Description. FOUN FRST
The course begins by asking a simple question: How did revolution become something that human beings can do? What made it possible for humans to first think about then enact an abrupt, transgressive, and intentional transformation of the society in which they live? From this initial question, the course will examine the viral spread of revolution across the earth over the past two centuries. Topics that we will engage with include: Changes in the meaning and practice of revolution, the relation of revolution to ideologies of nationalism, democracy, socialism, secularism, and religion; the emergence of people who call themselves revolutionaries (and conservatives); revolutionary spaces/time; and the concepts of permanent and counter revolution. The course will conclude with discussion of the global uprisings that have rocked the world since 2011 and the prospects for revolution in the United States today. FOUN RESC FRST W1
World History II: since 1500CE focuses on the history of the globalization of societies, cultures, and economies after 1500CE, emphasizing trade and exchange while examining local innovations, adaptations, and hybridization. The course considers carefully the relationship of changing religious belief to cultural practices and social concerns; the interplay of economy, technology, and environmental transformation; and, the impact of political change, especially imperial and colonial enterprises, to the course of world history. FRST ARHC
Description. ARHC W2
Description. ARHC AHLG DUSC W2
In this course, we seek to understand the causes and consequences of the United States Civil War. We address questions such as: What historical conditions (political, social, cultural, and economic) set the stage for Southern secession and cross-regional war? Who caused the conflict? What advantages and disadvantages did both the Union and Confederacy face at the outset of the war? How did war strategies evolve over time? What were soldiers fighting for? How and why did emancipation emerge as a central issue? How did African Americans transform the nature of the war? How did civilian life change throughout the war? Why did the Union ultimately prevail? How did some Southerners resist Union occupation? How did Black people respond to the Union victory? How have memories of the Civil War and its meanings changed over time? ARHC AHLG DUSC W2
This course examines the major developments in United States history from 1940 to the present day with particular focus on structural racism. We explore radical and reform politics; changes in the labor force; formal equality and structural inequality; and the criminalization of race and dissent. ARHC DUSC RPI
This course returns to a time when the continent and waters of North America were bitterly contested by different peoples: Indigenous, British, French, Canadien, and American. It follows decades of competing claims to territory and how this affected the national identities that emerge from this period. We will explore the critical role of environmental knowledge and adaptation in making these claims, through exploration and mapping, wars and dislocation, settlement and land use, and the construction of national memory and national narrative. This is a way of studying the eighteenth century that is highly visual – through maps and artwork – and that emphasizes the physical artifacts of the period still found in our North America today. ARHC AHLG EVCN FRST
Description. ARHC
Description. ARHC AHLG DUSC GBCC RPI W2
Description. ARHC
The purpose of History 288 “Vietnam: Bronze Age to the Present” is to provide students with a detailed, holistic introduction to the history of Vietnam from just prior to China’s colonization of what is now northern Vietnam to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam today. Because the syncretic nature of Vietnamese history requires careful attention to the societies that had an important influence on Vietnamese history, including and especially China but also the non-Vietnamese inhabitants of what is now Vietnam, Cambodians, the Thai, Europeans including most especially the French, and Americans from the United States. Because Vietnam’s endurance as a nation rests in part on strong national identity made up of particular cultural and social bodies, the course considers in some detail important cultural aspects of Vietnam such as literature, poetry, and music as well as certain special social practices such as the relatively high social status of women and the importance of the village. ARHC AHLG GBCC FRST
Description. ARHC
The Hamas-led attack on Israel in Oct 2023 and the ensuing genocide in Gaza have a long history. This course will examine the question of Palestine over the last century, tracing how settler colonialism, European antisemitism, third-world liberation struggles, and the cold-war turned a strip of land the size of Vermont into such an incendiary issue for so many people throughout the world.
Our course has two aims. First, to examine in detail the history of the land of Palestine, the people living in it, the claims made upon it, and the barriers built through it. Second, to work through the various ways we have come to know this history. In this context, we will discuss the relationship between knowledge and power, objectivity and its (ab)uses, as well as the connections between the politics of the past and present. ARHC RPI GBCC
Environmental history asks us to consider our relationships with nature in the past: how nature has shaped human thought and actions, and in turn, how humans have shaped the world around them. Environmental history includes physical or material dimensions of human intervention (extraction, settlement, transportation, etc.). But it also encompasses the imaginative and ideological: how cartography, art, and science help us absorb the new and unknown in nature into competing empires, bodies of knowledge, networks of exchange, and identities. Throughout, we ask how knowledge of the past might contribute to imagining a better future. Each year the seminar will focus on a different theme. For 2026 that theme is environmental history in the colonial past. ARHC AHLG EVCN
“Wartime” in the U.S. is framed as a fixed unit of time where the concerns of national security trump all else. Violations of the law and accepted norms and ethics are justified as momentary exceptions to how politics, policy, and social relations typically operate, and there is an implicit promise that the country will return to the “peacetime” way of being when the war is over. But the U.S. is almost always at war and politicians and policymakers depend on the wartime emergency mindset to expand their power and erode democracy. This course starts with World War I, then spends much of the first half of the semester focused on World War II and the legal and moral issues that the U.S. and the world had to confront—such as genocide, crimes against humanity, the use of nuclear weapons, incarcerating an entire segment of the population based on their race, and human rights. It then turns to the Cold War and the War on Terror to focus on the legality and morality of covert action, torture, violations of due process, drone strikes, and the hiring of mercenaries, among other topics. ARHC
Description. ARHC
Description. ARHC