College Catalog Archives

Michael P. Breen

Old Regime France; medieval and early modern European legal, social, and cultural history; Renaissance Italy.

Sabrina Datoo

Early modern and colonial South Asia, history of medicine and science, Islam in South Asia, cultural and intellectual history.

Jacqueline Dirks

American social and cultural history, United States women’s history.

Douglas L. Fix

Modern China and Japan.

David T. Garrett

Latin America and early modern Spain. On sabbatical 2020–21.

Joshua P. Howe

Environmental history, history of science, twentieth-century United States.

Benjamin Lazier

Modern Europe, intellectual history.

Mary Ashburn Miller

Revolutionary-era France and Europe, modern European cultural and intellectual history.

Margot Minardi

Colonial and revolutionary America, nineteenth-century United States.

Radhika Natarajan

Modern imperial Britain.

Padraig Riley

Nineteenth-century United States, slavery, political history.

At Reed, history is treated as a basic component of general education. The department attempts to include in its course offerings as many periods and areas of study as student enrollment and available faculty make possible. The priority, however, is on diversity of approach—constitutional, intellectual, economic, social, diplomatic, cultural—rather than on specific coverage of conventional fields. The aim is to arouse sufficient interest in history to stimulate a student’s independent inquiry and the necessary analytical thought and perspectives that go with historical study.

The department tries to inculcate students with a sense of history—to impress them with the legacy, conscious or unconscious, that each present has inherited from its past, as well as the many perspectives one can have on that legacy. While many graduates have become prominent as professional historians and teachers of history, it is even more as a fundamental contribution to liberal, humanistic education and the development of a critical intelligence, carried through in many different professions and ways of life, that the department program is conceived and directed to majors and nonmajors alike.

The department expects students to develop competence in various periods and areas of history, as specified in the course requirements below, and to attain analytical skills common to all fields of history. The junior qualifying examination in history requires students to analyze a significant piece of recent scholarship in the discipline. The examination is offered once each semester, in conjunction with the junior seminar. Students in the major ordinarily take the exam in the first four weeks of the semester in which they are enrolled in Junior Seminar (History 411). The department encourages but does not require its students to pursue the study of a foreign language.

For students who wish to pursue interdisciplinary study in American history and some other area—for example, literature, economics, or government—Reed offers an American studies major. Among other possible programs are interdisciplinary majors involving history, such as history–literature and international and comparative policy studies.

Requirements for the Major

1. Humanities 220, or Humanities 211 and 212, or Humanities 231 and 232. For students using the 2018 distribution requirements, these courses are considered part of the major field of study and may not be used to satisfy the Group A or Group B requirement. 
2. Six semesters (six units) of history courses. (Lower-division history courses taken outside Reed College may be included only with the consent of the department.) These history courses must be distributed so as to include, chronologically, at least one unit before 1800 and one unit after 1800, and geographically, at least one unit in each of the following areas:
   a. Europe;
   b. United States;
   c. areas outside Europe, the United States, and Canada.
   The same course may fill both a geographical and a chronological requirement. No more than two cross-listed courses from other departments may be included.
3. One semester of a junior seminar, to be taken during the junior year (History 411). (The junior seminar counts as one of the six required units in history.)
4. History 470.

Note: 300-level history courses are ordinarily open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students only with the consent of the instructor.

History 220 - Late Imperial China

Full course for one semester. This course surveys the history of late imperial China (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries) by examining several critical issues in the historiography of this period. Weekly discussions will address the following topics: despots, ritualized rulers and the growth of a “bureaucratic monarchy”; global economic crisis, peasant rebellion, and the Ming–Qing cataclysm; ethnicity, violence, and exchange on Chinese frontiers; lineage formation, strategic marriages, and the consolidation of gentry rule; local magistrates and scholars and their popular tales; migration, mobility, and social anxiety in a prosperous age; gender and sexuality in Qing Confucian ideology; exploration, trade, and emigration on the south China coast; and the challenge of seaborne imperialists in the nineteenth century. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 221 - From Treaty Ports to Megacities: Chinese Urban History

Full course for one semester. In China today, few environments change more rapidly than those in major metropolitan centers. Uncontrollable hypergrowth, large floating populations, and insufficient resources and infrastructure all make efficient urban planning and healthy community development difficult to achieve. This course will examine the origins of these current challenges, as well as solutions posed to solve earlier problems, both imagined and real. Topics to be addressed will include imperial models and spatial legacies; treaty ports, bunds, and foreign concessions; rural migration, sojourning, and movement between cities; hinterlands, regional networks, and global connections; revolutionary hygiene and public health; department stores, desire industries, and Shanghai fashion; the interwar lifestyles of petty urbanites and Westernized capitalists; covert political communities and urban labor organizing; wartime destruction and relocation; purifying the decadent city via socialist governance; hutongs, alleyway houses, and rebuilt residential space; and reassessing the colonial past and the globalized present in China’s megacities. Conference-laboratory.

History 222 - Consumer Cultures in Modern East Asia

Full course for one semester. This course will explore the relationship between consumerism, nationalism, and imperialism in Republican-era China and the Japanese empire. We will consider how individuals in China, Japan, and Korea forged new identities and livelihoods through the increasingly global marketplace. Governments and social reformers, recognizing the potency of consumerism, encouraged and coerced their citizens into spending patterns intended to support moral improvement, national strength, and imperial victories. Gender will be an important factor in our analysis, for anxieties about consumer culture frequently targeted women. Individual, class, and government interests converged and diverged in early twentieth-century efforts to mold not just spending habits, but daily life in East Asia. Topics will include Shanghai as a dazzling emporium, Japan’s department stores and their first branches in Seoul, and the colonial roots of South Korea’s chaebol. The course will also address the differences within each region, between the metropoles and provincial cities, for example. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 231 - Crime and Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Full course for one semester. How are societal norms defined and transgressions proven and sanctioned? Why are some wrongdoers forgiven for violating the law and reintegrated into the community, while others are deemed “criminals” who merit stern (even capital) punishment? How can the study of criminal justice and the law help us better understand medieval and early modern European societies and cultures? Through an analysis of law codes, court records, and other historical sources, this course will trace the development of criminal law and justice in premodern Europe. In particular, we will examine how medieval practices such as trial by ordeal, feuds, and the payment of blood prices (weregelds) gave way to more “rational” processes, such as trial by jury, inquisitorial procedure, and the use of judicial torture. We will also discuss the importance of religious attitudes and community norms in shaping the practical application of criminal justice in this period, as well as Enlightenment efforts to standardize criminal justice, abolish torture, and eliminate capital punishment. Conference.

History 240 - World Environmental History

Full course for one semester. This course approaches the study of “world environmental history” as a fascinating problem of historical methodology. We begin by introducing environmental history at its largest scales of time and space, investigating how climate, biodiversity, natural resources, and commodities have affected human history on a global level. We will then move on to a series of more specific case studies that complicate these large-scale historical analyses. As we visit the pastoral landscapes of Nazi Germany, the toxic waters and fields of modern Japan, the denuded countryside of imperial China, and the socially stratified villages of northern India, we will see how culture, memory, religion, and power shape reciprocal relationships between humans and their geographically unique surroundings in a number of different ways. Finally, we will investigate how these different valances of environmental history have informed a twentieth-century regime of global environmental governance—a regime born of good intentions, but one replete with problems of efficacy, equitability, and justice. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 251 - Slander, Censorship, and Surveillance in Modern European History

Full course for one semester. This course seeks to historicize and interrogate the limits on, and protections for, free speech in modern Europe. We will explore topics including libel laws, censorship and public morality, the development of ideas about natural rights, and the influence of changing technologies on practices and beliefs surrounding the liberty of expression. The class will focus on France and Britain between 1644 (the publication of Milton’s crucial text, Areopagitica) and 2016, when the EU adopted a code of conduct for regulating online hate speech. Conference.

History 256 - Migration Histories in the British Imperial World

Full course for one semester. The British Empire was built on migrations both forced and free, and in this course we will examine particular migration stories in wider imperial and global contexts. Some of the migrants that we will examine include settler colonists, enslaved persons, transported radicals, colonial officers, missionaries, and indentured and migrant laborers. The course will present a broad chronological survey of the British imperial world since 1700, paying attention to political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics. The final project for this course will be a digital exhibition to which students will contribute content and explanatory material. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 270 - Introduction to American Environmental History (Previously: Nature, Culture, and Society in American History)

Full course for one semester. This course introduces students to the major themes, questions, and methods in American environmental history. Environmental historians see the natural world as both a material place and a historical and cultural idea. This course considers how human societies have shaped the natural world, how the natural world has shaped human societies, and how ideas about nature have been created, challenged, and changed in American history. Conference.

History 271 - US Politics and Culture, 1964–2004

Full course for one semester. Like most of U.S. history, the 40 years between the 1964 presidential election and Illinois state senator Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention were times of change and conflict. We will explore this time period using secondary works and primary documents. The last baby boomers were born in 1964; Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z were still to come. U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was underway; after September 11, 2001, a war on terror would be waged. Women’s labor force participation (including that of married women and married mothers) was on the rise. Americans grappled with grassroots protests and political partisanship, persistent economic inequality, divisive foreign policies, and the so-called culture wars. In 1964, network TV and national and local radio and newspapers provided entertainment and news; by 2004, digital technologies would democratize and fragment access to information. We will examine all these changes, and more. Conference.

History 272 - Gender and the American Family

Full course for one semester. Historians can chart the numbers: from the changing demographics of birth and marriage rates to the rise in divorces and the number of households headed by single parents (usually mothers), families in the United States have changed dramatically in the past century. This course will explore the changing forms and meanings of “family.” We will examine changing family and household structures and look at how gender roles are built into and reproduced through social, legal, and political discourses. Topics include the shifting meanings of marriage and singlehood and the social value placed on children. Policy makers and social scientists privileged some families over others, and we will consider how constructions of race and ethnicity determined welfare benefits. We will also consider adoption practices and the legalization of same-sex marriage. Conference.

History 276 - Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century America

Full course for one semester. Chronological survey of selected social, cultural, and political developments in the United States, 1890s to 1940s. We will be especially concerned with the interaction of the society (defined here as social, economic, and political institutions) and culture (the values, ideals, and structures of meaning) through which Americans understood and interpreted private and public life. Topics include the ideals and reforms of the Progressive era; a comparison of World War I and the influenza pandemic; the 1919 race riot in Chicago; domestic culture in the 1920s; the respective economic and cultural effects of the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and New Deal; U.S. prosecution of World War II abroad and its effects on the home front; and the global and domestic legacies of the war. The course is open to sophomores considering the history major and transfer students; others, including students in their first year, will be admitted as space permits by consent of the instructor. Conference with occasional lectures.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 278 - U.S. Politics and Culture, 1929–1979

Full course for one semester. Examines the immediate and long-term social, cultural, and political effects of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, and the changing political landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s. Topics include the rise and fall of organized labor, the emergence of the civil rights movement, suburbanization, the economic and legal status of women, new immigrants after 1965, and the cultural roots of the new American right. The course is open to sophomores considering the history major and transfer students; others, including students in their first year, will be admitted as space permits by consent of the instructor. Conference with occasional lectures.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 283 - Latin America and the United States

Full course for one semester. Since their respective independence, relations between the United States and the Latin American republics have been of great importance to the domestic politics in both, and have disproportionately affected the political and economic trajectory of the latter. Topics addressed will include competing visions of the proper relationship between the two regions; overt and covert U.S. military intervention; foreign investment in economic ties; and popular attitudes toward the United States in Latin America, and vice versa. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 292 - The Ottoman Empire: Diversity, Power, and Memory in the Middle East

Full course for one semester. This course explores the history of the Ottoman Empire (1300–1924), which ruled vast territories in what is now the Middle East and Europe. The Ottoman state had many identities: Muslim caliphate; Turkic principality; successor to Rome and Byzantium; post-Mongol “gunpowder empire”; “terror of the world”; and then “Sick Man of Europe.” Its inhabitants had even more identities, as the empire included Muslims, Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Alawis, Druze, and more; speakers of dozens of languages; and a vast diversity of lifestyles and livelihoods. Through primary sources and select secondary readings, this course will trace the political, social, and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire from its foundation to its demise. We will pay particular attention to the ways the Ottoman state governed its diverse populations and to how those populations accommodated, resisted, or avoided state policies. At the same time, the course will consider the Ottoman legacy: from Syria to Bulgaria to Turkey to Algeria to Armenia to Ukraine, the empire looms large in the rhetoric of its successor states and, often, in the minds of their populations. Even ISIS has its own narrative of the Ottoman past—and so does the United States. We will explore how these perceptions are themselves historically contingent, and what role nationalism and globalization play in constructing historical narratives. More broadly, the course will serve as an introduction to Middle Eastern history. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 298 - Music and the Cold War United States

See Music 238 for description. 

Not offered 2020–21.

Music 238 Description

History 301 - Gender and Sexuality in Africa

Full course for one semester. This course examines constructions of gender and sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. This seminar supplants Western constructions of gender and sexuality with African feminism(s) and alternative approaches to the study of gender and sexuality in Africa more broadly. Topics include kinship and dual-sex systems; how categories such as “men” and “women” are understood and change over time; the effects of colonization on the political, social, and economic roles of men and women; anticolonial politics and gendered nationalisms; women’s “domestic” roles; and the effects of migration, urbanization, and globalization on sex and sexuality. We will explore these topics through secondary texts as well as fiction, political tracts, films, magazines, and visual culture. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 307 - War and Peace in Europe, 1700–1914

Full course for one semester. This course examines the cultures of war in Europe in the period leading up to World War I, and explores changes in the historiography as well as the history of warfare in this critical period. We will examine theories of peace and the rise of philanthropic organizations alongside developments in military recruitment, technology, and mobilization to question the relationships between military and society, and between pacifism and militarism. Key themes will include the influence of the press and public opinion on European wars, the role of women in modern warfare, and the relationship between war, diplomacy, and the development of national and European identities. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 308 - Precolonial African History

Full course for one semester. This course introduces students to the history and historiography of African societies and states from the early Iron Age through the emergence of the Atlantic world. The first part of the course focuses on case studies of African civilizations, including the empires of Ghana and Mali, the Swahili Coast and Great Zimbabwe. The second part considers West Africa during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and explores the changes that the tide wrought on African societies and states. topics include long-distance trade and state formation; the diffusion of Islam; practices of slavery; and the origins and effects of European contact. In this course, we will pay particular attention to the sources and methods that historians use to study precolonial Africa, including oral traditions, archival documents, historical linguistics, traveler’s accounts, and material and archeological evidence. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 310 - Water and the American West

Full course for one semester. This course uses the environmental and political history of America’s rivers, streams, reservoirs, and aquifers to introduce students to important issues in water history and contemporary water policy. We will begin by exploring a series of different frameworks for understanding the complex relationships between water, labor, land, and political power as those relationships have changed over time. As we build a deeper and more critical understanding of water as a natural, cultural, and political entity in American history, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which history has helped to shape the way we allocate and regulate water across a geographically and politically diverse continent. Armed with the dual weapons of history and basic legal doctrine, we will then begin to tackle some of the key issues in twentieth-century American water policy, starting with the Columbia and Colorado River basins. Looking toward the future, we will also explore the problems and potential solutions on the cutting edge of water politics both in the Colorado River basin and elsewhere, including groundwater policy, water marketing, and an extended discussion of the potential water implications of global warming. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 313 - Wildlife in America

Full course for one semester. Humans and wild animals have lived together in North America for more than 14,000 years. During that time, around 150 native species have gone extinct, and thousands of exotic species have colonized the landscape. Some formerly rare species have become common, and some common ones have become rare. Wild animals have served as food, clothing, shelter, servants, companions, weapons, and totems. This course will explore the turbulent, contested, and colorful history of wildlife in North America. It will span from the Pleistocene to the present and cover the entire continent. The goal of this course is for students to develop a sophisticated understanding of the changing relationships between people and wild animals over time. There are no easy answers for why things happened the way they did, and no simple lessons for what we should do in the future. But it’s a good story, and one that offers myriad, often unexpected insights for serious students of history and environmental studies. Prerequisite: Humanities 110. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 315 - Defining and Defying Difference: Race, Ethnicity, and Empire

Full course for one semester. From the origins of the British Empire in the sixteenth century, the encounter between Britons and colonial subjects demanded explanations of human difference. In this course, we will consider race and ethnicity as contingent and contested categories shaped by political and economic circumstances. Topics will include the international slave trade and abolition, caste and community in South Asia, color and class in the twentieth-century Caribbean, and immigration and multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Britain. Throughout we will pay attention to gender. Prerequisite: Humanities 110, sophomore standing, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 385.

History 316 - Russian Revolution(s), Peter to Putin

Full course for one semester. This course explores the many types of revolutions Russia has undergone from the time of Peter the Great’s seventeenth-century turn to the West up to Vladimir Putin’s global ambitions today. Peter was one of Russia’s great revolution-makers, orchestrating change in governance, society, and intellectual pursuit, and setting the stage for future revolutions both from above and from below. In his own way, Putin has been no less revolutionary and provocative. This course will proceed thematically, exploring Russia’s revolutionary experiences in four areas: politics, society, culture, and science and technology. Through analysis of multimedia primary and secondary sources, we will consider the many meanings the term “revolution” may take, investigate the often cyclical nature of revolutions, and interrogate why change in Russia has so often taken on a revolutionary character, rather than proceeding by a more gradual path of development. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 317 - The American Earth: U.S. Environmental History in the Twentieth Century

Full course for one semester. This course will address the concurrent histories of American environmental politics and the changing environment itself in twentieth-century U.S. history. We will approach the American continent both as a unique constellation of material and geographical spaces and as a changing and historically contingent cultural construct dependent on ideas about power, labor, identity, and morality. Topics will include nature and American nationalism, cultural constructions of nature, the American environmental movement, science and environmental management, and climatic change and sustainability in modern environmental politics. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 320 - Merchants and Mariners on the Water Frontier, 1400–1820

Full course for one semester. Indigenous mariners and merchants had traversed the oceans of East and Southeast Asia long before Europeans first ventured into those seas. By 1600 Chinese and Japanese sea lords and interlopers had created vast networks of migration and exchange, peppered with conflict and violence, from Siam and Malacca to Ryukyu and Nagasaki. This seminar explores the social and cultural history of this early modern maritime world. Selective topics include Zheng He’s Indian Ocean voyages; designated ports and unruly hinterlands; seaborne migrations and translocal connections; regional cults and sea goddesses’ miracles; merchants, supercargoes, and the vicissitudes of maritime trade; competing maritime cartographies; pirates and the business of violence; ocean archaeology and mariculture ethnographies; and hybrid identities in a maritime world. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 321 - Visual Cultures in Modern China, 1842–1949

Full course for one semester. This course will explore the rapidly changing visual environment of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. With printed and painted images, photographs, film, fashion, streetscapes, and exhibitions as our sources, we will establish the political, social, and technological changes that were at the root of these new manifestations of the visual. We will also question how images were instrumental in forming modern Chinese culture, paying attention to the development of national consciousness, gender roles, and consumer culture. We will attend to what visual sources depict, but also go beyond their subject matter to understand the complex messages these images conveyed to viewers. We will consider both the foreign gaze upon China and the ways in which modern Chinese artists, designers, and activists used the theories and techniques they had learned from Japan and the West. Pairing primary texts with visual materials, we shall see that these sources can be complementary or contradictory. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 322 - Revolution and the State in Twentieth-Century China, 1911–1976

Full course for one semester. This course examines the intertwined processes of revolution and state building in twentieth-century China, with a focus on the Communist revolution. The course considers the longue durée of the Communist revolution, including Mao Zedong’s investigation of local society in the 1920s, the Communist control of base areas prior to their 1949 victory, the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Considering the Communist revolution as a process, this course also examines the continuities between Communist rule in China and the preceding Nationalist government. The Nationalist efforts to develop China’s infrastructure, educate citizens, and discipline its population will be compared to the unprecedented penetration of Chinese society by the Communist state. Historical investigation based on local archives and personal accounts will permit an understanding of how diverse people experienced and enacted revolutionary change, as Mao Zedong’s territory expanded from scattered bases to nation to China’s borderlands. The course will question how the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution fit within a century of modernization and revolution, and consider government efforts to control nature as well as people. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 323 - Rice in East Asia

Full course for one semester. This course examines the history of rice in East Asia as crop, food, commodity, genetic resource, and symbol. How were institutions of social cohesion in China and Japan influenced by the particular demands of, and a commitment to, small-scale, labor-intensive riziculture? When and how were relations between consumer tastes and rice markets mediated by “rice masters”? What roles has rice played in linking the histories of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the world between 1000 and the present? How did the “green revolution” alter that regional regime of rice cultivation, exchange, and consumption? These and other questions will be explored in multidisciplinary fashion with a broad range of original data and recent historiography. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 324 - Early Modern South Asia

Full course for one semester. Whether admired or reviled, there is little doubt that the Mughal dynasty fundamentally changed South Asia and ushered it into the modern world. Connecting Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and South Asian histories, this course will introduce students to the many political, cultural and social worlds of this dynastic empire that was founded in the sixteenth century and endured until 1857. Beginning with an introduction to the Mughal state and its political alliances, we will then turn to questions of culture. We will read travelogues and courtly poetry, analyze miniature paintings, and think through early modern identities by attending to processes of translation, migration, and the production of scientific knowledge. By the end of the course we will be prepared to scrutinize modern representations of the Mughals in film and political discourse. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 326 - Layered Memories of Japanese Colonialism

Full course for one semester. This course explores major issues in the recent historiography on Japanese imperialism and colonialism and the complex communities that designed, managed, and/or experienced Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan and Korea (Japan’s major colonies). Major topics will include typologies and approaches related to colonialism, “colonial modernity,” and other major keywords; legal and epistemological structures of colonial rule, colonizers’ representations of colonial peoples and landscapes; assimilation policies, the rule of colonial difference, and colonial identity formations; narratives of elitist and subaltern resistance; colonial literature and literary movements; colonial anthropology and the “aborigine”; total war and total empire; wartime sex slaves and their clients; decolonization and the complexity of postcolonial problems and problematics. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 327 - Meiji Restoration/Revolution

Full course for one semester. Few events in Japanese history receive more attention than the Meiji Restoration (or Revolution). A critical marker in Japanese political history, the restoration is also perceived as a major watershed in economic, social, and cultural developments. This course will examine the specific drama of imperial restoration, the modernizing revolution initiated from above thereafter, and the historical contexts that help to explain both. Major topics will include agrarian uprisings, new religious movements, and ee ja nai ka dancing; nativism and world rectification thought; the “opening” of Japan and the effect of international trade and diplomacy on internal Japanese conflicts; bakafu attempts at political reform and the avoidance of foreign invasion; the military rebellion of “loyalist” samurai; and the transformative changes initiated by the Meiji oligarchy after 1868. Readings will include both participant observations and post-Meiji assessments. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 328 - Popular Culture in Interwar Japan, 1905–1937

Full course for one semester. Between Japan’s stunning defeat of Russia in 1905 and its invasion of northern China in 1937, citizens of Japan rushed headlong into all manner of modern culture, creating and consuming the forerunners of several well-known forms of contemporary Japanese cultural production. After a brief introduction to the social and economic transformation of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this course will address the following topics: silent film and benshi narrators; photography for everyone; detective fiction as a source for modern Japanese novels; cosmetics, advertising and design in department stores; popular songs and jazz; the “modern girl” and the eroticized cafe waitress; the gender-bending Takarazuka Revue; the origins of Japan’s national love affair with baseball; and “middle-classness” and the reform of everyday life. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Conference.

History 329 - Cameras and Photography in Nineteenth-Century East Asia

Full course for one semester. This course examines the early history of photography in China and Japan. Attention will be given to the complex (and disparate) technological histories of the medium, the varied uses to which the camera was put, and the impact of this new technology upon visual cultures in China and Japan. The dissemination of photographs into other media and the impact of consumer preferences upon content and style will also be examined. Travel landscapes, studio portraits, ethnographic photographs, and documentary images by Euro-American, Japanese, and Chinese photographers are among the visual data to be analyzed. Other sources include optical treatises, travel literature, government reports, and early ethnographies. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 330 - Captivity and Law in World History

Full course for one semester. This course explores the different legal, social, economic, and technological factors that have structured captivity in several European and Middle Eastern societies. The goal is not comprehensive factual coverage, but instead to achieve, through discussions, a general understanding of the many complex ways in which captivity has been structured through history, and what this can tell us about history, about law in society, and perhaps about modern issues such as human trafficking, piracy, and terrorism. We will read parts of a number of current monographs as well as primary sources, with some attention to slavery in the Atlantic world but a deeper exploration of slavery, serfdom, indenture, imprisonment, and captivity in the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and Eurasia. Key questions to consider will include: How have societies drawn different lines between those who can and cannot be captured, and between what can and cannot be done to them? For what reasons? How often are these differences based on ideas of who “belongs” and who does not in a society? What difference, if any, have modern discourses of humanitarianism, human rights, sovereignty, and nationality made? And why does law feature so heavily in this debate, when captivity is at its core a matter of power? Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 334 - Race and the Politics of Decolonization

Full course for one semester. This course examines how the struggle for decolonization in the British Empire was shaped by the politics of race. How did colonial subjects imagine freedom, and how were those visions of freedom constrained by the racial hierarchies of empire? How did they look to other movements within and without the British imperial world to theorize what political, economic, and intellectual decolonization might be? Topics will include intellectual critiques of empires, transcolonial movements, the transfer of power, the postcolonial nation-state, and the Commonwealth. We will pay attention to gender throughout and consider the legacy of the formal era of decolonization in the present day. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or permission of instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 384.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 335 - Development: An Imperial History

Full course for one semester. Improvement and welfare have not always been the work of government. This class traces the origins and uneven history of development through the moments when colonial governments in the British Empire became interested in raising the material and social quality of life of colonial subjects. More than a matter of administering policy, attempts to better conditions arose through political circumstances and impacted the lives of colonial subjects in ways that administrators could not have foreseen. We will consider development as a broad category through efforts to manage and improve education, the economy, and maternal health. We will pay attention to the importance of colonial ethnography to know populations; the way development emerged as a rationale for empire; the international contexts of development; and continuities of colonial development after formal decolonization through nongovernmental organizations such as the World Bank and Oxfam International. Our examples will be drawn from metropolitan Britain; subject colonies such as India, Kenya, and the West Indies; and international organizations working with postcolonial nation-states. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 336 - The Aftermath of World War I in the British Empire

Full course for one semester. While for many years the main historiographical question surrounding World War I concerned its origins, recently scholars have turned to the consequences of the war, particularly the postwar settlements that remade national, imperial, and international politics. The war demanded the mobilization of millions of men and women throughout the world; what was owed to these individuals for their service? In this class, we will approach this question in a variety of contexts and braid together the political and social history of the interwar period. Topics will include the League of Nations, the Commonwealth, anticolonial nationalist movements, international women’s movements, humanitarianism, development programs, and the welfare state. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Conference.

History 337 - Battle of the Books: The Beginnings of the Modern Sciences, c. 1500–c. 1800

Full course for one semester. The early modern period, covering the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, is often characterized as the era of “the Scientific Revolution,” which scholars who use the term portray as overturning traditional philosophy and ancient beliefs about creation and the role in it of the divine and replacing them with radically new forms of knowledge making and conceptions of nature. However, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who early in his life declared “truth” to be his “best friend,” also proclaimed: “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend.” Along with his researches in mathematics and physics, his studies included alchemy, astrology, biblical chronology, and theology. “If I have seen further,” he said, “it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” In this period, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, focusing on whether thinkers, writers, and artists should imitate the classics or exercise the freedom to innovate, was joined by debates about the relationship of new discoveries in the natural sciences to the arts, history and humanities, and religious scholarship. It was an age, itself a product of the invention of printing, the rise of print culture, and the emergence of new institutions of learning, and of cross-cultural contact and global trade, that brought new facts, methods, and ideas to the arts, literature, philosophy, and historical and religious studies. Rather than a “revolution,” it was a “battle of the books,” embracing knowledge gathered from across the globe, in which rivals clashed about the value, merit, and utility of old and new ideas. This course, focusing on early modern case studies in the several disciplines and drawing on texts, documents, images, and artifacts from the period as well as on recent scholarship will consider these changes in the context of the worldwide advancement of knowledge. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 338 - Crisis & Catastrophe in Modern Europe

Full course for one semester. Between 1720 and 1870, a series of natural and manmade crises forced Europeans to question the purpose of violence in a supposedly “improving” society and the role of rational individuals in a world sometimes beyond their control. This course will consider the political, religious, intellectual, and cultural ramifications of disaster and crisis, including financial collapse, revolution, war, earthquakes, disease, and famine. These crises disrupted the political and intellectual worlds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, threatening and transforming their ideas about risk, progress, religion, and political authority, and restructuring the relationships between man and the natural world. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 339 - Science and Islam: Global Histories

Full course for one semester. This course will introduce students to the hybrid origins, circulations, and translations of the secular sciences in the Islamic world from the Greco-Arabic translation projects to the high point of European empires. Covering a broad historical sweep from the tenth to the nineteenth century, this course will revolve around several core questions: What has science meant in different places and times? What has been the relationship between religious institutions and scientific thought and practice? How have beliefs about the beautiful, and the human body, found expression in the Islamic sciences? We will work through these questions by studying specific sciences, including medicine, astronomy, cartography, and architecture. By the end of the course we will appreciate the entangled histories of cultural exchange that preceded modern scientific revolutions. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 340 - Empire and Identity in Modern Europe: Encounters in the South Pacific

Full course for one semester. This course examines questions about the relationship between travel, imperialism, and understandings of the self through accounts of Europeans who traveled in the South Pacific as missionaries, colonists, naturalists, tourists, artists, and traders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the South Pacific became a site for exploration, exploitation, and colonization, as well as a figurative space for imagining alternative lives for Europeans and for interrogating the idea of “human nature.” Drawing on sources including Captain Cook’s journals from his expedition to Tahiti, the trials of the mutineers of the Bounty, Darwin’s accounts of the people and fauna of the South Pacific islands, missionaries’ reports from Tonga, and the art and writings of Paul Gauguin, this course will explore how the South Pacific as both real and imagined space reshaped Europeans’ ideas about race, religion, nation, and empire, as well as their conception of their own identities and place in the world. We will also explore how to write a history of identity, and what it means to think about identity as a historical category. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 344 - The Psychoanalytic Tradition in Historical Perspective

Full course for one semester. This class explores how the psychoanalytic tradition inaugurated changes in what we mean when we call ourselves human beings. The first half of the course reviews Freud’s thought as it evolved in the context of clinical practice. The aim is to consider how influential ideas about the unconscious, love and sexuality, dreams, fantasy, and the organization of the psyche developed in response to the peculiar kind of suffering Freud called neurosis. The second half of the course asks what is to be learned by situating psychoanalytic thought in its scientific, cultural, and social contexts, and by following its international dispersion in the work of those who extended (and revised) Freud’s ideas in ways he did not foresee. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 345 - Whole Earths, Globalizations, and World Pictures

Full course for one semester. Hear the word “Earth” or “world” and the image likely to flash through the mind is a photo known as “Whole Earth” (1972), which reveals the disk of our terraqueous planet suspended alone in the void. It is reputed to be the most widely disseminated photograph in human history, and together with other views of the Earth from beyond has prompted a revolution in the global imagination. The aim of this seminar is to assess the plausibility of that claim, by situating these images in their diverse historical contexts. These contexts include the history of humankind’s imaginative self-projection into the beyond from ancient times to our day; how the “whole earth” image has been mobilized by environmental campaigns, political movements, and commercial enterprises; how the view of Earth has figured in economics, anthropology, philosophy, biology, chemistry, cartography, and art; and how this pictorial imaginary has become integrated into the unthought ways we inhabit our natural and human-built worlds. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 351 - France and Its Colonies in the Age of Absolutism (1598–1760)

Full course for one semester. This course traces the complex and often tumultuous processes that established France as one of the preeminent political, cultural, and economic powers in Europe and the Atlantic in the seventeenth century, and its gradual decline during the first half of the eighteenth century. In the process, we will analyze the causes and consequences of the royal state’s expansion under Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV; the ideology and realities of “absolute monarchy”; the vexing religious problems posed by Huguenots and Jansenists; and transformations in elite and popular culture. Particular attention will be devoted to the constantly evolving relationship between center and periphery, both in the French provinces and the kingdom’s growing colonies in North America (Canada, the Illinois Country, and Louisiana) and the Caribbean, where divergent economic, social, racial, and political imperatives often strained royal authority, and even the very notion of French identity, to its limits. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 352 - Renaissance and Religious War in the French World (1494–1610)

Full course for one semester. This course will examine France’s rise from the devastation of the Hundred Years’ War to a position of prominence in early sixteenth-century Europe, focusing particular attention on the reign of Francis I, when France became a center of Renaissance culture and a major rival to the Habsburgs. From there we will trace the spread of the Reformation in France and the subsequent crises that spawned four decades of religious civil wars, two royal assassinations, and the near collapse of the monarchy, culminating in a religious and political settlement that promised toleration for France’s Protestant minority and the accession of the Bourbon dynasty to the throne. The course will also examine French explorations of the Americas; the effects of religious and political tensions on efforts to establish settlements in Canada, Florida, and Brazil; and the influence of these experiences on French culture and society. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 353 - The French Revolution, 1775–1800

Full course for one semester. Within a generally chronological framework, this course will focus on the social and cultural history of the French Revolution. Particular attention will be given to the ideological origins of the Revolution, the question of class, the popular movement, revolutionary culture, gender and citizenship, the role of terror, and the nature of counterrevolution. Another focus of the course will be the historiography of the French Revolution. Works from both traditional historiography and contemporary revisionist historiography will be included on the syllabus. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 354 - Cultural Construction in the Soviet Empire

Full course for one semester. This course examines in depth the methods employed by the Soviet government to closely integrate the union’s 15 republics and create a unified, pan-ethnic Soviet identity through cultural construction. Ranging from the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine in the west to the Caucasian republics in the south and the Central Asian republics in the east, the Soviet state sought to encourage the development of cultural practices “national in form, socialist in content,” in Stalin’s phrase, intended to raise these national groups from colonial oppression and encourage their investment in the Soviet project through demonstrations of official benevolence. We will explore a variety of “soft power” cultural construction techniques aimed at legitimizing Soviet authority. On the “national in form” side, we will consider policies that promoted the development of indigenous literature and folk culture, while on the “socialist in content” side, we will investigate limiting strategies that aimed to prevent national-ness from progressing into national-ism. Further, we will discover how members of national groups used such policies to advance their own aims. Through critical reading of secondary literature and engagement with primary sources in multiple media, including cultural artifacts from the Soviet republics, students will develop a complex understanding of the Soviet state’s reasons for working diligently to integrate its national minorities, the nature of its efforts, and the successes, failures, and unintended consequences thereof. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 355 - Heretics, Witches, and Inquisitors: Deviance, Orthodoxy, and the Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Full course for one semester. This course will examine the evolution and operation of one of medieval and early modern Europe’s most infamous religious and legal institutions—the Inquisitions of Heretical Depravity. Initially established in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to affirm the Roman Church’s spiritual authority and to repress religious heterodoxy, Inquisitions could be found across much of Catholic Europe by the early sixteenth century. This course will examine several of the most prominent examples: the Inquisition of medieval Languedoc, the Roman and Venetian Inquisitions, and the Spanish Inquisition, to compare how they functioned as hybrid legal and religious institutions in distinct historical contexts. We will also explore the complex interplay between inquisitors, secular authorities, and the populace by looking at their treatment of a specific heretical crime—witchcraft—during the early modern period. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 356 - Justice and the Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Full course for one semester. “Those who are even a little bit above the common find it impossible to escape the law courts,” lamented one seventeenth-century writer. From the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, men and women across Europe and its colonies flocked to courts of law in staggering numbers as plaintiffs, defendants, or witnesses. Why did Europeans from all social ranks increasingly seek justice through legal tribunals when other, more traditional methods were readily available? Was the “rule of law” imposed by social elites and political authorities, or did it emerge from premodern Europeans’ use of litigation and other legal practices to manage credit, defend reputations, air marital grievances, remedy injuries, and generally maintain order in their families and communities? What can the “uses of the law,” in other words, tell us about political authority and social relations in medieval and early modern Europe? Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 358 - Religious Reformations and Social Transformations in Early Modern Europe

Full course for one semester. While the tale that the Protestant Reformation started with Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the cathedral church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, remains an enduring one, the fracturing of Western Christendom over the course of the sixteenth century was the product of many forces. These included the transformation of popular piety, reform movements within the Roman Church, and broader changes in European culture and society. This course will examine the processes that brought about the end of centuries of religious unity in Western Europe as well as the many social, political, and cultural consequences of this epochal transformation. We also will examine how the Reformations (Protestant and Catholic) transformed European society by looking at the nature of religious violence, the hardening of confessional divides, and the gradual emergence of forms of religious coexistence and cooperation. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 360 - Histories of Anthropocene

Full course for one semester. Anthropocene. What kind of a word is that? For geologists, Anthropocene refers to the proposition that the history of the planet has entered a new epoch, in which human activity has come to exert the power of a geological force. The proposition has also produced some of the most interesting theoretical work on the practice of history in recent years, animated by the question, is it possible to conjoin human history with geohistory, and if so, how? This class will survey the most prominent answers thus far, above all, efforts inspired by postcolonial and subaltern studies to imagine new histories of capitalism. The class will build on that foundation by considering how phenomenology, a tradition of thought that aims at a thick description of lived experience, can also be of use in writing histories of the Anthropocene. Here, the focus will be on human experiences that embody both the conjunction and disjunction of scale—human time and geological time, human places and planetary spaces—at once. Students will have the opportunity to research and write minihistories of Anthropocenic episodes. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 361 - Dreaming the Twentieth Century

Full course for one semester. Every evening, just about every human on the planet enters an altered state of mind characterized by wild hallucinations sometimes thought to reveal the deep truths of the universe. Still, for something so common, dreaming is remarkably intractable to historical inquiry, in part because there is little agreement on what dreams are and on how or if they mean anything at all. The aim of this class is to consider two questions: What kinds of histories can we write with dreams? And, how can we use the history of approaches to dreams to shed light on the history of modern psychological thinking? The class will begin with a close reading of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and will situate it and other major approaches to dream interpretation in their historical contexts. We will then consider some exemplary collections of dreams dreamt under different regimes of control, including dreams under the Third Reich, the dreams of colonized peoples, the dream life of consumer capitalism, and dreams in the era of big data. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 362 - Revolutionary America

Full course for one semester. In the late eighteenth century, 13 North American colonies severed their colonial ties to Britain and constituted a new nation. This course will assess the causes of these changes, as well as the extent to which they altered the political, economic, social, and cultural landscape of North America. We will address major conflicts of the period from 1763 to 1815, including the tensions between libertarian ideology and institutionalized slavery, household dependence and national independence, centralized authority and local control, enlightenment rationalism and evangelical religion, private property and communal interests, and Indian sovereignty and American expansionism. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 363 - American Social Reform from Revolution to Reconstruction

Full course for one semester. Countless nineteenth-century Americans participated in movements for social reform. What made it possible for ordinary people to believe that they should and could change their world? What were the boundaries of their reformist visions? How did reformers balance radical and conservative impulses within their movements? This course considers these questions with reference to temperance, abolitionism, women’s rights, health reform, and other reform agendas. In contextualizing these movements, the course will consider the transnational dimensions of American reform, as well as connections between social reform and the rise of market capitalism, evangelical Christianity, and democratic politics in the early republic. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 365 - The Depression-Era United States

Full course for one semester. Students will study secondary texts and primary documents that focus on key events and various historical approaches of the period that spans the agricultural depression of the 1920s up to the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. Topics include the expansion of executive power, struggles and compromises in the establishment of New Deal agencies and programs, and the growth of labor unions. We will also explore the political and popular culture of this epoch, including documentary photography and art spawned by federal programs, Hollywood movies and commercial radio, and selected literature of the Popular Front. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 367 - Sources and Methods in Early African American History

Full course for one semester. What do historians know about the early African American past (c. 1619–1865), and how do they know it? This course will explore major problems in African American historiography, including the relationship between the rise of slavery and the development of racial ideology; the nature of slave resistance, rebellion, and revolution; the transmission of African cultural forms and the creation of black culture(s); the social dynamics of the slave plantation; and the significance of regional differences in the historical experience of African Americans. We will study various historians’ interpretations of these problems, as well as the primary sources that form the basis of those interpretations. While analysis of written texts remains a mainstay of historical practice, scholars in this field have also drawn on less traditional forms of evidence, such as DNA, demography, folklore, oral history, material artifacts, and human remains. We will critically assess the possibilities and pitfalls of using these diverse sources to reconstruct the early African American experience. Students will apply what they have learned from other scholars’ methods to produce their own primary source–based research papers. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 369 - Race and the Law in American History

Full course for one semester. Ranging from the colonial period to the recent past, this course examines the role of the law and the courts in the construction of racial categories and the production of racial inequality in the United States. We will read scholarship from history and other fields concerning the relationship between law and social practice and the possibilities and limitations of law as a means for resisting racism and securing equality. While we will engage a range of primary source material, we will devote particular attention to landmark Supreme Court decisions concerning civil rights, segregation, and immigration and naturalization. Other topics include regional variations in racialization in the United States, race making beyond the black-white binary, and historical methodology applied to the realm of law. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 389.

History 370 - The Tragedies of American Diplomacy: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1893

Full course for one semester. Building from the framework laid out in William Appleman Williams’ hallmark essay, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,” this course will explore the history of American foreign policy since Frederick Jackson Turner declared the end of the American Frontier in 1893. Beginning with Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” and John Hay’s famous “Open Door Note,” we will investigate how the flexible, economically oriented policies of the late nineteenth century became the sacred political ideologies at the heart of twentieth-century American imperialism. Topics will include the Spanish-American War, policies leading up to each of the two world wars, the advent of and decision to drop the atomic bomb, the Marshall Plan, and a variety of political, economic, and military issues associated with the Cold War, including its origins, its institutions, its many phases, and its ultimate end. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 371 - American Inequality, 1865–Present

Full course for one semester. The United States today is as unequal a society as it has been since 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression. Three billionaires—Bezos, Gates, Buffett—own more wealth than 160 million people, or half the population. How did so great a concentration of income and wealth at the very top come to be? Is such stratification the inevitable result of market processes in a globalized world, forces that, whatever their adverse consequences, lead to the most efficient allocation of society’s resources? In this course, we will get at some of these questions by exploring issues of wealth inequality in the United States from the end of the Civil War to the present. We will organize our exploration into the history of inequality around three analytical dimensions: ideas, institutions, and social forces. The course examines the roles of social scientists and other experts in identifying the causes of and cures for inequality, while also paying attention to the lived experiences of Americans from all income brackets. Prerequisite: Humanities 110. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 372 - U.S. Women’s History, 1890–1990

Full course for one semester. This course examines transformations in women’s economic status, political participation, educational opportunities, and familial and reproductive lives from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century in the United States. We consider how structural changes and political movements involved and affected women of different classes, races, and ethnic groups. Major topics will include: women’s increased participation in the paid labor force, especially wage work by married women with children; political struggles for equal rights (e.g., woman suffrage, pay equity); the separation of sexuality and reproduction; and the intellectual origins and development of feminism, as well as the arguments of those who opposed it. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 373 - The Progressive Era Reconsidered

Full course for one semester. The United States from the 1890s through 1920 used to be characterized by historians as “the Progressive era.” Yet a look at the social and political history of this epoch reveals much that seems contradictory or even repressive. Direct democracy was established, even as Jim Crow laws, enforced by lynchings, shored up racial segregation. Women emerged as reform professionals and wageworkers, yet lacked full suffrage. Recent immigrants and their children were sought out by settlement house workers who wanted to “Americanize” them, and vilified by nativists who wanted to restrict immigration. Proponents of war and imperialism met opposition. To understand these tensions, the course will compare old and new secondary works on this period, and make extensive use of primary documents and key works published at the time. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 374 - Gender and Sex

Full course for one semester. Examination of the changing ideas about gender and sex roles in the context of key transformations from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries in America. These include the second industrial revolution, which enabled women and men to live on their own outside of household economies; the emergence of modern consumer culture; service in same-sex militaries during two world wars; the rise of social scientific and psychological experts who named and quantified “deviant” and “normal” sexual practice; and the so-called sexual revolutions of the 1960s and beyond. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 375 - Hannah Arendt and Origins of Totalitarianism

Full course for one semester. Hannah Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is habitually invoked as one of the century’s most important works of nonfiction. The aim of this class is to provide entry to Arendt’s thought and to the history and theory of totalitarianism by way of a close reading of her seminal work and some of its historical and philosophical intertexts. Arendt’s work addresses topics like the rise of anti-Semitism and race thinking in nineteenth-century Europe, mass politics, propaganda, mob-elite alliances, the concentration camp, and terror as a mode of government. We will also consider texts from some of the leading thinkers of Arendt’s time attracted to authoritarianism, such as Carl Schmitt, Georges Bataille, Ernst Jünger, and the Italian futurists. Last, we will consider the reception and extension of Arendt’s work in postwar arguments about Zionism, Nazi criminality, and the Cold War. Throughout, we will ask if Arendt’s work can help us understand contemporary movements in the United States and Europe that explicitly or implicitly seek a renovation of totalitarian rule. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 376 - The United States in the 1970s

Full course for one semester. For many years U.S. historians neglected the 1970s to focus on the political and cultural shifts in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on a wealth of new historical studies, we will look at the 1970s to assess the successes and defeats of movements that originated in earlier decades. These include civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, environmentalism, and organized labor. We will examine transformations in party politics in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, and chart the changing fortunes of liberals and conservatives. This was a time of economic turmoil and anxiety, and we will consider how inflation, deindustrialization, and the oil crises in 1973 and 1979 influenced the lives of working Americans. We will also look at the changing demographics of families, households, and suburbs in this epoch. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

History 378 - Gender and Family

Full course for one semester. The course begins with the rise and spread of waged labor, with emphasis on how new economic structures altered household and familial life. Families under slavery will be considered, especially African Americans under slavery and in transition to freedom. Migration and resettlement in the West shaped families on the frontier and workers in male-dominated mining towns. The legal and political meanings of marriage also changed; we will examine arguments for and against married women’s ownership of property, and Mormon polygamy, to see how nineteenth-century Americans understood the relationship between patriarchy (legal rights of fathers and husbands over children and wives) and democracy. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 379 - The Fifties in America

Full course for one semester. We will use a range of secondary texts and primary documents to focus on key events and different historical approaches to the study of this era. The ’50s were shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, and we will look back at those cataclysmic events. Topics include the Cold War and its effects on domestic politics; the baby boom and the ideology of the American family; civil rights battles in the legal and political arenas; medical and public health responses to polio; and the political and economic ramifications of postwar consumer culture. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 382 - Riddles of Reciprocity

Full course for one semester. “Exchange” in the present day is commonly considered an economic category, but, understood as “the action of reciprocal giving and receiving,” it has been a ubiquitous feature of sociability and social interaction—of commodities and gifts, greetings and blows, friendships and enmities—across the globe from ancient times. It has been construed by many commentators as a blessing, in some instances a providential one, promoting peace and harmony among individuals and peoples. In practice, however, it has also been a source of oppression, violence, and conflict. Through a series of particular case studies and the analysis of major primary texts from the relevant periods, this course considers the principal practices of exchange as they emerged over time along with the main theories—philosophical and ethical as well as economic, social, and cultural—put forth in the past and the present to understand and analyze them. The coverage will begin with evidence of ancient exchange across the globe, and end with consideration of recent episodes in the world history. However, the case studies will concentrate on major developments in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds from ca. 1400 to ca. 1850—i.e., from the “age of discovery” to the “age of the industrial revolution.” Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 384 - The Mexican Revolution

Full course for one semester. This course examines the roots, development, and effect of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17), from the Porfiriato through the institutionalization of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rule. Principal themes include regionalism and tensions caused by centralization; industrialization, economic development, and dependency; class conflict; gender, citizenship, and political participation; and the production of a modern Mexican identity. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 385 - Catholicism in the Early Modern Spanish World

Full course for one semester. This course examines the central role of the Catholic church, of Catholic belief and practice, in the Spanish world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We start with the transformation of Iberia from a center of religious pluralism to the bastion of Catholic orthodoxy with the expulsion of Jews and Moslems and extreme hostility to Protestantism. The first half of the course looks at the role of the Church and the Inquisition in society; popular religion; and personal spirituality. We then turn to examine the role of the Church in intellectual debates surrounding the colonization of the Americas; indigenous religion and the campaigns and infrastructure of conversion; and the role of the Church in creole culture. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 386 - The Incas

Full course for one semester. This course examines the Incas of the central Andes, from their emergence in the thirteenth century as a small clan alliance through their imperial apogee, their colonial reconstitution, and their republican demise; the class concludes with a brief look at the Inca legacy in modern Peru. Topical emphases are archaic imperial organization, Andean history and cosmology, and Spanish colonialism and evangelization. Methodologically, the class focuses on the challenges of studying nonliterate civilizations and of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts as historical and ethnographic sources. Fulfills departmental pre-1800 requirement; does not fulfill departmental post-1800 requirement. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 388 - Race and Ethnicity in the Andes

Full course for one semester. This course explores the ethnic and racial organization of Andean society from Inca times to the present, and Andean discourses on race. Beginning with the ethnic pluralism of the Inca Andes, we turn to the creation of the colonial categories of “Indian” and “Spanish” and the imposition of two racialized legal republics from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. We then examine the development of “creole republics” that instituted unified republics with deeply racialized hierarchies; the indigenista critiques of that ordering in the twentieth century; and the emergence of indigenous and ethnic politics over the past few decades. While attention will be paid to Afro and Asian Andeans, the course focuses on the categories of indigenous and European. The central focus is on Peru, although ethnicity and race in Ecuador and Bolivia will also be considered. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. This course is recommended for students interested in critical race and ethnic studies. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies 388.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 389 - Labor in Modern Latin America

Full course for one semester. This course examines the social relations of labor, labor organization and militancy, and the political and cultural importance of the working classes in twentieth-century Latin America. Particular topics include the emergence of organized labor and its relation both to earlier guild-based relations and to oligarchic rule in the early twentieth century; the role of organized labor in Mexican, Bolivian, Peruvian, and Chilean revolutionary movements; alliances between labor and bureaucratic-authoritarian states; the position of rural laborers in these modernizing economies; the relationship between race, ethnic, and class identities; and the effects of the vast “informal” working class on postmodern Latin American societies. Prerequisite: sophomore standing or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Not offered 2020–21.

History 390 - Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865–1945

See Music 360 for description.

Music 360 Description

History 391 - The Greek World from 776 to 404 BCE

See Classics 371 for description.

Classics 371 Description

History 393 - The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic

See Classics 373 for description.

Not offered 2020–21.

Classics 373 Description

History 395 - Special Topics in Ancient Mediterranean History

See Classics 375 for description.

Not offered 2020–21.

Classics 375 Description

History 411 - Junior Seminar

Full course for one semester. Variable topics. See specific listing for prerequisites. Conference. 

Americans and the Wider World, 1789—1861
Full course for one semester. Scholarship on the “early republic” was once one of the most inwardly focused subfields of American historiography, focused squarely on the development of identities and institutions within the boundaries of the United States. However, recent scholarship of the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War examines how people living in the newly United States sought to make sense of their emerging nation’s place in a wider world. For some, these explorations meant visiting places outside the United States, while other Americans engaged with other peoples, places, and cultures vicariously. We will consider what it meant for an American to march in a parade celebrating the French Revolution, name her newborn after Simón Bolívar, contribute money to a missionary in Burma, become president of the independent republic of Liberia, and travel the oceans on a whaling vessel. In so doing, we will both deconstruct claims about “American exceptionalism” and examine how such myths came to be. We will give particular attention to the experiences of ordinary Americans, of various backgrounds, in order to push transnational history beyond the realms of diplomatic and military affairs. As the primary aim of this course is to equip students with the skills necessary to write a senior thesis in history, students will develop, research, write, and present a substantial research paper using primary and secondary sources. Prerequisites: junior-standing history major and two history courses at Reed. Conference.

Tribute, Gifts, or Trade? China’s Foreign Relations, 1400—1820
Full course for one semester. With growing Chinese power and influence on the global stage, scholars in several disciplines have developed a new interest in the “tribute system.”  This course will examine the history of Ming and Qing dynasty foreign relations, beginning with maritime diplomacy directed by the eunuch Zheng He in the early fifteenth century and ending with the Qianlong emperor’s responses to the British Macartney mission in 1783. Following an initial discussion of tributary structure, its ideological origins in classical texts, and the principles and practices associated with long-term maintenance, weekly readings and analysis will be devoted
to the following topics: the expansion of cartographic knowledge and textual representations of the world; “vassal” (i.e., Japanese, Korean, and Ryukyu) negotiations on the periphery; envoy portraits in the imperial portraits of tributaries handscroll; European competition for recognition; the impact of Japanese sakoku “closed country” edicts on Sino-Japanese relations; and questions related to discontent over gifts, guests, and imperial rituals. Students will develop, research, write, and present a substantial research paper using primary and secondary sources. Prerequisite: junior-standing history major and two history courses at Reed. Conference.

History 421 - Topics in Historiography

The Uses of Law in Renaissance & Early Modern Europe
Full course for one semester. Legislation and legal records have long figured prominently in historical scholarship. In recent years, historians influenced by perspectives drawn from anthropology, sociology, literary studies, and other fields have increasingly turned their attention to how the law functioned as a social practice. Increasingly, they have called attention to the ways law was used to negotiate quotidian aspects of familial, social, political, and economic life at the local level. This seminar will examine some of the most important works in the recent “legal turn” in historical scholarship, with an emphasis on exploring how they have opened up new perspectives and new questions on issues such as state formation, the family, gender, colonialism, and everyday life in premodern Europe and its nascent empires. Prerequisites: two history courses at Reed, one of which must be at the 300 level. Conference. May be repeated for credit.

History 470 - Thesis

Full course for one year.

History 481 - Individual Study

One-half or full course for one semester. Individual study in fields either more specialized than the regular courses or not covered by them. Individual reading also may be done in connection with a regular course for one or two units additional to the course. Prerequisites: junior or senior standing and approval of instructor and division.