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.

The power to produce food and reproduce society gave women significant public voice in African societies in the past. But over 200 years they lost that public voice and control over subsistence. Why, when women are still producing food and people, is the social and political voice of women so much less significant than it was before? We explore African womens' work of governing, production, and social reproduction across the tumultuous changes of the 20th century.

A course, organized topically rather than geographically or nationally, that offers a comparative analysis of African American slavery as a dominant social system in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the U.S. South. Topics include: why slavery?; sugar and slavery; historical demography; culture and the law; kinship and family; long-run economic development; patterns of race relations; master class and racist ideologies; resistance to slavery; and abolition and its aftermath. Readings include historical and anthropological studies, as well as a major documentary collection on slavery in Brazil.

This course will examine the social, cultural, political, and economic history of African Americans from emancipation and Reconstruction through the present. Emphasis will fall on postwar southern social and economic developments, the rise of segregation, northern migrations, black class stratification, nationalism, the twentieth-century civil rights movement, and current trends in African American political, social, and economic life.

This course introduces students to the major themes of U.S. women's history from the 1890s to the present. We will look both at the experiences of a diverse group of women in the U.S. as well as the ideological meaning of gender as it evolved and changed over the twentieth century. We will chart the various meanings of womanhood (for example, in relation to motherhood, work, the domestic sphere, and sexuality) along racial, ethnic, and class lines and in different regions, and will trace the impact multiple identities have had on women's activism.

The vast region of North America between the Mississippi River and Pacific Ocean has been a site of many migrations, conflicts, political transformations, and environmental changes. This course examines dynamic histories of Native American tribes, Euro-American "explorers" and colonists, cowboys and miners, Asian immigrant laborers, and mariners, all of whom helped create interior and oceanic worlds. It focuses on natural and human changes in specific locales, and also explores how public histories at these places shape the present and future.

A survey of European events, themes, and trends between 1900 and the new millennium, centered on discussion of a rich mix of primary sources that include fiction and film. Students will range from the Balkans to the Baltic, from the Urals to the United Kingdom, from death camps to the welfare state, from Bolshevism to neoliberalism, from European civil and cold war to European Union. This course complements History 151, does not repeat high school history, and pays close attention to developing historical consciousness and analytical skills.

This course asks: what are cities in the history of modern East Asia? Cities were cosmopolitan, centers of commerce, and sites of social movements in late imperial China, Tokugawa Japan, and late Chosǔn Korea. How did the roles of cities change in the nineteenth century when East Asia became more integrated into the global system? How was urban life affected in the first half of the twentieth century when the central states dealt with domestic turmoil and external pressures? How did the state work to redefine cities and urban culture in the postwar era?

Early Americans inhabited an interconnected world through which people, beliefs, and objects circulated. This course explores the 'Atlantic World' as both a place and a concept: an ocean surrounded by diverse communities and empires, and an imagined space of shared or competing affiliations. Moving from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, it examines ecological, cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and religious exchanges among Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans.

Why are some nations so much richer and more powerful than others? This course demonstrates that global inequality is not natural; it has a history. Exploring patterns of exchange that developed among regions of the world over the past 600 years, we will ask about the role of power in the establishment of practices of production and exchange. We will explore how cross-regional productive systems benefited some participants at the expense of others.