The Department of History Course Descriptions

History 329-001: Modern History of Science

CRN: 44800

Instructor: Spence MWF 10:00-10:50

CRN: 44801
This course provides an in-depth examination of the cultural, political, and environmental conditions that produced the modern world's first liberal democracy.  Some say that democracy is in peril today. Yet the structures the first generations of Americans established have proved remarkably durable. What makes the U.S. both so volatile yet so flexible? How did everyday folks, including African slaves, Indigenous Nations, and women of all colors and classes, contribute to the formation of the new nation? A close study of the Revolutionary Era will reward students with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the unfolding American experiment.
History 347/500-001: Native America 1850-1940

Instructor: Connell-Szasz TR 9:30-10:45

CRN: 44802
Focusing on the middle generations of American Indian/Alaska Native History, this course will concentrate on the major themes that dominate Native lives between the era of removal of the eastern tribes to Indian Territory and the Second World War. It will begin in the Trans-Mississippi West with the treaties, warfare, and removal of Native Nations in regions such as the Columbia River Plateau, the Great Basin, and California. Native involvement in the Civil War, especially in Indian Territory, will follow. During the post-Civil War years we will look at a number of issues: treaties, warfare, and removal that occurred on the Plains, the Southwest, and Plateau, alongside the national movement for land allotment, assimilation, and federal Indian schooling. These themes will be contrasted with pan-tribalism, revitalization movements, and Wounded Knee. At the turn-of-the-century, we will assess the dramatic role of U.S. Supreme Court decisions on relations between Indian nations and the United States. In the early twentieth century we will assess the significance of the Society of American Indians, the rise of Indian leadership in the 1920s reform movement, and, finally, the controversial measures of the Indian New Deal and the role of Native leaders in the federal programs that were cut off by World War II. The course structure will alternate between lecture and discussion.

History 361/561-001: Trans-Mississippi West

Instructor: Hutton TR 2:00-3:15

CRN: 44803/44830
This course is concerned with the exploration, settlement, and exploitation of the trans-Mississippi West, 1820-1900, and the resultant conflict between white Americans and Native Americans over the land. The Indian Wars, the cattle empire, the mining booms, the movement of great numbers of people of various origins and ethnicities, and the development of the great American myth of the Wild West will all be covered. This is not regional history as such, but is rather national history in a broad regional setting.

History 377-001/500-002: Modern Brazil

Instructor: Bieber                                                                            TR 11:00-12:15

CRN: 44804/45569

This course will examine Brazilian history from independence in 1822 to the present.  Brazil of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a dynamic society undergoing rapid social, political, and economic changes.  It shifted from an agrarian slaveholding society to a modern industrial nation whose population was augmented by successive waves of European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese immigrants.  Brazil is characterized by racial, ethnic and regional diversity.  This course will explore this varied mosaic examining Brazilian development from economic, political, social, intellectual, and cultural historical perspectives.  Race relations, the role of women, immigrants, the working class, the military and elites will be explored.  We will also examine the role of the Church, liberation theology, Afro-Brazilian religions, and contemporary issues such as Brazil’s environmental movement.

Instructor: Overtoom MWF 1:00-1:50

CRN: 44805
This is a student-driven seminar based on readings, research, and in-class discussions of military confrontations in the world of the Greeks and the Romans from the Age of Homer to Late Antiquity. The ancient world of the Mediterranean and Near East was a world of war. Ancient states were locked in a brutal struggle for limited resources and access to power. Warfare was a means to political advancement, economic prosperity, and state security. The military was fundamental to all ancient societies, and all ancient peoples were aggressive and warlike. To truly understand ancient civilization, it is important to study ancient military history.
History 395-002: The Hellenistic World

Instructor: Overtoom MWF 9:00-9:50

CRN: 44822
This is a student-driven seminar based on readings, research, and in-class discussions of the world created in the wake of Alexander the Great's death. Alexander may have conquered the Persian Empire, interconnecting the Mediterranean and Middle East like never before; however, the Hellenistic (or Greek-like) world that flourished from the fourth to the first centuries BCE is his true legacy. The Hellenistic world was a multi-cultural and sometimes chaotic exchange of Greek and indigenous customs and ideas. It also was a historical period consumed by violence. It began with the Greeks ruling the world and ended with the rise of Rome and Parthia.
History 402/602-001: Medieval Crusade and Jihad

Instructor: Davis-Secord TR 9:30-10:45

CRN: 44833/44823

This course will provide a history of the crusading movement of Western Europe (ca. 1095-1291 C.E.) and its impact on the civilizations of the medieval West and Middle East. Course material will address both the events and long-term legacies of the Crusades and counter-crusades (jihad) as well as the histories of the peoples and ideas involved. Students will be asked to reflect on the following questions, as presented in lectures, readings, discussions, and writing assignments: What were the motivations of the Christian crusaders? How did the Muslims and Jews of the Middle East view the Crusades, and how did they respond to them? In what ways did the prolonged contact between these two major civilizations affect the societies, religions, and economies of each?

Instructor: Withycombe MWF 2:00-2:50

CRN: 44797/45292
When did women's health become about pink ribbons and baby bumps? How did the development of modern medicine help and hurt women? This course examines the health issues women have faced and their responses to them from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries in the United States. In particular, it explores the personal experiences and the medical views of women's life-cycle events, the role of women as health care practitioners and activists, and the effect of gender on the perception of illness.
History 417-001/500-004: History of Modern Medicine

Instructor: Withycombe MWF 10:00-10:50

CRN: 44824/45587
The basic aim of this course is to present you with several different ways of looking at health and illness by examining how they have been understood at different times in history, from 1700 to the present. We will explore, through broad narratives and specific case studies, a range of theories and practices employed by physicians, the social construction of disease, and the development of the medical profession in the western world. From inoculation controversies of the early eighteenth century through the rise of pharmaceutical power of the twentieth century, the course demonstrates how shifting social and cultural values have motivated change in thinking about health. 
History 421/621-001: Modern Britain 1660-Present

Instructor: Richardson MWF 11:00-11:50

CRN: 44825/44834
It is easy to dismiss modern Britain. It can seem a museum piece, where Cockney bobbies and septuagenarian women detectives toast the queen while sipping warm beer on the village green. Or it can appear a cautionary tale of how a great power can wither into irrelevance, rich only in bad weather, bad food and bad teeth. But it is remarkable how influential these small islands on the outskirts of Europe have been, and continue to be. From the birth of imperialism to the industrial revolution to the war on terror to the rise of populism, Britain has been at the center of most of the important historical events of the last four centuries. A study of its history sheds light on many of the issues that shaped the modern era, including questions of how to balance progress and stability, assimilation and diversity, liberty and security, and nationalism and internationalism. Students will not just master the facts of what happened when, where, why and to whom, but will learn to think and write historically: in-class discussions will involve the analysis of both primary and secondary texts, and the central written assignment of the course will be a long research paper. The goal of this course will be to challenge stereotypical notions of modern Britain, by including a variety of perspectives and by focusing on how Britain’s history can illuminate broader themes. The story of modern Britain is a story of tories and revolutionaries, of angels in the home and suffragists in the streets, of powdered wigs and day-glo mohawks. And it is a story whose lessons are fundamentally relevant to the way we live now.


History 429/629-001: Beauty, Body and Power

Instructor: Hall MWF 12:00-12:50

CRN: 42128/44810
This course will explore the intersections of these three themes in comparative context. Most of the course content will use materials form the histories of the U.S. and of Latin America, though we will use material from other world areas as well. We will use both theoretical and empirical

works. Topics which we will cover include: social constructions vs. biological notions of beauty; the intersection of ideas of beauty and gender roles; beauty and business and beauty as business; the history of plastic surgery; historical case studies of famous beauties in Latin America and elsewhere in which issues of beauty, body and power, Political and otherwise, intersect; the history of anorexia and other body altering and sometimes health-threatening practices; issues of race and body; and issues of missing bodies. The major focus of the course will be on female beauty and body in relation to questions about power, but we will consider male beauty and body in this context as well. There will be three in-class essays. Graduate students will be required to do a paper as well.

History 440-001: Atomic America

CRN: 44827

Los Alamos, Trinity, Hiroshima—familiar names in the history of Atomic America. But long before the atomic bomb indelibly associated radioactivity with death, many believed that radium might hold the secret to life. What happened, and how did this change? Through a series of case studies, we will survey the complex historical, political, environmental, and moral dimensions of the atomic age, from the discovery of radioactivity in the late nineteenth century through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb, up to the world we live in today. Special attention will be paid to the role of scientists, secrecy, and security; the place of radioactivity and nuclear weapons in popular culture; and the central place of New Mexico and the nuclear borderlands in this history.
Topics to be covered include: the radium craze; radium and the origin of life; radiation and the discovery of the nature and structure of the gene; the discovery of nuclear fission and chain reactions; the development of the world’s first secret weapons laboratory in Los Alamos in 1942; the first atomic detonation at Trinity in 1945; the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its aftermath; and growing concerns over nuclear fallout. With the dawn of the Cold War, Atomic America armed itself with arsenals of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, giving humans the capacity to destroy all life on earth. A new calculus of nuclear geopolitics emerged: an arms race justified by the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” existing side by side with the development of radioisotopes for use in medicine, ecology, and other peaceful uses of the atom (such as nuclear energy under civilian control). As fears of global Armageddon, “nuclear winter,” and genetic mutation seemed increasingly imminent, broader health and environmental consequences also came to the fore. We will conclude by examining how even decades after the end of the Cold War, we are still dealing with the complex political and environmental legacies of the atomic age, from nuclear proliferation to waste disposal, as well as the unexpected ironies of mutant ecologies, toxic tourism, and more. (No scientific background necessary.)

History 464/644-001: US Mexico Borderlands

Instructor: Truett

CRN: 44826/44832

In this class, we will explore the histories of the American Southwest and Mexican North from a transnational perspective.  We will start by examining the colonial legacy of the American Southwest and Mexican North, when both regions were part of New Spain’s far northern frontier.  We will then explore how this frontier was transformed into a borderlands between nations—a place divided by national boundaries, and connected by transnational pathways of migration, culture, and economic development.  Discussions will move chronologically through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but will take thematic detours to examine such issues as imperialism and exploration, Apache Indians and “bandits,” the romantic Southwest, popular rebellions, mining and other forms of capitalist development, immigration, labor conflicts, Yaqui Indians and their resistance to Mexican and American conquest, the Mexican Revolution, the rise of a new multicultural borderlands in the twentieth century, and the future of the borderlands in a new global age.

Instructor: Cochran W 5:30-8:00

CRN:
This film study history course is a one credit course based upon the entire Ken Burn Film Series: “The Vietnam War.” The ten-part, 18-hour documentary series tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history exploring the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides—Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Included in the course will include contemporary observations by selected participants from all sides, academics assessment, and student input.


History 491-001: Historiography

Instructor: Gibbs MW 1:00-2:15

CRN: 40084
What is history? What is it for? Who is it for? How should it be done? This course presents a kind of history of history, with an emphasis on how historians have developed and employed various analytical and interpretive frameworks for making sense of the past. This course also presents a historical overview of various theories and philosophies of history that ask difficult questions about the relationship between the past (what has happened), the historical record (how we can learn about the past), and history (the interpretations of the historical record by historians).

History 492-001 Sem: Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll

Instructor: Florvil TR 2:00-3:15

CRN: 44828
Events in Johannesburg, South Africa to Mexico City, Mexico and from Chicago, Illinois to Berlin, West Germany had global reverberations in the 1960s that impacted diverse individuals. The 1960s, moreover, ushered in profound changes that unsettled and transformed traditional beliefs, practices, and ideas across the world. In this special topics seminar, we will explore a series of questions: How and why did the 1960s become critical to transnational events? What were the socio-cultural and political transformations that took place? What happened in the revolutionary year of 1968? We will attempt to answer these questions by studying the events, social movements, actors, places, and legacies of the 1960s throughout the globe. We will use case studies in Europe (West and East), the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. By interpreting the cultural, political, and social meaning of protest, violence, and resistance, we will discover the impact of the 1960s on race relations, gender, sexuality, emotions, and identity. The course will introduce students to emotional activism, the influence of the media, the cross-cultural exchange of ideas, the challenges of the Cold War, the “crisis” of racial politics, and the intersection of national and international dynamics. Studying the histories of the global 1960s and the long the sixties (1954-1975) more generally will enable students to examine the transnational connections that cultivated and divided solidarity networks and defined a generation.

History 492-002 Sem: Comparative Indigenous History

Instructor: Connell-Szasz TR 12:30-1:45

CRN: 29704
Students who enroll in this seminar may anticipate a world-wide tour that will look at Indigenous peoples from 1945 to the present. We will begin with definitions: what characteristics contribute to Indigenous identity and who should determine that identity? We will question if identity must include a widely spoken Indigenous language; and we will contrast Indigenous peoples who live within their own nation states with those who live within the geographical boundaries of larger nation states. The course will begin with extensive reading and assessment of works, including collections of essays and monographs. Students will write reviews and lead discussions of the readings. Each student will write a comparative research essay. We will assess these essays during the last weeks of term through written analysis and class discussion of individual essays.
History 642-001 Sem: Queer History

Instructor: Campos W 4:00-6:30

CRN: 44837

This seminar explores the emerging historiography of queer sexualities (LGBT*) in world history. In the first half of the term, students will read some of the "greatest hits" spanning ancient, medieval, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American contexts to develop a shared awareness of a common queer historiographical framework: the problem of using present-day categories to understand complex past practices and identities in diverse cultural contexts; the “epistemology of the closet”; and the difficulties of reconstructing the queer past from lost, censored, or coded sources. To learn to think like a queer historian is to pay detailed attention to methodological and theoretical concerns, and these issues will be highlighted throughout the empirical cases studied. In the second half of the term, and in consultation with the instructor, students will select additional monographs that will enable them to better integrate queer history approaches into the national and chronological historiographies relevant to their chosen areas or course of study.

Instructor: Ball M 4:00-6:30

CRN: 42972
This seminar explores the theoretical problems and practical challenges presented by research methods in the discipline of history: the identification, research, evaluation, and use of sources, especially primary sources broadly defined. The object of this course is to develop positive practices in the conception, design, research, and writing of historical papers, theses, and dissertations, and ultimately articles, books, and other scholarly products. The readings and discussions will address specific methodologies such as oral history, digital history, Cliometrics, impressionism, and others commonly used in historical research today. Hopefully, all seminarians will come away with the knowledge that all methodologies carry strengths and weaknesses into any project, and will develop skills to evaluate the methodologies deployed in their future research. As a cranky scholarly editor and copyeditor, I plan to discuss the imperatives of clear writing in the historical discipline. The craft of writing is most-basic methodology in the historian’s bag, and historical narrative is still the most-widely-used analytical form. In other weeks, sessions will focus on some of the practical challenges encountered in almost any research project. To this end, I will guide or inform the development of productive archival practices and good editorial process in graduate students—yes, right down to drafting those bad old footnotes in proper styles as decreed by the Chicago Manual of Style, the editor’s bible. My plan is to put all seminarians through the steps of conceiving, designing, researching, and writing a short historical monograph, which will be a major chunk on their final grade.


History 666-002 Seminar: Readings in African American History

Instructor: Jefferson T 4:00-6:30

CRN: 44839
This course will examine the growing literature on African American life in the industrial age of American history. Through an exploration of relatively recent secondary literature, particular emphasis will be placed on Reconstruction and Jim Crow’s Cycle Transition, African American Leadership, Black Migration, the Making of Urban Workers, Education, Class Formation, and Power, the Civil Rights and Grassroots Action, and Suburbanization. The course is organized both chronologically and thematically and the goal is to critically review this literature, with the purpose of identifying and recommending new scholarly departures.

History 668-001 Sem: Medieval Research and Bibliography

Instructor: Graham W 4:00-6:30

CRN: 42839
This course will offer intensive training in the research and bibliographic skills necessary for the study of the Middle Ages while also introducing students to the history of medieval scholarship from the sixteenth century onwards. A key aspect of the course will be a detailed orientation to the major published resources available to medievalists, including the volumes of the Patrologia Latina, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and the Early English Text Society, as well as the important series Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile. Participants in the course will learn about the techniques used by scholarly editors when preparing a medieval text for use by a modern readership; they will also be introduced to the conventions of the modern apparatus criticus. Students will learn how to read and analyze charters and other types of medieval document and will receive instruction in the basics of such important ancillary disciplines as medieval chronology, sigillography. The section of the course devoted to the history of medieval scholarship will include a special focus on the origins and development of Anglo-Saxon studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
History 685-001 Sem: Borderlands History

Instructor: Truett T 4:00-6:30

CRN: 44840
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History 685-002 Sem: Eurasian Borderlands

Instructor: Monahan R 4:00-6:30