Dear History Majors,

Note:  HIST 200/200W is a prerequisite for your capstone course. Please enroll in this course at your earliest convenience.

Below find the Fall 2009 dual listings, new course listings, and descriptions of seminars and capstones.  As always, please meet with your adviser with any questions. Link here to the faculty listing.

For a complete listing of ALL course offerings please link to the SCHEDULE OF COURSES HERE.

Notice to Econ/History Interdisciplinary Majors: The choice for courses in history for the Economic History Core has been updated to include two more history courses: HIST 288a and HIST 288b.  These changes will appear in the 2009-2010 catalog.  We wanted to let you know about this now for smart choices in fulfilling your major. Please see the full descriptions of these courses below. Also, HIST 160 will be taught S2010, HIST 161 will NOT be taught 2009-2010, HIST 166 will be taught F2009.

DUAL LISTINGS – Fall 2009
AADS 155 African American Migration counts toward U.S. and ME/A areas of concentration.
CLAS 212 History of Roman Republic counts toward EUR area of concentration.
ECON 226 counts toward the Economics/history interdisciplinary major.
ECON 245 (Same as HIST 166) counts toward the Economics/history interdisciplinary major.
ECON 266 counts toward the Economics/history interdisciplinary major.
JS 115F 09 Jews and Muslims: A Modern History counts toward ME/A area of concentration.
JS 156 The Holocaust counts toward the European and ME/A areas of concentrations.
JS 222 Jews in Egypt counts toward ME/A area of concentration.
JS 252 Social Movements in Modern Jewish Life counts toward ME/A area of concentration.
PHIL 210 Ancient Philosophy counts toward EUR area of concentration.

**NEW COURSES**

116. Modern South Asia.
Credits: elective, Asia area of concentration.
Early modern South Asia to British imperialism and the independence of India and Pakistan. Colonial society, political movements, caste, gender, and religious "reform." Mass nationalism and Gandhi, religious conflict, and the partition of India and Pakistan. Debates on history and memory. FALL. [3] Sheikh. (INT)

119. A History of Islam.
Credits: elective, ME/A area of concentration.
Origins to the present, with emphasis on the modern era. Early and medieval Islam, modernism and fundamentalism. Arabia and the Wahhabis, Iran and Shi‘ism, South Asian syncretism, Muslim minorities in Western Europe and the United States. Recent Islamic views on human rights, science, economics, and other religions. FALL. [3] Halevi. (INT)

219. Last Empire of Islam.
Credits: elective, ME/A, EUR areas of concentration.
The Ottoman "long nineteenth century," 1789 to 1923. The Reforms (Tanzimat), state patriotism, intercommunal relations, national "awakenings," and the emergence of a public sphere. Historiographical issues, such as perceptions of the empire as the "Sick Man of Europe" and debates over its decline. FALL. [3] Cohen. (INT)

**NEW**HISTORY DEPARTMENT
UNDERGRADUATE SEMINAR COURSES.
This is the first time these seminars have been offered.  They are open to all undergraduates.

NEW CAPSTONE ALTERNATIVE. The department of history and the Curriculum Committee has approved a new capstone alternative.  You may take the new Undergraduate Seminars, that are numbered from HIST 284a and above as a capstone alternative during the 2009-2010 academic year IF YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING REQUIREMENTS:
1. Must be a history major.
2. Must have completed HIST 200 or HIST 200W.
3. Must be a junior or senior.
4. Obtain permission from the instructor. The student must complete the Contract for Capstone Course form with the instructor of the course at the beginning of each semester before change period ends or the student has lost their chance to use this course as a capstone alternative. This form needs to be signed by the Director of Undergraduate Studies and brought to the history department office for our records (Benson Hall room 227).
YOU MAY REGISTER AS USUAL FOR THE COURSE THEN FILL OUT THE CONTRACT WITH THE INSTRUCTOR DURING THE FIRST WEEK OF CLASS IN AUGUST.

285W. Science, Technology and Modernity.
Credits: elective, US, EUR area of concentration.
Social, cultural, intellectual, and artistic responses to the challenges posed by modern science and technology from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. FALL. [3] Molvig. (P)

288a. Religion, Culture and Commerce: The World Economy in Historical Perspective.
Credits: elective, Middle East/Africa, US, Asia and Europe areas of concentration.
Cross-cultural trade in a broad chronological and geographical framework. Pre-modern and modern times, western and non-western locales. The role of religion in economic exchange and the movement of commodities. FALL. [3] Halevi. (HCA)

288b. Poverty, Economy, and Society in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Credits: elective, Middle East/Africa area of concentration.
History of poverty from pre-colonial times to the present. The evolution of economic systems and trading; impacts of trans-oceanic slave, commodity trading, and colonialism on Africans’ standards of living; contemporary African economic challenges of underdevelopment, debt, foreign aid, fair trade, and globalization. No credit for students who completed 295 section 3 in spring 2007 or 294 section 1 in fall 2008.
FALL. [3] Ochonu. (INT)

288c. Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Spain.
Credits: elective, Middle East/Africa and EUR.
Coexistence and conflict from 711 to 1492. The blend of cultures, languages, religions, and societies under both Christian and Islamic rule. No credit for students who have completed JS 115F section 1. FALL. [3] Wasserstein. (INT)

294 01 Race and Nation in Modern Latin America.
Credits: elective, LA area of concentration.
Nation-building entails forging a collective sense of belonging among peoples that live within a common territory. Within the post-independence history of Latin America, nation-building projects endeavored to subsume notions of difference based on ethnicity and region, a phenomenon that should be understood as processual.  National projects not only change over time, reflecting particular social, cultural, economic, and political concerns, but also are often riven by different (sometimes competing) visions of the nation, including conceptions of national identity that emanate from popular sectors. Across Latin America, race has formed an integral component of nation-building projects; at times, national projects have appeared inclusionary, at others not. Broadly, the multi-racial dimensions of Latin American societies have figured prominently within imaginings of the nation.

This course analyzes the racialized processes of nation-building in Latin America through a survey of three case studies—Peru, Brazil, and Cuba—countries chosen to represent the varied social geographies of the region. Drawing from an interdisciplinary set of readings, we will consider the race/nation dynamic in relation to a number of themes: indigenismo/indigenism, peasant politics and (civil and international) wars, immigration (Asian, Middle Eastern), museums and memory, music, Marxism, and the African diaspora. Temporally, the course focuses on three historical moments of the post-independence period, each characterized by different state structures and philosophies: the liberal state of the mid-to-late nineteenth century (Peru), the nationalist-populist state of the early-to-mid-twentieth century (Brazil), and the revolutionary state of late-twentieth century (Cuba). FALL. [3] Castilho. No Axle credit.

294 02 Blacks and Money.
Credits: elective, US area of concentration.
This course begins with a basic question – what is money? – as a way of initiating a study of the social and cultural history of money within the African diaspora. We will examine the ways in which Black people have thought about, written about, and used money as an object, symbol, and accessory. Topics may include the history of pre-capitalist exchange relations and the idea of a gift economy; the use of “primitive” money forms in Atlantic Africa; the notion of the slave as an exchangeable “person with a price;” the emergence of a Black identity in post-emancipation “free” labor markets; race, sex and the “libidinal” economy; reparations; the meanings of class and wealth within African-American thought; money laundering, corruption and the post-colonial state; Marcus Garvey and Black capitalism; numbers running, gambling, and financial speculation; the informal economy and the black market; the Freedman’s Savings Bank and the history of Black banking; rotating credit associations and the uses of micro-finance in the Caribbean and Africa; confidence, credit, and Third World debt; monetary sovereignty, decolonization, and the iconography of national currency; the political economy of African-American music; and the origins of the contemporary US subprime housing crisis and its effects on the black community. The course will take a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach that draws from political economy, economic anthropology, the sociology of markets, visual and cultural studies, semiotics, and history. FALL [3] Hudson. No AXLE credit.

HISTORY DEPARTMENT 295 MAJOR SEMINAR
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS  FOR FALL 2009
Note: In order to enroll in a 295 course you must have completed HIST 200/200W; be a history major; and be a junior or senior.

Fall 2009, HIST 295 03 Sex Scandals from Cleopatra to Clinton
Taught by: Katherine Crawford
Area of Concentration counts toward: elective, U.S. and Europe. No AXLE credit.
This course will explore several sexual scandals as case studies in the interplay of sex, gender, and politics.  Examining cases ranging from the “seductress” Cleopatra to the “sodomite” Henri III of France; from the marriages of Henri VIII to the adultery of Bill Clinton, the aim is to understand how sexual scandal was used politically.  The effects were not just on participants in the scandal, but on society as a whole.  Both the mechanisms of how sex becomes scandal and how sex scandal operates in different historical contexts can reveal much about sex, politics, and culture more generally across time and space.

Fall 2009, HIST 295 04 U.S. and the Caribbean in the 20th Century.
Taught by: Frank Robinson
Area of Concentration counts toward: elective, Latin America and U.S.. No AXLE credit.
Description:  On nearly twenty occasions in the first three decades of the twentieth century alone, U.S. presidents sent troops into Caribbean and Central American countries, most often the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Mexico. This course examines the sometimes contentious relations between the Caribbean and the United States, from state-to-state interactions at the level of diplomacy and military intervention to questions of culture and perception in inter-American affairs. We will examine the eras characterized by the Spanish-American-Cuban War, the Big Stick and Dollar Diplomacy, the Good Neighbor Policy, the Cuban Revolution, Cold War interventions (Dominican Republic and Grenada), and the Caribbean Basin Initiative and beyond.

Fall 2009, HIST 295 05 Modern Warfare, 1815 to the present
Taught by: Peter Lorge
Area of Concentration counts toward: elective, U.S. and Europe. No AXLE credit.
Description: This course is an investigation of the changing nature of warfare from 1815 until the present. The basic issue of the course is the problem of solving political issues with military force in the modern world. It will discuss the increasing importance of technology, as well as the integration of sea, air and land forces.
 
Any questions about the undergraduate major may be directed to the History Department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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