(Offered as HIST 376, ASLC 376 [SA] and SWAG 377.) This course explores how history can be understood through sex, gender, and the body. The course focuses on South Asia as part of global history. We explore what relationship sex had with medieval politics. We analyze how colonialism and capitalism dominated people through disciplining bodies. Finally, we examine how nationalisms operate through gender. Throughout the course, we interpret a range of primary sources including poetry, maps, and films.

(Offered as HIST-355,  BLST-355 and EDST-355) This interdisciplinary seminar blends African American history; urban history; and the history of education to explore the relationship between race, schools, and inequality in American society. In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois credited the creation and expansion of public education in the South to African Americans’ educational activism in the aftermath of slavery. And yet, race has historically delineated access to public schooling, and by extension, economic, political, and civic equality.

(Offered as ASLC 334 and HIST 334.) Japan’s rise from the ashes of total defeat to become one of the largest and most prosperous economies in the world was once celebrated as the “Japanese miracle.” Focusing on the so-called high-growth period between the mid-1950s and mid-1990s, this course explores shifting historiographic approaches to postwar Japanese history, with a particular focus on the intersection of economic growth and democratic politics.

(Offered as HIST-329, BLST-329 [US] and EDST-329.) In 2014-2015, young Black people in St. Louis and Ferguson rescued American democracy, and it scared the nation.  Their agitation on behalf of 18-year-old Mike Brown, who fatally resisted an overbearing white police officer, virtually brought millions of people to a sleepy suburb.  Brown’s last stand sparked a democracy movement throughout the country -- in places like Memphis, Baltimore, New York, Dallas, and Minneapolis.  This course will cover the making of a modern freedom movement.

This course offers an opportunity for history majors and students intrigued by the past to reflect upon the practice of history. How do we claim to know anything about the past at all? How do historians construct the stories they tell about the past from the fragmentary remnants of former times? What is the connection between the past as it was lived and the narratives that historians write? How do we judge the truth and value of these histories and memories? The course explores questions such as these through readings and case studies drawn from a variety of places and times.

When did race begin? This course explores answers to this question by focusing on the multi-faith and multicultural Mediterranean between the eighth-fifteenth centuries – prior to the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ideas it spawned about race that have violently shaped the present. We will study how the Christian and Islamic societies of southern Europe, Mediterranean Africa, and the Near East invented racial frameworks when and as it suited their needs.

(Offered as HIST-205 and EUST-129.) Intellectual history concerns itself with the study of social and political ideas. These ideas are known by big words, such as Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism. As George Orwell once remarked: “The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.” This course will help students to create a distance needed to analyze the big ideas and the meaning beneath them and help acquire skills for exploration of the origin of key social and political concepts, their development and impact.

(Offered as ASLC 201 and HIST 201.) The Indian Ocean World (IOW) is a vast world region that includes parts of five areas: Africa, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Thousands of large and small islands are also part of the IOW. Inspired by the “global turn” in history, we learn about the diversity of human experiences and histories in the IOW. Themes include Roman trade with India, travels of Buddhist scholars, Islamic empires, movement of commodities, pilgrimage, slavery, and European expansion and imperialism.

(Offered as HIST 112, ASLC 112, EUST 112 and RUSS 130) In the course of almost 500 years, the Russian Empire evolved from a backwater principality at the crossroad of Eastern Europe and Eurasia into one of history’s largest polities. By exploring the evolution of the Russian Empire, we will learn about different peoples and cultures in Northern Eurasia. We will also study how imperial states were built and managed, and how they dealt with human diversity reflected in languages, cultures, confessions, etc.

(Offered as HIST 111 and EUST 111.) This course is a detailed examination of the history of the Holocaust. The Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe was an event of global proportions and significance, which still shapes the world in which we live. In this introductory course we will interrogate the origins and preconditions of the Nazi genocide and analyze the transition of Nazi policy from exclusion and persecution of the Jews to systematic murder. We will closely study the perpetrators and try to understand how “ordinary men” became mass murderers.