(Offered as HIST-344 [EU/TE/TR/TS] and EUST-344.) Many see today’s world resembling some features of the world in the nineteenth century. Some powers today claim regional hegemony, attempt to pursue the course of supranationalism, and encounter the challenge of diversity. The course will explore the historical experience of the British, French, German, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires in the nineteenth century by focusing on how those imperial formations met the challenge of modernization and nationalism which included both accommodation of diversity and violent exclusion.

(Offered as HIST 284 [AF/TC/TE/TR/P] and BLST 311 [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. We will explore this varied history of states and cultures in the African past.

(Offered as HIST 283 [AF/TE/TR/TS/P] and BLST 322 [A]) The transition from white-minority rule in South Africa in 1994 ushered in a new era of independence and democracy in a troubled country whose name had become synonymous with “apartheid.” Yet that transition has not lived up to the high expectations of South Africans as many of the ruling structures built by the colonial and then apartheid regimes have endured, and economic and social inequality has increased in the nearly thirty years since Nelson Mandela was first elected President.

(Offered as HIST 258 [US/TC/TR/TS] and SWAG 258.) This course will examine the history of medicine in the U.S. with a focus on the roots and persistence of structural violence, discrimination, and stigma. The history of medicine was long viewed as the study of the development of new approaches to disease prevention and treatment. However, pathbreaking scholarship on the racist roots of American medicine has called for an examination of how broader social, cultural, and political norms and values shaped medical training and practices.

(Offered as HIST 236 [EU/AS/TE], EUST 238, and RUSS 237) The Cold War indelibly shaped the second half of the twentieth century. Spies seemed ubiquitous; nuclear annihilation imminent. Films such as Red October and the James Bond series forged a Western image of the Soviet Union. But how were these decades experienced behind the Iron Curtain? This course explores Soviet history between the end of World War II and the collapse of the USSR.

(Offered as HIST 236 [EU/AS/TE], EUST 238, and RUSS 237) The Cold War indelibly shaped the second half of the twentieth century. Spies seemed ubiquitous; nuclear annihilation imminent. Films such as Red October and the James Bond series forged a Western image of the Soviet Union. But how were these decades experienced behind the Iron Curtain? This course explores Soviet history between the end of World War II and the collapse of the USSR.

(Offered as HIST-222 [EU/TE/TR/TS] and POSC 222.The rise of the Far-Right at home and abroad in the last decade has taken much of the world by surprise, and calls for a reconsideration not only of its future but also of its history. Since WWII most of historical studies of the Far-Right have focused on the history of fascism, from proto-fascism to neo-fascism. in the twenty-first century; however, the Far-Right emerges as a much broader phenomenon, in chronology, in geography, and in attributes.

(Offered as HIST 176 [AS/TC/TE] and ASLC 176.) The transformation of the Japanese archipelago from a relatively secluded agrarian polity in the early-nineteenth century into the world’s second largest economic power by the end of the twentieth century is one of the most dramatic stories of modern history. This course introduces the history of this transformation through two “revolutions”: the formation of an imperialist nation-state and the post-World War II creation of a pacifist democracy.

(Offered as HIST 172 [AS/TC/TE/TS] and ASLC 172.) This survey of Chinese history examines the matrix of the internal and external forces and movements that have shaped modern China from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. During this period, the Chinese people dispensed with a form of government that had been used for three thousand years to form, despite various complications, a modern nation-state. China also went through a difficult transformation from a traditional society into a modern industrial nation.

(Offered as HIST 128 [EU/TC/TE/TR/P] and EUST 128.) The Middle Ages are typically defined as the period between 500-1500 CE, and this course aims to draw a new image of these thousand years in terms of periodization, geography, gender, race, and culture. On the one hand, we will examine processes of establishing power by exclusion, such as the race-thinking that coalesced around Jewish and Muslim believers or the strong hierarchies built to privilege men.