Toxic water in Flint, Michigan. Oil pipelines through sacred sites in North Dakota. These manifestations of environmental injustice and inequality are only the most recent incarnations of larger legacies. Environments are never simply natural or given: they are imbued with unequal entanglements of gender, race, class, and power. Environmental justice asks questions about the ways in which environments are produced, and the relations of risk, harm, benefit, access, privilege, domination, oppression, and liberation therein.

"Black Metropolis" refers to the more than half a million black people jammed into a South Side ghetto in Chicago at mid-twentieth century that featured an entrenched black political machine, a prosperous black middle class, and a thriving black cultural scene in the midst of massive poverty and systemic inequality. This course will follow the political, economic, and cultural developments of what scholars considered to be the typical urban community in postwar United States.

This course challenges students to consider how and why, following Ralph-Michel Trouillot, certain voices get "silenced" in the historical record. We study how women have both shaped history and been subject to its forces, though often in unexpected ways. This course is unique because we learn about women in 18th, 19th and 20th century West Africa through their own words. Students will encounter more than a dozen real and fictional African women: mighty queens, snide co-wives, shrewd traders, ingenious slaves, brilliant writers, and fierce activists.

One of the most significant shifts in global history is the incorporation of the New World into the Afro-Eurasian trading system. Slowly, but surely, the Mediterranean declined as a hub of inter-continental trade, and the Atlantic Ocean gained ground. On West Africa's Shores analyzes this world-historical pivot from the perspective of West Africa. Beginning with the rise of the Ghana Empire, we study trans-Saharan cultures of exchange, the societies of West Africa's Middle Ages, and the ways that the trans-Atlantic slave trade transformed the region.

Examines the life, work, and legacies of WEB DuBois. Drawing on domestic and diasporic fictional and nonfictional meditations on black life and progress in and beyond the 'DuBoisian century,' the course considers the changing meanings of and movements for global racial justice for people of African descent. The course also confronts the globalization of the color line in the post-Civil Rights/Black Power era.

This course introduces the oral traditions, important playwrights, and aesthetic innovations in postcolonial literary theatre in some African societies. The oral theatre traditions of Africa are an example of the innate human quest to perform and will eventually be the basis for understanding some of the innovations made in African literary theatre. We shall also focus on writings by African writers and writers of African descent who deal with the post-colonial conditions of Black Africa and the African Diaspora.

From the writings of Adam Smith in the 18th century to present-day arguments by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the benefits and costs of capitalism in human society have been hotly debated. Do the benefits of capitalism outweigh the costs? Is it possible or desirable to "tame" markets to maintain their good elements while minimizing the harm? How has a debate dominated by Europeans and North Americans considered or overlooked perspectives from the rest of the world?

Surveys the major movements and developments in Europe during the era of European expansion and dominance--from the devastations of the Thirty Years War to the Second World War--and up to the current era of European Union. Topics include: the French Revolution and the birth of nationalism; the scientific and industrial revolutions; the modern history of international relations; imperialism, fascism, the Holocaust, the two World Wars, and the present and potential roles of Europe at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

This course is an introduction to the expansion, consolidation, and eventual disintegration of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine this history with an eye to understanding the causes and legacies of empire. We will discuss British attitudes and policies toward empire and the imperial foundations of the British economy. Cutting an arc of territory from the Caribbean to Africa and from South Asia to the Pacific rim, we will consider the role of culture and gender in informing anticolonial resistance.

This course introduces the history of Native North America and the United States from the latter half of the 19th century to the present. Themes include the consolidation of the U.S. nation and of the reservation system; struggles over land, settlement, and citizenship; the transformations of the federal government and of capitalism; the evolution of racial, gendered, and class hierarchies; and changing forms of domestic life, work, politics, social protest, and cultural expression from Reconstruction through the coronavirus pandemic.