civil War (1939-1960) from both internal and international perspectives. This includes the establishment of the Francoist regime, its internal politics, and the United States’ reactions to Spain during and after World War II. We will conclude with an analysis of the 1953 Pacts of Madrid, which marked the U.S. government’s official recognition of Franco’s regime and its commitment to providing financial aid and international support to Spain.
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 3260
1 Course Unit
HIST 2290 The Great War in Memoir and Memory (Penn Global Seminar)
World War One was the primordial catastrophe of twentieth-century history. For all who passed through it, the Great War was transformative, presenting a profound rupture in personal experience. It was a war that unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of memoirs and poetic and fictional accounts written by participants. In its wake, it also produced new forms of public commemoration and memorialization - tombs to the unknown soldier, great monuments, soldiers' cemeteries, solemn days of remembrance, and the like. One hundred years after World War One, this course will explore the war through the intersection of these processes of personal and public memory. (Please note: This is not a seminar in military or diplomatic history, but rather an exploration of personal experiences of the War, representations of experience, and the cultural and political dimensions of memory.) The course will end with a one week visit to the Western Front region of northern France. Travel to sites in northern France will allow us to consider the scale and topography of some of the major battles, visit cemeteries and ossuaries and reflect on their various forms of secular and sacred organization, various national war monuments, and WWI museums, including the pathbreaking museum in Peronne and the national WWI museum in Meaux.
1 Course Unit
HIST 2350 Migration and Refugees in African History
This seminar will examine the experiences of recent African emigrants and refugees within and from the continent Africa from a historical and comparative perspective. We will look at the relations of overseas Africans with both their home and host societies, drawing on some of the extensive comparative literature on immigration, ethnic diasporas, and transnationalism. Other topics include reasons for leaving Africa, patterns of economic and educational adaptation abroad, changes in gender and generational roles, issues of cultural, religious, and political identity, and the impact of international immigration policies. Students will have the opportunity to conduct focused research on specific African communities in Philadelphia or elsewhere in North America, Europe, or the Middle East. We will employ a variety of sources and methodologies from different disciplines--including newspapers, government and NGOs, literature and film, and diaspora internet sites--to explore the lives, aspirations, and perceptions of Africans abroad. History Majors may complete the research requirement if their paper is based on primary sources. Students not seeking credit for the research requirement may write papers drawing on secondary sources exclusively. Class will consist of a combination of lectures (including several by invited guests), discussions, video screenings, and presentations by students of their research in progress.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2350
1 Course Unit
HIST 2352 Israel and Iran: Historical Ties, Contemporary Challenges
Israel and Iran have longstanding ties and connections that predate the contemporary feuds in which they are currently engaged. Iranian Jews rank as some of the oldest communities of the Middle East, and their history dovetails with the ancient Iranian past. This course will explore the historical roots of Jewish communities in Iran, with a focus on the post-18th century period, and will end with conversations that contributed to the diplomatic impasses faced by both countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Films, novels, memoirs, and other historical accounts will be incorporated alongside secondary works to give students an opportunity to consider the complexities of this relationship.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: MELC 2566, NELC 2566
1 Course Unit
HIST 2353 Sex and Power in the Middle East: Unveiling Women's Lives
How did Middle Eastern women and men really live? What impact did tradition have on practices of veiling, seclusion, and politics? How did attitudes toward intimacy and sexuality change over time? This course strives to answer these questions by offering a comparative perspective on people's lives in the modern Middle East (Southwest Asia) and North Africa. We begin in the 19th century and move quickly to the twentieth century when social policies and politics shaped gender relations. We will consider the birth and popularity of fashion industries, beauty contests, journalism, the visual arts, television, and challenges to norms of sexuality. Part of the class will also engage with traditionalist rejection of such new social and cultural trends. From Iran to Algeria, women and men grappled with culture wars that centered on gender, sexuality, and power. To make the learning process interactive, we will watch video clips, documentaries, and interviews as we delve into this ongoing tug-of-war.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 2353, MELC 2567, NELC 2567, SOCI 2947
1 Course Unit
HIST 2354 The Body in Middle Eastern History
The body has long been the focus of social and scientific inquiry, as well as the foundation of religious, philosophical, and artistic thought. This seminar examines premodern and modern notions of the body in the Middle East as they intersect with colonialism, nationalism, religion, labor, law, military, gender, race, medicine, and art. Students use the notion of the body as a "useful" historical category to investigate the broader social, cultural, and political transformations occurring in the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran, followed by post-empire and colonial modern Middle Eastern contexts. The course addresses diverse views and theories as manifested in the constructions and practices over the body by using literary texts, primary sources, medical recipes, religious orders, and even public monuments to unearth the role of the body in the making of Middle Eastern history.
Also Offered As: GSWS 2354, MELC 2354, NELC 2354
1 Course Unit
HIST 2355 Classic Icons, Cinematic Images: Popular Culture in the Middle East
The meaning of culture can sometimes best be understood through a look at its popular traditions and the routines of everyday life. This course will grapple with issues of ethnicity, political conflict, and identity in the Middle East by analyzing the culture produced for and consumed by a wide spectrum of the general public in different countries. Political cartoons, photography, novels, film, music, dance, and other modes of cultural expression will be used to explore the historical roots of the political anxieties and social conventions common to many modern Middle Eastern communities. In this way, we will recast studies of politics through an understanding of identity and culture.
Also Offered As: CIMS 2355
1 Course Unit
HIST 2356 Museums and the Middle East
This course will explore the history of museum-building between western and Middle Eastern cultures, based on cultural trade networks established during the Renaissance, then institutions built on European extraction of art to current arguments about where best to house the ancient past. Case studies will include the Louvre, Versailles, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
1 Course Unit
HIST 2360 Postcolonial Africa: Promises and Challenges of Independence
This course examines Africa’s recent history by exploring various social, political, cultural, and economic developments during the independence struggles and post-colonial era. We will look in greater depth at key turning points, including Africans’ responses to colonial rule, the rise of nationalist and liberation movements, independence, and the crises of the post-colonial state. The focus will be mostly on West and Central Africa. Challenges facing independent Africa will be explored in the context of debates about development, neocolonialism, nation-building, democracy, authoritarianism, and the new solidarity between countries of the Global South. Using the works of scholars, films, archives, oral history, and artifacts, the course emphasizes African agency and investigates how Africans have navigated the legacies of colonial rule.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2360
1 Course Unit
HIST 2365 Bacteria, Bodies, and Empires: Medicine and Healing in the Eastern Mediterranean (15th-21st c.)
Bacteria, Bodies, and Empires is a course about the history of medicine in the Eastern Mediterranean from the early modern period to the present. It addresses the major issues and questions concerning bodies, diseases, and medical institutions within the context of major historical developments in the world and region’s history. The course looks at how medicine, knowledge, and practices about diseases and bodies changed political and social conditions, as well as how socio-political changes defined and transformed people's perceptions of health, life, and the environment. Scholars have frequently examined the history of medicine in Eastern Mediterranean societies, either in relation to Islamic culture in the early modern period or, more recently, in relation to Westernization and modernization. By situating the history of medical knowledge and practices in the Eastern Mediterranean within global history, this course seeks to challenge these fixed paradigms and shed light on questions and research agendas that will unearth the encounters, connections, and mobility of bacteria, bodies, and medical methods among various communities.
Also Offered As: HSOC 2362
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 1365
1 Course Unit
HIST 2390 The Israeli Settler Movement: the Road to One State?
This course traces the rise of the Israeli settler movement, Gush Emunim, from a fringe group to a dominant political force in today’s Israel. Since the 1990s, the movement has helped secure most of the West Bank for Jewish settlement, confining nearly three million Palestinians to isolated enclaves. The course explores the movement’s ideological roots in Jewish messianism, its violent offshoots, and its takeover of Israeli state institutions. It also examines the settler role in the military campaign against Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Finally, it considers how this success affects prospects for a political solution and engages with claims the region functions as a “one-state” reality, akin to Apartheid.
Also Offered As: JWST 2390
1 Course Unit
HIST 2400 Indigenous History of Mexico from the Aztecs to Present
This course will explore the history of indigenous peoples of Mexico from roughly 1400 to the present. Mesoamerica – the cultural region that encompassed what is today Mexico and much of Central America – in the fifteenth century saw the ascendance of the Aztec Empire in central Mexico (and beyond) and the continued independence of numerous Mayan communities. We will begin by looking at a diverse range of sources produced by the linguistically diverse people in these areas, particularly focusing on the “codices,” as the painted deer hide books that recorded history and ritual knowledge are known. Reading sources (in translation) by both European and indigenous languages (primarily Spanish, Nahuatl, and Maya), we will look at the divergent ways that Native communities and individuals responded to Spanish wars of conquest and how they responded to colonialism. The final part of the will look at the impact of Mexican independence and Revolution in the nineteenth century through the present, as well as the ongoing indigenous Mesoamerican diaspora to locales throughout the United States. In addition to written primary and secondary sources, we will consider a diverse array of visual sources – taking advantage of the spectacular holdings of the Penn museum – and contemporary cinema.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 2400
1 Course Unit
HIST 2401 Indians, Pirates, Rebels and Runaways: Unofficial Histories of the Colonial Caribbean
This seminar considers the early history of the colonial Caribbean, not from the perspective of colonizing powers but rather from “below.” Beginning with European-indigenous contact in the fifteenth century, and ending with the massive slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), we will focus on the different ways in which indigenous, African, European and creole men and women experienced European colonization in the Caribbean, as agents, victims and resistors of imperial projects. Each week or so, we will examine a different social group and its treatment by historians, as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and novelists. Along the way, we will pay special attention to the question of sources: how can we recover the perspectives of people who rarely left their own accounts? How can we use documents and material objects—many of which were produced by colonial officials and elites—to access the experiences of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor? We will have some help approaching these questions from the knowledgeable staff at the Penn Museum, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Van Pelt Library.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2401, GSWS 2401, LALS 2401
1 Course Unit
HIST 2402 The Haitian Revolution
In August 1791, enslaved Africans on the northern plain of Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti) rose up in a coordinated attack against their French colonial masters, launching the initial revolt in what would come to be known as the Haitian Revolution. In the years that followed, their actions forced the abolition of racial discrimination and slavery throughout the French Empire. When Napoleon Bonaparte threatened to return slavery to Saint Domingue, they waged a war for independence, declaring Haiti the world's first "Black Republic" in 1804. This seminar will examine some of the major themes and debates surrounding Haiti's colonial and revolutionary history. We will begin by considering the colonial paradox: France's leading role in the intellectual movement called the "Enlightenment" coincided with its ascent as a slaveholding colonial power. The seminar will also explore parallels and points of connection between the revolutionary movements in France and Saint Domingue: how did increasingly radical ideas in France shape events in the Caribbean? Likewise, how did west African traditions and political ideologies influence insurgents and their leaders? And how, in turn, did revolution in the Caribbean impact the revolution in France? Finally, we will ask how the Haitian Revolution influenced ideas about liberty, sovereignty and freedom throughout the Atlantic World. We will read a combination of primary and secondary materials each week. A final research paper will be required of all students.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2402, LALS 2402
1 Course Unit
HIST 2403 Animal,Vegetable,Mineral:Culture, Tech, & the Columbian Exchange, 1450-1750
In this course we will explore how Native American technologies shaped the early modern Atlantic World in order to understand the role of culture in what is often called the "Columbian Exchange.” Technologies, for the purpose of this course, include animal practices (such as hunting and taming techniques), foraged and domesticated plants (such as maize, potatoes, and annatto), foods (such as cassava and chocolate), drugs (such as tobacco, quinine and coca), textiles (such as hammocks and featherworks), and precious metals and gemstones (such as pearls, emeralds and gold). We will explore technologies' relationships to other aspects of art and culture, and focus particularly on how and why certain technologies - and not others - moved beyond colonial Latin America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will read intensively in both primary and secondary sources.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 2403
1 Course Unit
HIST 2450 Coca and Cocaine
This seminar compares practices that center on coca leaf production in indigenous communities, where coca cultivation has been sustained over millennia, on the one hand, with practices linked to the post 1961 “drug war” in the Americas, on the other. Participants will read scholarly work in history and anthropology, support one another through a research process, and explore what historians and other scholars might contribute to discussions about drug policy. Case studies we'll explore include Peruvian Quechua-speakers' ritual use of leaf, the history of Coca-Cola, patterns of violence in Medellín and Northern Mexico, and the evolution of money laundering in 1980-2010. Students will also have the opportunity to define a topic of interest to them and prepare an in-depth literature review.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 2450
1 Course Unit
HIST 2451 Haiti's Odious Debt and Beyond (1825-2025)
This seminar will ponder Haiti's experience of debt and underdevelopment going back to the 19th century. Taking cues from the debate started by the New York Times in 2023, we will read and discuss texts describing debt, debt crisis, focusing on the interaction between global and local politics, the problem of debt forgiveness, etc. The approach will be chronological, with readings that will engage with the manner in which alternative capital markets set up reverberated locally and vice versa. We will also invite a number of Haitian and other scholars through interactive zoom sessions. While the seminar is focused in the case of Haiti we will also discuss broader implications.
Also Offered As: ECON 0471, LALS 2451
1 Course Unit
HIST 2500 History of Private Life in China
Underneath the grandeur of empires, war, revolutions, history eventually is about people’s life. This seminar explores how the boundaries of private life in China intersect with the public arena and how such an intersection has significantly re-shaped Chinese private life between the 16th century and the present. The first half of the seminar will explore how the private realm in late imperial China was defined and construed by Confucian discourses, architectural design, moral regulation, cultural consumption, and social network. Moving into the twentieth century, the remaining part of the seminar will examine how the advent of novel concepts such as modernity and revolution restructured the private realm, particularly in regard to the subtopics outlined above. Organizing questions include: How did female chastity become the center of a public cult which then changed the life paths of countless families? How did the practice of female foot-binding intersect with marriage choices, household economy, and social status? How did print culture create a new space for gentry women to negotiate the boundaries between their inner quarters and the outside world? What was the ideal and reality of married life in late imperial China? How did people’s life change when the collective pursuit for Chinese modernity placed romantic love, freedom to marry and divorce at the center of public debates? How was “Shanghai modern” related to the emerging middle class life style as evidenced in advertisement posters? How has the ideal of gender equality been re-interpreted and realized under the Communist regime? How have the current market reforms reformulated the contours of private life in China?
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 2721, GSWS 2500
1 Course Unit
HIST 2501 Cities in Chinese History
This seminar will study the development of Chinese cities over the past two millennia with respect to their spatial structure, social constitution, economic system, political functions, and cultural representation (including cityscape paintings, maps, and films).As China transitioned from a collection of city-states to a united empire to nation state, Chinese urbanism underwent transformations as drastic as those of the country itself. Cities, which serve as a critical mechanism for the operation of a vast agrarian empire/nation like China , offer a unique vantage point for us to observe and analyze the continuities and discontinuities between dynastic empires as well as the radical transition from empire to modern nation state. Topics include: the city-state system in ancient China; the creation and evolution of imperial capitals; the medieval urban revolution and the subsequent collapse of classic city plans; the development of urban public sphere/public space in late imperial China; the rise of commercial power in urban politics; the negotiation of urban class and gender relations via cultural consumption; the role of cities in the building of a modern Chinese nation state; the anti-city experiment under the communist regime; urban citizenship in the reform era; as well as the expanding urbanization and shifting urbanism of Greater China as reflected in cinematic representations of Shanghai, Hongkong, and Taipei.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 2722, URBS 2501
1 Course Unit
HIST 2555 Pacific Worlds: Vietnam
Reflecting our increasingly diverse world and echoing scholarly attempts to move beyond the bounds of national and imperial histories, this Penn Global Seminar highlights the interaction of peoples and cultures across what may be described as the most dynamic world region of the twenty-first century, the Asia-Pacific. While discussions of Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean Worlds are now commonplace, scholars have, to date, paid less attention to the idea of a Pacific World or Worlds. To what extent are patterns of culture, climate, trade, migration, empire, and war distinctive in the Asia-Pacific? To what extent can they enrich our Euro-American-centric notions of history and modern life? Each iteration of this Penn Global Seminar will include a travel component to a different area of the Pacific. In this course, we travel to Vietnam.
Also Offered As: EALC 2791
1 Course Unit
HIST 2600 Witches, Whores and Rogues
What should we make of the disorderly people of the past? Were they acting out their dissent against powerful customs and institutions in their lives? Or were they the victims of those customs and institutions? In this course, we consider the lives of these disorderly people: the witches, prostitutes, criminals, escaped servants and slaves, criminals, cross dressers, and rowdies of early modern Europe and the Americas. The course will focus on several case studies featuring people considered to be troublemakers, or at the very least, non-conformist, by their contemporaries. We will use films, primary sources, book-length studies, and works of theory to develop our analyses of the problem of dissent, disorder, and resistance in the early modern past
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 2600
1 Course Unit
HIST 2605 The Jewish Book from Scroll to Screen
Through much of their history, Jews have been known as a “people of the book” and have, often, prided themselves on such an association. The very definition of a book, what books contained, and who might use them are not so easy to define, and their study opens up new ways to think about the Jewish past. Books are perhaps the most important way people share ideas and change minds. But they are also commercial goods, collectors’ items, community memories, and cherished heirlooms. This course offers a cultural history of communication and knowledge in Jewish experience through an exploration of the history of the book. It will use primary sources, scholarly articles, and hands-on encounters with books in different shapes and sizes to explore the way people of the past engaged with books both texts and material objects. It will also offer examples of new methods in the study of the book drawn from the digital humanities. Tracing changing conceptions and uses of the book from the ancient world until the present, we will consider the way that books have shaped religion, caused upheaval, and changed over time, even to face their possible obsolescence in our own age.
Also Offered As: JWST 2605
1 Course Unit
HIST 2607 Queens of the Sea: Port Cities in the Early Modern Mediterranean and the Middle East
When one steps into Marseille or Naples, into Genoa or Alexandria, a strange sense of familiarity settles over the mind. The multi-storied buildings facing the sea, slightly blackened by years of humid weather; the small groups of anonymous youths; the seagulls adding to the bustle of the port—these elements evoke a shared landscape. Yet these cities are each distinct, adorned with dialects and languages unique to their histories, and home to the ships and armies that once set sail to conquer or defend against one another. Both point of departure and place of arrival, they are the Queens of the Mediterranean: vibrant port cities, connected to and separated from each other by the same sea. These cities have housed armies and queens, legendary warriors and migrants—both departing and arriving—lovers, enemies, poets, self-proclaimed kings, and emperors anointed by others. How are we to understand these cities, divided today by national identity, yet bound together by common histories and persistent stereotypes? In this course, we will immerse ourselves in each of these cities. We will read, discuss, and imagine them through works of history, literature, and poetry. Students will engage with themes in urban history and the environment, as well as cultural difference, identity, familiarity, and distance.
1 Course Unit
HIST 2608 (Un)Natural Disasters: Environment and Politics in the Early Modern World
Fires and floods, droughts and plagues, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions: these environmental crises are both natural and political events. They transform human environments and require large-scale, coordinated responses, but they are also cultural constructs, emerging through public discourse and debate. This course will explore how natural disasters catalyzed political, cultural, and technological change in the early modern period (roughly 1450-1800), an era of widespread political conflict, unprecedented global exchange and colonial conquest, and the climatic disruption of the “Little Ice Age.” Starting with the Black Death in Europe, we will look at natural disasters across the early modern world to address the following questions: What, and who, made something a natural disaster? How did natural disasters reshape humans’ understanding of their environments and produce new knowledge, especially in colonial contexts? How did different polities, states, and empires respond to these events? And what do these crises tell us about power and politics in the early modern world?
1 Course Unit
HIST 2700 Utopia
Western thinkers from the ancient Greeks to the present have speculated about what the ideal human society would look like. We can study the resultant utopias as works of literature, philosophy, religion, psychology or political science; we must understand them in their historical contexts. This seminar will take a multidisciplinary approach to utopian thought from Plato's Republic to the ecological utopias of the 1980s. Works to be examined include More's Utopia; seventeenth century scientific utopias like Bacon's New Atlantis; the political theory of Rousseau (Social Contract); essays of the French utopian socialists and Hawthorne's version of the Brook Farm experiment; Morris' News from Nowhere; its American counterpart, Bellamy's Looking Backward; Gilman's feminist blueprint, Herland; BF Skinner's psychological utopia, Walden Two; and the utopian science fiction of LeGuin. Huxley's dystopia, Brave New World, will be set against his later utopia, Island.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2703 Decades of Extremes: Protectionism, Fascism, Imperialism, 1917-1945
The rise of Fascism in Italy, the Russian Revolution, anti-colonial struggles in India, the New Deal in the United States, the Spanish Civil War, and the emergence of populist Juan Perón in Argentina. These events – as distinct as they are – all responded to the crisis of the global economy following World War I. These were decades of ideological extremes: liberal democracy pitted against fascism, socialism versus capitalism, imperialist expansion in some parts of the world and struggles for self-determination in others. What did the world look like in 1917, and why did it give rise to such revolutionary politics? This course studies the ideological conflicts and economic crises of the interwar decades (1917-1945) through firsthand accounts produced by intellectuals, economists, dictators, and ordinary citizens. We will read from the 1917 Soviet Constitution, George Orwell’s personal account of the Spanish Civil War, and Mussolini’s writings to understand the revolutionary visions at stake. We will debate alongside John M. Keynes and Friedrich Hayek to engage one of the driving questions to arise in these years: what is the role of the state in economic life? We explore the policy experimentation that arose in response to this crippling economic situation, from the New Deal in the United States to the rise of populism in Latin America. Finally, we consider how these interwar struggles explain the outbreak of World War II, an extreme experience of totalitarianism, destruction, and genocide. The key concepts we explore – fascism, imperialism, protectionism, capitalism, socialism, authoritarianism, liberalism – are of enduring relevance. What lessons – if any – can we learn from these interwar decades of extremes?
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2705 Wars and Postwars
This course focuses on the study and analysis of the political and social challenges posed in, and faced by, post-war societies in the modern period, 1800-1950. Casting a large net from the early nineteenth century to the twentieth century it looks at the process of rebuilding after wars, both international and civil wars. The course will be organized thematically – Conducting War; Reconstructions; Vengeance and Justice; Public Memory. Cases will include the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, and WWII, with references to other conflicts in various world regions.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2706 Wastes of War: A Century of Destruction
This seminar examines the human and environmental consequences of violent conflict from the South African War at the beginning of the 20th century to the War on Terror. War violently transforms the social and physical environment. War reshuffles ideologies, reimagines futures and reshapes alliances, destroys bodies, spaces, societies, habitats, ecosystems and cultures. And of course, there’s no war that doesn’t produce a whole host of wastes, and as a result, inspires a multitude of strategies to combat and eradicate them. In this course, we approach war as an engine of destruction and transformation rather than as politics gone awry. The wastes of war will serve as our focal point as we study the new worlds (technological, social and environmental) that war not merely leaves in its wake but systematically generates. Critically examining two key categories – “waste” and “war” in tandem, we discover how together they fundamentally restructure our social, cultural and natural worlds in unexpected ways.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 2707 Extreme Heat: White Nationalism in the Age of Climate Change
The Amazon is burning. The glaciers are melting. Heat waves, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and droughts devastate ever larger swaths of the earth, producing crop failures, air pollution, soil erosion, famine and terrifying individual hardship. At the same, time the so-called Western World is literally walling itself off from the millions who are fleeing from disaster and war with what little they can carry. White militants chant "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us," social media spreads memes and talking points about "white genocide" and "white replacement" and online ideologues fantasize about building white ethnostates. Are these developments connected? Is there a causal relationship? Or are these conditions purely coincidental? Increasingly, arguments about limits to growth, sustainability, development and climate change have come to stand in competitive tension with arguments for social and racial equality. Why is that case? What are the claims and underlying anxieties that polarize western societies? How do white nationalist movements relate to populist and fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century? What is new and different about them now? What is the relationship between environmentalism, rightwing populism and the climate crisis? And how have societies responded to the climate crisis, wealth inequality, finite resources and the threat posed by self-radicalizing white nationalist groups?
Also Offered As: ENVS 2440
1 Course Unit
HIST 2710 Inflationary Times: Money, Currency, and Debt in History
What is inflation? What are its causes and consequences? Inflation has become a pressing concern recently, as prices of fuel, food, and consumer goods have ticked upwards at alarming rates. From the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, and climate disasters, current inflationary pressures are inseparable from the major events disrupting the global economy. This is as much the case today as it was following the discovery of silver mines in Potosí (Bolivia), the French Revolution, the breakdown of Bretton Woods, or the 1980s debt crises in Latin America. This course explores the economic and social consequences of inflation across history. It also considers the economic models used to explain the rise and fall of prices—and how economists and policy-makers experiment with new formulas when old ones appear obsolete. By exploring inflationary moments in historical perspective, this seminar explores topics like the political and social meanings of money, how to build trust in a new currency, and what governments can do (or tried to do) to correct financial crisis. Students will be asked to explore past moments of financial and economic crises on their own terms, but also to look for how the past can offer lessons for the present.
Also Offered As: LALS 2710
1 Course Unit
HIST 2713 The Corporation: A Global History from the East India Company to Amazon
Corporations, today, are ubiquitous. Most choices in our modern world are structured not only by governmental rules and regulations, but by a dizzying number of corporations. From the range of groceries or clothes we can buy online or in stores, to the number and price of flights that service our hometown, to the job we are likely to get after college, to the packages we can mail and receive to any point around globe: all these services are provided by corporations. Alongside the state, corporations are therefore one of the most powerful institutions of 21st century collective life. But if the corporation is everywhere, what even is it? And more importantly: where does it come from, and why did it develop? Through this course, we will read and interrogate a diverse cast of readings to answer these fundamental—if highly debated—questions. We will trace the historical origins and evolution of the corporate form: from early chartered monopolies like the East India Company created by Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1600, all the way to Amazon. Ultimately, we will come to a better grasp of how the corporation—in all its various legal incarnations in Britain, the U.S. and India—forged our modern world.
1 Course Unit
HIST 2714 Monsoons, Migration and the Making of the Indian Ocean
This course explores the Indian Ocean as a dynamic space shaped by the rhythms of the monsoon winds, the rise of port cities, and the movements of peoples and religious traditions across centuries. Focusing on the period from the early medieval era through the nineteenth century, we will examine how environmental patterns, maritime trade, and imperial rivalries fostered migrations and the formation of diasporic communities. Special attention will be given to the role of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and indigenous belief systems in shaping social and political life in key port cities such as Zanzibar, Mozambique Island, Diu, and Damão. We will examine the migrations of Banian merchants from western India, Goan migrants, and communities along both the Indian and East African coasts, as well as the movement of peoples from the Arabian Gulf to East Africa. Zanzibar, in particular, will serve as a central case study for understanding how these intersecting migrations reshaped the cultural, religious, and political landscapes of the Indian Ocean world. Students will engage with recent scholarship on oceanic history, religious networks, and mobility to understand how the Indian Ocean connected Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia into one of the world’s most vibrant intercultural arenas.
Also Offered As: SAST 2714
1 Course Unit
HIST 2715 Beyond Race: a Conceptual Framework for the 21st Century
This course will visit some of the existing studies that contradict, facilitate and challenge the extant discourses on hierarchies and status observed through the conceptualisation of race and caste. These two concepts have overlapped throughout the past two hundred years. The concept of caste is as old as the nineteenth century, seen through public policy interventions led by Boston Senator Charles Sumner. Similarly, race is studied through the South Asian topography by colonialists such as Herbert Risely, emphasizing the racial dimensions of societies. These studies were influential for the next one hundred years. But they were also challenged and critiqued. These studies aid us in informing the contemporary scales of societies that weigh oppression and control through antecedent-held concepts of race and caste, which can be effectively understood through colour-castes, a term popularized by Du Bois. In this course, we will study cross-national historical, anthropological, and political debates to make sense of our times. Students will learn about the twenty-first century’s new concepts and what they mean to our times and near future.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2715, SAST 2715
1 Course Unit
HIST 2716 Color, Caste and Global Resistance Movements 1920-2020s
Caste is one of the oldest surviving forms of hierarchy, and it has many avatars and forms. While color is a recent invention that has taken the form of race, ethnicity, and nationality in the West, caste refers to a much older order comprising diverse socio-cultural relations. This course explores these systems of hierarchies through the lens of caste and color tracing how 20th-century political upheavals—from global decolonization to the U.S. Civil Rights movement—to the Reconstruction of modern Europe—reshaped how we understand identity and belonging in a mobile, post-war world. We will examine iconic movements from the 1920s to 2020s, including anti-caste resistance in India and Nepal, as well as the Civil Rights Campaigns and Black Solidarity Movements of the UK and beyond.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2716, SAST 2716
1 Course Unit
HIST 2733 Taking Off: How Some Economies Get Rich
What makes an economy grow? This question has been asked – and answered – many times over in the modern era. From Adam Smith’s classic Wealth of Nations (1776) to today’s political leaders, many have debated the ingredients necessary for a nation to prosper, or policies to promote growth. Some point to the need for fiscal responsibility, others an educated labor force, or to tariffs, natural resources, and the right laws. This seminar explores the deep history of this problem of economic growth. Students will read works by economists, social scientists, and historians that present different theories for why some nations develop faster than others. With case studies from across the globe, we will tackle topics like why Europe industrialized first, or the paradox of why the abundance of natural resources does not necessarily contribute to long-lasting economic development. This course also asks students to think critically about the metrics used to measure “success” and “failure” across nations, as well as how such comparisons between societies have been mobilized to legitimize imperial expansion, human exploitation, environmental destruction, or political repression. By discussing how governments, corporate interests, and individual actors have implemented strategies to increase national wealth, students will also be asked to grapple with some of the consequences of economic growth for the environment, human welfare, and social inequality.
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 3703
1 Course Unit
HIST 3101 American Conspiracies, 1600-1865
Witches. Cannibals. Popish plots. Mountains of silver and gold. Smallpox blankets. Slave uprisings. Evil ministers. Traitors. Barbarians. Mercenaries. Freemasons. Illuminati. Catholics. Freedom. Slavery. Tyranny. Race war. In this course, we will examine the conspiracies that swirled around early America among the European, Indigenous, and African people of who slept, ate, worked, and fought alongside and against each other. These diverse peoples tried to make sense of their rapidly changing world with the information at hand. Particularly in times of war and instability, rumors ran rampant. Whether these stories were true or false is less important than the fact that real people supposed that they might be true. These stories captured people’s imaginations because they reflected some of their hopes and fears. Only conspiracies that matched people’s expectations would continue to grow. Even false stories had to ring true to continue to circulate and propagate. And sometimes, the stories were all too true. Through a variety of primary and secondary sources, we will study these rumors, conspiracies, and hoaxes of the period not to assess their factual accuracy but to consider why people in early America believed they were possible, plausible, and even likely. The sliver of plausibility and possibility that our early American historical subjects found in these conspiracies will be our way into their political, social, religious, and cultural worlds.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3120 Revolutionary Stories: Philadelphians and the American Revolution
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches in 2026, the question of how we commemorate it seems a whole lot more complex than it did in 1976, when the nation celebrated its 200th birthday. Partly, this complexity lies in the very different views of the American Revolution held by academic historians and the wider public. While most scholars have spent the last forty years researching the Revolution through the eyes of ordinary people, the public’s appetite is often for stories about America’s great heroes and Founding Fathers. This research seminar will introduce you to these competing viewpoints, giving you the opportunity to conduct original research into Revolutionary-era Philadelphians, whose lives are documented in the rich collections of manuscripts held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. At the end of semester you will have written an original research paper, grounded in primary sources you have unearthed at the Historical Society. In doing so you will confront some of the most important questions preoccupying Revolutionary historians today: What can these individual stories tell us about the American Revolution? How can we reconcile their very different narratives? And how can we interpret them for those Americans who haven’t had the opportunity to read them first-hand?
1 Course Unit
HIST 3150 The Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans
This research seminar will consist of a review of representative studies on the Japanese American internment, and a discussion of how social scientists and historians have attempted to explain its complex backgrounds and causes. Through the careful reading of academic works, primary source materials, and visualized narratives (film productions), students will learn the basic historiography of internment studies, research methodologies, and the politics of interpretation pertaining to this particular historical subject. Students will also examine how Japanese Americans and others have attempted to reclaim a history of the wartime internment from the realm of “detached” academia in the interest of their lives in the “real” world, and for a goal of “social justice” in general. The class will critically probe the political use of history and memories of selected pasts in both Asian American community and contemporary American society through the controversial issue of the Japanese American internment.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ASAM 2100
1 Course Unit
HIST 3151 The Civil Rights Movement
This course traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement from its earliest stirrings in the 1st half of the twentieth-century to the boycotts, sit-ins, school desegregation struggles, freedom rides and marches of the 1950s and 1960s, and beyond. Among the question we will consider are: What inspired the Civil Rights movement, when does it begin and end, and how did it change American life? Readings will include both historical works and first-hand accounts of the movement by participants.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3151
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 2161
1 Course Unit
HIST 3155 Fake News and American Democracy
At separate moments, Thomas Jefferson famously declared both that newspapers were crucial to sustain a nation and that a person who never looked at a newspaper was better informed than a regular reader of the press. The ideal of an informed citizenry occupies a central spot in our understanding of the democratic project in the United States, and, consequently, the news and the news media play a vital role. But the news may also be a means to manipulate and distort, not simply inform. As Americans on both the Left and Right wonder today, what happens to our democratic prospects when public information and the media are unreliable? In this class we will consider the history of fake news in the United States and its implications for democracy and citizenship. We will dig into an array of episodes – from the Jefferson-Hamilton debates in the press to battles over what could be printed about slavery; from McCarthyism to the ways in which different racial and ethnic groups often engaged with different accounts of the news. We will examine in depth the moment of a global rise in fascism and America’s best-known news hoax, the “War of the Worlds” radio program. Throughout, we will explore the importance of the different media that conveyed news in the past – and think about what that means for us in the present moment as news travels through new channels.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3156 Liberalism in the 20th Century
At a moment when American liberalism is embattled and in a profound state of flux, this research seminar explores the development of the political ideology of the Democratic Party since its first modern articulation in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In addition to examining key moments of reform, expansion, and reimagining through the Cold War, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and under Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, students will explore the ways in which liberals and liberalism have both succeeded and often failed to meaningfully incorporate the interests of a diverse array of Americans including women, organized labor, African Americans, immigrants, rural constituencies, immigrants, and LGBTQ citizens. Over the course of the semester, students will develop a significant piece of original, primary source-based, historical research on a theme of their choosing within the modern history of liberalism, broadly construed.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3158 ¡Huelga! The Farmworker Movement in the United States
This intensive research seminar invites students to explore the history of farmworkers in the United States during the twentieth century. Research will primarily but not necessarily exclusively focus on the west coast, a region in which many archival sources have been digitized. Students may explore a wide variety of topics, including but not limited to: farmworker unions; the relationship between farmworker mobilizations and other movements in the US and abroad; the experiences of workers from the Philippines and Latin America and the role of US imperial and immigration policies in the lives of farmworkers; farmworkers' confrontations with and participation in systems of racism; the Great Depression in rural communities; the history of gender and family in farmworker communities; the history of environment and health; struggles over citizenship and social rights; counter-mobilizations of growers and the right; religion in farmworker communities; legislative and legal strategies to obtain rights denied agricultural workers in federal law; artistic, musical, and cultural production; or the relationship between consumers and the workers who produced their food.
Also Offered As: LALS 3158
1 Course Unit
HIST 3159 The Homefront: America at Home During World War II
Students in this research seminar will design original research projects related to life in the United States during World War II. Perhaps the most consequential war in global history, World War II profoundly altered the trajectory of human history, reshaping global boundaries, introducing terrifying new killing technologies, and paving the way for a world shaped by democracy. In the United States, the domestic changes wrought by World War II were nearly as dramatic, highlighted by booming manufacturing, mass migrations, and major changes to the nature of race and gender. While World War II is often depicted as a unifying moment, American life at home was rife with controversy and conflict. Students in this class will learn more about the immense societal changes in America during World War II and work with the instructor to design research projects that meet their interests. Projects might focus on topics as diverse as Rosie the Riveter, weapons manufacturing, or one of several race riots covered in class.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3160 The Vietnam War
This intensive research seminar explores the US war in Vietnam, its contestation, and its afterlives. Students will conduct independent archival research to produce an original essay on a topic of their choice. Papers might explore the political origins and consequences of the war; the catastrophic destruction that the war wrought in Vietnam; the relationship of the war to race, class, and gender inequalities in the trans-Pacific and the United States; the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s; the war’s devastating health and environmental consequences in the US and Vietnam; the experiences of Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, and US soldiers who fought in Vietnam; US-sponsored programs for capitalist development that formed part of the war; the role of Vietnamese and US religious communities in the war; the GI movement that resisted both the war and racism in the military; the role of US scientists, social scientists and corporations in facilitating the war effort, and the reckoning they faced; the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees across the Pacific and the United States after 1975; postwar initiatives for restitution, justice, and reconciliation; and disability politics that emerged from the war. History majors may use this course to fulfill requirements for the Diplomatic, Intellectual, or Political History concentration, depending on the topic of the research paper.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3166 Fear Itself: The American People, the Great Depression, and the New Deal, 1929-1942
In March 1933, three years into the economic and social catastrophe of the Great Depression, newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt struck a confident note in his first inaugural address: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” With fascism on the march at home and abroad, the domestic unemployment rate reaching 24.9%, and as thousands of banks folded – and took with them Americans’ savings and homes – FDR sought to galvanize the American people. He continued: “unreasoning, unjustified terror . . . paralyzed needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” In this research seminar, we explore the lived experience of the Great Depression and the variety of ways Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal attempted to surpass it: its many failures and successes, as well as its many controversies, such as when FDR attempted to “pack” a defiant Supreme Court with additional justices. Over the course of the semester, students will develop an original, primary source-based, 15-20ish page historical research paper on a theme and topic of their choosing. In our class meetings, students will explore a variety of methodological and thematic approaches to the history of the 1930s, broadly construed, including the history of labor organizing, the social history of the Depression, African American history, women’s and gender history, and the political and policy history of the New Deal itself. We will also read and interpret key primary sources, and students’ archival work might encompass not only the many physical and digital archival materials available at Penn but also numerous repositories in the greater Philadelphia region, including, for instance, the Hagley Museum and Library’s collection of materials related to business’ anti-New Deal mobilization.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3173 Penn Slavery Project Research Seminar
This research seminar provides students with instruction in basic historical methods and an opportunity to conduct collaborative primary source research into the University of Pennsylvania's historic connections to slavery. After an initial orientation to archival research, students will plunge in to doing actual research at the Kislak Center, the University Archives, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and various online sources. During the final month of the semester, students will begin drafting research reports and preparing for a public presentation of the work. During the semester, there will be opportunities to collaborate with a certified genealogist, a data management and website expert, a consultant on public programming, and a Penn graduate whose research has been integral to the Penn Slavery Project.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3173
1 Course Unit
HIST 3174 Free State Slavery and Bound Labor Research Seminar
This seminar invites students to do original research into the stories of Black refugees – including escaped, kidnapped, sojourning, and other temporary or permanent residents of Pennsylvania. Their stories unfolded through contentious freedom suits, daring escapes on the Underground Railroad, newspaper wars, gun fights and thuggery, treason cases, and more. We have assembled an archive of statutes, legal cases, testimony, judicial and administrative decisions, newspaper stories, images, memoirs, maps, and more to help students get started with their research. In addition, students will have opportunities to pursue additional research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a co-sponsor of this course. Many of these materials have never been the subject of sustained study or placed in their historical context. Students will choose their topics in consultation with the professors and will produce research reports in written or digital or cinematic formats. Students are expected to contribute to the course website, a platform that will be available to the public as well as to the Penn community, and we aim to provide new information and venues for research. The course therefore will involve considerations of how best to convey what we learn, as well as explorations of historical methods and collaborating archives.
Also Offered As: AFRC 3174
1 Course Unit
HIST 3200 War and Conquest in Medieval Europe
This seminar will focus on conquest in the medieval period. We will seek to understand the medieval mentality of warfare in order to think about how war was understood and justified: what constitutes acceptable violence and military intervention? War, however, cannot be separated from its goals. We will thus go beyond the battlefield to look at how conquest of territories was cemented with the establishment and enforcement of new orders. Themes will include knighthood, ideas of just war, laws of war, territorial control and colonization. The course will also include two fabulous field trips to visit Penn’s manuscript collection and the arms and armor collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3201 Capitalism and Charity: The Long, Complicated Connection
Capitalism and charity seldom appear in the same sentence, much less the same title. They seem diametrically opposed. While capitalism is commonly understood as “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit”, according to Merriam-Webster, charity refers to “generosity and helpfulness especially toward the needy or suffering, also aid given to those in need”. The former implies self-interest, while the other breathes common interest. Yet, the two are closely, dynamically connected. As capitalism has emerged and evolved historically, so has charity changed to meet new circumstances and find new legitimations. From simple charity in the form of indiscriminate alms-giving have emerged “poor relief”, “work relief”, “social welfare” and, more recently “effective altruism” to name but a few permutations. Charity as a personal, face-to-face interaction between rich and poor has become cloaked in varieties of impersonal programs and institutions. This research seminar will explore the tensions (and synergies) between capitalism and charity over time. Through readings and discussions of primary sources, students will come to understand something of this historical dynamic. By completing independent research projects, they will contribute to that understanding as well.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3202 Medieval Justice
What exactly is justice? What is its relationship to law? To what extent is it culturally contingent? How do ideas about justice change over time? This course will examine different theories and representation of justice in European Middle Ages (ca. 500-1500). We will begin by looking at aspects of dispute resolution in the early middle ages, when there was little centralized government. This was the heyday of feud, ordeal, and the law of talion, when law was largely unwritten and disputes were resolved informally by the community. We will then look at how law professionalized and how ideas of justice changed as formal legal institutions and centralized governments developed. Readings will be drawn from a variety of sources, including the so-called barbarian codes, stories of feud, accounts of crime, charters of rights, lawbooks, and trial records.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3203 Conversion in Historical Perspective: Religion, Society, and Self
Changes of faith are complex shifts that involve social, spiritual, intellectual, and even physical alterations. In the premodern West, when legal status was often determined by religious affiliation and the state of one’s soul was a deathly serious matter, such changes were even more fraught. What led a person to undertake an essential transformation of identity that could affect everything from food to family to spiritual fulfillment? Whether we are speaking of individual conversions of conscience or the coerced conversions of whole peoples en masse, religious change has been central to the global development and spread of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and reveals much about the people and contexts in which it took place. This seminar will explore the dynamics of conversion across a range of medieval and early modern contexts. We will investigate the motivations for conversions, the obstacles faced by converts, and the issues raised by conversion from the perspective of those who remained within a single tradition. How did conversion efforts serve globalization and empire, and what other power relations were involved? How did peoplehood, nationality, or race play out in conversion and its aftermath? How did premodern people understand conversion differently from each other, and differently than their coreligionists or scholars do today? The course will treat a number of specific examples, including autobiographical conversion narratives and conversion manuals, the role ascribed to conversion in visions of messianic redemption, forced conversions under Spanish and Ottoman rule, missionizing in the age of European expansion, and more. The course aims to hone students’ skills in thinking about—and with—premodern religiosity, opening up new perspectives on the past and present by reading primary texts and analytical research.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: JWST 3207, RELS 3207
1 Course Unit
HIST 3210 Revolutions in Three Kingdoms: England, Ireland, Scotland
This course examines the political, religious, and military conflicts and social and cultural transformations that wracked England, Ireland, and Scotland between the late 1630s and 1660. While much of the focus will be on events from the breakdown of royal authority and the coming of rebellion and Civil War through the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, we will also consider the longer-term roots of conflict in religious Reformation, state-formation, social change, and colonial conquest, as well as its legacies in subsequent imperial expansion, political thinking, and historical memory. Readings will include a mixture of classic works and contemporary scholarship, and students will develop a research project based in extensive engagement with primary sources.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3215 Art and Nature in Early Modern Europe
This seminar examines ideas of art, nature, and the relationship between them from the era of the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. The boundaries between the natural and the artificial were central to early modern understandings of the world, of knowledge, and of the possibilities of human agency; these boundaries were hotly debated and dramatically redrawn between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth, giving rise to new kinds of knowledge and new attempts to control or reshape environments, populations, societies, and economies, in Europe and across the world. Readings from recent scholarship will complement sustained engagement with primary sources, and the course will culminate in a substantive research project. Topics likely to be covered include but are not limited to agricultural projects, alchemy, artisanal knowledge, experimental philosophy, natural history, political economy, travel literature, and utopianism.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3250 Great War in Memoir and Memory
World War One was the primordial catastrophe of twentieth-century history. For all who passed through it, the Great War was transformative, presenting a profound rupture in personal experience. It was a war that unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of memoirs and poetic and fictional accounts written by participants. In its wake, it also produced new forms of public commemoration and memorialization – tombs to the unknown soldier, great monuments, soldiers’ cemeteries, solemn days of remembrance, and the like. On the centenary of World War One’s outbreak, this course will explore the war through the intersection of these processes of personal and public memory. The first ten weeks will be devoted to shared readings on these themes. In the remaining weeks, students will pursue independent research projects investigating the literature of the Great War or aspects of public or private commemoration. Please note: This is not a seminar in military or diplomatic history, but rather an exploration of personal experiences of the War, representations of experience, and the cultural and political dimensions of memory.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3252 Marx, Nietzsche, Freud: Masters of Suspicion
In his influential book Freud & Philosophy, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified three master thinkers whose influence on the twentieth century was inestimable. What these figures shared was what Ricoeur called a “hermeneutics of suspicion”; that is, in their different ways, each developed a style of interpretation aimed at unmasking, demystifying, and exposing the real from the apparent. “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.” Taking its inspiration from Ricoeur, this seminar will explore some of the key writings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. We will encounter the hermeneutics of suspicion above all in these authors’ attempts to unmask religion and reveal its true origin and function. And we shall also pursue the hermeneutics of suspicion in the specific concerns that form the core of each thinker’s work: Marx’s critique of capitalism, Nietzsche’s genealogy of Judaeo-Christian morality, skepticism about ‘truth’, and proto-deconstruction of the human self, and Freud’s theory of the unconscious. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to independent research and writing of an original essay in intellectual history.
Also Offered As: COML 3252
1 Course Unit
HIST 3350 Religion and Colonial Rule in Africa
This course is designed to introduce students to the religious experiences of Africans and to the politics of culture. We will examine how traditional African religious ideas and practices interacted with Christianity and Islam. We will look specifically at religious expressions among the Yoruba, Southern African independent churches and millenarist movements, and the variety of Muslim organizations that developed during the colonial era. The purpose of this course is threefold. First, to develop in students an awareness of the wide range of meanings of conversion and people's motives in creating and adhering to religious institutions; Second, to examine the political, cultural, and psychological dimensions in the expansion of religious social movements; And third, to investigate the role of religion as counterculture and instrument of resistance to European hegemony. Topics include: Mau Mau and Maji Maji movements in Kenya and Tanzania, Chimurenga in Mozambique, Watchtower churches in Southern Africa, anti-colonial Jihads in Sudan and Somalia and mystical Muslim orders in Senegal.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3350
1 Course Unit
HIST 3351 Africa and the Mid-East
This seminar will explore the historical relationship between these two regions from the early modern age to the present. We will examine the history of trade, particularly the slave trade, and its cultural and political legacy. We will compare the experiences of European imperialism--how the scramble for Africa dovetailed with the last decades of the Ottoman Empire--with an eye to how this shaped nationalist movements in both regions. The course will also explore the decades of independence with a special eye towards pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism. We will also study the ramifications of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the relationship between African and Middle-Eastern countries, from Uganda to Ethiopia, from OPEC to Darfur. The course will pay close attention to migrations through the regions, whether forced or economic or religious. Whenever possible we will explore, through film and literature, how people in Africa and the Middle East see their connections, and their differences.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3351, MELC 3550, NELC 3550
1 Course Unit
HIST 3500 Women and the Making of Modern South Asia
This course on women in South Asian history has four objectives - 1. To acquaint ourselves with the historiography on South Asian women. 2. To gain an understanding of evolving institutions and practices shaping women's lives, such as the family, law and religious traditions. 3. To understand the impact of historical processes - the formation and breakdown of empire, colonialism, nationalism and decolonization - upon South Asian women between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. 4. To become familiar with some of the significant texts written about and by women in this period. We will read a wide variety of primary sources including a Mughal princess' account, devotional verse authored by women, conduct books, tracts, autobiographies and novels.
Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 2601, SAST 2260
1 Course Unit
HIST 3551 Pacific World
Following ongoing attempts by historians to move beyond the confines of national and imperial histories, this research seminar highlights the interaction of peoples and cultures across what may be described as the most dynamic world region of the twenty-first century. While discussions of Mediterranean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds are now commonplace, scholars have, to date, paid less attention to the idea of a Pacific World. How useful is it to identify a “Pacific World” before and after the Age of Discovery—that is, to locate distinctive patterns of human, material and cultural exchange across the Pacific before and after the flood of European power from the fifteenth century? What has been the effect of the rise of the nation-state, modern empires, modern war and globalization? How critical are national and/or imperial legacies to enduring patterns of human interaction and exchange in the twenty-first century Pacific? As global economics, politics and culture increasingly tilt toward the Pacific, we will attempt to uncover the source of the region’s extraordinary energy.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 1792
1 Course Unit
HIST 3600 Human Rights in the Age of Revolutions
This seminar is designed as both as an introduction to the question of the origins of the idea of human rights and as an opportunity to develop a sustained research project related to the Age of Revolutions in Europe, the Americas (North or South), or Caribbean, mid-18th century to 1848. Topics to be discussed include: the relationship and tension in Enlightenment thought between equality and liberty, the idea of “the rights of man” and its exclusions, the emergence of abolitionism in the context of slave societies, the roots of feminism, the problem of the poor and the question of social and economic rights, rights and national self-determination, and left- and right-wing critiques of rights language. Primary source readings will range from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, to 18th-century slave codes, to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jeremy Bentham. Secondary source readings will introduce students to interpretative problems in thinking about human rights in the context of the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions. Throughout the seminar, emphasis will also be placed on the development of a historical research project, including framing a question, building a bibliography, analyzing various kinds of sources, constructing an effective outline, and writing an argument-driven and well substantiated seminar paper. **Note for History Majors and Minors: if your research paper addresses a Latin American/Caribbean or US topic, then you may use this course to fulfill that particular geographic requirement.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3603 Writing, Publishing, and Reading in Early Modern Europe and the Americas
In this course we will consider the writing, publication, and reading of texts created on both sides of the Atlantic in early modern times, from the era of Gutenberg to that of Franklin, and in many languages. The seminar will be held in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in Van Pelt Library and make substantial use of its exceptional, multilingual collections, including early manuscripts, illustrated books, plays marked for performance, and censored books. Any written or printed object can be said to have a double nature: both textual and material. We will introduce this approach and related methodologies: the history of the book; the history of reading; connected history; bibliography; and textual criticism. We will focus on particular case studies and also think broadly about the global history of written culture, and about relations between scribal and print culture, between writing and reading, between national traditions, and between what is and what is not “literature.” We encourage students with diverse linguistic backgrounds to enroll. As part of the seminar, students will engage in a research project which can be based in the primary source collections of the Kislak Center. History Majors or Minors may use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, or Latin America geographic requirement if that region is the focus of their research paper.
Also Offered As: COML 3603, ENGL 2603
1 Course Unit
HIST 3700 Abolitionism: A Global History
This class develops a transnational and global approach to the rise of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. In a comparative framework, the class traces the rise of abolitionism in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, examining the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the rise of colonialism in Africa, and the growth of forced labor in the wake of transatlantic slave trade. We will deal with key debates in the literature of African, Atlantic and Global histories, including the causes and motivations of abolitionism, the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of forced labor in Africa, the historical ties between abolitionism and the early stages of colonialism in Africa, the flow of indentured laborers from Asia to the Americas in the wake of the slave trade. This class is primarily geared towards the production of a research paper. *Depending on the research paper topic, History Majors and Minors can use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, Latin America or Africa requirement.*
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3700, LALS 3700
1 Course Unit
HIST 3701 Capitalism and Humanitarianism
Reviewing David Brion Davis’ Problem of Slavery in Western Culture for the New York Review of Books in 1967, the great ancient historian Moses Finley concluded that Davis’s book was “one of the most important to have been published on the subject of slavery in modern times.” Yet he found the book inconclusive on the “decisive question” of why slavery was finally abolished in the West. “Nothing is more difficult perhaps than to explain how and why, or why not, a new moral perception becomes effective in action,” Finley wrote. Almost 50 years after this statement was made, the complicated processes that are being played out at the heart of capitalism, mobilizing both ethical issues and the pursuit of profit are still imperfectly understood, yet more fascinating than ever. This course’s working hypothesis is that, from a better understanding of the entanglements of capitalism and humanitarianism a better understanding of the nature of the “material civilization” can be achieved. For this purpose, the course does provide a multi-pronged approach including sessions discussing analytical arguments about the reasons for the entanglements of capitalism and humanitarianism, sessions devoted to historical turning points and sessions devoted to case studies and the exploration of specific mechanisms whereby capitalism and humanitarianism connect with one another. I wish in particular to try and make students aware of the problem of “quality” and its social construction, which is found at the heart of both capitalism and humanitarianism. By awakening them to this question, I also hope to provide an engaging way to understand the importance of economics in cultural history. Last, while the course will make verbal references to work on more recent periods, the focus is on a time frame that ends with World War I. This seems warranted given that the purpose is to unpack the entanglements of finance and humanitarianism “as they got intertwined.” Nota Bene, some a few non-mandatory readings in French.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3702 Feminism in the Americas
Students in this seminar will choose their own research topic in the history of feminism. With guidance and support each person will produce a twenty-page paper based on intensive work with primary sources. Readings will range across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. We’ll take a long view, beginning in the sixteenth century, and use an expansive frame. Our purpose will not be to decide who was or wasn’t ‘a feminist’ but instead to try to understand actors within their contexts. Readings include scholarship on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sojourner Truth, the struggle for voting rights across national lines, opposition to dictatorship, and organizing against racism and homophobia. *For History Majors and Minors: Geographic requirement fulfilled by this seminar is dependent on research paper topic.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 3702, LALS 3702
1 Course Unit
HIST 3703 Taking Off: How Some Economies Get Rich
What makes an economy grow? This question has been asked – and answered – many times over in the modern era. From Adam Smith’s classic Wealth of Nations (1776) to today’s political leaders, many have debated the ingredients necessary for a nation to prosper, or policies to promote growth. Some point to the need for fiscal responsibility, others an educated labor force, or to tariffs, natural resources, and the right laws. This seminar explores the deep history of this problem of economic growth. Students will read works by economists, social scientists, and historians that present different theories for why some nations develop faster than others. With case studies from across the globe, we will tackle topics like why Europe industrialized first, or the paradox of why the abundance of natural resources does not necessarily contribute to long-lasting economic development. This course also asks students to think critically about the metrics used to measure “success” and “failure” across nations, as well as how such comparisons between societies have been mobilized to legitimize imperial expansion, human exploitation, environmental destruction, or political repression. By discussing how governments, corporate interests, and individual actors have implemented strategies to increase national wealth, students will also be asked to grapple with some of the consequences of economic growth for the environment, human welfare, and social inequality. *Students may fulfill one geographic requirement for the History major or minor with this course. The specific requirement fulfilled will be determined by the topic of the research paper.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 3703
1 Course Unit
HIST 3704 Re-reading the Holocaust
This course explores how the Holocaust has been constructed as an historical event. Beginning in the mid-1940s, with the first attempts to narrate what had transpired during the Nazi era, this seminar traces the ways that the Holocaust became codified as a distinct episode in history. Taking a chronological approach, the course follows the evolution of historical and popular ideas about the Holocaust and considers the different perspectives presented by a variety of sources. We will examine documentary films, memoirs, survivor testimonies, as well as other scholarly and popular representations of the Holocaust. Students will be introduced to unfamiliar sources and also asked to reconsider some well-known Holocaust documents and institutions.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: JWST 3704
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 1711
1 Course Unit
HIST 3705 Jews and the City
Jews have always been an extraordinarily urban people. This seminar explores various aspects of the Jewish encounter with the city, examining the ways that Jewish culture has been shaped by and has helped to shape urban culture. We will examine European and American cities as well as some in Palestine/Israel, covering an expansive view of urban culture. We will consider Jewish involvement in political and cultural life, the various neighborhoods in which Jews have lived, relations with other ethnic groups, as well as many other topics. We will read some classic works in the field along with contemporary scholarship. No prior background in Jewish history is required. *This course may be applied toward the US, European, or Middle East requirements for the History Major or Minor, depending upon the research paper topic. Students must consult with the instructor to determine which geographic requirement will be fulfilled.*
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: JWST 3705, URBS 3705
1 Course Unit
HIST 3706 Oral History
From wax cylinders to reel-to-reel to digital video, recording technologies expanded the historical profession dramatically during the twentieth century. We will read some classics, such as Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days and Alessandro Portelli’s Death of Luigi Trastulli, as well as scholarly pieces aimed at working historians and very new work, such as Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. We will also explore the interface between documentary filmmaking, pod-casts, and more traditional Oral History forms. However, this course centers on methodology—students will learn about ‘best practices’ in the field and will work toward creating an interview record that can be housed in an archive and accessed by other researchers even as interviewees and their families retain intellectual property rights.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: LALS 3706
1 Course Unit
HIST 3708 History of Truth
Truth has become a controversial topic lately. This course will take a historical look at truth and its opposites, including lies and false beliefs, in the history of the West from the Renaissance to the present. We will consider changing conceptions of evidence and knowledge in law, religion, science, the arts, and politics and the media. We will also consider the historian's responsibility to truth, in the past and today. Part of the course will focus on the discussion of readings in common, including both primary sources and secondary sources that introduce students to interpretive problems in this field. Part will be devoted to the construction of an extensive research paper in which students grapple with a problem of their choice related to the history of truth claims or lies. Class time will also be devoted to discreet steps involved in this process, including framing a question, building a bibliography, analyzing various kinds of evidence or sources, constructing an effective outline, and writing an argument-driven and well-substantiated seminar paper.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3710 Introduction to Business, Economic and Financial History
Business, Economic and Financial History plays a crucial role today in informing the views of business leaders, policy makers, reformers and public intellectuals. This seminar provides students with the opportunity to acquire a command of the key elements of this important intellectual field. The seminar format enables us to do this engagingly through reading and discussion. Students acquire a knowledge of the fundamental texts and controversies. Each meeting focuses on one foundational debate and provides a means to be up to date with the insights gleaned from rigorous economic history. We will examine twelve important debates and students will be asked to write a paper. The debates will include such questions as: What is growth and how can it be measured? What caused the "great divergence" in long run development among countries? How can we "understand" the rise and fall of slavery and its long shadow today? What is globalization and when did it begin? Did the Gold Standard and interwar fiscal and monetary policy orthodoxy cause the great depression? How can we explain the evolution of inequality in the very long run?
Also Offered As: ECON 0625
1 Course Unit
HIST 3713 Singer-songwriters in the Cold War
This research seminar considers the overlapping political worlds of performers like Violeta Parra (b. Chile 1917), Pete Seeger (b. USA 1919), Miriam Makeba (b. South Africa 1932), Vladimir Vysotsky (b. USSR 1938), Gilberto Gil (b. Brazil 1942), Bob Marley (b. Jamaica 1945), Silvio Rodríguez (b. Cuba 1946), Waldemar Bastos (b. Angola 1954), and others. We will have shared readings about youth-identified musicians who brought Leftist politics on stage with them, as well as about the activism of anti-communists and anti-Stalinists in different geographic spaces. Each participant will produce a 15-20 page paper based on primary sources. Throughout the semester, in-class work will be designed to support the research process. Students will work through multiple drafts and share their writing with one another. Faculty members from Music, Comparative Literature, and other departments will be invited as guest speakers, as will folklorists, performers, and members of other Philadelphia-area communities.
Also Offered As: LALS 3713
1 Course Unit
HIST 3714 Doing History: Research, Writing, and Mentorship
Focused on mentorship, both on campus and off, this course allows Penn Students to design and develop a research project while engaging with high schoolers from the School District of Philadelphia who will be pursuing their own historical work. Their teacher, Joshua Block, is a Penn graduate with twenty-five years of experience in the Philadelphia School District--his support will allow seminar participants to learn about teaching as a profession. During the first half of the semester, we will discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and develop research plans that reflect students' own intellectual goals as historians. Research projects may focus on Philadelphia or anywhere in the Americas (please note that research projects beyond the Americas will require the student to seek an additional mentor beyond Professor Farnsworth-Alvear). We'll visit archives and other repositories in the city; examine digitized manuscript documents in Spanish and English and present our sources in Mr. Block’s classroom; and begin writing a 15-20 page research paper based on primary sources. During the second half of the semester, we will concentrate on supporting and mentoring high schoolers’ work as they pursue their own investigation of Democracy in America, with each seminar participant being paired with a group of high school researchers to mentor their research process. This is an Academically-Based, Community Service (ABCS) course.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3715 Family Stories as History
Do you have a family story that you want to understand more deeply and broadly? Perhaps you have family memories of ancestors who faced great challenges or violence, stories of movement, departures or arrivals, challenges of adaptation, personal stories of triumph or failure, scandals, secrets, or extraordinary achievements, individual experiments in living. Narratives, stories, and sometimes enigmas play crucial roles in the dynamics of family life and formation of personal identity. Yet, even the most personal story intersects with a broader history. To explore that intersection, students will develop research projects that create historical accounts from personal family history. The seminar will give students an opportunity to bring their academic interests quite literally home, while also opening possibilities for experimentation in forms of historical writing. The first part of the course will introduce some examples of family history and consider relevant methodological skills, including oral history. We will explore scholarship on trauma, intergenerational memory, and the evolution of the modern family. Above all, we will explore the intellectual and creative challenges of writing about one’s own family within a scholarly framework. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of transforming family stories into historical understanding? How do private lives intersect with publicly shared histories? What ethical and interpretive questions arise when scholars turn the lens inward? The bulk of the semester will be devoted to original research and writing. Each student will craft a research paper centered on their own family, selecting a “story” that illuminates a pivotal experience or process, such as migration, social mobility, cultural transformation, or the reverberations of historical trauma. In principle, every family story has the potential to yield valuable insights, but part of the challenge will undoubtedly be to identify narratives that speak to broader historical or cultural dynamics while remaining grounded in adequate sources, rigorous research and critical reflection. By semester’s end, students will produce an essay that combines personal narrative with scholarly insight, contributing to ongoing conversations about memory, identity, and the writing of history. This seminar fulfills the History Major research requirement. However, depending on your topic and pending approval by both me and your Major advisor, the seminar might fulfill an additional Major or Concentration requirement.
1 Course Unit
HIST 3820 Renaissance Europe
The Renaissance was a defining era in European history, the age of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, crucial in the formation of Europe’s culture and identity. In this course we will examine the philosophers, writers, artists, and scientists of this era, as well as the political and social climate in which they lived and worked. We will give particular attention to the humanist movement, university culture, revolutionary changes in the visual arts, science, and religion. Readings will include key primary sources from the Renaissance era as well as the writings of modern historians.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ITAL 3820
1 Course Unit
HIST 3910 Immigration and the Making of US Law
This course illuminates how debates over immigration have transformed the legal contours of the United States. We examine the evolution of federal immigration policy and the legal battles immigrants waged against exclusionary practices in the U.S. from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. The key federal and state cases explored in this course center on national citizenship, housing segregation, and school segregation. In addition to considering the key legal issues at stake in these cases, this course also encourages an analysis of the roles race, disability, gender, and labor play in shaping U.S. law within the context of immigration history.
Also Offered As: ASAM 3110, LALS 3911
1 Course Unit
HIST 3920 European Diplomatic History 1789-1914
This exciting course is of great value – especially to majors in international relations history, and political science – because it examines the rise and fall of a genuine world order: the Congress of Vienna system established by the governments of Europe’s Great Powers following the Napoleonic Wars. The "long 19th century"(1789-1914) was simply the most dynamic in history. Europe was transformed by technological, political, and ideological revolutions, and the rest of the world was transformed by Europe’s imperialism and trade. Yet, no general wars erupted over that century thanks to the sturdy pillars of peace raised by the statesmen at the Congress of Vienna. Over time, however, the pillars crumbled and human folly, combined with the impersonal forces of modernity, pushed Europe into the world wars and holocausts of the hideous 20th century. This is a history that compels us to ask: why did the world order break down and what are the implications for the disordered world of today?
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 3921 European International Relations 1914-present
This exciting survey of international politics in the 20th century might well be called the decline and fall of the European Great Powers because it describes the unspeakable carnage of the two world wars and the apocalyptic tensions of the divided continent during the Cold War that followed. As late as 1914 the British, French, German, Austrian Habsburg, and tsarist Russian empires enjoyed military and imperial hegemony throughout Eurasia and Africa, while Britain was the world’s financial and commercial leader and Germany a military-industrial giant. But by 1945 the continent lay in ruins and the world had been partitioned by the United States and Soviet Union. How and why did European civilization self-destruct and how did it manage to resuscitate itself in the European Union since 1991? Those are among the big questions we shall explore, while encountering along the way such striking personalities as Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and Charles De Gaulle. So strap on your seatbelts and sign up for this adventure.
Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either
1 Course Unit
HIST 3922 European Thought and Culture in the Age of Revolution
Starting with the dual challenges of Enlightenment and Revolution at the close of the eighteenth century, this course examines the emergence of modern European thought and culture in the century from Kant to Nietzsche. Themes to be considered include Romanticism, Utopian Socialism, early Feminism, Marxism, Liberalism, and Aestheticism. Readings include Kant, Hegel, Burke, Marx, Mill, Wollstonecraft, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: COML 3922
1 Course Unit
HIST 3923 Twentieth Century European Intellectual History
European intellectual and cultural history from 1870 to 1950. Themes to be considered include aesthetic modernism and the avant-garde, the rebellion against rationalism and positivism, Social Darwinism, Second International Socialism, the impact of World War One on European intellectuals, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and the ideological origins of fascism. Figures to be studied include Nietzsche, Freud, Woolf, Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger.
Spring
Also Offered As: COML 3923
1 Course Unit
HIST 3960 Histories of the Information Economy
This course provides a perspective on the role of information as a historical actor. Moving beyond common narratives of the progress of the information economy driven by technological factors, the course underscores the significance of what may be called the political economies of information. We will approach major works, dealing with the historical importance of information (Foucault, Cohn, Habermas) and simultaneously engages with the history of institutions to store and circulate information. We will emphasize the importance of value (social, political, economic) which is at the heart of information gathering and producing. In particular, we will discuss the rise and fall of institutions to store and circulate information. We will study the importance of information in historical processes such as imperialism and colonization, state building, propaganda, the Enlightenment, as well as the informational aspects of the rise of global NGOs and international organization, police and spying. Information may be accumulated or lost; it can be safeguarded or debased; it can confer power or undermine it. In the age of fake news, these are issues worthy of a closer interest.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 3965 The International Monetary System from Sterling to Cryptocurrency (1720-2020)
The course will cover the modern evolution of the international monetary system going all the way back to the era when sterling became the leading international currencies. It is arranged thematically and chronologically both. The lessons and readings will introduce students to the principal evolutions of the international monetary system and at the same time, it will give them an understanding of regimes, their mechanics and the geopolitical economies behind systemic shifts. Students need not have an economic background but must be prepared to read about exchange rates (and world politics). Special focus on: The early modern international monetary system. How Amsterdam and London captured the Spanish treasure. Beyond the West (Ottoman Empire, India, China). The Napoleonic wars and the rise of sterling. Hong-Kong: Silver, Opium, and the Recycling of Surpluses. The emergence of the Gold Standard. Bimetallism: The US election of 1796. Sterling and Key Currencies before WWI. The First World War and the origins of dollar supremacy. When the dollar displaced sterling (1920s). The collapse of the international gold standard (1930s). The Bretton Woods System. The rise and rise of the US dollar. Currency competition (Dollar, Euro, Yuan Renminbi). The meaning of cryptocurrencies.
Also Offered As: ECON 0615
1 Course Unit
HIST 4103 Women and the Civil Rights Movement
This advanced undergraduate course examines women’s role in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, with an emphasis on women’s activism, impact, and gender dynamics in social movements. This course will use first-hand narratives as well as monographs to provide an overview of women’s experiences in major organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Through writing assignments, students will have an opportunity to strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 4203, GSWS 4203
1 Course Unit
HIST 4202 Black Childhoods
African-American Childhood is an upper-level seminar designed to introduce students to the literature on childhood and youth through the lens of African-American children's history. The class will demonstrate the relationship that race, gender, and age have in shaping children's experiences. Readings will focus on institutions serving African-American children, their participation in civil rights struggles, and the representation of African-American children in popular culture. The class will also consider children as political actors in major moments of African-American history. Class assignments will include two long research papers, presentations on course texts and a field trip. Students will strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 4202
1 Course Unit
HIST 4518 Haiti and the African Diaspora: Historical Methods
On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3518, GSWS 3518, LALS 3518
1 Course Unit
HIST 4560 Attacking the Talmud: From Antiquity to the Alt-Right
Attacking the Talmud: From Antiquity to the Alt-Right examines the long and evolving history of polemics, censorship, and hostility directed at the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism, from late antiquity through the medieval and early modern periods to contemporary extremist movements. Treating attacks on the Talmud as a window into broader dynamics of religious conflict, political power, and antisemitism, the course analyzes how Jewish texts have been read, misread, weaponized, banned, burned, and repurposed across cultures and centuries. Students will study ancient pagan and Christian critiques of rabbinic authority, medieval disputations and trials of the Talmud, early modern censorship and print culture, and modern racial, conspiratorial, and ideological appropriations of anti-Talmud discourse. Special attention is given to how the Talmud has been represented by its opponents versus how it functions within Jewish intellectual, legal, and religious life. The course also explores contemporary digital and alt-right rhetoric, tracing continuities and ruptures with earlier traditions of anti-Jewish thought. Through close readings of primary sources, engagement with scholarly analysis, and focused case studies, students will develop the tools to critically evaluate polemical texts and to understand how attacks on Jews and Jewish texts have been shaped by the specific historical, social, and political conditions of each era. Emphasis is placed on historical context, methodological rigor, and ethical responsibility in the study of contested religious traditions.
Also Offered As: JWST 4560, MELC 4560, RELS 4560
1 Course Unit
HIST 4910 Independent Study: U.S. History before 1800
Independent Study on U.S. History before 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4915 Independent Study: U.S. History after 1800
Independent Study on U.S. History after 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4920 Independent Study: Europe before 1800
Independent Study on Europe before 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4925 Independent Study: Europe after 1800
Independent Study on Europe after 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4930 Independent Study: African or Middle Eastern History before 1800
Independent Study on African or Middle Eastern History before 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4935 Independent Study: African or Middle Eastern History after 1800
Independent Study on African or Middle Eastern History after 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4940 Independent Study: Latin American or Caribbean History before 1800
Independent Study on Latin American or Caribbean History before 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4945 Independent Study: Latin American or Caribbean History after 1800
Independent Study on Latin American or Caribbean History after 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4950 Independent Study: East or South Asian History before 1800
Independent Study on East or South Asian History before 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4955 Independent Study: East or South Asian History after 1800
Independent Study on East or South Asian History after 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4960 Independent Study: Transregional History before 1800
Independent Study on Transregional History before 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4965 Independent Study: Transregional History after 1800
Independent Study on Transregional History after 1800
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4997 Junior Honors in History
Open to junior honors candidates in history. Introduction to the study and analysis of historical phenomena. Emphasis on theoretical approaches to historical knowledge, problems of methodology, and introduction to research design and strategy. Objective of this seminar is the development of honors thesis proposal.
Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 4998 Senior Honors in History
Open to senior honors candidates in history who will write their honors thesis during this seminar.
Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete
1 Course Unit
HIST 5100 African American History
Selected topics in African American History as determined by the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 5100
1 Course Unit
HIST 5240 The Rise and Fall of the Russian Empire, 1552-1917
How and why did Russia become the center of the world's largest empire, a single state encompassing eleven time zones and over a hundred ethnic groups? To answer this question, we will explore the rise of a distinct political culture beginning in medieval Muscovy, its transformation under the impact of a prolonged encounter with European civilization, and the various attempts to re-form Russia from above and below prior to the Revolution of 1917. Main themes include the facade vs. the reality of central authority, the intersection of foreign and domestic issues, the development of a radical intelligentsia, and the tension between empire and nation.
Also Offered As: REES 5310
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 0240
1 Course Unit
HIST 5550 East Asian Diplomacy
Home to four of the five most populous states and four of the five largest economies, the Asia/Pacific is arguably the most dynamic region in the twenty-first century. At the same time, Cold War remnants (a divided Korea and China) and major geopolitical shifts (the rise of China and India, decline of the US and Japan) contribute significantly to the volatility of our world. This course will examine the political, economic, and geopolitical dynamism of the region through a survey of relations among the great powers in Asia from the sixteenth century to the present. Special emphasis will be given to regional and global developments from the perspective of the three principal East Asian states--China, Japan and Korea. We will explore the many informal, as well as formal, means of intercourse that have made East Asia what it is today. Graduate students should consult graduate syllabus for graduate reading list, special recitation time and graduate requirements.
Also Offered As: EALC 5711
Mutually Exclusive: HIST 1550
1 Course Unit
HIST 6100 Topics in US History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in US history.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6110 Topics in Early American History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Early American history.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6120 Topics in 19th-Century US History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in 19th Century US history.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6130 Topics in 20th- and 21st-Century US History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in 20th & 21st US history.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6200 Topics in European History
Reading and Discussion course on selected topics in European History.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6210 Topics in Medieval European History
Reading and Discussion course on selected topics in Medieval European History.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6220 Topics in Early Modern European History
Reading and Discussion course on selected topics in Early Modern European History.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6230 Topics in Modern European History
Reading and Discussion course on selected topics in Modern European History.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6300 Topics in Asian History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Asian History.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6310 Topics in Premodern Asian History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Pre-Modern Asian History.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6320 Topics in Early Modern Asian History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Early Modern Asian History.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6330 Topics in Modern Asian History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Modern Asian History.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6400 Topics in Middle Eastern History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Middle Eastern history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6410 Topics in Pre-Colonial Middle Eastern History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Pre-Colonial Middle Eastern history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6420 Topics in Colonial-Era Middle Eastern History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Colonial Middle Eastern history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6430 Topics in Post-Colonial Middle Eastern History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Post-colonial Middle Eastern history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6500 Topics in African History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in African history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6510 Topics in Pre-Colonial African History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Pre-Colonial African history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6520 Topics in Colonial-Era African History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Colonial Era African history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6530 Topics in Post-Colonial African History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Post-colonial African history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6600 Topics in Latin American and Caribbean History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Latin American and Caribbean history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6610 Topics in Pre-Colonial Latin American History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Pre-Colonial Latin American and Caribbean history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6620 Topics in Colonial-Era Latin American
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Colonial Latin American and Caribbean history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6630 Topics in Post-Colonial Latin American
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Post-Colonial Latin American and Caribbean history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6680 History of Law and Social Policy
This is a course in the history of law and policy-making with respect to selected social problems. Discussion of assigned readings and papers will elaborate the role law, lawyers, judges, other public official and policy advocates have played in proposing solutions to specific problems. The course will permit theevaluation of the importance of historical perspective and legal expertise in policy debates.
Fall
1 Course Unit
HIST 6700 Seminar: Transregional History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Transregional History
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6710 Seminar: Transregional Economic History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Transregional Economic History
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6720 Seminar: Transregional Gender History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Transregional Gender History
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6730 Seminar: Transregional Intellectual History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Transregional Intellectual History
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6740 Seminar: Transregional Religious History
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Transregional Religious History
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6750 Seminar: History of Transregional Race and Slavery
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in History of Transregional Race and Slavery
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6760 Seminar: Transregional Nationalisms
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in the History of Transregional Nationalisms
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6770 Seminar: TransRegional History of War and Diplomacy
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in the History of Transregional War and Diplomacy
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6780 Seminar: History of Transregional Migrations and Diasporas
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in the History of Transregional Migrations and Diasporas
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 6790 Seminar: History of Transregional Empires and Colonialisms
Reading and discussion course on selected topics in the History of Transregional Empires and Colonialisms
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7000 Proseminar in History
Weekly readings, discussions, and writing assignments designed to introduce students to the discipline of history. The emphasis is on critical approaches, global comparisons, and an expansive chronological frame for thinking about the past. This course is required for all PhD students, and is taken in the first year of study.
Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given even if second term not complete
1 Course Unit
HIST 7100 Research seminar in US history.
Research seminar on selected topics in US history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7110 Research seminar in Early American history.
Research seminar on selected topics in Early American history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7120 Research seminar in 19th Century US history.
Research seminar on selected topics in 19th Century US history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7130 Research seminar in 20th & 21st Century US history.
Research seminar on selected topics in 20th & 21st Century US history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7200 Research Seminar in European History
Research seminar on selected topics in European history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7210 Research Seminar in Medieval European History
Research seminar on selected topics in Medieval European history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7220 Research Seminar in Early Modern European History
Research seminar on selected topics in Early Modern European history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7230 Research Seminar in Modern European History
Research seminar on selected topics in Modern European history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7300 Research Seminar in Asian History
Research seminar on selected topics in Asian History.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7310 Research Seminar in Pre-Modern Asian History
Research seminar on selected topics in Pre-Modern Asian History.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7320 Research Seminar in Early Modern Asian History
Research seminar on selected topics in Early Modern Asian History.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7330 Research Seminar in Modern Asian History
Research seminar on selected topics in Modern Asian History.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7400 Research Seminar in Middle Eastern History
Research seminar on selected topics in Middle Eastern history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7410 Research Seminar in Pre-Colonial Middle Eastern History
Research seminar on selected topics in Pre-Colonial Middle Eastern history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7420 Research Seminar in Colonial Middle Eastern History
Research seminar on selected topics in Colonial Middle Eastern history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7430 Research Seminar in Post-Colonial Middle Eastern History
Research seminar on selected topics in Post-Colonial Middle Eastern history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7500 Research Semianr in African African History
Research Seminar on selected topics in African history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7510 Research Semianr in Pre-Colonial African History
Research seminar on selected topics in Pre-Colonial African history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7520 Research Seminar in Colonial African History
Research Seminar on selected topics in Colonial African history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7530 Research Seminar in Post-Colonial African History
Research Seminar on selected topics in Post Colonial African history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7600 Research Seminar in Latin American History
Research Seminar on selected topics in Latin American and Caribbean history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7610 Research Seminar in Pre-Colonial Latin American History
Research Seminar on selected topics in Pre-Colonial Latin American and Caribbean history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7620 Research Seminar in Colonial Latin American History
Research Seminar on selected topics in Colonial Latin American and Caribbean history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7630 Research Seminar in Post-Colonial Latin American History
Research Seminar on selected topics in Post-Colonial Latin American and Caribbean history
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7700 Research Seminar in Transregional History
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7710 Research Seminar in Transregional Economic History
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional Economic history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7720 Research Seminar in Transregional Gender History
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional Gender history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7730 Research Seminar in Transregional Intellectual History
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional Intellectual history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7740 Research Seminar in Transregional Religious History
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional Religious history.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7750 Research Seminar in Transregional Race and Slavery
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional Race and Slavery
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7760 Research Seminar in Transregional Nationalisms
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional Nationalisms.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7770 Research Seminar on Transregional War and Diplomacy
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional War and Diplomacy.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7780 Research Seminar in TransRegional Migration and Diasporas
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional Migration and Diasporas.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 7790 Research Seminar on Transregional Colonialism and Empires
Research seminar on selected topics in Transregional Colonialism and Empires.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 9800 Prospectus Workshop
Summer workshop designed to prepare students for the process of research and writing of a dissertation.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 9810 The Craft of Writing
This faculty-led workshop for advanced doctoral students focuses on dissertation writing. The course will be adapted to meet the needs of enrolled dissertators, but expected topics include: finding your historical writing voice; telling an evidence-based narrative; what to do when you have too much or too little evidence; structuring your material into chapters; developing effective titles; streamlining and signposting; the best use of quotations; knowing when to revise and when to overhaul; knowing when and how to stop.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
HIST 9900 Master's Thesis
Master's Thesis Research and Writing.
Fall or Spring
3 Course Units
HIST 9950 Dissertation
Dissertation Research and Writing.
Fall or Spring
3 Course Units