Courses in History (Division 390)

Fall Term, 1998 (September 8-December 21, 1998)

300-Level Courses and Above are for Juniors and Seniors

308/Religion 308. The Christian Tradition in the West from New Testament to Early Reformation. (3). (Excl).
See Religion 308. Cost:3 (Tentler)
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318. Europe in the Era of Total War, 1870-1945. (4). (SS).
In 1945 Europe lay in ruins. Entire cities had been leveled by the destructive powers of modern warfare, and the cultural, political, and social norms of the pre-war world had been shattered. What made such violence possible, and how did ordinary men and women experience it? History 318 will explore the ideological, political, economic, social, and cultural forces that both caused and were destroyed by the savagery of the early 20th century. We will not only study the origins and consequences of World Wars I and II, but also the ways in which everyday life was transformed during this turbulent era. We will look at Europe from the inside (by studying relations of class, gender, and nationality), and from the outside (by tracing the ideology and practice of imperialism). Grading will be based on several in-class quizzes, active participation in a discussion section, and two take-home essay assignments. WL:1 (Porter)
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320. Britain, 1901-1945: Culture and Politics. (3). (Excl).
This course will examine British culture and politics from the death of Queen Victoria through the Second World War, with particular attention to the nature and structure of politics and the state; the First World War and the processes through which the war experience of mass participation and trauma were understood; cultural and political debates in the interwar years; the growth of mass media; gender; the empire and colonial subjects; the Great Depression; British politics during the rise of Nazi and fascist governments in Europe; and the experience of the Blitz and World War II. Students will be asked to think critically about the various means by which national and personal stories are constituted, repressed, re-imagined, and deployed in debates about the meaning and uses of the past. Readings and other course materials will include autobiographies, novels, films, and photographs, and class sessions will include extensive discussion. No previous knowledge of British history will be assumed or required. (Israel)
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332/REES 395/Poli. Sci. 395/Slavic 395/Soc. 392. Survey of Russia: The Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Successor States. (4). (SS). Laboratory fee ($10) required.
See Russian and East European Studies 395. (Rosenberg)
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334/MENAS 334/AAPTIS 364. Selected Topics in Near and Middle Eastern Studies. (3). (Excl).
See Middle Eastern and North African Studies 334. (Cole)
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346/NR&E 356. Environmental History and the Tropical World. (3). (Excl).
For Fall Term, 1998, this course is offered jointly with RC Social Science 306. (Tucker)
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363. U.S. Foreign Policy and International Politics Since World War II. (4). (Excl).
In this course students will explore contemporary international history by reading the works of some leading scholars in the field and discussing why they differ. Classes will focus on the conflict and cooperation of the U.S. with other states in the Cold War, decolonization, and regional crises. But lectures will also analyze how non-state actors, cross-border migration, new means of communication, and global markets are transforming the international system as a whole. Each week we will study a period in post-war U.S. diplomatic history, piecing together the story of Americans' experiences abroad. At the same time we will tackle a broader theme that is of particular importance in the period but will also prompt us to consider how this history has created the world in which we live. The readings will reflect the contested nature and continuing relevance of these issues by including differing accounts and original documents from America and abroad. (Connelly)
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368/Amer. Cult. 342/WS 360. History of the Family in the U.S. (4). (SS).
This course aims to help students gain a perspective on the contemporary family by studying the development of this important institution in the American past. Particular emphasis will be placed on changing attitudes toward and experiences of sex roles, sexuality, childrearing, work patterns, and relationships between men, women, and children. We will explore race, ethnicity, and class; cover economic developments as well as shifting conceptions of the role of the state; and ask about the impact of these factors on family life. We will want to examine how much the family has changed over time and try to project, on the basis of historical evidence, whither the family is going. Cost:3 (Morantz-Sanchez)
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370/WS 370. Women in American History to 1870. (3). (Excl).
This course is an introduction to the history of American women - as a group, as individuals, and as members of different classes, and racial, regional, and ethnic communities. Using work, politics, and sexuality as organizing concepts, it focuses particularly on the significance of gender in determining women's experiences from the early seventeenth century to 1870. Special attention is paid to initial and continuing encounters of Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and African-Americans; to evolving constructions of "womanhood" and their significance for different groups of women; to the meaning of religious movements, wars, economic transformations, and demographic shifts for women's individual and collective efforts to determine the course of their own histories.
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381. History of the Jews from the Moslem Conquests to the Spanish Expulsion. (3). (Excl).
This course will survey major trends in medieval Jewish society under both Islam and western Christendom. Broadly, the course will fall into three parts: the Jews of the Muslim world in the Geonic period, the rise and decline of Spanish Jewry, and the rise and decline of the Jews of northern Europe. It will look at the impact on Jewish society of the Crusades, the Reconquista, the emergence of the mendicant orders, the Black Death, and the Spanish expulsion. It will examine the interaction of Jewish society with the majority culture at various junctures, as well as changing cultural trends within Jewish society. The distinctive religious climate of the medieval period will serve as a unifying theme throughout. Requirements for the course: midterm and final examinations. Cost:2 WL:1
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384. Modern Jewish History 1880-1948. (3). (Excl).
This course surveys the history of the Jewish people in Europe, America, and the Middle East over the last one hundred years. The course begins with the rise of virulent forms of semitism at the end of the nineteenth century and examines how this undermined Jewish assimilation in Western Europe and dashed all hope for emancipation in Eastern Europe. The course then considers the various ways in which Jews responded to this new crisis: nationalism, revolutionary socialism, emigration, assimilationist defense activities, and conversion. The last third of the course is devoted to the drama and often tragic events of the twentieth century that totally changed the face of world Jewry – the Bolshevik revolution, the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel, and the emergence of the American Jewish community as the largest and most secure community in the history of the diaspora. There will be a midterm and a 10-12 page paper. Cost:3 WL:3
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391. Topics in European History. (3). (Excl). May be elected for credit twice.
Section 001 – Visions of the Past. This course rests on the proposition that most of what most people have ever known about the past has come from deliberated aesthetic forms such as monuments, paintings, novels, and films. Many more Americans have read or seen Gone with the Wind than have ever read a history of the Civil War; films like Schindler's List have been the primary means by which Americans and Europeans have conceptualized the destruction of European Jewry. This course, therefore, will examine how and why history is represented in the various aesthetic forms, and how those representations have created our sense of what is important in history. We shall read a half dozen novels and plays, see several films, look at a variety of art and architecture, and listen to several musical forms. Classes will be lecture and discussion, and there will be one or two papers besides a midterm and final. (Marwil)
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393. Topics in U.S. and Latin American History. (3). (Excl). May be elected for credit twice.
Section 001 – U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History. America, one historian has remarked, is a nation of words. In this lecture course we will examine some of the words and concepts that have been central within American culture from pre-colonial times to the present and how they have been articulated, debated, instantiated, and used at a variety of times and by a variety of people. Our approach, derived from the cultural history of ideas, will examine not just the world of thinking, but how those thoughts get translated into doing and making, and in the process are themselves transformed. Our reading will include such major figures as Jonathan Edwards, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William James, Daniel Bell, and Toni Morrison, as well as a host of less well known writers, scientists, political thinkers, popular commentators and the like. We will focus throughout, however, as much on how the words are used – in producing arguments, laws, social movements, consumer goods, and machines – and on the technologies that make them available, as on the language itself. (Carson)
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394. Reading Course. Open only to history concentrators by written permission of instructor. Only 12 credits of History 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, and 399 may be counted toward a concentration plan in history. (1-4). (Excl). (INDEPENDENT). May be repeated for credit only with permission of the Associate Chairman.
Individual reading program under the direction of a staff member.
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396. History Colloquium. History concentrators are required to elect Hist. 396 or 397. Only 12 credits of History 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, and 399 may be counted toward a concentration plan in history. (4). (SS). May be repeated for a total of twelve credits.
Section 001 – Postwar Japan: History and Memory. Beginning with the surrender to Allied Forces in 1945, Japan was transformed from a country devastated by total war into an economic world power. This course explores the complex and often troubled path of that transformation through the medium of different forms of history ranging from autobiography and oral history to more conventional historical narratives. We will focus on key themes in Japan's postwar history – the aftermath of war, the Occupation, Cold War diplomacy, high-growth economics, citizen movements, the "managed society," minority politics, consumer culture – as they have been variously remembered and historicized. Students will be expected to prepare and discuss weekly reading assignments, write and revise several short papers during the course of the term, and complete one longer final paper. Cost:3 WL:2, The history department will create a waitlist; do not attend the first class meeting unless the instructor has admitted you to the course. (Pincus)

Section 002 – Gender, Science, and Revolution. In this class we will investigate the ways in which the construction of gender plays an integral role in the construction of knowledge about – and power over – the natural and human worlds. We will explore how gender, far from being a marginal and excluded perspective, is of central importance in understanding the history of such ideas as liberty, equality, justice and truth. In doing this we will try to understand how both knowledge and power were constructed around practices of exclusion, repression and resistance, and how gender roles and gender identities were symmetrically defined in relationship to the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge and political practice. In particular, we will focus our gaze on the early modern period (the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries); our goal will be to try to understand the ways in which gender identity was both a cause and a consequence of political and scientific practice. Seen from this perspective, revolutionary attempts to redefine social and epistemological order (e.g., the Scientific and French Revolutions) will provide us with an analytical and historical framework which will allow us to see processes of social construction normally hidden from view. Our readings will range widely in both primary literature (e.g., Machiavelli, Bacon, Montesquieu, Diderot and de Sade), and on more recent commentators (e.g., Haraway, Merchant, Schiebinger, Fox-Keller, Biagioli, Landes and Outram). The course will be conducted as a seminar, and will be writing intensive. (Wintroub)

Section 003 – Towards an Intellectual History of Social Theory in Europe, 1750-1980. This course is intended to provide students with a chance to reflect on some of the larger social and intellectual structures underpinning the development of social theory as an intellectual and (ultimately) political pursuit in modern Europe. Hence, premodern political theorists tended to highlight the primacy of political order when analyzing state-society relations. Creating political order was thus essential to avoiding anarchy and civil strife, and the sole means by which society might acquire some shape and coherence. From the turn of the 18th century forward, however, theorists began to view the social as potentially self-regulating, thanks to the human capacity for rational and self-interested behavior. As the bonds linking society and state loosened, politics came to be seen as involving some kind of collective and conscious choice, a vision of human agency and possibility which, in turn, affected the shape and stakes of the entirely new discipline – social theory – that emerged at this crucial moment. Readings include Bourdieu, Mill, Comte, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Rousseau. (Downs)

Section 004 – The Idea of Universal Law: European Theories and Regional. This course will examine closely theories about law developed in Europe from the late 18th to the 20th centuries and the application of these theories in different national settings. In the first part of the course, we will read texts by Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, and other theorists and consider their implications for social change. The second part of the course focuses on the cases of Russia and Brazil, examining the efforts made by jurists to transform their societies through the law and the practice of legality by ordinary people. This section will highlight actual criminal trials, and students will have the opportunity to reenact these trials in class. The final part of the course is devoted to analysis of students' research on an issue in legal theory or practice in the nation of their choice. This section will culminate with a mini-conference on law and legal history featuring students' research and commentary. WL:2 (Burbank, Caulfield)

Section 005 – Plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. This colloquium will consider the question of disease in premodern European history by focusing on the Black Death of 1347/8 but considering also the cycles of plague that then regularly struck Europe until the eighteenth century. Apart from the demographic and social effects of the plague, some of the questions to be considered are: (1) medical treatment and the state of medical knowledge during the period; (2) developing ideas of hygiene and public health, along with the policy and politics of quarantine; (3) posited relationships between diseases of the body and diseases of the soul; (4) artistic and cultural responses to plague. Readings will be a mix of original sources (e.g., plague chronicles and diaries, religious and medical tracts, public health legislation and debates) and of analytic works which try to assess the effects of terrifying cycles of plague on the society of Europe and upon its religious beliefs and cultural practices. During the course of the colloquium, students will write a number of short papers. (Hughes)
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397. History Colloquium. History concentrators are required to elect Hist. 396 or 397. Only 12 credits of History 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, and 399 may be counted toward a concentration plan in history. (4). (HU). May be repeated for a total of twelve credits.
Section 001 – Facing Death. Philosophical and religious thinking about death in western culture (the fear of death, preparation for death, the good death, death in the scheme of divine justice) from the Old Testament and the Greeks to the seventeenth century (or possibly to the twentieth). The reading list varies from year to year, but it is always selected from the major works and authors of the western tradition, such as the Old and New testaments, Plato, the Stoics, Augustine, the Ars moriendi, Thomas à Kempis, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Montaigne, John Donne, Voltaire, Freud, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Geoffrey Gorer, Ignace Lepp, and Viktor Frankl. The course meets for one three-hour session weekly: the first two hours will be devoted to discussion of the reading, and participation is an essential part of the course. The third hour is to be an informal lecture in preparation for the next week's reading. Students will be graded on class participation, occasional quizzes, and four essays, based on the assigned readings. The first three essays will be 3 to 6 pages each. The fourth essay (10 to 12 pages) will be a synthetic exercise: students will be encouraged to find topics that will allow them to draw on relevant reading from the whole term. Cost is difficult to predict but it should be below $100; how much below depends on the Internet. (Tentler)

Section 002 – The World of Lady Nijo: 14th Century Japan. The Confessions of Lady Nijo, our main text, is a fascinating window to a remarkable life of an aristocratic woman living in the age of Mongol invasions and an Emperor's rebellion. Lady Nijo's account of her liaisons with emperors and ranking nobles, rivalry with other palace women, unwelcome pregnancy and childbirth, and interactions with provincial warriors, all lead us to reconsider the conventional understanding of medieval Japan from a fresh perspective. We will learn about the historical, religious, cultural and political dimensions of Lady Nijo's time, including the place of Buddhism and Shinto, the interrelatedness of sex and politics, and the meaning of status and gender differences. The question of politics and privacy in premodern Japan, and the impact of war on gender relations are examples of topics for class discussion. The course is a colloquium which requires the students' active class participation and completion of essays. No prerequisites. Cost:2 WL:4 (Tonomura)

Section 003 – Topics in the Modern History of India. This colloquium will examine aspects of the history of India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on issues of gender, caste, class, and nationalism.

Section 006 – Revolution and Religion in Modern Iran. This colloquium treats the involvement in politics of the Shi'ite Muslim clergy in modern Iran. Topics covered include the Safavid Empire, the Babi movement, the protests against the concessions to British entrepreneurs such as Reuter, the Tobacco Revolt, the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, the Mosaddeq oil nationalization crisis of the early 1950s, and the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 and its aftermath. Attention will be given to Shi'ite thought - theological, millenarian, and social. No special background is required, except a grounding in history as a discipline. Short precis of the readings and a 10-page term paper are required. The professor will cover some general ground, but the class will be oriented to discussion. Cost:3 (Cole)
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399. Honors Colloquium, Senior. Honors student, Hist. 398, and senior standing. Only 12 credits of History 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, and 399 may be counted toward a concentration plan in history. (1-6). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.
This course is a workshop for thesis writers. It concentrates on practical and theoretical problems of research and writing with special reference to methodological questions. (Spector)
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100-199

200-299

300-399

400-599

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