'An in-depth exploration of American culture, politics, and society at the turn of the twentieth century, from roughly the 1890s to World War I. Through readings, films, lectures, and discussions, we will examine several of the key transformations propelling the U.S. into the modern era: the boom and bust of industrial capitalism; the creation of legal segregation; the origins of modern mass media; the impact and experience of the New Immigration; tensions between urban and small town culture; the imperial project abroad; Progressive reform and more radical visions at home.

'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.'

'Slavery existed throughout the U.S. at the time of the American Revolution; afterwards, gradual emancipation plans freed the children of the formerly enslaved in the northern states. Runaways from the South increased their numbers. These nineteenth-century African Americans built the first edifices of freedom, chiefly through the institutions of family and religion, and furnished both leaders and foot soldiers for the abolitionist movement. They acted in the hope that their efforts would end slavery and bring full citizenship for black people.

'Is the United States an 'empire'? Today, U.S. political, military, and economic involvement in many parts of the world, such as the Middle East, makes this an urgent and important question. This course addresses the issue of American imperial power by examining the history of U.S. colonization of the Philippines, during the first half of the twentieth century, and by comparing it with that of two other imperial powers--Spain and Japan.

'Our age is pre-eminently the age of great cities,' wrote Robert Vaughan in 1843. Many Europeans questioned whether the greatness of cities was such a good thing, but most agreed that the history of nineteenth-century Europe could not be written without reference to them. We will examine that history from the perspective of Europe's largest cities between the mid-eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking greatness in its broadest sense, our readings will treat both the feats of urban transformation and the murkier histories of streets, sewers, sex, and slums.

'The Holy Office of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church proved an effective instrument for controlling religious and political orthodoxy from the Middle Ages through the early modern era. Its range of activity spanned investigations into doctrinal purity, groups of dissenters, Jews and Muslims who converted to the Christian faith, scientific discoveries, witchcraft, cunning folk, the black arts, and popular dissent.

'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.

'This course explores the relationships of passion, obligation, and love that bound men and women over the course of nearly two millennia, from Rome in the first century B.C.E. to sixteenth-century France. In particular, we focus on the formal ways in which those relationships were organized under the rubric of 'marriage', on the social roles created by that institution, on the relationship (or lack thereof) between marriage, love, and sexual passion, and the role of homosocial and homosexual desire within that history.'

'This course is about writing history, commonly called historiography. It examines some of the most successful works of historical writing from the ancient world to the present day. It investigates strategies historians use in interpreting the past, secrets of their trade, and the awful price not a few have paid for challenging orthodox versions of the past. Students will also analyze works of contemporary authors and apply their own hand to the historian's craft.'