Topics course This seminar provides students with an introduction to the mid-twentieth century development of the professional study of Africa's past and the current state of the field in African history. Key historiographical themes addressed in the course include slavery and emancipation, African conceptions of race, gender and sexuality in colonial Africa, African conceptions of race, nationalism and decolonization, and popular culture on the continent. In addition, students will conduct their own research project based upon primary sources.

Topics course. One of the most enigmatic political leaders of the modern period, M.K. Gandhi remains a controversial figure. On one hand, he is celebrated as the father of the Indian nation and an apostle of non-violence, and on the other hand viewed as a wily politician and a patriarch with problematic views of gender and sexuality. In his lifetime, thousands saw him as a saint, while others (mainly Hindu nationalists) reviled him as a traitor to Indian nationalism and blamed him for the partition of India.

Topics course. What did college education mean to the first generations of Smithies? . How did students' opportunities and experiences vary according to their race, religion, and class? How did college alter women's ideas about what it meant to be a woman (in terms of work, sports, dress, politics, sexuality, and social life)? This course addresses such questions by exploring the history of Smith College in a broader American and European context, with a focus on the period from Smith's founding in 1871 through the 1920's.

Topics course. The captivity of Europeans and European Americans ? especially women -- by Native Americans has been a persistent theme in mainstream literary and popular culture since early colonial times. This course examines several cases of such captivity in historical and cross- cultural context as well as some of the many more instances in which Native Americans and other non-Europeans were captives.

Topics course. Historical debates surrounding racial identities, particularly of African- descended people, throughout the Atlantic World, tracing the experiences of Black people from Western Africa and the Middle Passage to the British colonies, the United States, Haiti and the British Isles. This course will also consider the experiences of other forced laborers in the Atlantic World, including indigenous Americans and Asians. The lives of non-white people as slaves, indentured servants, sailors, rebels, intellectuals and even passengers on the Atlantic.

Analysis of the historical realities, social movements, cultural expression and political debates that shaped U.S. citizenship from the Declaration of Independence to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. From the hope of liberty and equality to the exclusion of marginalized groups that made whiteness, maleness and native birth synonymous with Americanness. How African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and women harnessed the Declaration of Independence and its ideology to define themselves as also citizens of the United States.

Topics course. The course uses magic as a case study for exploring cultural transmission in the middle Ages. We begin by examining Germanic and Greco-Roman occult traditions, and the way in which the medieval synthesis of these cultures effect understandings of the occult. The course follows the influence of the Arabic and Hebrew influences on western occultism of the High Middle Ages, and flowering of the renaissance magical tradition. The course challenges and reshapes some of our basic understandings about Medieval Society.

Were the Renaissance and Reformation something new and modern, or a continuation of medieval trends? Topics include the Black Death, Europe as a persecuting society, the emergence of humanism, the fragmentation of religious unity across Europe, Witch Trials, the intersection of politics and science, and the beginnings of the Age of Exploration and European Imperialism.

Were the Renaissance and Reformation something new and modern, or a continuation of medieval trends? Topics include the Black Death, Europe as a persecuting society, the emergence of humanism, the fragmentation of religious unity across Europe, Witch Trials, the intersection of politics and science, and the beginnings of the Age of Exploration and European Imperialism.

Were the Renaissance and Reformation something new and modern, or a continuation of medieval trends? Topics include the Black Death, Europe as a persecuting society, the emergence of humanism, the fragmentation of religious unity across Europe, Witch Trials, the intersection of politics and science, and the beginnings of the Age of Exploration and European Imperialism.