Highlighted Courses

HIST 099-90 – History Focus: Finding Tibet – Jacob Dingman

HIST 099 is one of the required core classes in History. All sections of HIST 099 fulfill the same role, though each instructor will develop a specific topic. Students are urged to consult syllabi available on line or at the History Department.

The general aim of HIST 099 is to introduce students to various elements of historical work and thinking, within the context of looking at a particular historical period, event, or theme in some depth. Though lectures and discussion will focus on particular topics, there will also be class exercises, assignments, and readings that will allow instructors and students to explore how historians identify, define, and employ primary sources of all types, how historians analyze those sources, how they formulate questions, how they engage with the work of prior historians, and how they aim to reconstruct various elements of the human experience in particular times and places.

HIST 112 – Africa II – Tracy Mensah

Nineteenth-century Africa was the site of continued and intensifying engagement with both the East and the West as well as a host of in situ changes and episodes. For example, towards the middle of that century, the Sultan of Muscat and Oman moved his capital from the Middle East to the East African coast to expand and consolidate his control over the region’s commercial activities. France, Britain, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and Spain intensified their activities on the continent which by the end of the century they had formalised at a conference in Berlin (1884 – 1885). It was also the site of internal events of great socio-political and economic repercussions. In Southern Africa, a variety of environmental and socio-political pressures combined to produce a period of upheaval whose repercussions were felt as far north as the Great Lakes region of East Central Africa, the gradual abolition of the slave trade was changing socio-economics and politics along huge swathes of the continent while in West Africa the revival of Islam in the western Sudan was accompanied by jihads. In this course, we shall delve into these events in different parts of the continent. As we do so we shall also have the opportunity to analyse critically related primary sources. Amongst other things, we shall study the authors, query their motivations and the circumstances in which they wrote.

HIST 183 – U.S. Latinx History – Mike Amezcua

The growth of Latinx groups has transformed cities and communities throughout the United States, and has led to heightened debates about their political power, cultural influence, citizenship, and ethnic and racial categorization. While increasing attention to Latinx peoples may in fact feel “new,” Latina/o/x communities have played a pivotal role in U.S. history for centuries. This course explores the historical foundations and transformations of Latinxs groups across time and the range of issues that shaped their worldmaking from colonialism, immigration, race, gender, politics and culture. This course will draw on a range of historical, archival, and media materials in order to understand the histories of distinct groups, including Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Central Americans, and Dominicans – that forged communities in the U.S.

HIST 285 – African American Women’s History – Marcia Chatelain

This advanced undergraduate course examines African-American women’s history in the U.S., with an emphasis on social activism, politics, and cultural production.  This course will use first-hand narratives as well as monographs to provide an overview of African-American women’s lives from slavery to the contemporary period.Through writing assignments, students will have an opportunity to strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.

HIST 372 – Soviet History and Cinema – Christopher Stolarski

Soviet History and Cinema: Art, Propaganda, and Politics Lenin famously declared cinema the “most important of all arts,” and under the Bolsheviks, the medium developed into an effective tool of propaganda and a popular form of mass entertainment. This course uses film as a historical source to examine how cinema shaped the public image of the Soviet Union. Students will analyze films in terms of Communist ideology, the “woman question,” collectivization, socialist realism, the Stalin cult, Soviet nationalities policy, and the Holocaust.

HIST 485 – Latinx Social Movements – Mireya Loza

This course will examine the long durée of Latinx social movements with an emphasis on the 20th century and into the present. The late 1960s ushered in a new period of mobilizations to organize around race, ethnicity, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality. In this course we will look at how various Latinx communities throughout the US articulated their struggles, protest, and change in this broader context. We will take a comparative and relational approach to the study of this history. Topics will include immigrant mobilizations, transnational organizing, agrarian and farmworker movements, political representation, feminisms and reproductive rights, environmental justice, labor, cultural and social transformation truck, education, and urban social movements. Great attention will be paid to the broader legacies of the struggles and what they mean for contemporary social movements and organizing.