Independent reading.

Fall and spring semesters.

(Offered as History 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.

[US^P] This seminar, focused on the period from 1760 to 1815, examines the origins, development and more immediate consequences of the American Revolution. The course looks at the founding of the American republic as an intellectual debate, a social movement, a military conflict and a political revolution. By offering an overview of these developments and introducing the historiographic debates surrounding them, the seminar provides students with the necessary background to examine in depth a topic of interest by writing a research paper.

[^C] Participants in this seminar will explore the environmental and social histories of nine commodities: sugar, silver, silk, coffee, tobacco, sneakers, microchips, units of bandwidth, and the human body. Each of these commodities represents a complex array of linkages among producers, consumers, and intermediaries over time and space. Readings draw upon the disciplines of history, ecology, anthropology, and geography to place these commodities in their social, environmental, and spatial contexts.

[EU^P] Did medieval persons think of themselves as individuals? Medieval historians continue to engage in the long and controversial debate over whether we can oppose the medieval person (who found selfhood only in collective entities) to the modern person (who finds selfhood in the autonomous will). In this course we will work our way through a number of medieval persons who either wrote about their own self (autobiography), another self (biography), or a holy self (hagiography), and apply these texts to the great debate.

[^C] This course will introduce students to major philosophical roots, historical developments, and contemporary debates in human rights politics.  The course will begin by examining the global historical evolution of the notion of human rights, stressing the pivotal role of the American and French Revolutions in framing modern conceptions of rights in the late eighteenth century.

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 284 [AF^P] and BLST 211 [A].) The African continent has been called by one historian the social laboratory of humanity. Art, trade, small-scale manufacturing, medical knowledge, religion, state systems, history and legend all flourished before the formal political take-over of the continent by European powers in the late nineteenth century and continue to have a decisive impact on African societies today. It is this varied and sometimes difficult to access history of states and cultures in the period before 1885 that this course will examine.

(Offered as HIST 275 [AS] and ASLC 249 [C].) This course is designed as an introduction to local and global themes in the history of modern China. We will focus on the period between the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and the Treaty of Versailles and Chinese May Fourth Movement of 1919, which launched the Communist revolution. The major issues of this period have taken on new significance since the end of the Cold War.

[LA^P] This course examines the early history of Latin America, beginning with the major pre-Columbian civilizations that flourished before the arrival of the Spanish in the New World and ending with the maturation of colonial society. The class is thematic, built around an in-depth examination of certain parts of the story.