World History I: the Ancient World to 1500CE focuses on the history of the rise of civilizations in the Old and New Worlds, emphasizing trade and exchange between those civilizations 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.
AHLG, ARHC, GBCC, FRST
This course challenges you to thinking about what it means to claim an American identity by focusing on how histories related to immigration and the immigrant experience have shaped the United States. Through the study of immigration history, I want you to develop a deeper understanding of the historical relationship between race, nationalism, citizenship, and justice.
ARHC
What does environmental health mean, and who gets to define it? This course examines the historical intersections of environment, race, economics and health in the United States.
ARHC, DUSC, EVCN, NPJ, RPI, W2
Any interpretation of U.S. history without appreciation of the histories of Indigenous people is fundamentally incomplete. As this course demonstrates, Native people have been pivotal actors during every watershed moment in U.S. history (and beyond). Although mass displacement and community devastation are two of the primary legacies that Indigenous people have been forced to bear, their responses to Euro-American colonialism illuminate histories of dynamic adaptation, nativist ingenuity, and militant resistance. Thus, this course details centuries of Native American history, amid and beyond the broad spheres of Euro-American colonialism. Along the way we investigate, from the varied perspectives of diverse Indigenous peoples, the possibilities of alternative histories and frameworks of analysis. What, we ponder, is History through the eyes of Native narrators?
ARHC AHLG DUSC RPI
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, W2
The course will present students with a series of specific past events which will serve as case studies of critical historical and geographical thinking so as to ascertain the usefulness of those events for understanding the present. To this end, students will explore different notions of space and time, place and event, scale and narrative. In particular, the course will examine “hidden histories” and “residual geographies” to address how counternarratives have helped non-dominant peoples preserve and defend their identities and influence and sometimes overturn the politics of oppression.
ARHC, CCIP
At a time when our political and moral horizons have narrowed considerably, a survey of the intellectual impulses that comprised European thought offers a wide range of questions and attitudes that have, for the most part, been forgotten.
This course will ask what can – and should – be saved from this tradition.
AHLG, ARHC, GBCC
INSIDE/OUT COURSE – Please email Professor Thomson for more information on this course.
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
This course examines histories of childhoods and the most significant characteristics of childhood globally. This course is an exercise in looking closely at and asking questions about childhood, youth, girlhood, and boyhood as a social, political, cultural, artistic, and personal act of identity. It also utilizes United Nations definitions of child and childhoods to understand homogenization of the constructions of childhood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
ARHC
This course is a history of republics in Latin America & the Caribbean, from independence to the present. Our focus will be drawn to the Haitian, Mexican, and Cuban Revolutions; dictators and populists; banana republics; hurricanes; inflation, and the beautiful game of fútbol…er, soccer. Together we will explore the region’s major developments in Latin American politics, society and culture.
ARHC, GBCC, SSLG, SLCS
Course Title Changing to: Latin America Since 1826
In popular U.S. culture, Samuel Adams and “Johnny Reb” tend to be remembered as the true bearers of America’s rebellious spirit. But how accurate is this interpretation? What about the Daniel Shays, Nat Turners, Denmark Veseys, Metacoms, Pontiacs, Harriet Tubmans, and Tecumsehs of U.S. history? How do their rebellions reframe our understandings of the “American rebel”? Thus, to better evaluate the prevalence and significance of rebellion in pre-1900 North American history, we cast a wide net in this course by examining the experiences of famous and lesser-known rebels. Naturally, we also consider issues of state authority, ideas and discourses of rights and liberties, processes of mobilization, violent resistance, counterrevolutions, and systems of oppression.
AHLG ARHC DUSC RPI W2
The course examines the United States carceral system, with particular focus on the twentieth century. The course asks how state, federal, and local authorities have used immigration, race, gender, and mental health as justifications for confinement.
ARHC, RPI
Description
AHLG, ARHC, DUSC
What are the stories that pour into minds when we hear the word “race?” Why do we imagine what we imagine when we hear the descriptor “blonde” or “Puerto Rican?” Where do the stories we learn early about skin color, hair texture, ability, and national identity come from?
This seminar engages the history of racial storytelling in Latin America and Caribbean. From witches and biographies to Bad Bunny, we will understand how race and ethnicity have been imposed and challenged in the region. We engage colonial and modern primary documents to interrogate the stories Latin Americans have narrated about race and ethnicity; their misreadings and misunderstandings by outsiders; and the reclamation of racial storytelling by Afro-Latinos, Indigenous peoples, and mestizos in the spotlight.
ARHC, GBCC, RPI, W2
In History 400, students will complete their culminating experience requirement for the History major. Students will research and write an original work of historical analysis on a topic of their choice, producing an article-length essay that engages with both scholarship and primary sources. Students will also read and discuss the research process and historical methods, and present their findings.
ARHC
This course will consider some of the causes, values, expressions of, and responses to the Anthropocene: the proposed geological epoch in which humanity has demonstrably affected the natural systems of Earth.
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.
CCIP
This course explores the ways in which sports and politics, broadly construed, intersect historically and contemporarily. Topics will include social justice and rebellion; political economy; workers rights; mass media and popular culture; punishment and much more.
CCIP
This course asks: what is race and when did the concept emerge? Why do different societies define and explain race in very different terms? How do these competing notions of race interact? How does race impact lived experiences? How do contemporary fields of study approach race, use race and challenge race?
CCIP
*All course and times subject to change.