History Colloquia

Colloquium sign-up for Winter 2010 sections
Wednesday, November 11
9:00 am to 3:00 pm
1014 Tisch Hall

After November 11, to request an override, please email your section choice, ID number, and UM email address to sheilaw@umich.edu. ATTENDANCE AT THE FIRST CLASS IS MANDATORY.

A colloquium takes students through the process of doing history: read, think, discuss, write, rewrite.

All history concentrators elect at least one section of either History 396 or 397 in their junior or senior year. They choose from a changing variety of topics each fall and winter term; a limited number of sections are usually offered in the spring or summer. The colloquium counts as one of the upper-level concentration courses and may satisfy the geographic and pre-1800 requirements, depending on the topic.

Students in the History Honors Program satisfy the colloquium requirement by completing both courses in the honors sequence, History 398 and 399, but may take 396 or 397 if they wish. more about the Honors Program

What is the difference between 396 and 397?

• Only History 396 satisfies the Upper-Level Writing Requirement and typically involves a series of short papers leading to a longer final paper.

• Both are discussion seminars of 15 students or less.

• Students in either course must regularly attend class and actively participate in the discussion.

• Both courses require a significant amount of reading and writing.

How to register?
The colloquium sections are closed on Wolverine Access and available only by override from the department. Most sections have 15 seats, but some may have fewer.

For fall and winter term sections, a sign-up day is held before early registration (mid-March and mid-November). Students indicate their choice of section and requests are sorted with priority going to graduating History seniors who have not already taken a colloquium. Overrides are issued based on this list which allow students to register on Wolverine Access for a particular section.

Students studying abroad and those earning a teaching certificate in History should contact Sheila Coley (email: sheilaw@umich.edu) for override information before sign-up day.

Registration procedures for spring and summer term colloquia vary; these are announced to the History email group and posted on this page in March.

History 396 (396 sections satisfy the Upper-Level Writing Credit)

396.001 – Canadian History, Prof. Kenneth Sylvester
Wednesday 10 – 1
ULWR

396.002 – Ideologies of Empires in Chinese History, Prof. C.S. Chang
Wednesday 1 - 4
ULWR,  non-Western, pre-1800 history

396.003 – Living Apart Together: Peoples of the Book in Egypt, 640-1517
Thursday 1-4
ULWR, non-Western, pre-1800 history

396.004 – The Great War: Europe’s Trauma of Modernity, Prof. Dario Gaggio
Tuesday 2-5
ULWR, European history

396.005 – The Age of Atlantic Revolutions, Prof. Elise Lipkowitz
Tuesday / Thursday 2:30-4
ULWR,  transregional, pre-1800 history

396.006 – After Salem: The Transformation of the Witch in American Culture, Prof. Carol Karlsen
Monday 1-4
ULWR, U.S. history

History 397 (397 sections do NOT satisfy ULWR)

397.001 – Mapping Space in a Pre-Columbian World, Prof. Diane Hughes
Tuesday 2-5
Transregional, pre-1800 history

397.002 – The Great War and Literature, Prof. Jonathan Marwil
Tuesday / Thursday 10-11:30
European history

397.003 – Christianity in Modern East Asia, Prof. Michael Shapiro
Thursday 11 - 2
Transregional history

 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

HISTORY 396 satisfies the Upper-Level Writing Requirement

396.001 – History of Canada
This class blends chronological coverage with in-depth analysis of selected topics.  The purpose is to address a number of themes that frame the Canadian narrative and to explore the diversity of perspectives that inform it.  Today, Canada is an extraordinary blend of world cultures, a multicultural diversity unheralded before the 1930s, now embraced in the context of activist bilingual state.  This social experiment is occurring in the midst of a French-English détente that seems constantly on the verge of breaking down.  The Canadian story has never been the history of single people realizing its national ambitions through revolution or civil war.  Instead it is a story of adjustment, accommodation and transformation: of indigenous societies to French and English empires; of French colonists, British newcomers, and American refugees to one another, in what remained of British North America after 1783; of a quasi-independent transcontinental state between 1840 and 1940; and a modernizing, open society since. 

The class does not assume prior knowledge of Canadian history.  Some familiarity with British, French and American history is helpful.  Class will meet twice a week in seminar to discuss assigned readings.  There will be close to 200 pages of reading each week.  These will include background reading, journal articles and chapters from monographs.  The readings will be posted on the Library’s electronic reserves. 
Every week students should prepare a discussion question on the week’s readings, and post it on the class Ctools site.  The questions will be used to guide the discussion each week.  A different student will be encouraged to lead the discussion each week, with the help of the instructor.  You will also prepare two short papers (2500 words) that review and compare the perspectives in the assigned readings.  Students are encouraged to submit draft papers for feedback, and to rewrite poorly written papers. Two classes, listed as Paper Conferences on the schedule, will be devoted to peer discussion of students’ papers.  Students will post their papers on the Ctools site prior to class. 

Discussion is the main component of student assessment, and attendance and participation are essential.

396.002 -  Ideologies of Empires in Chinese History
This course will examine the major ideologies behind the rise, constitution, and fall of the powerful empires in Chinese history. In Winter 2010, it will focus on the first empires: the Qin (Ch'in), 221 – 207 B.C., and the Han, 202 B.C. – 220 A.D. Popularly known as the empire of the Great Wall and Terracotta Warriors, the Qin Empire marked the end of China’s Classical Age and the beginning of Imperial China. Founded by one great mystic hero, the First Emperor (Ying Zheng, r. 221 – 210 B.C.), its short life of fourteen years actually charted the course of Chinese history for the next two thousand years. This course will look into the complex ideological forces behind the enigmatic personality of the First Emperor and the founding and developing of the Qin Empire. Finally, through this study, some big questions in current historical scholarship will be raised: Do powerful empires lead to the “end of history?” Do history-making heroes “live” forever? The study of the Han dynasty and its great mystic hero Wu-ti (Wudi, Emperor Wu, r. 141-87 B.C.) will follow the same approaches. The final topic is an examination of the Ming-Qing Empire (1644-1911) in comparative perspectives.

396.003 – Living Apart Together: Peoples of the Book in Egypt, 640-1517
The Arab invasion of Egypt in 640 was a defining turning point in the history of Egypt and its peoples, opening the Nile Valley above Aswan to new rulers, to a new faith, and to new routes of trade, as well as defining its borders separately from Christian Nubia to the south, a Christian Mediterranean to the north, and ‘Ifriqia’ to the west.  From the establishment of Islamic power in the mid-7th century to the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in 1517, we will consider how Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together, or alongside one another, in urban and village settings, and how they found coherence for their religious communities while simultaneously participating in networks of social and economic exchange and of political power and influence.  The approach will be thematic, with special consideration given to literary traditions, architectural and artistic developments, and the urban history of Cairo, a cross-roads for all three faiths.  We will work closely with S.D. Goitein’s survey of the Cairo Geniza for the Fatimid period.  Broader questions of tolerance and intolerance and of religious self-definition and regional identity will frame our discussions.


396.004 – The Great War: Europe’s Trauma of Modernity
The First World War (1914-1918) was experienced by contemporaries as both a disconcerting revolution and a terrible revelation. The conflict radically changed social and political life and revealed that modernity was anything but a synonym of progress. Relations between social classes, genders, different parts of the globe (especially the metropoles and the colonial empires), and civil societies and state power would no longer be the same. And yet few people predicted these changes in 1914. This seminar explores these massive transformations and the historical experience of trauma engendered by the Great War. This is NOT a military history course. Weaponry and military strategies will not be discussed, except for their social and cultural dimensions. Students will be expected to work on an original essay dealing with the impact of total war on European societies.


396.005 -  The Age of Atlantic Revolutions
In the sixty years from 1770 to 1830, a series of political and social revolutions occurred in North and South America, Europe, and the Caribbean.  Remarking on this phenomenon, the historian R.R. Palmer in 1959 suggested that in the final decades of the eighteenth century, the Atlantic World was “swept by a single revolutionary movement,” albeit one with diverse inspirations, goals, and outcomes.  In this course, we will study the Age of Atlantic Revolutions through the lens of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions.  Although these revolutions have long been considered pivotal moments in each nation’s national history, their temporal proximity and interconnected narratives have long prompted comparative analysis.   In this course, we will employ the framework of the Atlantic Revolutions to analyze these three revolutions as historical and comparative phenomena beyond a single national history.  We will also consider the utility of studying these revolutions in an Atlantic perspective. What common themes can be discerned? What aspects might be overlooked by viewing them in an Atlantic framework? How have historians from Palmer to the present understood the Age of Revolutions?

In this course, we will focus on the many activities of a professional historian.  We will develop and refine skills in formulating historical questions, in closely reading and analyzing primary and secondary source documents, and in critiquing historical arguments.  We will practice common forms of historical writing – source analysis, the book review, the essay review, and the analytical paper. Since writing is a key medium of inquiry and exchange for historians, we will approach writing as historians do – as a vehicle for sorting out thoughts, summarizing and reporting findings, and analyzing, interpreting, criticizing, and synthesizing information.  In lieu of a major research paper, this course will require frequent, short, writing assessments with an emphasis on argumentation, appropriate use of evidence to support contentions, brevity, clarity, editing, and revision.

396.006 – After Salem: Transformation of the Witch in American Culture
Historians interested in witchcraft in America have usually focused on the Salem Outbreak in 1692 or on the New England witch trials that came before.  This course, on the other hand, begins with the seventeenth century cases but devotes most of its attention to Anglo-American witchcraft history from 1692 to the present day.  In it, we will explore several questions not easily answered.  Why, for example, did witchcraft trials come to an end soon after the Salem outbreak? When and why did witches and witchcraft cease to play a central role in official religious doctrine and popular belief?  Why has a fascination with the witch endured in new cultural forms, such as Romantic painting, child and adult fiction and film, advertising, and political cartoons?   In what specific ways has the witch image, usually but not always female, been transformed over the past three centuries?   What meanings do these transformations convey today, especially but not exclusively for women and girls?  And what significance lies in the rash of recent challenges to the most predominant uses of the witch?  Early in the semester, this class will concentrate on published scholarship and strategies for engaging in research on this topic, but as the term progresses students will direct their energies increasingly toward conceiving and carrying out their own research in primary sources.  Because this is an advanced-level history colloquium that meets the upper-level writing requirement, students should be prepared to undertake a variety of writing assignments, including outlines and progress reports, evaluations of what others have written about their findings, and a first and final draft of an original 15-20-page history proposal.  Required reading for the early weeks of the course include Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft; Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England; Marion Gibson, Witchcraft Myths in American Culture; and Arthur Miller, The Crucible (although students who have taken History/Women’s Studies 375 will be assigned alternative interpretations.)

HISTORY 397 does NOT satisfy the Upper-Level Writing Credit

397.001 – Mapping Space in a Pre-Columbian World
This course will investigate the ways world geographies were envisioned in the medieval West.  Central to the enquiry will be 1) the tension between scientific and religious understanding; 2) the means by which geographic knowledge was transmitted and absorbed or rejected; 3) the ways in which maps were constructed and used (by scholars, theologians, merchant-travelers, and rulers) ; 4) the mapping of imaginary spaces/  A comparative element of the course will engage both the mapping in ancient Greece and in  other civilizations, including,  the Islamic world, Asia (India and China) , and the Americas.

Assignments will engage both literary and cartographic sources and will encourage students to adopt comparative perspectives.  The chief requirement consists of a project centered on an original historical study of a coherent body of cartographic sources from the pre-modern world.

397.002 – The Literature of the Great War
World War I, which to Europeans remains the Great War, has inspired an extraordinary body of literature. A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front are still read today, and the English poet, Wilfred Owen, has gradually emerged as the most poignant poetic voice of the war. While much of the literature was composed within fifteen years of the war’s end, poets, novelists, and dramatists still are inspired by it. And in the last two decades numerous crime novelists, like Sebastian Japrisot and Rennie Airth, have turned to the war for their heroes and settings. Why this should be so will be one question this course will examine. Another will be why this literature has so profoundly shaped our view of the war, indeed of war itself. We shall also dip into the considerable scholarship that has grown up around this literature, further testimony to its power and importance. The reading in this course will be drawn from a variety of literary genres, including history.

 397.003 –Christianity in Modern East Asia
 The story of Christianity’s impact on East Asia is a subject far too rich and complex than can be appreciated by studying its reception in just one country. In China, Japan and Korea, the decision to embrace or reject this foreign religion, considered to be quintessentially “Western,” carried radically transformative implications not only for their individual histories, but also for the modern East Asian region that emerged over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet the reaction to Christianity in each of these countries was far from uniform. Responses ranged from a powerful anti-foreignism that helped lay the basis for a communist revolution (as was the case in China) to the total embrace of Christianity as the foundation of a new, modern form of nationalism (as occurred in South Korea). This difference is all the more interesting when we consider that this reception of Christianity was deeply rooted in East Asia’s earlier exposure to Catholicism in the sixteenth century. Interestingly, in this period it was Japan that went furthest in defining its early modern form in direct opposition to Christianity, a decision that has interesting implications for how we understand its later attempt to form a modern nation-state. Thus with Christianity’s arrival in East Asia we have an event that defies easy categorization either spatially or temporally; in sum, a truly unique opportunity to examine the formation of modern identity in East Asia. But what does it all mean? How have Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, at levels both individual and collective, attempted to make sense of Christianity? And how can we, as students of history, make sense of this interesting encounter and its significance for how we understand modern East Asia? In this course, we will try to answer these questions by examining the East Asian experience of Christianity as it appears in scholarship, fiction and autobiography. In order to contextualize our understanding of this topic, we will also consider some of the theoretical literature, both classic and cutting edge, on the study of religion.