Taken together, Muslims in South Asia constitute the largest population of Muslims worldwide. This course will serve as an introduction to the political history of this diverse group of people. We will begin by considering religious conversion and the rule of Muslim kings in the premodern period.

This course surveys Native American history from ancient times through the U.S. Civil War, tracing the ways that tribal communities have shaped North America. Beginning with the diverse indigenous societies that inhabited the Americas millennia before Columbus's arrival, it discusses the cultural complexity of Native peoples, nations, and worldviews rooted in particular ecosystems and homelands.

This course introduces students to the major themes of U.S. women's history from the 1890s to the present. We will look both at the experiences of a diverse group of women in the U.S. as well as the ideological meaning of gender as it evolved and changed over the twentieth century. We will chart the various meanings of womanhood (for example, in relation to motherhood, work, the domestic sphere, and sexuality) along racial, ethnic, and class lines and in different regions, and will trace the impact multiple identities have had on women's activism.

This course examines both race and racism as elements in the historical process of 'racialization,' and proceeds by positing racialization as key to understanding the political, economic, social and cultural dynamics of the United States. We will outline the basic patterns of migration to the United States from the late nineteenth century to today. Specific topics may include (but are not limited to) imperialism; diaspora; immigrant rights; immigrant labor; 'illegal' immigration; nativism; social movements; and the relationships between gender, sexuality, race, class and nation.

This course will examine the cultural, social, political, and economic history of African Americans through the Civil War. Topics covered include the African background to the African American experience, the Atlantic slave trade, introduction and development of slavery, master-slave relationships, the establishment of black communities, slave revolts, the political economy of slavery, women in slavery, the experiences of free blacks, the crisis of the nineteenth century, and the effect of the Civil War.

This course explores ecological thinking and changes in landscape through human intervention and natural processes, primarily from the eighteenth century to the present. Our survey of thinking will include Europeans such as the founder of modern ecology, Ernest Haekel, and Americans Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Frederick Law Olmsted.

This course examines Native and colonial understandings of 'place' in the region today called New England. Beginning with indigenous homelands, it investigates Algonquian Indian ancestral and mythic landscapes that rooted Native communities in particular ecosystems. It moves through the colonization period, tracking how European arrivals transferred Old World ideas, agendas, and organisms into new environments. It examines colonists' strategies for exploiting natural resources of the rivers, forests, and coasts, and for developing built environments that made the New World feel like home.

We find martyrs in times of crisis, under tyranny and persecution. Yet not all victims of tyranny and persecution become martyrs, nor are all martyrs victims of tyranny. What social and political conditions have in the past fostered the choice of martyrdom? What cultural values drive this form of self-immolation? What's worth dying for?

Recent cultural histories of imperialism--European as well as U.S.--have illuminated the workings of race and gender at the heart of imperial encounters. This course will examine the United States' relationship to imperialism through the lens of such cultural histories. How has the encounter between Europe and America been remembered in the United States? How has the cultural construction of 'America' and its 'others' called into play racial and gender identities? How have the legacies of slavery been entwined with U.S. imperial ambitions at different times?