The course traces how anti-Black racism shaped the development of western medicine in the Americas. It will examine how ideas of anti-Blackness shaped the work of health practitioners and the experiences of patients. It will engage the emergence of racial science and scientific racism, and how they contributed to the production of medical knowledge. It will also address the enduring legacies of anti-Black racism in medical practice, and its impact on health inequality.

This lecture offers an introduction to the major themes, critical questions, and pivotal moments in post-emancipation African American history. It traces the social, political, cultural, intellectual, and legal contours of the Black experience in the United States from Reconstruction to the rise of Jim Crow, through the World Wars, Depression, and the Great Migrations, to the long civil rights era and the contemporary period of racial politics. Using a wide variety of texts, images, and creative works, the course situates African American history within broader national and international contexts.

For over two centuries, Lower East Side tenements have housed immigrant and migrant families. Since 1988, the Tenement Museum has researched and told the stories of Jewish, German, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Black and Chinese families, connecting individual family stories to larger historical questions. This course offers the unique opportunity to dive deeply into the research and methodology. What sources can we use to tell the story of "ordinary people," and how do those sources change over time? How do contemporary questions of American identity connect to the stories that we tell?

This seminar will examine the concept of 'plague' from antiquity to the present using works of art and archaeological materials. The course will explore in particular the bioarchaeology of the Black Death, the Justinianic Plague, and other examples of infectious diseases with extremely high mortalities. We will also consider the differing impact of plagues during the medieval, early modern, and modern periods: themes in art; the development of hospitals; the meaning of the word 'plague' and questions of scapegoating throughout history; and changing ideas of disease and medicine.

The Greek experience from Alexander the Great through Cleopatra. An exploration of the dramatic expansion of the Greek world into Egypt and the Near East brought about by the conquests and achievements of Alexander. Study of the profound political, social, and intellectual changes that stemmed from the interaction of new cultures, and the entrance of Rome into the Greek world. Readings include history, biography, and inscriptions.

This course tells the epic story of the people, ideas, and institutions that made the first Chinese empires, ca. third century BCE to the first century BCE. The course looks at the rise and fall of the Qin empire as well as the way Qin institutions and ideas reverberated through the succeeding Han dynasty--and beyond. Course will cover most recent archeological materials and excavated texts (in translation), including ongoing excavations of the terracotta warriors, funerary art, excavated legal codes, legal cases, religious and philosophical texts, and much more. Finally, we ask: did the Qin empire ever end?

This course examines classical Chinese texts and their commentary traditions, with commentary selections and additional readings from the earliest periods through the early twentieth century.

This course will focus on a major intellectual controversy of the 17th and 18th centuries known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Through close readings of seminal texts we will address issues pertaining to the historical significance of the Quarrel, its sociopolitical implications, and the role it played in the cultural and scientific evolution of early modern Europe. We will approach the Quarrel as a critical moment in the prehistory of modernity that resulted in a redefinition of concepts such as mimesis and originality, tradition and innovation, decline and progress.

Technology and society are unthinkable without each other, each provides the means and framework in which the other develops. To explore this dynamic, this course investigates a wide array of questions on the interaction between technology, society, politics, and economics, emphasizing the themes such as innovation and regulation, risk and failure, ethics and expertise. Specific topics covered include nuclear power and disasters, green energy, the development and regulation of the Internet, medical expertise and controversy, intellectual property, the financial crisis, and the electric power grid.

New Schools surveys experiments in para- and counter-institutional higher education over the last century, from Black Mountain to Outer Coast to Deep Springs. Why do experimental schools arise, flourish, fossilize, fail? What are the epistemic, social, and political implications of departures from pedagogical norms? We approach these new schools as historians, critics, and teachers (and students); we study their records, try their methods, and we may well build our own. The seminar responds to the crisis of opportunity in higher education and to the perpetual call for new ways to teach and learn.

Who wrote about politics in the eighteenth century? Why? And for whom? This course will examine the genres and techniques Enlightenment writers invented to talk about politics in spite of official and unofficial censorship. Coined by Montesquieu, the phrase "political writer" can apply to a wide range of writers whose motivations, purposes, and publishing strategies varied in response to different urges and new audiences. The course is based on the study of primary texts, but also historical documents, such as indictments of writers.

This course is an introduction to the history of modern East Asia. We will examine the inter-related histories of China, Japan, and Korea since 1800 and their relationships with the wider world. Major topics include: trade and cultural exchanges, reform and revolutions, war, colonialism, imperialism, and Cold War geopolitics.

An overview of European history since the French Revolution, taking as its major theme the changing role of Europe in the world. It looks at the global legacies of the French and Russian revolutions, and how the Industrial Revolution augmented the power of European states, sometimes through formal and sometimes informal imperialism. How did ideologies like nationalism, liberalism, communism and fascism emerge from European origins and how were they transformed? How differently did Europeans experience the two phases of globalization in the 19th and 20th centuries? Biographies are used as a way of approaching the problem of structural change.

Until 1918, empire was the most common form of rule and political organization. This lecture course focuses on England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the Empire these peoples generated after c.1600, and uses this as a lens through which to examine the phenomenon of empire more broadly. How and how far did this small set of islands establish global predominance and when did this fail? What roles did war, race, religion, economics, culture and migration play in these processes? And how far do the great powers of today retain characteristics of empire?

Africa is both the Mother and Father Continent: it gave birth to humankind as a species and our African ancestors created human history, culture and civilization. Human history developed for hundreds of thousands of years in Africa before it spread worldwide. The depth of Africa's history explains the continent's enormous diversity in terms of genetics, biodiversity, languages, and cultures. This course demonstrates that Africa and its societies were never isolated from the rest of the world. Rather, the continent and its peoples have been and remain at the center of global history.

Capitalism has been the dominant form of social and economic organization since the industrial revolution, defining what we eat, what we wear, and how we work. Since its dawn, capitalism has also fueled discontent and revolution. How does a historical perspective give insights for the future? This course is about the history of economic life around the world, from peasant communities in the nineteenth century to fashionistas and wealth managers in the twenty-first century. It looks especially at the technological, institutional, and intellectual forces governing how people survive, flourish, and struggle.

This course is designed to introduce students to the historical processes and issues that have shaped the lives if Indigenous Americans over the past five centuries. We will explore the ways that the diverse peoples who lived in the Americas constructed different kinds of societies and how their goals and political decisions shaped the lives of all those who would come to inhabit the North American continent. The course requires students to read and analyze historical documents and contemporary literature, and includes a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

A useful introduction for potential history concentrators, particularly those interested in a course focused on the methodology and practice of writing history. Students will immerse themselves in documents from three critical historical events: the Salem witch trials, Native American policies in the West, and the Little Rock school integration crisis. We will stress interpretation of documents, the framing of historical questions, and construction of historical explanations.

A survey of the history of war in the Western world since the late middle ages. Will cover both "operational" military history (strategy, tactics, logistics, mobilization, etc.), and also the relationship of war to broad changes in politics, society and culture.

This course explores Latin America's history from independence to the present. We examine the contentious process of building national polities and economies in a world of expansionist foreign powers. The region's move towards greater legal equality in the 19th century coexisted with social hierarchies related to class, race, gender, and place of origin. We explore how this tension generated stronger, even revolutionary demands for change in the 20th century, while considering how growing U.S. power shaped possibilities for regional transformation. Primary sources foreground the perspectives of elites, subalterns, artists and intellectuals.

History 306 studies all Latinos in the US, from those who have (im)migrated from across Latin America to those who lived in what became US lands. The course covers the historical origins of debates over land ownership, the border, assimilation expectations, discrimination, immigration regulation, intergroup differences, civil rights activism, and labor disputes. History 306 looks transnationally at Latin America's history by exploring shifts in US public opinion and domestic policies. By the end of the course, students will have a greater understanding and appreciation of how Latinos became an identifiable group in the US.

This course is an examination of the major political and economic trends in twentieth-century African history. It offers an interpretation of modern African history and the sources of its present predicament. In particular, we study the foundations of the colonial state, the legacy of the late colonial state (the period before independence), the rise and problems of resistance and nationalism, the immediate challenges of the independent states (such as bureaucracy and democracy), the more recent crises (such as debt and civil wars) on the continent, and the latest attempts to address these challenges from within the continent.

This course is an introduction to the history of modern China, from imperial dynasty to Republic, from Red Guards to red capitalists. Through primary sources in translation, we will explore political and social revolutions, transformations in gender relations and intellectual life, and competing explanations for events such as the rise of the Communist Party and the 1989 democracy movement. Major themes include: the impact of imperialism, tensions between governance and dissent, the rise of nationalism, the political stakes of historical interpretation, and the significance of China's history for its present and future.

The Mughal Empire was one of the great empires of the early modern world known for its wealth and courtly splendor. At the height of their power, the Mughals controlled most of the Indian subcontinent. This class will explore Mughal sovereignty, political control, economic reform, spatial organization, and aesthetics. It will also re-examine the enduring narrative of Mughal imperial decline that frames conventional understandings of the rise of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent in the late 18th century. The lectures and readings for the course will draw on travel narratives, films, chronicles, and courtly literature.

This course aims to provide an introduction to Southeast Asia and its prominent place in global history through a series of encounters in time; from Marco Polo in Sumatra to events in such buzzing cities as Bangkok, Jakarta and Hanoi. For the early modern period we will read various primary sources, before turning to consider a series of diverse colonial impacts across the region (European, American and Asian), and then the mechanisms underpinning the formation of some of the most vibrant, and sometimes turbulent, countries on the world stage.

This course will survey the "Dark Ages" from the end of the Roman Empire to the end of the first millennium (ca. 400-1000 AD), often seen as a time of cultural and political decline, recently even labelled as the "end of civilization". The complex political and social landscape of the Roman Empire, however, had more to offer than just to end. This course will outline how early medieval people(s) in the successor states of the Roman Empire used its resources to form new communities and will suggest to understand the "Dark Ages" as a time of lively social and cultural experimentation, that created the social and political frameworks of Europe.

This course attempts to understand the breadth and variety of the modern Jewish experience through the interpretation of primary and secondary sources.

An examination of the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Empire. Topics include: the invention and unfolding of single-party revolutionary politics, the expansion of the machinery of state, the onset and development of Stalin's personal despotism, the violent attempt to create a noncapitalist society, the experiences and consequences of the monumental war with Nazi Germany, and the various postwar reforms. Special attention paid to the dynamics of the new socialist society, the connection between the power of the state and everyday life, global communism, and the 1991 collapse.

Why did the flourishing United States, by some measures the richest and most democratic nation of its era, fight the bloodiest civil war in the 19th century Western world? How did that war escalate into a revolutionary political struggle that transformed the nation--and then, almost as rapidly, give way to a reactionary backlash? This course will explore the causes, course, and consequences of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, keeping in mind the ways that America's greatest conflict also represented a major event in the history of the global 19th century, and a landmark moment in the making of the modern world.

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality across the 20th century, with emphasis on both regulation and resistance. Topics include early homosexual subcultures; the commercialization of sex; reproduction and its limitation; sex, gender, and war; cold war sexual containment; the feminist movement; conservative backlash; AIDS politics; same-sex marriage; Hillary; and many others.

In our contemporary world, science, technology, and medicine enjoy tremendous cultural and intellectual authority. This class introduces a set of analytical tools historians use to understand the origins and consequences of these ways of knowing, across space and time. We will discuss a variety of ideas and methods that describe the social, cultural, and intellectual conditions of possibility for creating knowledge about the natural world. In addition, the class materials invite students to reflect on the cultural and intellectual constraints that shape how societies determine which knowledge is worth pursuing and why.

From "Chinese opium" to Oxycontin, and from cocaine and "crack" to BiDil, drug controversies reflect enduring debates about the role of medicine, the law, the policing of ethnic identity, and racial difference. This course explores the history of controversial substances (prescription medicines, over-the-counter products, black market substances, psychoactive drugs), and how, from cigarettes to alcohol and opium, they become vehicles for heated debates over immigration, identity, cultural and biological difference, criminal character, the line between legality and illegality, and the boundaries of the normal and the pathological.

The Junior Seminar serves to introduce departmental majors to the tools, methods, and interpretations employed in historical research and writing. This course is compulsory for departmental majors. Seminar topics will tend to be cross-national and comparative.

The history of the Americas is indelibly marked by mass, violent, racialized enslavement. How did this come about - and how can, and should, we write about it? This class will explore different primary sources, consider the ethical issues they raise, and read brilliant recent work by leading historians of the subject. It will focus mainly on the overlooked epicenter of North American slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries: the islands of the British West Indies, Barbados and Jamaica. It is intended to be collaborative, and to strengthen students' ability to write successful junior and senior theses in history or in any other subject.

For the first seventy-five years of U.S. history, anti-slavery parties were confined to the radical fringe of national politics. Yet just six years after it was founded in 1854, the Republican Party became the only third party organization in U.S. history to capture the Presidency.The triumph of this new, avowedly anti-slavery was unprecedented: "the revolution of 1860," some called it. But who exactly were these Republicans? How did they rise so far, so fast, and against such mighty obstacles? And what sort of world did they want to build? Using both primary and secondary sources, this seminar will explore these and other vital questions.

What do you know about Marxism? Public discourse and academia in the U.S. often dismiss Marx and the Marxist method: economic determinism at its worst; simplistically teleological; Marxists ignore race, gender, culture, and the environment; the Communist Manifesto sums it all up; Soviet totalitarianism proved its utopian failure. Is all this true? Let's test it. Let's take Marxism seriously. This course begins with fundamental works by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Preobrazhensky, Trotsky, and Lenin and then expands to study how the social and natural sciences have used the method to explain key processes in their domains.

How have Black healers and communities conceived of health and healing throughout history? Notions of health and healing and healing practices in the "Black Atlantic" (inclusive of Africa and the Americas) from the era of slavery to the present are the focus of this course. Students will engage with primary sources, historical and sociological scholarship, and historical documentaries concerning healing and Black life.

An undergraduate seminar about the urban experiences and representations of the modern city as society. Beginning with the premise that the "soft city" of ideas, myths, symbols, images, and psychic expressions is as important as the "hard city" of bricks and mortar, this course explores the experiences and imaginations of modern cities in different historical contexts. Among the cities we will examine are Manchester, London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Algiers, Bombay, and Hong Kong. The course will use a variety of materials, but will focus particularly on cinema to examine different imaginative expressions of the urban experience.

The course examines the fundamental changes after the end of the Roman empire in the writing of history. We will begin with Roman historians writing about barbarians, and continue to explore how in later centuries 'barbarian' and Christian men of the pen reinterpreted and continued these histories as cultural brokers, blending older Roman history with biblical narratives or stories and myths taken from their own imagined "primordial" pasts. In doing so we will observe that these histories not only reflect the fundamental changes from the late Roman empire to its medieval successor cultures, but also how they shaped these changes.

Catastrophe reveals the fragility of human society. This course examines a series of phenomena--plague, famine, war, revolution, economic depression etc.--in order to reach an understanding of humanity's imaginings of but also resilience to collective crises. We shall look in particular at how political forces such as empire have historically both generated and resisted global disasters. Material dealing with the especially fraught centuries at the transition between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period will be set alongside examples drawn from antiquity as well as our own contemporary era.

This seminar explores the history of Ukraine from the early 20th century through the present day. Though it covers a rather long period, this course is geared towards the contemporary events in the 21st century. We will try to understand how despite a relatively peaceful transition from communism to independence in the 20th century Ukraine became engulfed by a new war with unprecedented destruction. We start this seminar by setting up historical background of Ukrainian territories between the empire in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. We will end the course with discussion and analysis of most recent events in Ukraine.

The ups and downs of the so-called "special relationship" between the United Kingdom and the United States is one of the major themes of the history of the twentieth century, and the one figure who embodies that association in all its many contradictory guises is Winston Churchill, who actually coined the phrase. For Churchill's relationship with the United States was much more nuanced and complex (and, occasionally, hostile) than is often supposed, and it will be the aim of this course to tease out and explore those nuances and complexities (and hostilities), in the broader context of Anglo-American relations.

This class will cover the broad sweep of California History. How did the "Golden State" come to loom so large in the global consciousness? How did it come to wield such economic and political power? Who built the state, and at what cost? As we look for historical answers to those questions, we will discuss topics such as: Indigenous sovereignty, Spanish colonization, the Gold Rush, Pacific immigration, urbanization, Prop 13, agriculture, Silicon Valley, surfing and more.

This course examines historical research and scholarship about the role of empires in creating or remaking global hierarchies and the role that racial and other practices and categories of difference played in shaping the history of empires. The period we cover arcs from the clustered formation of Mughal, Ottoman, Qing, and Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires starting in the fifteenth century to the connected crises of the 1850s.

This intensive reading seminar situates recent monographs from a variety of disciplines against the backdrop of extant scholarly literature and broader intellectual debates that continue to shape the field of Middle East studies, in general, and Middle East history, in particular.

This course explores readings in the history of Latin America, covering both South America and the Caribbean from the Colonial period to modern day. Topics include African slavery in Latin America, abolitionism, politics in Latin America, labor history, and U.S.-Latin American relations.

This course introduces and engages with historiographical questions central to our understanding of the Byzantine Empire from its inauguration in the fourth century to its fall in the fifteenth century. Sample sources - available in original and translation - are examined and analyzed using a variety of current methodological approaches. We consider aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural and intellectual history. The main areas of focus in a specific year will depend on the interests of the group. The aim is to provide students with concrete tools that will inform and strengthen their own research and teaching.

How should we think about the history of language and communication, especially in light of the digital revolution of our own time? This course considers the different themes, approaches, and conclusions of recent scholars of history and related fields. Reading and discussion of one or two books each week. All readings in English. No prior knowledge required.

This seminar explores the history of Britain and its empire after 1700 from the broader and necessary perspectives of global history. Topics include the complexities and tensions of British and Irish unions, industrial, urban and cultural revolutions, citizenship and constitutions, warfare, empire, ideologies and race, and the shifting nature of imperial linkages and decline.

This seminar introduces students to some of the major themes and debates in the history and historiography of modern Eastern Europe. The focus of the class is upon Eastern Europe generally defined as a space in- and between the Russian and the Austrian Empires and territories that today constitute Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. Readings include scholarly monographs and primary sources but the focus is upon recent studies that have influenced the field.

A reading seminar focusing on race and ethnicity in modern American politics and society. Readings in topics including segregation, immigration, citizenship, assimilation, World War II, Cold War, the civil rights movement, economic rights, Black Power, mass incarceration, white backlash, etc.

This seminar guides students through the process of producing a scholarly research paper. Over the course of the semester, each student produces an article-length paper that could serve as the basis of a future publication. We discuss developing topics, doing and organizing archival research, crafting arguments and interventions, and writing effective, compelling academic prose. We also explore the broader settings and infrastructures of our scholarly work, including publishing a journal article and peer review.

This course is intended to guide U.S. history PhD students through the research and writing of a scholarly paper. During the semester, each student writes one article-length research paper that might serve as the basis for a later publication. Along the way we discuss the historian's craft: how to go about initial research, create an argument, and write engaging narratives. Chiefly, students work closely with each other as well as with the instructor, offering comments and suggestions from the selection of a topic to revising the final draft.

Fourth in a sequence of core courses in United States history, this course is designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to the literature and problems of American history since World War I.

The seminar introduces graduate students to central problems, themes, concepts and methodologies in the history of science and neighboring fields. We explore past and recent developments including the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Actor-Network Theory, the study of practice and experimentation, the role of quantification, the concept of paradigms, gender, sexuality and the body, environmental history of science, the global history of science, and the role of labor and industry, amongst others.

HUM 248 will introduce students to the multi-faceted literary and cultural production of a region that at one point stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indus Valley. Starting at the tail end of the Abbasid Empire up to the rise of nation-states in the 20th century, students will learn of the different power dynamics that shaped the region's diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and ultimately national communities, and their worldviews. Readings will include literary works written originally in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew.

Between the 700s and 1000s, pirates known as Vikings raided much of Europe. Some were linked to merchant communities trading in Central Asia, while others joined diaspora groups that settled the North Atlantic. They made their world through various means--texts, images, artifacts, and behaviors. In this course, students will accomplish parallel work, guided by the principle that making is best studied by doing. Students will learn how Viking-Age peoples made their world and consider how we recreate and represent that world today. This course includes travel to Denmark during spring recess.

This course, designed as a seminar, will trace the ways in which humans have dug into the ground in order to find the material remains of the past and then interpreted what they found. We will look at efforts of many kinds: discoveries made by chance as well as those made by deliberate searches; discoveries inspired by dreams and visions as well as those motivated by formal surveys; discoveries of the relics of saints, Christian and other, as well as the remains of ancient civilizations. We will examine our subjects' ideas and their practices, and set both into context.

Trauma has become a part of our everyday lives with the pandemic, mass shootings, police brutality, etc. What is the role of researchers, reporters, filmmakers, and museum workers in mitigating the effects of trauma on individuals and communities? Throughout this course, students will learn how to conduct trauma informed interviews, interpret, and present their findings in a safe and respectful way that can facilitate healing rather than increase the pain. By the end of the course, students will be expected to develop their own interview-based research project.

Introduction to the Judeo-Arabic documents of the Cairo Geniza, including personal and business letters of the tenth through thirteenth centuries. Students learn the Hebrew alphabet, the peculiarities of middle Arabic, diplomatic technique, research methods, manuscript paleography, digital tools and the existing literature.

This course explores how enslaved and free Black people created and sustained religious communities in the United States during the eras of slavery and freedom. It explores the resonances of African traditions and the roles of conjure, Islam and Christianity in sustaining Black people through slavery and postemancipation transformations. The course challenges the paradigm of Black religion as always pointing toward freedom and explores how the transition in status from enslaved to free was reflected in and influenced by Black religious practices and communities.

The course will teach core principles of the life sciences through a set of key questions that biologists have sought to answer over the past 200 years. We will read historic scientific publications, discussing the basic biology at stake as well as what enabled each scientist to see something new. In addition, we will schedule several hands-on sessions with relevant materials. By situating key findings in their place and time we show how science is an inquiry-based, concrete, and ongoing activity, rather than codified and unchanging knowledge. Topics include cell theory, evolution, experimental embryology, genetics, and molecular development.