This lecture and discussion course studies the cultural and environmental history of the College from its origins in the farmlands of South Hadley to recent efforts to re-create former traditions and to preserve its historic landscape. Themes center on changing ideas about women, nature and natural scenery, learning and living; on the interactions of the College community and its physical environment; in sum, on ideas and practices embedded in the campus landscape, recorded in the College Archives, and interpreted by historians and writers in the broad context of American history.

An exploration of the roles and values of Chinese women in traditional and modern times. Topics will include the structure of the family and women's productive work, rules for female behavior, women's literature, and the relationship between feminism and other political and social movements in revolutionary China. Readings from biographies, classical literature, feminist scholarship, and modern fiction.

This colloquium will explore the history of South Asia as seen from women's perspectives. We will read writings by women from the ancient period to the present. We will focus on the diversity of women's experiences in a range of social, cultural, and religious contexts. Themes include sexuality, religiosity, rights to education and employment, violence against women, modernity and citizenship--in short, those issues central to women's movements in modern South Asia.

This course examines the political and cultural power of the New York Times in the American past and present. Students will analyze the NYT today through daily reading, study its evolution as an institution, and research its coverage of critical historical events over the past century.

This course will examine the maturation of North American slave regimes after the American Revolution and the diverse activities of people who worked to abolish slavery. The assorted motives of white opponents of slavery and the actions of both free and enslaved African Americans to achieve freedom will be highlighted. We will analyze the mechanics of biracial coalition building and assess the historical legacy of these activists for subsequent social movements.

This seminar explores the history of money and finance in modern Britain, from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth. It addresses this history not from the perspective of classical economics or political economy, but rather from that of cultural history.

This course will explore female rulership in Europe from the late Roman empire to the age of Elizabeth I. Our discussion of various texts and images (most of them primary sources in translation)will reveal the role of queens within their societies, their relationship to broader social and cultural institutions such as the Christian Church, and the ways in which queens were celebrated,criticized, and imagined by writers and artists of their time.

A research seminar on the late-nineteenth-century transformation of Japan from a feudal state ruled by hereditary warriors into a modern nation-state ruled by a cabinet, a legislature, and a professionalized bureaucracy under the symbolic sovereignty of a sacred monarch. A turning point in East Asia's modern history, this revolution shaped the following century throughout the region and remains a subject of intense scholarly and popular interest.