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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to acquaint students with some of the ways historians have thought about the past. Beginning with Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, the work of eleven historians will be studied closely and critically over the course of the semester. In the process, students not only will become familiar with various important historical approaches but will also be encouraged to examine their own assumptions about the past and about how and why--or even if--we know it. We will meet weekly to define, understand, and assess the different ways historians considered in the course have thought about the past.
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3.00 Credits
As a technology and practice, photography evolved alongside Europe's colonization of Africa. Nevertheless, the image and its archiving were critical facets of the continent's histories of liberation and post-independence. This survey course introduces students to the historical development of photography in Africa and the historical usages of photographs in the late-nineteenth century to recent times. The course begins by considering the photography of the royal courts in North Africa and Christian missionaries in West Africa, before shifting to the role of photography in the making of independent African nations and their liberation struggles after World War II. The course concludes by considering the commoditization of African photography at international biennales and its function for single-party regimes that continue to rule across Sub-Saharan Africa. Key themes include photography's role in shaping historical knowledge and representation of Africa and its people, the appropriation of image making into African creative practices and daily life, the politics of exhibition and archiving, and the ethics of seeing war and social injustice. Students will cultivate their skills in visual analysis through historical contextualization and by frequently engaging with the photographic collections available at the WCMA and Clark Art Museum.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the constructions of feminine and masculine categories in modern Africa. We will concentrate on the particular history of women's experiences during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In addition, we will examine how the study of history and gender offers perspectives on contemporary women's issues such as female-circumcision, teen pregnancy, wife-beating, and "AIDS."
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students with instructors permission
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3.00 Credits
This course provides a close examination of the six decades of the history of the People's Republic of China, from the 1949 Revolution to the present day. Through readings and discussion, we will explore the multiple political, economic, social, and cultural factors that contributed to the idealism of the "golden age" of Communist Party leadership (1949-65), the political violence of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the profound transformation of the Reform Era (1978-present) as well as the motors of change in China today. Course materials will include films, novels, and ethnographies, as well as secondary analyses. Please note that this is a discussion seminar and not a survey course.
Prerequisite:
(HIST 213 recommended)
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3.00 Credits
The partitioning of the Indian subcontinent has typically been understood as an event that began and ended in 1947, culminating in the independence of India and the birth of Pakistan. Eschewing these perceptions, however, by examining a longer history of this historical moment, this course seeks to offer an alternate account to this popular narrative. Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, we will trace the trajectory of the Indian nationalist movement and the demand for freedom from British colonial rule. Moving into the middle half of the twentieth century, we will examine the impact of decolonization on the region. Millions of people were directly affected by this cataclysmic event. Drawing on official archives, alongside sources as varied as memoirs, poetry, short stories, films, and oral history, students will re-visit this most significant event in South Asian history and engage with the historiographical debates that surround it. Using a combined chronological and thematic approach, this course will address themes such as nationalism, decolonization, secularism, communalism, the post-colonial nation-state, and identity politics. The main aim is to interrogate the impact of Partition on the state, society, and people of the subcontinent. What did Independence mean for India? Was Partition the only solution? Was Pakistan inevitable? And finally, why does Partition continue to matter today?
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3.00 Credits
An unabating tension between conflict and cooperation has been an undercurrent of U.S.-Japan relations in the past 150 years, at times erupting into clashes reaching the scale of world war and at times allowing for measured collaboration. We will explore the U.S.-Japan relationship from the perspectives of both countries with a focus on how culture, domestic concerns, economic and political aims, international contexts, and race have helped shape its course and nature. This course will fulfill the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative by examining not just the diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and Japan, but also how various types of interactions have influenced the dynamics of power between these two countries and have shaped the ways in which each country has understood and portrayed the other. Topics will include early U.S.-Japan encounters; the rise of both countries as imperial powers; the road to, and experience of, World War II; the politics and social history of the postwar American occupation of Japan; the U.S.-Japan security alliance; trade relations; and popular culture. Contemporary topics will also be discussed.
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students with instructors permission
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3.00 Credits
Medieval laws form the foundation for much of our modern legal system. They also constitute crucial but problematic sources for our understanding of medieval society. This course will cover law from the sixth through the fourteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the law of the Roman empire and the law of the Christian church. Through smaller units on Law in Antiquity, Law in the Early Middle Ages, The High Medieval Legal Tradition, and Marriage in Canon Law, we will gain some exposure to the depth and complexity of the medieval legal tradition. We will spend most of our time with the legal sources themselves, concentrating specifically on legislation dealing with marriage, the settlement of disputes, and crime of all kinds. Along the way, we will also study the early history of lawyers and the legal profession. No prior experience with the Middle Ages is expected.
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3.00 Credits
The Weimar Republic has been examined and re-examined, not only in an effort to account for the failure of democracy and the rise of Hitler in Germany but also for its remarkable artistic achievements. Using a variety of primary documents, including movies, works of art and literature, as well as more traditional historical sources and the writings of historians, this course will consider the social, political, and cultural history of the Weimar Republic. At issue in the course will be the relationship between the political and social instability and the cultural blossoming that characterized in Germany during the 1920s. We will also consider whether the Weimar Republic in general, and Weimar culture, in particular are better understood as the product of Germany's past or as harbingers of its future.
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3.00 Credits
This course is a history of National-Socialist Germany based to a considerable extent on primary documents. Students will use the documents to reconstruct the history of the Third Reich and to articulate and assess some of the principal historiographical debates relating to National-Socialist Germany. The course will consider the following topics: the failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism; the consolidation of Nazi rule; the experiential reality of the Volksgemeinschaft; the popularity of National Socialism; youth and women in the Third Reich; Nazi culture; Nazi racism and image of the Jew; Gestapo terror; the pre-war persecution of Jews; popular German anti-Semitism; the regime's euthanasia program; the Nazi Empire; the experience of war in Russia; the implementation of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem"; German knowledge of and complicity in the "Final Solution"; the experience of "total war" on the home front; resistance to National Socialism; and the collapse of the Third Reich. The course will focus especially on how ordinary Germans experienced and participated in the history through which they lived. We will take an empathic approach to National-Socialist Germany and to the Germans who lived through this period, attempting to understand why they felt, thought, and acted as they did. We will also consider the epistemological and ethical problems involved in attempting to empathize with Nazis.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
The Spanish conquest of the Americas happened with astonishing rapidity: Christopher Columbus entered the Caribbean in 1492; Hernando Cortes completed the conquest of the Aztecs of central Mexico in 1521; Francisco Pizarro triumphantly entered the Inca capital Cuzco, in Peru, in 1533. Other conquistadors pushed north to the Carolinas and California, south to the Tierra del Fuego and the River Plate, and across the Amazon basin to the Atlantic. "We came," wrote the conquistador Bernal Dias del Castillo, "to serve God, and our King, and to get rich." Their deeds were legendary, the courage, daring, and endurance remarkable. They were also notoriously quarrelsome, greedy, and cruel. Before their onslaught the major civilizations of the New World crumbled--destroyed or changed beyond recognition. Rarely in history have so few conquered so many so quickly. The conquest of the New World has both excited and appalled the human imagination for more than five centuries. Many questions remain to be answered or are still capable of provoking controversy. Who exactly were the conquistadors? What motivated them? What meaning did they themselves assign to their actions? How could they justify their many misdeeds? How did they develop their sense of the Other? Why did resistance by indigenous peoples and regimes ultimately fail? Was the conquest somehow preordained? What mixture of human agency, culture, technology, religion, nature, and biology can best explain the results of this encounter between the conquistadors and the Amerindian worlds?
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