A consideration of how the study of history, broadly conceived, gets translated into curriculum for middle and secondary schools. Addressing a range of topics in American history, students develop lesson and unit plans using primary and secondary resources, films, videos and internet materials. Discussions focus on both the historical content and the pedagogy used to teach it. Does not count for seminar credit in the history major. Enrollment limited to 12. Juniors, seniors and graduate students only. Instructor permission required.

Despite the particular degradation, violence and despair of enslavement in the United States, African American men and women built families, traditions and a legacy of resistance. Using the WPA interviews—part of the New Deal Federal Writers Project of the 1930s—this course looks at the historical memory of former slaves by reading and listening to their own words. How did 70- through 90-year-old former slaves remember their childhoods and young adulthoods during slavery?

This course explores the history of conservatism in the United States, from the 1920s to Trump. Students will examine the key ideas, leaders, and movements that fueled and defined the rise of the modern right, broadly construed. In the process, we will go beyond electoral politics, exploring the relationship between conservatism and American life – especially in the realms of race, gender, religion, and capitalism.

The N-word is the great symbol of white supremacy in the United States. When spoken by African Americans, it emerges as a powerful symbol of anti-racist politics, verbal protest and artistic expression. What does the N-word really mean? How does it create a firestorm in certain contexts, but not others? In this interdisciplinary course, students explore history, film, literature, music and political debate to look closely at the histories of race and racism in the U.S.

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. Enrollment limited to 40.

The period 1815-1914, a century of fundamental change without a general war. The international order established at the Congress of Vienna and its challengers: liberalism, nationalism, Romanticism, socialism, secularism, capitalism and imperialism.

This survey course examines Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the early medieval era, starting with the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Students will study the turbulent nature of political and societal boundaries and the rise of Christianity in Europe before 900 AD, as well as the emergence of Islam as a religion and political power and its influence on the medieval European and Byzantine worlds. Students will engage in the examination and discussion of early medieval notions of kinship, race, law and justice, popular piety and political power. Enrollment limited to 40.

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.

Offered as HST 208 and MES 208. This course examines the history of the modern Middle East from a global perspective. How have gender, economy, ecology and religion shaped Middle Eastern empires and nation-states within a broader world? The course begins with transformations in Egypt, Iran and the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and World War I. Next, it turns to experiences of colonialism, the rise of independent nation-states and the birth of new political movements.