This course explores African American history from the Atlantic slave trade up to the Civil War. It is centrally concerned with the rise of and overthrow of human bondage, and how they shaped the modern world. Africans were central to the largest and most profitable forced migration in world history. They shaped new identities and influenced the contours of American politics, law, economics, culture, and society. The course considers the diversity of experiences in this formative period of nation-making. Race, class, gender, region, religion, labor, and resistance animate important themes in the course.

This course will explore the intersections between commemoration, heritage, social and political movements, and urban (re)evelopment. Through field trips to local institutions, museums, historic sites, and community groups planning for the upcoming Semiquincentennial, we will examine how Americans have mobilized the memory and meaning of Revolution to press for greater political rights, challenge commemorative projects, and launch revolutionary practices of memorialization. Students will develop a digital exhibition exploring past and present struggles to define the Revolution that have fueled the region's commemorative and urban landscapes.

This seminar will examine the historical concept of 'plague' from antiquity to the present using works of art, archaeological contexts, and bioarchaeology. Students will also learn the scientific principles behind each disease outbreak, including how the pathogen was first discovered; how it is currently understood by modern infectious disease experts; and how it functions within the human body and as part of ecosystems. The course will explore in particular the three pandemics of Y. pestis, malaria, and smallpox; the social impact of plagues during the ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern periods; and the history of medicine.

The social, political, and cultural history of ancient Greece from ca.750 B.C. through the time of the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.). Special attention is paid to the emergence of the distinctively Greek form of political organization, the city state, and to democracy, imperialism, social practices, and cultural developments. Emphasis is placed on study of the ancient sources, methods of source analysis, and historical reasoning.

What philosophy of history belongs to Greek and Roman historians? How did the ancient historians themselves ask this question? Was their theory and practice as marked with change as has been European and American historiography since the 18th century? Finally, why did some contemporary practice turn back to classical narrative historiography? This course will cover major Greek and Roman historians, ancillary classical theory, and some pertinent contemporary philosophers of history.

This discussion-based seminar will examine the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of food and dining in the ancient Roman world. This course will approach food in the Roman world through a variety of sources, literary and archaeological, and will push students to consider what we can learn about Roman society and culture through the lens of food.

The Augustan age is generally considered to be a golden age of Roman art, literature, and culture. This course will examine the time-period between the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BC) and the death of his heir Augustus (AD 14) from a variety of perspectives, with special focus on politics, religion, and culture. The political and religious climate of this age will serve as background both to the transition to a system of one-man rule and to the many cultural developments in literature and the arts, especially in the city of Rome itself.

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?

The seminar introduces the manuscript culture of ancient and medieval China from the 4th century BCE to the advent of printing in around 1000 CE. We discuss the creation, uses, purposes, and the visual and material aspects of writings on bamboo, wood, silk, and paper. Examining texts buried in ancient tombs, left in watchtowers, or stored in desert caves, we look at writings to accompany the dead; personal letters; calligraphic masterpieces; copies of the classics; and carriers of medical, legal, administrative, or mantic knowledge cherished by the cultural and political elite and soldiers and peasants alike. With two museum visits.

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. Readings are selected from the three ritual classics (so-called San Li), historical writings, and excavated manuscripts relating to ritual, broadly construed. Secondary readings selected from the theory of ritual and the use of ritual texts and commentaries in Chinese intellectual, social, and cultural history.

In this course we will see how texts have been written, made into books and read in the West, from ancient Greece to modern America. We will read primary sources and modern case studies and make a number of visits to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone, where we can examine manuscripts and early books. Through the semester we will track the ways in which the experience of reading has changed - and remained the same - over the centuries.

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.

This seminar in history and documentary film explores personal narrative and how individual experience contributes to profound social change. We study 1960s youth through oral history, archival research, ethnography and journalism. Trenton NJ is the case study. Themes include: civil rights and Black power; immigration and migration; student uprisings and policing; education; gender and sexuality; churches and city institutions; sports; work, class and neighborhood; politics, law and government. Using documentary narrative, the course asks how a new generation of storytellers will shape public conversations and policy.

Ruled from Constantinople (ancient Byzantium and present-day Istanbul), the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire by over a millennium. This state on the crossroads of Europe and Asia was Roman in law, civil administration, and military tradition, but predominantly Greek in language, and Eastern Christian in religion. The course explores one of the greatest civilisations the world has known, tracing the experiences of its majority and minority groups through the dramatic centuries of the Islamic conquests, Iconoclasm, and the Crusades, until its final fall to the Ottoman Turks.

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.

This course will focus on the history of the later Roman Empire, a period which historians often refer to as "Late Antiquity." We will begin our class in pagan Rome at the start of the third century and end it in Baghdad in the ninth century: in between these two points, the Mediterranean world experienced a series of cultural and political revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. We will witness civil wars, barbarian invasions, the triumph of Christianity over paganism, the fall of the Western Empire, the rise of Islam, the Greco-Arabic translation movement and much more.

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.

This course offers a chronological and topical overview of one of the world's most diverse and contested spaces. Sketching the deep linkages between East Africa, the Subcontinent and Southeast Asia, short focused readings and in-depth precepts will highlight such issues as the spread of Buddhism and Islam, the rise of colonialism, the importance of nationalist and third-worldist movements, the struggles for exclusive ethno-religious enclaves and the consequences for diasporic communities with ever-tightening links to the Americas, Europe and Australasia.

An introduction to the history of Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict from the late-nineteenth century to the present.

The course focuses on digital history as a way to integrate different unconventional and conventional sources and approaches especially oral, spatial (maps), images (photos) and netbased data. Digital history allows for the combination of, for example, spatial history (through the use of Geographic Information Systems or GIS) with oral history in a single multi-dimensional, multimedia, and interactive platform (a blog or webpage). Oral history can be used to recapture the history of individuals, groups, and phenomena that conventional written sources (written by the elite) have erased.

A rigorous introduction for potential history majors, 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, the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, and the Little Rock school integration crisis. We will stress interpretation of documents, the framing of historical questions, and construction of historical explanations.

This course explores how new developments in science, medicine, and technology shaped European cultures during three crucial centuries, from 1400-1700. During this period, knowledge of nature was transformed by the rediscovery of ancient texts, the invention of new technologies, and encounters with new lands and peoples. Political upheaval, religious Reformation, and the expansion of global commerce and colonization also affected how science was carried out, and by whom. From medicine and mechanics to alchemy and magic, this course examines the interplay between natural knowledge and human culture.

This course will introduce students to technology in U.S. history, from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century. Throughout, we will consider how people designed, made, and used technologies in order to accomplish work, to organize society, and to make sense of their world. Warfare and agriculture; transportation and communication networks; plantations and factories; media, money, and information systems; engineers and other kinds of technologists: all will be explored, examined, and analyzed in order to understand the role of technology in making the nation.

From a relatively poor, multi-religious, and politically-fragmented land during the Middle Ages, Spain became in the early modern period one of the biggest empires in world history. This introductory course offers a historical overview of the Spanish empire, from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its eventual dissolution in the nineteenth century. We will examine the nature of Spanish imperial rule, the societies and cultures that were forged in the process, and the asymmetric connections that it facilitated between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

In lectures, to provide my interpretation (and a conspectus of differing interpretations) of the civilization of Western Europe, 11th-14th century; by readings, to introduce students to the variety of surviving sources; through the paper, to give students a taste of doing medieval history.

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

The history of contemporary America, with particular attention to political, social and technological changes. Topics will include the rise of a new conservative movement and the reconstitution of liberalism, the end of the divisive Cold War era and the rise of an interconnected global economy, revolutionary technological innovation coupled with growing economic inequality, a massive influx of immigrants coupled with a revival of isolationism and nativism, a revolution in homosexual rights and gender equality coupled with the rise of a new ethos of "family values."

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 was there an American Revolution? How revolutionary was it, and for whom? Why did it end with the creation of a fractious independent republic, an "empire of liberty" rooted in slavery? This class explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution, from the Seven Years War through the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Lectures, readings, and precepts will trace the ideas and experiences of the many peoples whose lives intersected with the United States' struggle for independence: female and male, Black and white and Native American, free and enslaved, American and British, Loyalist and Patriot.

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.

This course examines ebbs and flows in U.S. drug policy, and how issues of race and identity inform the creation, implementation, impact, and dismantling of substance control policy. From "Chinese opium" in the 19th c. to "Hillbilly heroin" (as OxyContin was once labeled) and from "crack" cocaine to menthol cigarettes and marijuana, we examine the forces shaping drug policies, how policies are transformed, why they change, and what drug laws reveal about society. We also examine how social, political, and economic circumstances shape drug policies, and how the US built a vast system governing people and the substances they can and cannot use.

What is life? This course looks at how scientists have answered that question since 1750, while considering the cultural context and social impact of the biological knowledge they generated. We will pay particular attention to how specific organisms, materials, and instruments have altered the course of research into and conceptions of life. Topics include natural history, cell theory, eugenics and its relationship to genetics, evolution and Darwin's contribution of natural selection, the changing understanding of race in life science, ecology, molecular biology, biotechnology, and genomics/proteomics.

This course examines the deep histories behind contemporary issues in Indigenous North America. In this class we will dive into the past to uncover the policies, laws, experiences of Native peoples that have shaped our contemporary moment. Each week we'll focus on a specific recent headline case in native America. Throughout this course students will be asked to think about the coverage of Indigenous issues, and to focus on what gets left out of these stories. Over the course of the class, students will select their own topics to research and work on these investigative stories throughout the course.

This seminar will examine this global history of anticolonial, anti-racial, and postcolonial thought during the twentieth century. We will read the works by key 20th century anticolonial thinkers and activists - Mahatma Gandhi, WEB Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Edward Said, and others. Will read these historical texts critically and ask: How do they understand colonialism and its relationship between colonial domination and race, culture, and economy? How do they understand colonialism as a global system? How do they think of liberation and world transformation?

In an age of science, reason, and empiricism, how do we understand thriving beliefs in the supernatural and the occult? What is the history of the relationship between the supernatural, structures of power, and acts of transgression? To explore this terrain in the past and at present, we will draw upon theoretical works, histories, and anthropological studies focusing on supernatural actors--witches, vampires, jinns, and yoginis--from around the world. We will turn attention to the emotional states and regimes of power generated by encounters with supernature--fear, wonder, and reverence--in early modern and modern lifeworlds and cultures.

This course will explore the history of political propaganda in the context of mass politics, international rivalries, colonialism, the rise of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. We will discuss the use (and abuse) of visual images and verbal messages, channels of delivering them to audiences, and their reactions. The topics for comparative and cross-cultural study of mass persuasion will include avant-garde art and propaganda, the cult of political leaders in totalitarian regimes, propaganda of hate and genocide, new media and terrorism, "weaponization" of information in international politics, and more.

Few political gestures are as ubiquitous or powerful as the appeal to our common "humanity." But a politics based on the human self (or, as it once was, "man") has often been accused of harboring limitations or prejudices that undercut its claim to be universal. More recently, the priority accorded to humans has been brought into question by studies into the cognitive and emotive capabilities of other animals, and developments in computing. In this course, we will examine the emergence of the human self as a master concept of politics, and we will also track the criticisms made by feminists, anti-colonial writers, and animal rights activists.

This course explores the history of political dissent in Russia from the 1860s to 2023. We will discuss the emergence of revolutionary populism and terrorism, the specificity of Russian Marxism and the role of the worker and peasant movement in the revolutions of 1917. The class also includes discussion of Soviet dissident movement and the forms of protest and non-conformism in contemporary Russia.

This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the origins of Roman law in the ancient world, and end with the rediscovery of Roman law in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries. Over the course of the intervening millennium, we will focus on pivotal moments and key texts in the development of the legal cultures of the Roman and post-Roman worlds of Western Eurasia. Our goal will be to think about how law and law-like norms both shape and are shaped by society and social practices.

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 seminar examines the history of antislavery movements and struggles from the end of the seventeenth century to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery in 1865. With intensive reading in an array of primary sources, including speeches, manifestos, private letters, poetry, and more, supplemented with pertinent secondary readings, it inquires into how antislavery fitfully moved from the margins of American politics and culture to become, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a mass political movement that won national political power and sparked the Civil War.

Throughout WWII, over 16 million Americans served in uniform, while countless others contributed to the war effort on the Homefront. We will delve into the remarkable transformation of American society from the Great Depression to the Cold War, as the country rallied to fight what was considered a "just" war. However, we will also tackle the moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding the notion of a "good war" and who truly benefited from it. The class will be taught from different perspectives including the women, African Americans, and Navajo who mobilized during the war and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in concentration camps.

From renowned artists to everyday artisans, cultural history provides a lens to view complex formation of societies, ideas, and identities. Spanning Egypt to Ethiopia this course takes the Nile Valley as its scope to break down boundaries between the Middle East and Africa. Rather, it is a useful place to examine the fluidity of cultural production, how it can be localized, nationalized, and globalized. Students will examine forces of imperialism, capitalism, nationalism and explore how 20th century states, empires, and individuals mobilized culture to create and challenge national identity and to articulate their own sense of place.

In this upper-level undergraduate seminar, we will explore the making of the medicine of mind and brain, paying particular attention to the complex relationship between biological investigations of the brain and subjective experience of mental and neurological illness. We will look at patient memoirs; therapeutic regimes (including drugs and somatic treatments); psychiatric classification; trauma; mind-body medicine; the neuroscientific identification of brainhood with personhood; and anti-psychiatry, amongst others.

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 mid 20th century.

The littoral of the Great Sea has long been viewed as a major place of contact, conflict and exchange for groups belonging to the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This course approaches the encounters of different religions and ethnicities in such a manner as to introduce students not only to the classic historiography on the subject, but also to the main controversies and debates now current in scholarship. Our analysis and evaluation of the connections that developed between individuals and communities will focus on the High Middle Ages.

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.

Reading and research seminar on thirteenth-century France.

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 class critically approaches the idea of a trans-regionally or globally constituted early modern age. It does so by reading methodological interventions as well as studies that advocate, exemplify, complicate, or challenge the global approach. The course engages with the idea of pre-modern and non-European cosmopolitanisms as well as exchanges between South Asia on the one hand and other world regions on the other. It reflects on the use of terms like "encounter", "circulation", "flow", and "network" in this historiography with the aim of exploring the roots, stakes, possibilities, and limits of the idea of an early modern world.

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 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.

This readings course focuses on the central problems engaged by recent scholarship on Indigenous and Western American history. The seminar explores topics including borders, migration, slavery, and politics from the 17th-20th centuries.

A comprehensive introduction to the literature and problems of American history from the Era of Good Feelings through Reconstruction.

This course offers an historical survey through the medicine and science of the brain - from psychoanalysis (and a little before) to modern neuroimaging. It pays particular attention to the ways in which the mind and brain sciences have played a role in "making up people" (Hacking). Amongst others, it examines the birth of the asylum; the psyche in the secularizing politics of 19th c. France; how a discourse of nerves fed into a discourse on modernity; the role of the laboratory in the formation of 19th c. psychological sciences; the origins and reception of psychoanalysis; and the various cultures of contemporary neuroscience.

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.

The course introduces some major works in the history of computing, digital media, and information technologies, with particular attention to transformative and methodologically important texts, often at loggerheads with one another. Students are likewise introduced to some major current works in the history of technology and media studies. The course along the way provides an outline of the development of computing from the late nineteenth century. Authors include Kelty, Kline, Medina, Seaver, Haigh, Chun, Brunton, Mahoney, Nakamura, Nooney, Turner, Philip, Lécuyer, Rankin, Hicks, Diaz, among others.

The Middle Ages was a period of far-ranging travel, long-distance entanglements, and cultural hybridity. This course will study how geographers and travelers - including eco-travelers like crops and disease - encountered a world grown smaller through empires, trade, and migration, ca. 750-1250 CE. By gathering texts, artifacts, and art from regions often studied separately, this course will test the possibilities for defining a "global Middle Ages" and what that means for our understanding of globalization today. Includes visits from outside experts and trips to special collections.

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.

The 1960s was a decade of dramatic changes around the world, and Latin America was not an exception. In January 1959, the Cuban Revolution triumphed and made a significant impact on the island, the Western Hemisphere, and the on-going Cold War. Guerrillas and other types of social movements developed; the United States launched an aggressive crusade against Cuba and other efforts at social change in the region; and new intellectual, literary, and artistic trends. This seminar will review key episodes, processes, and actors during that turbulent decade, from 1959 through the 1973 coup against socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile.

How did the introduction of new text technologies impact premodern culture? What motivated or delayed the adoption of the codex or the various types of print? Did these technologies encourage new practices or suppress old ones? And how does the story change when we turn from European to Near Eastern contexts? By learning about past text technologies, we'll gain a fuller understanding of how today's digital text technologies leave their mark on how we interact with texts and with the world. This course teaches relevant digital humanities methods for texts and reflects critically on both our current moment and premodern pasts.

In this course you will learn the history of one of the world's most enduring Empires, the Ottoman Empire, from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to the advent of reform in the early nineteenth century. At its height, the Ottomans ruled over the Middle East, Southeastern Europe and much of the Mediterranean. About twenty five countries today were at one time part of the Empire. In addition, empire has been the world's most common form of political organization for the last 2500 years. In this course you will also learn the essentials of this enduring political arrangement in governing the world.

This course merges research in American religious history with creating an archive using digital and deep mapping practices. It explores the politics of mapping, geography and race before delving into a place-based exploration of American religious communities during the late 19th century. The course investigates extant archives of postemancipation southern Christian communities and applies strategies of historical analysis to explore the formation and transformation of American religious community.

This course introduces students to the ways that policy, design, and citizen activism shaped affordable housing in the United States from the early 20th century to the present. We explore privately-developed tenements and row houses, government-built housing, publicly-subsidized suburban homes and cooperatives, as well as housing developed through incentives and subsidies. Students will analyze the balance between public and private, free market and subsidy, and preservation and renewal. Close attention will be paid to the role of race in structuring the relationship between policymakers, property owners, renters, and homeowners.

This course examines how Africans have made cities from the Medieval era to the present day. Students will learn about the forces that have structured the buildings found on African cityscapes, the jobs done by urban workers, and the relationship African urbanites had with their environments. Students will examine how people experienced and transformed urban landscapes across Africa and develop the skills needed to critically analyze urban built environments. By doing so, students will develop the tools to interpret how cities are made and remade as well as the ability to explain how cities have structured Africa's past, present and future.