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.

Exploration of the history of Afro-Latin American populations since Independence within and outside the nation-state. We will question why and how to study those whose governments define them not as peoples of African descent but as part of a mixed-race majority of Hispanic cultural heritage, who themselves may often have supported this policy, and who may have had compelling reasons to avoid official scrutiny.

This reading- and writing-intensive course draws upon the intellectual traditions of African American, African, and African diasporic studies in order to explore the connections and disjunctures among people of African descent. While the course pays attention to national, regional, and historical contexts, it asks this question: what do African descended people have in common and when and how are their experiences and interests different? What can we glean from contemporary discourses grounded in the consideration of global black lives?

Over the last century, religionists have labored to discover the meaning of African dispersal beyond the continent and its accompanying spiritual lineages. What theories of encounter sufficiently adjudicate the synthetic religious cultures of African-descended persons in North America, South America, and the Caribbean? What are the cross-disciplinary methodologies that scholars utilize to understand African religious cultures in the Western hemisphere? Firstly, this course will introduce the field of Africana religious studies.

This seminar focuses students on researching and writing the history of their own families, going back at least two generations. Along with digging into the specifics of family history, students will explore the key historical contexts for the decisions and choices made in the past, e.g. immigration (both voluntary and forced), war, economic conditions, political movements, professional and entrepreneurial opportunities. Kitchen Table History asks that we interrogate critically the stories and lessons learned from family members, using the widest array of historical sources.

This is a research seminar, designed to introduce students to classic and recent debates on the "history of capitalism" and to support original research on a broad array of topics related to the social and cultural history of economic life. Rather than take British capitalism as exemplary of modernization we will situate that which was particular about the British case against the pluralities of capitalism that have evolved over the past three centuries.

How and why has Africa become synonymous with "development"? This class traces the historical construction of an idea so pervasive that it has become almost invisible. Moving through 200 years of history, we interrogate the ways that different projects for "developing" Africa have been envisioned, challenged, planned, implemented and lived. Throughout, we return to key questions. Why and how have the lives of African people become entangled with various ideologies of "progress"?

This course explores relations among Germans, Slavs, and Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after the First and Second World Wars. Emphasis lies on tracing continuities and ruptures in nationalist and racist ideologies and policies, from late imperial Germany and Austria through the interwar republics and then on to the Third Reich and the post-Nazi regimes.

This colloquium examines the causes and the course of the Civil War, its social, economic, and political results during Reconstruction, and the early roots of both de jure segregation and the civil rights movement. It will examine the process of emancipation from the perspective of social history. Violent conflicts over free labor, the establishment of sharecropping, and the political and economic policies pursued by various groups--freedpeople, ex-masters, northern policymakers, wage laborers, and African American women, for example--will be covered.

This 200-level seminar introduces students to gender relations in the history of China. It offers students a broad historical narrative of women's lives from early China through the imperial period, and concludes with the power dynamics of gender relations in modern China in the twentieth century. The course is organized chronologically with thematic focus on the politics of marriage and reproduction; the state's shifting perspectives on women's social roles; and how women interpreted and responded to the changing cultural landscape.