Independent reading.

Fall and spring semesters.

(Offered as HIST 474 [AS] and ASLC 474 [SA]) Anti-colonial nationalism in India was one of the first major movements towards the decolonization of the global south. This reading and writing intensive research seminar examines the story of the Indian nationalist movement and the effort to liberate the subcontinent and its peoples from British colonial rule.

(Offered as HIST 445 [EU] and RUSS 345) The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the end of the dynastic imperial regime and the onset of the new, unprecedented attempt to create a utopian society of universal equality and justice. It was also the beginning of the bloody and brutal Civil War and foreign intervention. Yet the Russian Revolution as a modernist project of remaking the social order and human nature had a much longer history as it developed since the nineteenth century in politics, science, literature, and arts.

[c] Nationalism–by far the most powerful political idea of the past 250 years–has transformed human history the world over. By positing a new form of human identity, it has liberated and enslaved, built and destroyed. Most importantly it persisted by presenting itself as a natural fact of human life. Studying nationalism, therefore, is an act of self-exploration, whether we regard ourselves as national or not. Yet, though nationalism has shaped the modern age, people strongly disagree on its most basic concepts: What are nations? When did they emerge? What is their future?

Physicians often say that medicine became truly effective in the mid-twentieth century when an avalanche of new remedies became available, first in Europe and North America but soon thereafter around the world.  Collectively dubbed “the wonder drugs,” these products included sulfa drugs and antibiotics for bacterial infections, cortico-steroids for arthritis and other inflammatory diseases, tranquilizers for mental illness, and diuretics for hypertension.  The new medicines offered patients relief from dread diseases and physicians long-awaited validation of the power

(Offered as BLST 381 [CLA/D] and HIST 365 [LA/FA])  Did the emancipation of millions of African-descended people from the bonds of chattel slavery--beginning with the 1791 slave rebellion in Haiti and ending with Brazilian abolition in 1888--mark the beginning of an irrevocable march towards Black freedom?  Or was it merely an evolution in the continuing exploitation of Black people throughout the Americas?  This course scrutinizes the complex economic, political, ideological, social and cultural contexts which caused and were remade by emancipation.  Students are asked

(Offered as BLST 342 [US] and HIST 358 [US])  Often overshadowed by the long 1960s and the conservative ascendancy in the 1980s, the 1970s provides an important transitional moment for the United States, one that arguably linked local experiences to global dynamics and social movements in unprecedented ways. It was also a decade fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, Americans experienced widespread disillusionment with the power of the federal government to promote and protect the minority from the majority.

This course offers an opportunity for history majors 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 of historians’ work to public memory? How do we judge the truth and value of these stories and memories? The course explores questions such as these through readings and case studies drawn from a variety of places and times. Two class meetings per week.  

(Offered as HIST 272 [AS] and ASLC 272 [SA])  Political and social movements in South Africa, the United States of America, Germany, Myanmar, India, and elsewhere, have drawn inspiration from the non-violent political techniques advocated by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi during his leadership of the anti-colonial struggle for Indian freedom from British colonial rule.This course charts a global history of Gandhi’s thought about non-violence and its expression in civil disobedience and resistance movements both in India and the world.

[LA/p] Over the course of three centuries, massive migrations from Europe and Africa and the dramatic decline of indigenous populations in South and Central America radically transformed the cultural, political, economic, and material landscape of what we today know as Latin America. This class will investigate the dynamism of Latin American societies beginning in the ancient or pre-conquest period and ending with the collapse of European rule in most Spanish, Portuguese, and French speaking territories in the New World.