[TC/ C] This course surveys how different peoples in different places and distant times have conceived of and engaged with the past. Our guiding questions include: Why have different groups described the past in different ways—as lost or recoverable, dangerous or a teacher, determined or open to change? What mediums—from rocks to charts, songs to manuscripts, and isotopes to cities—contain history’s secrets and shape it? And how have cultures adapted their understanding of history to form new ways of living?

(Offered as HIST 319 [AS/TC/TE/C] ASLC 320 and RELI 322.) Conceptions of the religious and the secular assumed global significance over the course of the nineteenth century. Legal and scholarly means to identify, compare, and regulate religion took shape as colonial empires and nascent nation-states sought to govern and integrate heterogeneous populations. Drawing on inter-disciplinary conversations, this course historicizes the categories of religion and secularity in order to consider their political and intellectual functions as they developed in the nineteenth century.

This course offers an opportunity for history majors and students intrigued by the past to reflect upon the practice of history. How do we claim to know anything about the past at all? How do historians construct the stories they tell about the past from the fragmentary remnants of former times? What is the connection between the past as it was lived and the narratives that historians write? How do we judge the truth and value of these histories and memories? The course explores questions such as these through readings and case studies drawn from a variety of places and times.

(Offered as HIST 283 [AF/TE/TR/TS/P] and BLST 322) 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.

[US/TC/TR/TS/P] This course will examine the historic roots of some of the most pressing debates in American politics today. What did people in the revolutionary era really think about citizenship, colonization, democracy, disease, guns, equality, punishment, religion, reproduction, slavery, taxation, and violence? This fresh examination of the nation’s founding period draws heavily on primary sources such as diaries, newspapers, speeches, and pamphlets as well as innovative historical scholarship.

[EU/TC] Sigmund Freud, as we know, was a Jew. But why was psychoanalysis called “The Jewish Science”? And why did Freud include so many Jewish jokes in his short 1906 volume, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious? This course is an introduction to the intellectual history of psychoanalysis and its intersections with modern Jewish history, using Freud’s book on jokes as an entry-point to his scientific, humanistic, and religious milieu.

(Offered as HIST-233 [US/TR/TS] and BLST-233 [US].) This course explores racial capitalism through the lenses of history and economics.  Racial capitalism understands racism, slavery, segregation, and imperialism as key to how the economic system of capitalism enables the creation of profit for some via the racialized exploitation of others.  After reading foundational texts in the beginning of the semester, we will turn to look at the economic benefits of whiteness, consider how slavery devalued Black lives and labor, and investigate a series of case studies illuminating racist c

(Offered as HIST 230 [EU/TC/TE/P] and EUST 230.) Often viewed as one of the defining events in modern history, the French Revolution has been debated and discussed, derided and celebrated by generations of politicians, cultural commentators, and historians. This course enters into this on-going conversation by examining the nature of the revolutionary process as it unfolded in late eighteenth-century France and its empire.

(Offered as HIST 217 [US/TC/TR/TS] and BLST 217 [US].) Many Americans think of the northern United States as removed from and antagonistic toward slavery. The truth is much more complicated. Slavery existed in the region for generations, and northerners continued to support and profit from slavery in the South and the Caribbean even after the institution came to an end in the North. For example, northerners produced and sold to enslavers the food, clothing, shackles, and other items that kept plantations in operation.

Offered as HIST-205 [EU/TC/TS] and EUST-129. Intellectual history concerns itself with the study of social and political ideas. These ideas are known by big words, such as Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism.