History Department

Courses

HIST 205 - The Twentieth-Century Middle East through Music

This course is a survey of the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa region, using the lens of music to approach that history, from the early twentieth century to the present. The course will focus on the Arabic-speaking countries of the region, particularly the Maghrib (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Egypt, and the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Jordan). Taking a critical cultural approach, we will learn how music can be a window into a broader understanding of political and social histories, and how musical traditions have shaped and been shaped by their historical contexts. Special attention will be given to race, gender, class, religion, colonialism, nationalism and state building, Orientalism, and the politics of knowledge production in the region's history.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 206 - Anti-Colonial Movements in Africa and the Middle East

This course is a survey of anti-colonial movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on various political and social movements that arose in response to European colonial rule. Topics will include but are not limited to the Mahdi rebellion in the Sudan, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, and the Algerian War for Independence. We will also consider acts of rebellion and resistance that do not always fit into textbook narratives of nationalism, and thus are not always engaged with as "anti-colonial." In the process, students will learn to think critically about the nature of resistance; the construction of nation, race, and identity; the role of violence; and the significance of cultural and intellectual debates in political struggles. We will also be attentive to global contexts and material and ideological connections between decolonizing movements within and between these regions, and how anti-colonial solidarity fostered transnational exchanges and globalized worldviews.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 207 - Gender in the Middle East

This course will explore the topic of gender, as well as women, sexuality, and the family, in the Middle East and North Africa region, spanning a chronology from the height of the Ottoman Empire (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will explore a wide variety of scholarship, including feminist literature, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and discuss current and developing trends in Middle East studies that have sought to apply these lenses to Arab and Islamic societies. Questions we will explore include: How has gender defined the social and political subject? How have Western feminist lenses influenced or distorted depictions of Muslim women? How were gendered categories transformed under colonialism and globalization, and what did precolonial conceptions of gender and sex look like? Topics will include precolonial gender and sexual categories in Islamic societies; women in the Ottoman Empire; the making of gendered nationalist subjects in Egypt, Palestine, and North Africa; Orientalist fetishization; and feminist political movements, among others.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 215 - Environmental History of US Empire

This course offers an introduction to the key questions, methods, and sources in the field of environmental history. We will ground our study of environmental history in place-based case studies drawn from across areas over which the United States has claimed sovereignty, throughout North America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Arctic. Drawing examples from across what has sometimes been called "the Greater United States," the course explores how nature, people, and environmental change transcend and trouble the boundaries of the nation-state. By thinking transnationally and comparatively beyond the traditional bounds of U.S. environmental history and the continental United States, we will consider the environmental and social impacts of the far reach of U.S. empire and colonialism. Over the course of the semester, we will focus on themes such as conservation, extraction, science, and migration as we consider the history of how various agents of U.S. empire and communities living in U.S. territories and colonies have thought about and interacted with nature and state power at large and small scales.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 223 - Early Modern China and the World: 1300-1900

This course surveys the history of China from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, tracing the rise and fall of the Ming dynasty, the Manchu conquest, and the disintegration of the Qing empire. This course will not only "discover history in China," but also situate China in a global context by discussing the flow of peoples, goods, and ideas into and out of China. After the Silk Road connecting the Eurasian continent declined with the end of the Pax Mongolica, China continued to be an engine of the Afro-Eurasia network and began to interact with the Americas. However, since the Great Divergence in the 1750s, China has scrambled to join a new international order. By analyzing the exchanges between China and other regions, students will understand how the concept of China was in flux and the dynamic role of China in the early modern world.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 224 - Modern China through Foreign Eyes: 1800-1980

This course investigates the history of modern China, from the last century of the Qing dynasty to the post-Mao reform era, through the eyes of missionaries, diplomats, adventurers, scholars, tourists, etc. In these two centuries, China was transformed from an empire to a modern state. At the same time, it had to face a new international order and resituate its relationship with the rest of the world. In the era of revolutions and reforms, China was more than once at the crossroads, asking which direction it should take. It chose its paths to address not only domestic needs, but also the vicissitudes of international environments. In this course, we will examine travel diaries, missionary reports, maps, political treaties, literary compositions, and other documents produced by people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Through "foreign" eyes, we will explore a series of the "old" (e.g., demographical pressure and ethnic conflicts) and "new" (e.g., high mobility of goods, capital, and people; urban-rural disparity; and environmental deterioration) questions that China has encountered and how it has responded to them. By focusing on non-Chinese sojourners and observers, we will think about how China becomes China and the role of China in the global era from an alternative perspective.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 225 - The History of Slavery and Human Trade in East Asia Since 1200

This course examines the history of slavery and human trade in East Asia from 1200 up to now. We will explore questions such as: Was East Asia a slaveholding region? How did people in East Asia enter and exit from slavery? How were the human markets in East Asia operated locally and globally? How were family practices, such as adoption, marriage, and concubinage, entangled with slavery? How did Confucianism, the dominant ideology in premodern East Asia, conceptualize and legitimize the relationship between slaves and masters? What are modern forms of coerced labor in China, Japan, and Korea? How could the East Asian histories of slavery and human trade contribute to international efforts in combating unfree labor and human trafficking worldwide? At the end of our class, we will reflect on globalized concepts-such as freedom, coerced labor, and property rights-and their applications from non-Western perspectives.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

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

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 240 - World Environmental History

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 242 - The Love and Destruction of Nature: Romanticism in the Time of Settler Colonialism

This course studies the history of the idea of nature in American thought, from the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century to the development of environmentalist thought and organizations in the twentieth century. The course will contextualize that history in two ways: in relationship to the formation of the United States through settler colonialism and the death and displacement of Indigenous peoples, land, and culture; and in relationship to the capitalist exploitation of nature that has fundamentally reshaped the ecological communities that live in and across U.S. political space. The course will ask what it means-politically, ethically, and philosophically-to love nature in the wake of environmental and cultural destruction.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 253 - History of Reading from Gutenberg to Chat GPT

"How shall you begin to read a book?" asked a nineteenth-century book on self-improvement, before laying out specific instructions to guide young boys in the proper reading of authoritative texts. This question reveals that a practice we often take for granted - reading itself - is actually the product of social and historical circumstances. Reading practices have been shaped by technologies and by social conditions that regulated access to education and to literature based on gender, class, and race; reading can also be political, as texts can facilitate the dissemination of controversial ideas and potentially spark revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) change. As a result, thinking critically about the practice of reading generates important methodological questions for historians, who are reliant on the texts produced in the past. How do our practices of reading differ from those of our historical subjects?  How can we know who could read, what they read, or how they read? This course will allow students to learn about and reflect on what it means to think historically and make historical claims, and will serve as a thematic and methodological introduction to the histories of reading in western Europe from the printing press to the digital era. A portion of class time will be dedicated to a reading "lab," in which we will experiment with reading and writing using the technologies of our historical subjects, and work closely with materials in Reed's Special Collections.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 256 - Migration Histories in the British Imperial World

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 270 - Introduction to American Environmental History

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 271 - U.S. Politics and Culture, 1964-2004

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 272 - Gender and the American Family

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 273 - U.S. Politics & Culture: The 1990s

This course will examine the recent history of partisan and popular politics, social movements, and transformation in U.S. political culture during the long 1990s. Key world events (the end of the Cold War U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, eastern Europe and Africa) shifted global alliances and inspired protests, while communication technologies (video via satellite, the Internet) made the world seem smaller. In domestic politics feminist, LGBT, civil rights, and environmental activists forged new ideologies and strategies while conservatives waged culture wars on political ground. We will pay particular attention to the two terms of Democratic President Bill Clinton and his Republican predecessors. Topics include responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis, enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), the reception of the televised Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, and the racial politics of the 1992 LA uprising.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 298 - Music and the Cold War United States

See MUS 238 for description.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): MUS 238 
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
  • Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
  • Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).

HIST 303 - The History of the Sahara

This course will examine the history of the Sahara, a region that is often treated as a "blank space" or only peripherally included in histories of the Middle East/North Africa and Africa. Beginning in the early Islamic period and the heyday of the trans-Saharan trade (eighth to seventeenth centuries), we will trace the region's history up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the formation of nation-states and (often contentious) political borders. Employing textual primary sources, literary and cultural representations, ethnographies, and music, we will outline a history that counters the myth of a "blank space" and instead reveals a vibrant and diverse region characterized by long histories of exchange and mobility. While being attentive to themes of race, religion, colonialism, state formation, trade, and environment, we will also problematize the depiction of the Sahara as a natural "borderland" between an imagined North and sub-Saharan Africa, instead bringing the histories of these two areas together.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): HUM 110 
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 307 - War and Peace in Europe, 1700-1914

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 310 - Water and the American West

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 311 - Environmental Justice Histories of Latin America

Latin America has historically been a center of global extraction, but it is also a region with a long history of contesting colonialism and inequality. This course examines histories of environmental injustice and movements for social and environmental justice in modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Blending multiple theoretical and disciplinary traditions, the course will expose students to a growing body of scholarship that analyzes how cultural, political, and economic factors have shaped natural and social landscapes in the region. We will explore the historical processes which have shaped environmental injustices and how people have contested them through topics ranging from mining, food, conservation, climate, and energy. Discussions, readings, and writing assignments will assess and reflect on how interdisciplinary sources, methods, and archives can inform reading and writing about environmental justice issues and their relevance, in combination with critical theory and political mobilization, to building more just futures during the Anthropocene and the contemporary global climate crisis.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 314 - Nature Knows No Borders: Environmental History of the U.S. - Mexico Borderlands

The United States and Mexico are "neighbors by nature," inescapably linked by environmental factors such as pollution, water resources, and human and wildlife migration. Although the international boundary line is itself an artificial construct, since its demarcation in the nineteenth century and especially through its ongoing fortification, the border has had an outsized impact on the ecosystems and human communities it transects. The international boundary has increasingly become a site of intensive policing and environmental control, yet people and nature have long managed to evade state and corporate power on both sides of the line. In this course, we will explore the dynamic and contested social and natural landscapes of northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest from pre-contact to the early twenty-first century, focusing on political, social, and environmental change after the U.S. - Mexico War (1846 - 1848). We will examine how the natural landscape has shaped cooperation and conflict in the border region through thematic case studies of issues such as parklands and conservation, boundary disputes, extraction, citizenship, and migration. The course will take a transnational and decolonial approach to understanding the history of the region, introducing students to distinct environmental historiographies the U.S. West and Mexico. By the end of the course, students will have a nuanced understanding of the historical roots of contemporary environmental and social issues in the U.S. - Mexico border region.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

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

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing and HUM 110 
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): CRES 385 
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

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

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 321 - The History of Sexuality and Society in East Asia Since 1200

Under the global #MeToo movement, people in East Asia also speak out their stories of sexual harassment. However, East Asian countries have their unique battlegrounds where perceptions of good/bad sexual behaviors have been deeply rooted in history. This course provides an opportunity for students to understand complicated sexual politics in China, Japan, and beyond. It surveys various sexual practices and their intersections with law, labor, leisure, reproduction, money, health, science, and warfare from 1200 to the present. We will explore questions such as: Who can have sex and who cannot? What did legal and illicit sex look like in the premodern period? Did people in this most populous region practice birth control? How did East Asian people receive Western sexology? Why are "comfort women '' still controversial in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China nowadays? Following a chronological order, the course will finally turn towards a futurist perspective: how to make gendered and intimate relationships better in the East Asian world.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 325 - History of Technologies in Imperial and Modern China: 1500-2000

In this course, we will explore the development of technologies from imperial China through the end of the twentieth century. Rather than a chronological overview, we will discuss one thematic topic each week by reading translated primary sources together with secondary literature. These topics include but are not limited to cartography, hydraulic engineering, printing, communication technologies, and medicine. The focus is on China, but its neighbors, Japan and Korea, and China's encounter with the West will also be discussed. How technologies evolved in a non-Western society and how Indigenous technological traditions struggled for "modernity" in the twentieth century constitute the two themes of this course. By examining the trajectory of technological development in China, we will probe two broad questions: how to approach technology as a social construct rather than as a value-free existence, and how technology in turn plays a crucial role in the making of an interconnected modern world.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 334 - Race and the Politics of Decolonization

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): CRES 384; also cross-listed as CRES 300 junior seminar 2024-25. 
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 338 - Crisis & Catastrophe in Modern Europe

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 343 - The Human Condition

See POL 390 for description.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): For history credit: HUM 110 
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): POL 390 
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 344 - Freud and the Psychoanalytic Tradition

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 345 - Whole Earths, Globalizations, and World Pictures

Hear the word "Earth" and the image likely to flash through the mind is the descendant of a photo commonly known as "Blue Marble" (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 in to the beyond from ancient times to our day; how the "whole earth" image has been mobilized by environmental campaigns, political movements, and commercial enterprises; howe the view of Earth has figured in economics ("globalization theory"), aesthetics (earth art, architecture, mapping and visualization techniques), philosophy (especially in the phenomenological tradition), and the natural sciences (the Gaia hypothesis, the Biosphere projects, earth systems science); and how this pictorial imaginary has become integrated into the unthought ways we inhabit our natural and human-built worlds-what has happened once its ubiquity meant that we ceased, in a fashion, to see it. Arrangements will be made to enable students to explore new media and research tools for analysis and presentation, should they wish to do so.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 353 - The French Revolution, 1775 - 1800

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

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

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 362 - Revolutionary America

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 364 - Slavery, Freedom, Anarchy: The Politics of Abolition

This course studies the resistance to slavery in the nineteenth-century United States, tracing the practical and theoretical politics of abolition. How could enslaved people become free, and what would freedom entail? The course will trace various and tangled answers to these questions, from direct resistance to slavery through rebellion and flight, to attempts to win political power and reshape the national state, to nonresistance and the rejection of state power. For some abolitionists, slavery remained the central and primary problem, while for others, the problem of slavery generated criticism of other forms of social and political hierarchy. The course will examine the variety of abolitionist thought and its intersection with feminism, anarchism, and labor radicalism.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 369 - Race and the Law in American History

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): CRES 389 
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

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

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 371 - Sports in Modern America

This course explores the history of sports in modern American culture and life, beginning in the nineteenth century but focusing predominantly on the twentieth century. From the "sport" and spectacle of waterfall jumping in nineteenth-century New England to the Cold War Olympic doping challenges of the 1950s and '60s to the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s, students will explore the structures and meaning of individual sports, as well as sports as a broader category of social engagement, as the nature of sports in America has changed over time. Beyond the history of sports themselves, students will also consider how sports have both reflected and influenced the constructed categories and lived experience of race, gender, class, ability, and identity among a variety of American publics, leveraging sports as a lens for approaching other dominant cultural, social, and political themes in American history.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 374 - Gender and Sex

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 376 - The United States in the 1970s

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 385 - Catholicism in the Early Modern Spanish World

This course examines the central role of the Catholic church, and 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, campaigns and infrastructure of conversion and religious syncretism; and the role of the Church in creole culture. 

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): HUM 110 or sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 386 - The Incas

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: This course applies toward the department's pre-1800 requirement.
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 388 - Race and Ethnicity in the Andes

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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): CRES 388 
Notes: Recommended for students interested in critical race and ethnic studies. 
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 390 - Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865-1965

See MUS 360 for description.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): MUS 360, CRES 359 
Not offered: 2025-26

HIST 391 - The Greek World from 776 to 404 BCE

See ANME 371 for description.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): ANME 371 
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 392 - The Hellenistic World: Egypt, the Middle East, and Central Asia after Alexander the Great

See ANME 372 for description.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): ANME 372 
Not offered: 2025-26
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 397 - Women in the Ancient World

See ANME 377 for description.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): HUM 110 
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): ANME 377 
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 411 - Junior Seminar

Post-Imperial Histories of Britain

How does the imperial past shape the present? In the twentieth century, Britain transformed from the largest empire the world had seen, to an island nation off the northwest coast of Europe. These changing borders profoundly shaped life within Britain itself. In this course, we will examine how historians have studied the afterlife of empire in Britain's twentieth century. Course readings will address formal decolonization, Britain's global role, public institutions, the welfare state, immigration, racial formation, gender, and culture. From this shared foundation, students will be able to pursue independent research projects on topics of their own choosing.

 

Americans and the Wider World, 1789-1861

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 spanning the end of the American Revolution through the Civil War examines how people living in the 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 foreign peoples, places, and cultures vicariously. We will consider what it meant for an American to march in a parade celebrating the French Revolution, name a newborn after Simón Bolívar, contribute money to a missionary in Burma, become president of the independent republic of Liberia, or 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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Junior standing, and two history courses at Reed
Restriction(s): History and Interdisciplinary-History majors only
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 421 - Topics in Historiography

Gender and Labor in the U.S.
This course examines classic and recent historiography on gender and labor in the U.S., with a focus on continuity and change in women's unwaged and waged labor from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. We will study how enslaved black women's labor, and free women's unpaid household work, sustained their families and shaped nineteenth-century capitalism. We will examine how gendered and racial conventions and familial obligations kept most female wage-earners in agriculture, domestic service, and sex-typed and segregated factory jobs. Educated single women trained for feminized professions (teaching, nursing, and clerical work) but were routinely fired if they married. While women's labor sustained families during the Depression and helped win World War II, government jobs programs and postwar entitlements mainly benefited heterosexual family men. Single workers, straight and queer, found new ways to make their livings. Married women with children remained in the paid workforce throughout the postwar period; their number steadily increased through the end of the century, yet they remained underpaid and concentrated in feminized jobs. While wage-earning mothers became the norm, the ideal and symbol of the male breadwinner persisted. Labor historians have covered all of these topics, and more-we shall do so as well.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Two history courses at Reed, one of which must be at the 300 level
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 2 times for credit if different topics.
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
  • Evaluate data and/or sources.
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.

HIST 470 - Thesis

Unit(s): 2
Instructional Method: Independent study
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Yearlong course, 1 unit per semester

HIST 481 - Individual Study

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.

Unit(s): Variable: 0.5 - 1
Prerequisite(s): Junior or senior standing, instructor and division approval
Instructional Method: Independent study
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 4 times for credit.

HIST 554 - The French Revolution (c. 1770 - c. 1804)

Few events are as significant, or controversial, as the French Revolution of 1789. From one perspective, it marked the sudden, violent end of the ancien régime. Within a few years, revolutionaries eliminated the monarchy, aristocracy, guilds, and a corporate society rooted in legal privileges and traditional hierarchies. They also deprived the Catholic Church of much of its power and confiscated most of its property. In France's lucrative Caribbean colonies, meanwhile, enslaved people and free people of color set in motion a chain of events that culminated with slavery's abolition and the ultimate independence of Saint-Domingue (Haïti). From another perspective, the French Revolution can be seen as the beginning of the modern world. Its struggles were replayed across much of the world for a century or more. Concepts such as human rights, nationalism, mass democratic politics, and even our understanding of "Revolution" as a process of radical change can be traced to the events that unfolded in the wake of 1789. This course will examine the history of the French Revolution as well as the ongoing debates surrounding its causes, trajectories, and consequences. Exploring competing Marxist, Revisionist, and Post-Revisionist interpretations of the Revolution we will also contrast the wide range of approaches historians have used to analyze how the Revolution happened and why it followed the course that it did.

Unit(s): 0.5
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: Graduate course. Offered fall 2025.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

 

  • Identify interactions and influences among various disciplines, fields, theories, analytical strategies, and source materials.
  • Deploy skills, methods, and knowledge developed in coursework.
  • Demonstrate close, analytical interpretations of source materials in one's writing.
  • Conduct complex research, synthesize it, and argue persuasively in support of a claim based on evidence.
  • Analyze the value and significance of one's own academic and creative work, and situate it within the context of similar works.
  • Express oneself articulately in oral discussion and in presentational modes when appropriate, and express oneself articulately in writing.