This course surveys the history of the United States since the 1940s. It will cover the key developments that defined postwar America, focusing especially on the history of inequality, politics and public policy, social movements, and intellectual life. We will critically engage with the process of historical narration, analyzing the politics of the stories we tell about postwar America. And we will construct and substantiate our own historical narratives in course assignments, including both academic papers and public-facing podcasts.

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 our moral duty? This course will focus 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.

Survey of the major economic, political and social changes of this period, primarily through the lens of race, class and gender, to understand the role of ordinary people in shaping defining events, including industrial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, mass immigration and migration, urbanization, the rise of mass culture, nationalism, war, feminism, labor radicalism, civil rights and other liberatory movements for social justice. Enrollment limited to 40.

Examines the longevity of the U.S. Civil War in historical memory, as a pivotal period in the development of American racism and African American activism. Explores cutting-edge histories, primary source materials, documentaries, popular films, and visual and political culture. Explores the Civil War as a mass slave insurrection and studies the myriad meanings of Emancipation. Looks at the impact of slavery on race and racism on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This course examines the political, social and economic role of women, gender, and sexuality in African history, while paying particular attention to the ways in which a wide variety of Africans engaged, understood, and negotiated the multiple meanings of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality in the changing political and social landscapes associated with life in Africa. Key issues addressed in the course include marriage and respectability, colonial domesticity regimes, sex, and religion.

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.

A survey of the ancien régime. On behalf of the central State, war-making absolutists, Enlightened philosophes and patriotic republicans assailed privileges. The era culminated in the leveling of European societies through the French Revolution and the industrial revolution.

The emergence, expansion and maintenance of the Russian Empire to 1929. The dynamics of pan-imperial institutions and processes (imperial dynasty, peasantry, nobility, intelligentsia, revolutionary movement), as well as the development of the multitude of nations and ethnic groups conquered by or included into the empire. Focus on how the multinational Russian empire dealt with pressures of modernization (nationalist challenges in particular), internal instability and external threats.

A critical investigation of a thousand years of globalization, centering on China, Persia, and Britain. How did Europe, a mere cape of Asia, come to dominate much of the planet politically and culturally? Ventures by Vikings, Crusaders, conquistadors, missionaries, traders, settlers, revolutionaries, and feminists. How distinctive forms of family, state, religion, and economy participated in and grew out of imperialism. Open to all students.