A study of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, this course is the introduction to European history in the Department of History and is a fundamental course in the Program in Classical and Medieval Studies. It addresses themes and events extending from the eighth century B.C.E. until the second century C.E. Students consider the disciplines that comprise study of classical antiquity, engage with primary texts (literary, graphic, and epigraphical), and learn how ancient history has come to be written as it has been.

Far from being an “enormous hiccup” in human progress, the medieval centuries (c. 300-1500) marked the emergence and development of new cultures and identities in and beyond the Mediterranean. These powerful medieval cultures—Islamic, “Byzantine,” and Western European—continue to shape our present. The central theme of this introductory survey course is to explore their genesis and development, including their social, economic, political, and cultural aspects. Important topics include the transformation of the Roman Empire; religious changes across Europe, the Mediterranean, and Middle East; the persistence of the Eastern Roman world; cultural vitality; and alterity and race-making.

This course examines European revolutions and their legacies—social, cultural, political, and ideological. The French Revolution of 1789 brought unprecedented promises of reform to old Europe, introducing new democratic and egalitarian possibilities. Yet it also brought counterrevolution and new authoritarian rulers, a cycle that seemed to repeat itself in 1848, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce," as Karl Marx lamented. We consider these revolutions together with the Communist uprisings waged in Marx's name, the "velvet" revolutions of 1989, and the relationship between these last European revolutions and the populism that engulfs the continent today. We investigate these histories as lenses to understand the dynamics of modern revolution; the engagement of ordinary Europeans in these processes; and, not least, the making of modern Europe over the past 300 years.

For many observers, the history of Africa begins with European colonization. What about the period prior to colonization? This introductory survey of African history from 1500 to 1900 covers the social, political, cultural, and economic life of sub-Saharan peoples. Topics include African kingdoms, the transatlantic and the Indian ocean slave trades, the expansion of European power after the abolition of the slave trade, Islamic reforms, and the spread of Christianity. The course not only introduces students to a range of historical events in the continent, but also highlights how some of these events shaped other parts of the world.

This course is designed to introduce students to the ways in which the study of the classical and medieval worlds has been constructed alongside, and as an integral part of, modern systems of colonialism, racism and white supremacy. It aims, likewise, to introduce students to the ways in which the distant past, so constructed, continues to inform the contemporary world, both as a locus of oppression and of resistance. The course will, therefore, present students with the tools necessary to understand and critique these fields of study, as well as help them to more critically view the way they understand the past and the present.

This course examines Greece from the Bronze Age to Alexander. It focuses on the geographical breadth and temporal extent of "Ancient Greece," and how that considerable space and time were negotiated and understood by the Greeks themselves. In such a far-flung world, extending from Sicily to Ionia, from the Black Sea to North Africa, Greeks experienced "Hellenicity" through sea lanes and land routes, and by means of a network of religious festivals and athletic meets, coordinated among multiple civic calendars. Topics include political structures, philosophies, literature, and modes of warfare.

Physical remains from the ancient world are important for reconstructing daily life in past societies. The goal of the course is to familiarize you with the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world and the social contexts that gave rise to important sites, monuments, and objects. We will use archaeology and material culture as a lens to explore Roman values, political and religious institutions. We will examine critically how ancient sites and monuments have been appropriated over the centuries by different groups and why these sites continue to fascinate archaeologists, collectors, and the general public millennia later.

In the three centuries after Europeans' and Africans' first arrival among Indigenous Americans, a variety of peoples from America, Africa, and Europe constructed new societies in North America. Some of these new peoples, like the Iroquois, Kongolese, and British, reorganized themselves as a result of colonization. Others, like the United States, were entirely new nation-states. Whatever their origins, these new nations were shaped by a number of factors, including the contests of empires and the definitions of "family." They struggled over ideas like liberty and enslavement, sovereignty and subjection. All of them were collective efforts to manage new dynamics of confrontation and cooperation. By examining a variety of sources, students learn how a host of peoples created a new world that has strong ties to our own.

During the nineteenth century, the United States experienced one of the most dramatic political transformations in world history, rising from an imperiled post-revolutionary state to become a global empire. This course examines the diverse experiences of those who lived through this era of dizzying change and confronted the forces that shaped a restless nation: slavery, capitalism, patriarchy, expansionism, urbanization, industrialization, and total warfare. Whether fighting for recognition or resisting the encroaching state, they struggled over the very meaning of American nationhood. The outcome was ambiguous; its legacy is still being contested today.

This course surveys the American experience in the twentieth century from a deliberately interpretive point of view, examining political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of life in the United States. Special attention is directed to the impact of war, corporate globalism, and movements for change upon the development of an increasingly complex, variegated modern society confronting the paradox of simultaneous social segmentation-by race, class, gender, ethnicity-and cultural homogenization. Students consider the disjunction between Americans' democratic ideals and their administered reality and what can be done to heal the split.

An overview of Chinese civilization from the god-kings of the second millennium and the emergence of the Confucian familial state in the first millennium B.C.E., through the expansion of the hybrid Sino-foreign empires, to the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society by internal and external pressures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This course introduces students to Roman civilization from an interdisciplinary perspective with particular emphasis on Roman literature, history, and culture. Using a combination of primary sources and information from lectures, we will create a chronological framework for analyzing Roman culture through its literature and systems of values and beliefs. We will also focus on distinctly non-elite culture: the jobs and occupations that were performed, which provide alternative perspectives on what it meant to be ‘Roman.’ Not open to students who have received credit for CMS 108/HIST 108 or CMS 109/HIST 109.

Beginning with the lead up to the first encounters between Europeans and Americans and ending with the challenges of globalization in the twenty-first century, this course offers a chronological and topical overview of 500 years of Latin American history. It examines individual lives within the frameworks of sweeping political, social, and cultural transformations. Students use primary documents, images, texts, and film to explore major themes of the course, including conquest and colonialism, independence and the creation of new nations, and twentieth-century social revolutions and military dictatorships. Special attention is given to issues of race, gender, religion, and relationships with the United States.

In 1927, Katherine Mayo wrote a scathing report on public health and religious custom in India; the study was meant to support British rule as a modernizing force. Indian women, among others, responded immediately, tacking carefully between outrage at Mayo’s argument for imperial oversight and desires for reform. The battles for and against European empires included battlefields and soldiers. As this course underscores, however, the logics of empire and anti-imperialism were deeply entwined in ideas about how those under imperial rule should live, as well. Such rationales underwrote social incursion; condensing visions drove resistance movements, too. As we will see, the makings of many of these campaigns began as early as the rise of modern European empires themselves. We focus on the British Empire, and India and Ireland especially, while taking close stock of what would become a truly global anti-colonial wave in the twentieth century.

Surveys the development, distribution, and use of technology in the United States, drawing on primary and secondary source material. Subjects treated include racialized and gendered divisions of labor and the ecological consequences of technological change.

This course explores the relationship between the North American environment and the development and expansion of the United States. Because Americans' efforts (both intentional and not) to define and shape the environment were rooted in their own struggles for power, environmental history offers an important perspective on the nation's social history. Specific topics include Europeans', Africans', and Native Americans' competing efforts to shape the colonial environment; the impact and changing understanding of disease; the relationship between industrial environments and political power; and the development of environmental movements.

Through a combination of analytical, experiential, and collaborative exercises, students merge traditional historical methods with digital tools to explore new useful methodologies for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating historical knowledge. They develop technical and theoretical proficiency within the broader field of digital humanities. They engage digital tools and resources to rethink old historical questions. They develop with new questions that can be investigated only through digital practice. They contemplate avenues for collaboration between historical research and public communities. Finally, they weigh the practical and theoretical implications of using digital history to create more inclusive scholarship.

This team-taught course looks at struggles for independence throughout the American hemisphere. From Buenos Aires to Boston, the revolutions that reshaped the Americas from 1765-1830 were as varied as the hemisphere. European men were not the only ones to claim new authority. Women claimed power men had long denied them. Black people challenged slavery, even creating a new republic in Haiti. Indigenous nations reshaped Peru and New York. Poorer soldiers redefined political power. These competing and overlapping interests reshaped the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish empires and the nations that replaced them. These interests also challenge simple stories of “Founding Fathers” crafting new nations in closed rooms. This course focuses on how different peoples defined independence, why they pursued it, and how they shaped it in new American republics.

This course will examine the historical and archaeological aspects of death and burial in the Roman world from c. 150 BCE – 300 CE, in order to understand how the Romans cared for, disposed of, and commemorated the dead. We will explore culturally-specific attitudes to death, grief, mourning and funerals, alongside the physical monuments that commemorate the deceased. Geographically, we will focus on Italy, although case studies will span the Mediterranean world. Together, we will investigate Roman funerary rituals and follow the body on its journey from the world of the living to that of the dead, while exploring new narratives about death in different classes of ancient (and modern) society.

Medieval Spain was a crossroads where the civilizations of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism met, mingled, and fought. Diverse and dynamic societies emerged, and from this climate of both tension and cooperation came a cultural and intellectual flowering that remains a hallmark of human achievement. Using a wide range of primary sources, this course focuses particularly on two key concepts in Spanish history: the Reconquista and the Convivencia. To examine these, students investigate the nature of conflict in medieval Spain and the ways in which those who lived there constructed and understood their communities.

Race in Europe has seemed to be a 20th-century importation, the product of new migrations from the “outposts” of European empires in the wake of WWII. The “migrant crisis” of the present era doubles down on this sense of racial, ethnic, and religious difference as externally imposed. This account has served as a comforting narrative, just as it’s been intended to fuel reaction. In this course, we examine changing views on racial, ethnic, and religious differences in European thought and politics since the eighteenth century. In contrast to populist claims, there has been a long history of European difference-making -- of “othering” along racial, ethnic, and religious lines that has produced a seemingly white and Christian European identity. Together, we will situate our investigation of difference-making alongside primary sources and recent scholarship which highlight the experiences of the individuals who built their lives and communities in the midst.

African women have been instrumental in “making history,” as female scribes in ancient Egypt recording and generating exegetical thought to producing legislation and leading movements as modern day leaders of state in Liberia and Rwanda. Yet, the lives of African women have, until only recently, been flattened with the historiography largely focusing on their roles in the domestic space rather than their contributions in preserving the cultural past as well as change makers and leaders. This class examines the roles of women in pre-colonial African society into the 21st century by considering how African women confronted, challenged, and shifted societal expectations, both locally and imported.

This course explores daily life and community in the Middle Ages through festivals, holidays, and marking the passage of the seasons. First, students are introduced to the format of both the natural and ritual year, and how individuals and groups responded to environmental factors. Second, they consider the role of such seasonal rituals as a means of creating social cohesion and coercion. Medieval festivals and holidays were not just fun: they frequently sought to impose specific visions of social and religious order on participants (and those who were excluded). Third, students reflect on how holidays and communal rituals still have power to shape community, identity, and belonging in contemporary society. The course helps students learn about medieval religious and cultural practices in a critical manner; while focusing on Christian traditions, they also consider Jewish and Muslim customs in a broader European context. Recommended background: prior coursework on the pre-modern world.

The Haitian Revolution is widely regarded as one of the most dramatic and significant events in history and is the only slave revolt in the Americas to successfully result in the abolition of slavery. It began with a massive slave insurrection in 1791 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and in 1804 it culminated in independence from France and the creation of the free, Black nation of Haiti. The revolution was shaped by people and ideas from Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and in turn had a profound impact on people from enslaved laborers and rebels to politicians and merchants. This course examines the events of the Haitian Revolution and explores how it changed the history of the broader world in which it took place.

During the 20th century, Jewish racial identity has increasingly moved towards notions of whiteness with the perceptions of “Black Jews” being fictional and farcical. By the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, Black communities and cultural icons were identifying as Jewish. Ethiopian Jews were admitted to Israel under the Law of Return and musicians such as Lenny Kravitz, Drake, as well as comedian Tiffany Haddish publicly asserted a Jewish identity. Global perceptions influenced by racial science criminalized Blackness, and Judaism participated in racial thinking and hierarchies as well while also being subjected to them. In this global history of Black Judaism (1800-present), students will learn about the historiographical and current debates regarding race and ethnicity in Judaism, discuss the increasing diversity of global Judaism, and push beyond the history of Blacks and Jews as an allied history to an intersected history.

This course explores race and the history of tobacco in North America. With a primary focus on the intersection of tobacco capitalism and African American history and settler colonialism the course introduces students to the impact of tobacco on the formation of racial ideologies and lived experiences through a consideration of economic, cultural, political, and epidemiological history. Recommended background: at least one course on the study of race, settler colonialism, US history, capitalism, and/or gender and sexuality.

This class will introduce students to the early history of the Ottoman Empire (c. 1300–c. 1600) as it grew from a small territory in Anatolia to a diverse domain that straddled three continents. While we will consider the development of the Ottoman state and its apparatus, we will focus more on Ottoman society and culture. What was life like for a person who lived under the sultans? How did people live, work, play, and pray in a pluralistic late-medieval and early-modern state? What did they think of the world around them? And what did others think of the Ottomans, from the sultan to a sailor? This class will ask us to leave aside misconceptions that have long surrounded the Ottoman Empire and challenge us to look at it with fresh eyes. Recommended background: Prior coursework in the pre-modern world and/or the history of Islam.

A survey of Native American peoples from the centuries just before European contact to the present, this course addresses questions of cultural interaction, power, and native peoples' continuing history of colonization. By looking at the ways various First Nations took advantage of and suffered from their new relations with newcomers, students learn that this history is more than one of conquest and disappearance. In addition, they learn that the basic categories of "Indian" and "white" are themselves inadequate for understanding native pasts and presents. Much of this learning depends on careful readings of Indigenous American writers.

Dance Histories of the United States invites students into creative and critical engagement with history and historiography by examining dance and performance topics and theories. This course encourages students to research aesthetic and conceptual lineage and influence in concert and commercial dance forms in the United States by considering contemporary and historic choreographies and dance artists. In researching various histories of modern, jazz, street styles, ballet, and indigenous forms, students will gain insight into a multitude of embodied expressions in africanist, europeanist, and indigenous traditions. Students will be asked to engage their curiosity and question the role that dance history plays in developing collective and individual creativity and ingenuity, as well as in resisting and/or reifying notions of power, hierarchy, and privilege in contemporary societies. Course content will include regular reading, writing, personal reflection, viewing assignments, and presentations.

From the 15th century onward, captive Africans and their descendants created new cultures, communities, intellectual traditions, and strategies of freedom-seeking in the face of enslavement and oppression. In turn, the formation of the African Diaspora fundamentally shaped the development of the modern world. This course introduces students to the key historical and conceptual themes in the study of this Black Atlantic, focusing in particular on relationships between the African Diaspora and the maritime world. Beginning with early African-European interactions and ending with the Black transnationalism of the early 20th century, this course engages with histories of the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement in the Americas to explore the emergence of the African Diaspora, resistance to enslavement, emancipation, Black transnationalism, and the development of new political and theoretical approaches to Black life in the Atlantic world.

For many, "medieval" is simply another word for "superstition" and the Middle Ages were consumed by delusion punctuated with witch trials. This course instead focuses on religious and folk practices beyond orthodox Christianity in the Middle Ages, to understand the realities of "magical" practice and supernatural beliefs during the period and move away from misconceptions based on Enlightenment polemic and modern fantasy. Students discover the variety of beliefs associated with the concepts of magic and supernatural and come to understand that these concepts were not always seen as evil, or even wrong, by contemporaries. Students consider the differences between how learned and unlearned magic were perceived and the gender dynamics at the heart of this dichotomy. They explore the syncretic relationship between medieval Christianity and paganism and other traditional beliefs, as well as the overlap between "magic" and primitive science. Recommended background: prior coursework on the pre-modern world.

Places recent popular and scientific discussions of human heredity and genetics in broader social, political, and historical context, focusing on shifting definitions of personhood. Topics include the commodification of human bodies and body parts and the emergence of new forms of biological citizenship and belonging.

This course introduces students to the history of Latinx Americans drawing on the distinct experiences of Puerto Ricans, Chicanxs/Mexicanxs, Dominican Americans, Central Americans, and Cuban Americans. The course underscores international processes (imperialism and immigration) as central forces in the formation of U.S. Latinx communities. This global perspective accompanies a focus on the relationship between Latinx culture and American society, the dynamic role of women in the shaping of Latinx American communities, and origins and place of Latin American-origin immigrants in U.S. society.

The world became permanently connected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While some have identified the origins of this globalization in Europe, the Spanish empire offers a different perspective. The ties of empire were forged throughout its vast territories: from Madrid to Manila. This course considers questions of identity and belonging in it, including for "old Christian" Spaniards, recent Jewish converts to Christianity, Muslims, Africans and their descendants, and indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Philippines. It also takes up questions of imperial scale, including global commerce, royal authority, and how people, knowledge, and beliefs moved throughout the early modern world.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" encapsulates the belief that the United States is a nation of immigrants, yet that can be an oversimplification of a deeply complex issue. This course explores the various reasons people migrate, acculturate, and what it means to be an "American" and an immigrant. Students review immigration records to examine how issues of poverty, sexual orientation, gender, race, and political affiliation affected how people "breathe free" and navigated the US immigration regime from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Modern China's century of revolutions, from the disintegration of the traditional empire in the late nineteenth century, through the twentieth-century attempts at reconstruction, to the tenuous stability of the post-Maoist regime.

The Horn of Africa represents one of the great crossroads of the world, connecting the Red Sea and Mediterranean worlds with those of the Indian Ocean. In the medieval period, the region flourished, with its history and society shaped by religion, trade, and politics. Christian states of Ethiopia sought both to pursue an independent expression of their faith and link themselves with the wider Christian world. Muslim states in Somalia sought political definition and economic power in a booming interconnected global community. Community-engaged learning sits at the core of this course.

If the home was the “Englishman’s castle,” its walls were porous. Liberal culture called for separating private from public life, yet households were key sites for negotiating classed, gendered, and racial relationships. Fear that family units might break down spurred social movements and governmental reform. Modern life tends to be understood as the rise of the presumptively white, male individual, someone independent of his surroundings. By flipping the script, this course demonstrates the centrality of women, family, and community in defining and redefining society. Topics explored include work, motherhood, property rights, and the everyday life of politics, capitalism, and empire.

Scholars have long subscribed to the myth that East Africa has "historically been detached from the world." However, the region's engagements with the rest of the world date back almost a millennium. This course seeks to correct the common misconception and introduce students to the rich histories of this less-understood region of the world. Using a variety of primary and secondary source materials, the course begins with an examination of East Africa's roles in world history before European colonization. It then turns to case studies and examines the changes that came with colonization, the rise of nationalism and decolonization, and finally the post-independence challenges in the region.

While treated by some scholars as peripheral, North Africa was and is a central arena in global history. This course examines the Maghreb in the dynamic period of transformation that saw the Roman Empire devolve into separate political and social entities, ca.200-700 C.E. In these critical centuries, North Africa and North Africans served both as anchors preserving Roman culture and society, and key agents in its transformation and devolution. Approaching the topic through primary and secondary sources, this course focuses on key themes: colonization and resistance, ethnicity and identity, and cultural and social cohesion.

The period of Mediterranean history stretching from ca. 300 to ca. 700 C.E. saw both change and continuity, radical transformation and sociocultural resiliency. Often maligned as the "Dark Ages," this period has attracted a great deal of scholarship, and looms large in the construction of modern national identities. The central question is not only how the ancient world became the medieval, and what that meant, but how and why this understanding has changed over the years, and why it matters. This course examines the period through the analysis of primary sources, key secondary sources, and historiography.

This course examines the early history of trans-Saharan Africa from roughly 600-1600 CE. During this period, new ideas, new political structures, and a new religion—Islam—united West Africa and the Maghreb in new, profound, ways. This dynamic era saw the formation of powerful, Islamic empires. Some, like the Fatimids, channeled Indigenous, anti-colonial anger into imperial projects. Others, like the Almoravids, used radical interpretations of Islam to form newly-conceived states. Others still, like Mali and Songhai, adapted Islam to enhance and amplify long-established African practices of state power and conceptions of imperial authority. This course examines key topics such as the spread and adaptation of Islam in West and North Africa, the dynamics of state and society building, the nature of historical sources, and the creation of historical knowledge regarding early African history.

The Aztec state encompassed millions of people, featured a capital whose size and towering pyramids left the first Spanish visitors in awe, and developed a culture that continues to influence contemporary Mexico. Yet Aztecs are more often remembered for their cannibalism than their complex civilization. This course examines the Aztec world: what it was like to live under Aztec rule, how society was organized, what people believed about how the cosmos worked, and why Aztecs practiced ritual human sacrifice.

These seminars provide opportunities for concentrated work on a particular theme, national experience, or methodology.

Economic and political change during the 1800s revolutionized the daily lives of Europeans more profoundly than any previous century. By the last third of the century, the modern city became the stage for exploring and enacting new moral fears. This course examines these developments by focusing on sex, gender, and new urban spaces in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. We will explore the writings of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Le Bon, investigate middle-class fascination with urban voyeurism and new media, and read about sensational cases like those of Jack the Ripper and the “discovery” of an international sex trade. Note: As part of History’s 301 series, the course is designed to guide students through the research and writing process.

Public history takes place beyond history classrooms and academic contexts. Traditionally, it has been found in museums, walking tours, and performances, and has told the stories of people with social and political privilege. Increasingly, however, public history has come to focus on a greater range of voices, and takes place in a wider range of forms: on websites, graphic novels, interactive sensory experiences, social media, and other digital spaces. In this community-engaged course, students learn to see public history "in the wild," engage with primary sources, and present those sources and historical interpretation to the public in digital form. Students with interests in history and public engagement are encouraged to enroll in this course.

Despite being referred to as the “world’s oldest profession,” sex labor is often excluded from traditional discussions of “work.” To understand sex work’s exclusion, this course focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries efforts by the United States, Canada, and Mexico to control, regulate, and end sexual commerce. The course will pay particular attention to how race, class, and gender ideologies have influenced the regulation and perception of sex labor. Students will learn to analyze historical sources, understand scholarly debates in the field, and conduct original research, culminating in a final research paper.

Of the millions of immigrants who arrived in North and South America during the colonial period, the majority came not from Europe but from Africa. They came as human property, but they insisted on their freedom. Because slavery shaped the American hemisphere, this seminar takes a broad look at the histories of Africans and African Americans in the United States, Haiti, Brazil, and parts of western Africa. Students will better understand the ways that Black struggles against slavery shaped and continue to shape the Americas. They will also develop their skills as historical researchers and writers, including how to address the challenges of reading records that often obscure Black humanity. We do this work through careful reading of contemporary scholarship as well as primary sources such as music, letters, autobiographies, and material artifacts.

From antebellum slavery through twentieth-century struggles for civil rights, black Americans have resisted political violence, economic marginalization, and second-class citizenship using strategies ranging from respectability to radicalism. Engaging with both historical and modern scholarship, literary sources, and other primary documents, this course explores the diverse tactics and ideologies of these resistance movements. By considering the complexities and contradictions of black resistance in American history and conducting source-based research, students develop a deep understanding of the black freedom struggle and reflect on the ways that these legacies continue to shape present-day struggles for racial justice.

Ancient Rome was an enslaving society, yet what little we know about slaves comes largely from the members of the social elite who wrote about slaves in literary and legal sources. How do we recover the lives and experiences of enslaved individuals? This course aims to understand the condition of slavery in the ancient Roman world from a variety of perspectives using methods and theories from social history and archaeology. Key topics include how individuals became enslaved; the treatment of slaves; the coercion and control of slaves; slave resistance; the family life of slaves; manumission and other paths to freedom; the material culture associated with Roman slaves. This seminar will include a mix of short lectures and discussions, as well as both oral and written assignments. Prerequisites: Two CMS or premodern History courses.

This course will explore the nature of education, schooling, and university in the Middle Ages. Who attended schools and universities? How did a person become a teacher or professor? How were educational institutions organized and administered? What subjects and texts were studied? What was a school day or an academic year like? What were the motivations behind education (why go to school, why provide opportunities)? What was the material culture of education? How did education impact wider communities and society and visa-versa? We will consider these questions and more by employing a longue durée approach and examining how educational practices evolved over a thousand-year period. We will also take a transregional and transcultural view by comparing and contrasting education in Jewish, Christian (both Western and Eastern), and Muslim communities. Prior coursework in pre-modern history/medieval studies is strongly recommended.

This course examines the roots of American ideas about crime, punishment, and carceral culture from the colonial period to the late 19th century. In current discourses about policing and prison abolition, the roots of the modern carceral system are often traced back to the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 and the development of mass incarceration in the 1970s. By tracing the history of policing and prisons back to the 1740s, this course places these developments in a much longer history. In this seminar, we will examine how Americans defined crime, conceived of punishment, and resisted incarceration in the period before modern carceral culture. We will read texts that focus on themes of policing race and gender; the development of the prison; policing slavery and freedom; and the development of new ideas of crime and punishment in the early Republic.

This seminar examines how people relate to their environments and how those relationships have changed. It also examines how understanding of “the environment” has consequences for how people influence it, how it influences them, and even how people influence each other. Understanding these varied relationships within the human and more-than-human world highlights how canoe routes, beach towns, textile mills, apple orchards, and all other New England environments are products of human dynamics, including those of race, gender, and class. Drawing on scholarly work as well as primary sources (including paintings, newspapers, diaries, and maps), students gain an appreciation for this complex history. They then engage in the process of writing their own analysis of some part of the region’s past.

Between 1948 and 1994, the National Party enforced apartheid, a system of racial segregation in South Africa. How did nonwhites respond to the apartheid state? Using a variety of primary and secondary source materials, this seminar begins with an examination of major historical events to highlight the laws and social structures put in place prior to 1948. It then turns attention to the apartheid era and examines the lived experiences of the nonwhites under, and their struggle against, the apartheid state. The course pays close attention to the experiences of women, union leaders, students, and artists.

Free speech has long been a centerpiece of modern, liberal institutions. Dictators have feared it, of course, but it chronically troubles democratic societies, too. Words have fanned racial and religious hatred and destroyed personal reputation, bringing neighbors to the courts over women’s sexual honor and drawing men into deadly duels. This course draws students into the intertwined histories of freedom of speech and the protection of reputation. The course is rooted in early modern and modern European histories, drawing connections and comparisons not only over time, but also with American, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. Note: As part of History’s 301 series, the course is designed to guide students through the research and writing process.

This course investigates the deep historical roots of China's contemporary environmental dilemmas. From the Three Gorges Dam to persistent smog, a full understanding of the environment in China must reckon with millennia-old relationships between human and natural systems. In this course students explore the advent of grain agriculture, religious understandings of nature, the impact of bureaucratic states, and the environmental dimensions of imperial expansion as well as the nature of kinship and demographic change. The course concludes by turning to the socialist "conquest" of nature in the 1950s and 1960s and China's post-1980s fate.

This course examines Latin American experiences during the cold war from a historical perspective. Students explore how some of the revolutionary transformations, military coups and governments, wide-scale human rights violations, and civil wars shaped the region between the 1950s and the 1980s. Topics covered include Guatemala’s 1954 coup and thirty-year civil conflict, revolution in Cuba, and military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. Students use and analyze primary sources, including declassified government documents, Truth Commission reports, memoirs, and films.

Were witches and heretics really tortured in the Spanish Inquisition's infamous jails? This course examines both the institution of the Spanish Inquisition and the lives of those who came before it. Students read and analyze original Inquisition cases as well as consider the ways historians have used cases to investigate topics such as sexuality and marriage, popular beliefs, witchcraft, blasphemy, and the persecution of Jewish and Muslim people. The sins that concerned the Inquisition depended on the time and place, and the crimes prosecuted in sixteenth-century Spain or eighteenth-century New Spain reveal a great deal about early modern (ca. 1500-1800) culture and society.

This course considers how racial formations have developed in and influenced gendered and feminist movements. Movements examined may include woman's suffrage, anti-lynching, civil rights, Black Power, LGBTQ+, moral reform, welfare rights, women's liberation, and peace. Topics examined include citizenship, colonization, immigration, reproductive justice, and gender-based violence. Cross-listed in gender and sexuality studies, history, and politics.

Once regarded as impenetrable barriers dividing Europe, the Alps and Carpathian Mountains were transformed into international meeting places with the arrival of mass tourism in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, these mountain ranges began to be claimed in the constructions of national and ethnic identities that reshaped Central and Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The course examines the role ascribed to the Alps and Carpathians at a pivotal time in European history, when the demise of empires and rising nationalism, but also new ideas about class, gender, ethnicity, and race, fundamentally restructured dynamics of power on the continent. Recommended background: a 200-level course focused on the study of literature and/or film in any department.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.

This seminar refines students' proficiency as historians and prepares them to write their senior thesis. The course is designed around two interrelated goals. First, students analyze how different approaches to history and sources matter to understandings of the past. Second, students design and test their own arguments, drawing upon critical readings of primary sources and close engagement with historiography. The course culminates in the completion of individual thesis proposals. Prerequisite(s): one HIST 301 seminar.

The research and writing of an extended essay in history, following the established practices of the discipline, under the guidance of a departmental supervisor. Students register for HIST 457 in the fall semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both HIST 457 and 458. Prerequisite(s): HIST 399.

The research and writing of an extended essay in history, following the established practices of the discipline, under the guidance of a departmental supervisor. Students register for HIST 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both HIST 457, 458. Prerequisite(s): HIST 399.

From the formation of the Androscoggin River Valley to the demolition of abandoned mills, the landscape we now call Lewiston has changed dramatically over centuries. This course examines the spatial history of Lewiston: how the landscape has shaped human settlement, and how people have transformed the local landscape. The course runs from deep time through indigenous settlement, European colonization, industrialization, immigration, and the post-industrial period. We will pair readings on these subjects with site visits, walking tours, and creative projects.

What makes a "Chinese" meal? From dumplings in Shandong to chop suey in California, the meanings and flavors of “Chinese” food are hardly uniform. In this course, students explore-and taste their way through-the diverse ways of producing, preparing, and consuming "Chinese" foods. They focus especially on unique historical contexts and global patterns of migration, reflecting on what food and food culture might reveal about issues of authenticity, identity, gender, race, class, and memory. They consider these topics not only through textual and visual sources, but through oral interviews, hands-on cooking demonstrations, and taste tests.

Oscar Wilde, an icon today, was popular in his own time as well. His relationship with Alfred Douglas was an open secret despite the fact that homosexuality was at the time a criminal offense. Indeed, Wilde’s sexuality was tolerated until he sued Douglas' irascible father for libel. This course begins with the 1895 trials, seeking to understand cultures of sexuality in a period notorious for sexual repression, and contextualizing issues they raise of scandal and the law, celebrity, gender, and sexuality. Designed to encourage independent research, the course guides students through the research process, drawing to the fore histories often hidden from view. Cross-listed in European studies, gender and sexuality studies, and history. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 30.

One of the first major labor victories for Mexican Americans came from an unlikely source: young, Latina organizers. This course examines these women, their organizing, and the larger contexts of labor movements and the place of Latina women in the mid-twentieth century. The course focuses on the 1938 Pecan Shellers Strike in San Antonio, Texas, led by 21-year-old strike leader Emma Tenayuca, and Luisa Moreno, a Guatemalan immigrant who organized workers in Florida and California. Grounded in feminist theory, the course places the strike and Latina workers as critical in core social tensions of the time through the use of primary sources.

How do people remember their pasts when forced into exile? When do archives move with them and how so? This class historically foregrounds examples of African communities under duress due to climate change, political oppression, and religious persecution in Africa and its diaspora from the seventeenth century to present day. Students examine, observe, and engage with a variety of written, oral, and ritual sources, including landscape, music, ceremony, and food. Students also work with the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and learn from the African Diasporic communities in Lewiston.

In 1987, Alice Lakwena, a thirty-one-year-old woman, formed the subversive Holy Spirit Movement. She became the only woman to lead a rebellion against the government of Uganda, yet she remains poorly understood. Today, she is dismissed as a "witch," "prostitute," and "prophet." Who exactly was Lakwena? What motivated her to lead the rebellion? This course introduces students to themes of gender and militarism in Africa. Students work with a range of documents about Lakwena and her movement, including court records, detective reports, eye-witness testimony, receipts, and newspapers. Students use these records to compose scripts and produce a forty-five-minute podcast for the general public.

The year is 1911 and Mexico just ended a thirty-year dictatorship. Now civil war looms as revolutionaries, reformers, and conservatives cannot agree on what should happen next. In this course, students investigate some of the most pressing issues facing Mexico by taking on roles of historical figures in a Reacting to the Past exercise that transforms the classroom into a constitutional congress. There they attempt to shape Mexico’s future by deciding what to do about voting rights, land reform, workers' rights, education, the church, and women's rights.

The global cataclysm of World War II put fever-dreams of racial destiny, staggering liberal democracies, rickety colonial empires, and militant communism together in a crucible of unprecedented violence and mass cruelty. Having reshaped humanity’s political horizons during the 20th century, World War II needs urgent reexamination in our current era of resurgent authoritarianism. This course juxtaposes the analytical insights of history and related social sciences with the efforts of filmmakers trying to make commercially appealing and historically responsible narratives that do justice to the humanity (and inhumanity) of individuals’ experience of the War and its aftermath.

Wabanaki, or "the people of the Dawnland," include the Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mi'kmaq, and Wolastoqey (or Maliseet) nations. This course examines the ways that Wabanaki have adapted to, fought with, and lived alongside European invaders and their descendants in the region now known as Maine. Students examine some of the ways that European Americans' racism has erased Wabanaki presence in the state and its history, the meanings of sovereignty in a state that still retains a great deal of influence over native peoples, and the role of environmental change in shaping Wabanaki cultural practices. Given widespread ignorance about Wabanaki in the state and at Bates College, students' final research projects will address contemporary Wabanaki efforts to become more visible and more respected. In most years students will spend several nights off campus to meet Wabanaki educators, so students with on-campus commitments should consider whether they can complete this course.

This off-campus Short Term course will travel to Rome to explore the layers of the ancient city. The course will provide a broad overview of ancient Roman art, architecture, and archaeology, from the pre-Roman cultures of Iron Age Italy to Constantine and the late Roman Empire. Since Rome has been continuously inhabited for more than 3000 years, we will think about Rome as a palimpsest of layers, and we will explore the ways in which the fabric of the city (walls, roads, ancient and modern buildings) record human history. The goal of the course is to familiarize students with the physical world of the ancient Romans and the social contexts that gave rise to important sites, monuments, and objects. This course has an anticipated cost of $5200 per student. Final costs will be determined in Fall 2024 in consultation with Darren Gallant and the Center for Global Education. Estimated costs include round-trip airfare and travel to Italy, lodging in shared accommodations, a daily food budget, entrance to sites, travel within Rome, and access to emergency services through a partner institution. Prerequisite(s): Any CMS or CMS cross-listed course.

Most people’s first encounters with the “Middle Ages” are through fictional films & television programs. The purpose of this course is to help us explore the common themes & tropes utilized in popular media that construct a particular image of the period. In particular, this course will challenge the veracity of these constructs & consider how the presentation of the past feeds into racist, colonialist, & white-supremacist/nationalist ideas of the Middle Ages. The course will focus on popular film & television that was/is widely consumed. We will also move away from “Hollywood” depictions of the period to examine the Middle Ages in Middle Eastern & Asian cinema. Prior coursework on medieval topics (history, literature, religion etc.) is recommended.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.

This course will help develop a new course examining the revolutions and independence movements in two regions: Latin America/the Caribbean and what is now the U.S. The new semester-long course that will result from this Short Term will cover territories within the former British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish empires, beginning with uprisings of the 1760s-1780s and ending with two continents of newly independent nations in the 1830s. We will center on questions of how and why independence came to these regions, why it took the forms it did, and what independence meant to different groups of people. Short Term students will help with surveying recent scholarship on the topic, gauging the best ways to frame the course, and building in assessment for this course in the age of AI.