Explores significance of im/migrant workers and their transnational social movements to U.S. history in the late 19th and 20th centuries. How have im/migrants responded to displacement, marginalization and exclusion, by redefining the meanings of home, citizenship, community and freedom? What are the connections between mass migration and U.S. imperialism? What are the histories of such cross-border social movements as labor radicalism, borderlands feminism, Black and Brown Liberation, and anti-colonialism?

Offered as HST 271 and REL 271. Was Jesus a revolutionary socialist? Or did he preach an ethic of self-help? Is it holy to be poor? Or is prosperity a moral duty? This course focuses particularly on the relationship between religion and capitalism in the realms of economic and moral ideas, labor and working class politics, business history, and grassroots social movements.

During slavery, white Americans, especially U.S. slaveholders, feared the specter of insurrection. Uprisings at Stono or those led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved that slaves often fought back. Yet the central historiographical question remains: why didn’t U.S. slaves overthrow enslavement like Haitian slaves did on Santo Domingo? Enslaved people challenged slavery in a variety of ways including violence, revolts, maroon communities, truancy, passing, suicide and day-to-day resistance.

Offered as MES 244 and HST 244. How could revolution be theorized from the MENA region? How might older histories and vocabularies of social change connect to recent events in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia? In the first part of this course, students engage prominent theories of revolution generated within EuroAmerican and MENA contexts. Next, the course considers diverse theories of social change generated within key moments in the history of the modern Middle East, from Ottoman constitution in 1876 to postcolonial revolts in Oman, Yemen, and Algeria.

Focuses on the history of the Soviet Union during the "greater Cold War," that is, between World War II and the disintegration of the USSR. Touches on foreign policy developments, but the main focus is on the social, political and economic processes, and cultural developments inside the USSR itself. Explores Soviet history in the second half of the 20th century through historical works and a range of primary sources. Topics include the post-war reconstruction, rise of the military-industrial complex, education, popular culture and dissent. Enrollment limited to 40.

This course investigates the interplay of consumerism and medicine through a series of medical objects, both in the present day and in the past. Medicine and capitalism are strongly linked in history, and this course uses objects to tease apart their relationship, paying special attention to the identity of patients and the provenance of objects. Do consumer goods further or inhibit the goals of medicine? Can medical objects advance the agency of marginalized people? And what makes something medical, anyway? Enrollment limited to 18. (E)

Offered as MES 237 and HST 237. The history of the modern Middle East is a story of border-crossing as well as border-making. From 19th century immigrants from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas, to today's migrant laborers in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Gulf, the region has been forged by those who move within and beyond national borders. How have forces of gender, class, and ethnicity shaped these journeys? This course examines the gendered processes of movement and migration--voluntary and involuntary--that have shaped the modern Middle East from the 19th century to the present.

This course provides a general, introductory survey of African social and cultural history from approximately the end of World War II to the present. In doing so, the course will look beyond the formal political maneuvering of elite figures, focusing instead on the many and competing ways in which a broad array of African actors engaged the changing political and social contexts in which they lived. As such, key themes of the course such as anticolonialism, decolonization, development, and HIV/AIDS will serve as lenses into a range of perspectives on life in an independent Africa.