This course is an introduction to the history of the United States, from the end of the U.S. Civil War to the present, and it introduces students to the practice of history.
AHLG, ARHC, DUSC
This course engages recent and foundational scholarship and extensive primary source material in an effort to understand the causes and consequences of the United States Civil War. Several exploratory themes guide our historical interpretation of the Civil War, including: the rise of sectional politics; the diversity of the South; Black initiative and contributions; soldier perspectives; death and destruction; gender ideologies; the war beyond the South; and, of course, the role of slavery. Our treatment of the consequences of the war is quite capacious. Not only do we examine the immediate, personal experiences resulting from mass mobilization, horrific warfare, and vast social transformation; we also contemplate how the Civil War – and especially its memory – has reverberated far beyond the 1860s. Popular understandings of the Civil War, therefore, receive considerable attention and analytical energy in this course, and our periodization takes us well into the 20th century.
ARHC, AHLC, DUSC, RPI, W2
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.
AHLG, ARHC, EVCN, NPJ
This is not a course about baseball trivia, but a class that uses baseball as the lens through which to view US history. We will examine issues of race, gender, class, immigration, suburbanization, urban planning, corporate power, labor relations, consumerism, nostalgia, nationalism, colonialism, the legal structure, drug abuse, the power of public spectacle, and identity in US history.
AHLG, ARHC, DUSC
This course aims to introduce new approaches to the history of the USSR as a multinational state from its inception to its collapse. The focus on the multinational nature of the Soviet state is inspired by new revisionist scholarship, which interrogates the meta-language of ethno-national diversity, as well as ways of constructing and managing it on the statewide and regional levels. Building on this innovative scholarship, this course explores the construction of categories of ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, belonging and “othering” in the multiethnic Soviet Union, as well as interrogates the absence of race as a category of difference in presence of the racialized discourse. These categories are explored in relation to other social categories such as gender, class, and sexuality.
ARHC, AHLG, GBCC, RES, RPI, W2
This course explores the history of Russia, the Soviet Union, and the present Russian Federation through the lens of empire to discover how and why Russia expanded to become the largest country on the globe. The course aims to incorporate both central narratives based in Moscow and Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) and the history of “peripheries” and regional actors in order to provide a nuanced and inclusive picture of all the pieces as part of an interrelated whole.
AHLG, ARHC, GBCC, W2
This course’s primary learning goal is to historicize the cultural encounters and competitions between two superpowers from the perspective of the Soviets. The course will start with the American recognition of the Soviet government in 1933. After exploring a short-lived U.S.-Soviet collaboration during World War Two, the course will analyze how, after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, superpower relations oscillated between detente and confrontation up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, only to bring us to the present moment of renewed geopolitical tensions in the form of the Cold War 2.0.
Another important goal has to do with skill-building, for this course strives to cultivate independent thinking—when appraising the historical uses of cultural wars and propaganda outlets. Historical analysis of the evolving soft-power mechanisms, techniques, and uses of propaganda and persuasion is designed to enable students to come to informed, independent, grounded judgments about propaganda tools, past and present. Course projects are designed to skill-up reflective thinking, widen knowledge of media uses, and develop critical research tools that explicate and assess media controversies and “fake news.”
ARHC, AHLG, GBCC, RPI, W2
This course begins from the premise that to understand health and disease, we must analyze Western medicine through how it treats the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society. Through a series of major episodes in the twentieth century history of medicine – eugenics, medical experimentation, reproductive control, mental illness, and epidemics – students will learn to ask key questions: Who is recognized as a legitimate patient? Who has access to robust medical care? Whose experiences are validated (and, by extension, invalidated)?
ARHC, AHLG, DUSC, RPI, W2
Description.
ARHC, AHLC, DUSC, RPI
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.
AHLG, ARHC, GBCC
We will study the Mexican-American war, the Spanish-American war, American occupation of Cuba and the Philippines, and the unbroken twentieth century of American military and economic imperialism. Simultaneously, we will examine resistance to imperialism, from both from within the empire and from without. Students should anticipate a significant reading load, two short papers, and a final paper based on original primary source research. Students without a background in history and/or primary source research are strongly advised to consult with the instructor before enrolling.
ARHC, DUSC
The Nuremberg Trials synthesized many different strands of developing international law to become the first significant venue for trying war criminals and individuals who committed crimes against humanity. Most people focus on the first and primary trial, that of 21 of the highest-ranking members of the Nazi Party from October 1945 through November 1946 who survived the war and the Allies captured. However, several trials had preceded the first affair, at least twelve other trials followed under the Nuremberg ambit, and it created the impetus for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in Germany and elsewhere that endure to today. The Nuremberg Trials are unequalled in how they set new legal boundaries of human behavior after World War II. The question is now, has the Nuremberg spirit survived?
ARHC, AHLC, DUSC, RPI
Senior Captsone. Students will be pre-registered for the course.
Students will be exposed to pedagogy in both the natural and applied sciences, and in the humanities and social sciences. This course will explore how scholars study and understand the basic physical and biological principles related to climate change, the sixth mass extinction (thought to be underway), and other manifestations of the Anthropocene, while also questioning the human construction and conceptions of this epoch. These approaches are linked by an overarching sense of the role of environmentally-related scholarship: framing, documenting, and then imagining responses to the various problems associated with the socio-environmental crises of the Anthropocene. In other words, how do we as scholars make sense of the crises – and what do we do about them? Key pillars include: • The nature of evidence and scientific measurement of aspects of the Anthropocene; • The meaning and uses of scientific literacy, and the place of science in public policy; • The existence of diverse narratives of the Anthropocene from a variety of disciplines; • Historical patterns and precedents of industrialization and unsustainable energy frameworks; • The ethics and technological efficacy of human response, and the meaning of well-being.
ARHC, AHLC, DUSC, RPI
*All course and times subject to change. Tentative Schedule