Origins, course and consequences of the war of 1861-65. Major topics include the politics and experience of slavery; religion and abolitionism; ideologies of race; the role of African Americans in ending slavery; the making of Union and Confederate myths; Reconstruction; white Americans? final abandonment of the cause of the freed people in the 1880s and 1890s.

A thematic survey of Latin American history in the 19th and 20th centuries focusing on the development of export economies and the consolidation of the state in the 19th century, the growth of political participation by the masses after 1900, and the efforts of Latin Americans in the second half of the 20th century to bring social justice and democracy to the region.

Topics course. This course examines the political, social, and economic role of women in African history, while paying particular attention to the ways in which a wide variety of women - rural and urban, Christian and Muslim, married and unmarried, and literate and non-literate - engaged, understood, and negotiated the changing political and social landscapes associated with life under colonial rule. Key issues addressed in the course include marriage and respectability, colonial domesticity regimes, and women and religion.

This course provides an introductory survey of African history since 1800. In doing so, the course offers students a framework for understanding the political, social, and economic history of Modern Africa by foregrounding the strategies African peoples employed as they made sense of, accommodated themselves to, and confronted their changing historical landscapes.

The cultural context of fascism. Readings from Nietzsche, Sorel, Wilde, Pareto, Marinetti, Mussolini, and Hitler, as well as studies of psychology, degenerate painting and music. Both politicians and artists claimed to be Nietzschean free spirits. Who best understood his call to ruthless creativity? Enrollment by permission of the instructor.

Women's experience and constructions of gender in the commonly recognized major events of the 20th century. Introduction to major thinkers of the period through primary sources, documents and novels, as well as to the most significant categories in the growing secondary literature in 20th-century European history of women and gender.

Contemporary debates among European historians, artists and citizens over the place of memory in political and social history. The effectiveness of a range of representational practices from the historical monograph to visual culture, as markers of history, and as creators of meaning.

The emergence, expansion, and maintenance of the Russian Empire to 1929. The dynamics of pan-imperial institutions and processes (imperial dynasty, peasantry, nobility, intelligentsia, revolutionary movement), as well as the development of the multitude of nations and ethnic groups conquered by or included into the empire. Focus on how the multinational Russian empire dealt with pressures of modernization (nationalist challenges in particular), internal instability and external threats. The emergence, expansion, and maintenance of the Russian Empire to 1929.

Topics course. Histories of social conflict, protest, and revolution in early modern and modern Japan. In the early modern period (1600-1867), peasant resistance and protest, urban uprisings, popular culture, "world-renewal" movements, and the restorationist activism of the Tokugawa period.

Chinese society and civilization from the Tang dynasty to the Taiping rebellion. Topics include disappearance of the hereditary aristocracy and rise of the scholar-official class, civil service examination system, Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, poetry and the arts, Mongol conquest, popular beliefs, women and the family, Manchus in China, domestic rebellion, and confrontation with the West.