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.

This course challenges the racial parameters of disability studies and disability history by asking how persistent conditions of antiblack violence, including mass incarceration, state divestment, medical neglect, and environmental racism, destabilize assumptions about what constitutes an "able body." Surveying scholarship in Black studies, disability studies, African American history, and the history of science and medicine, we will study the construction of disability as a racialized category. Students will also recover disability theories that are already intrinsic to the Black radical tradition, postcolonial studies, and Black feminisms.

Why are some events from the past widely recalled, memorialized, and taught in school, while others are consigned to obscurity? What role do acts of historical erasure play in processes of exclusion? How have acts of remembering figured in struggles for justice? Using historical scholarship, memoirs, visual art, and music, this course examines the relationship between "history" and "memory", focusing on the different ways that race and social power have shaped the relationship in the U.S. and across the African diaspora. We will link representations of the past to debate about issues such as public monuments, legal redress, and reparations.

This course uses historical and anthropological methods to examine the health of Native communities. By investigating the history, social structures, and colonial forces that have shaped and continue to shape contemporary Indigenous nations, we investigate both the causes of contemporary challenges and the ways that Native peoples have ensured the vibrancy, wellness, and survival of their peoples. We will treat health as a holistic category and critically examine the myriad factors that can hinder or enable the wellbeing of Native nations.

Which affected Roman history more: Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE, or the massive eruption of Alaska's Okmok volcano the following year? This course will study the local and global contexts and consequences of a small republican city-state's rise to imperial domination, through analysis of primary sources in translation and recent archaeological findings. Our emphasis will be on the development of Roman society, the rise and fall of republican government, and the Republic's many afterlives.

This course will examine the origins, evolution and organization of the democratic system in Athens, and address some of the most controversial questions about the topic: To what extent was Athens democratic? What were the links between Athenian democracy and its aggressive imperialism? What are the similarities and differences between ancient and modern ideas of democracy?

An interdisciplinary, diachronic, and critical study of the senses in the ancient world. Explores how a variety of senses might be recovered from the past and assesses the possibilities and limitations of sensory approaches. Surveys the types of primary evidence that might be used, weighs the possibilities for objective interpretation, and considers the reasons for regional and chronological variation. Senses examined in their social, political, and cultural contexts and with attention to conceptions of bodies, perception, and ontology. Strengths and weaknesses of the secondary literature on the topic evaluated.

This course is designed to introduce the culture and history of Japan, and to examine how one understands and interprets the past. In addition to considering how a culture, a society, and a state develop, we will try to reconstruct the tenor of life in "ancient" and "medieval" Japan and chart how patterns of Japanese civilization shifted through time.

In telling histories of East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, various groups of nomadic people often loomed large in the background and served as the foil to the travail of their sedentary neighbors. In this course we put the nomadic peoples of Inner Asia front and center, and ask how the nomadic way of life and mode of state building served as agents of change in pre-modern Eurasia.

This class introduces students to the tradition of monstrous imagination in Japanese history, from the earlier texts of the 8th century to the most recent films. Students will be exposed to a vast array of sources depicting different monstrous creatures. Monsters will function as the meaning-making devises through which students will understand different aspects of Japanese culture through twelve centuries of its history. Far from being simply figures of imaginations, the vast coterie of monstrous creatures and phenomena 'interacted' in very concrete ways with people, influencing their political, economic, and social life.

This seminar has two main goals. The first is to offer a survey of the philosophical production of Japan from the Tokugawa period to the end of the Second World War, with a focus on the socio-political and intellectual conditions that favored the development of sophisticated philosophical discourses, their terminology, recurring themes, and changing authorizing/legitimating strategies. The second is to investigate on the heuristic adequacy of the Western term "philosophy" to understand forms and style of speculative thinking in Japan.

This course is designed to introduce fundamental themes and debates about ancient and medieval Japanese history, and how conceptualizations of Japan have changed over time from the third century CE through 1600. Approximately two books, or a comparable number of articles, are required each week, and wherever possible, a brief passage of Japanese scholarship is presented as well. Reading knowledge of modern Japanese is desirable.

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.

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, Europe and the Middle East meet at the Mediterranean. This course will look at two millennia of Mediterranean history to see how this sea has been both shared and contested. This course is organized around a geographical entity rather than a political framework such as a state. As such, environmental and maritime history will be a theme running throughout the course.

This course offers a history of Eastern Europe in the modern era, from the age of Enlightenment and the French revolution in the late 18th century through the present. It covers the territory between today's Italy and Russia, including Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Topics include: Enlightenment, Romanticism, nationalism, socialism, Zionism, fascism, Nazism, communism, the Holocaust, genocides, Cold War, and post-1991 Europe. The course will incorporate a variety of primary sources, including novels, memoirs, diaries, and the arts as well as several films.

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.

Surveying key moments from the 19th century to the present, this course tracks how networked communications, numerical calculation, symbolic reasoning, and information processing converged to create contemporary information technologies. The course introduces students to the major kinds of historical inquiry-philosophical, engineering, labor, material, social, gender, legal, and cultural-needed for studying information technologies in the last 150 years. Topics include Silicon Valley, software engineering, PCs, hacking, artificial intelligence, information, cryptography, outsourcing, privacy, information warfare, social networks, surveillance

What is colonization? How does it work? What kind of societies does it create? Come find out through the lens of the Latin America. First we study how the Aztec and Inca empires subdued other peoples, and how Muslim Iberia fell to the Christians. Then, we learn about Spanish and Portuguese conquests and how indigenous resistance, adaptation, and racial mixing shaped the continent. You will see gods clash and meld, cities rise and decline, and insurrections fail or win. Silver mines will boom and bust, slaves will toil and rebel; peasants will fight capitalist encroachments. This is a comprehensive view of how Latin America became what it is.

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.

Covering 1868 to the present, this course emphasizes Japan's dramatic rise as the modern world's first non-Western power, imperialism, industrialization, social change, gender relations, democracy, World War II, the U. S. Occupation, the postwar "economic miracle" followed by slow growth, and the preoccupation with national identity in a Western-dominated world. We will think about post-1945 developments in terms of continuities with prewar Japan. We will also hold Japan up as a "mirror" for America, comparing how the two capitalist societies have dealt with inequality, urbanization, health and welfare, and intervention in the economy.

The course will focus on the formation of the Christian West from Ireland to the Eastern Mediterranean until ca. 1000 CE. We will start with the insignificance of the Fall of Rome in 476 CE, to move on to much more fundamental changes in the Ancient and medieval world: the Christian revolution in the 4th century, the barbarian successor states in the fifth, their transformation into Christian kingdoms, or the emergence of new nations and states whose names are still on the map today and which all came to be held together by a shared culture defined by the Rise of Western Christendom in the first Millennium.

In the twentieth century, Europe underwent a range of wrenching social and political upheavals that brought into question received truths about politics, the role of religion, the relationship between the sexes, and the place of Europe in the wider world. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of different thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida, examining how they responded to these upheavals and offered new ways to thinking about the world and our place in it.

How did the United States emerge as a revolutionary republic built on the principle of human equality at the same time that it produced the wealthiest and mightiest slave society on earth? This course approaches that question in an interpretive history emphasizing the contradictory expansion of racial slavery and political democracy. Topics include the place of slavery in the Federal Constitution and the founding the nation, the spread of the cotton kingdom, Jacksonian democracy and the growth of political parties, the rise of antislavery and proslavery politics, and the growing social and political divisions between North and South.

This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the American Revolution and progressing through to the contemporary intellectual scene, it hopes to introduce students to major debates, themes, and intellectual movements in the history of American ideas. We will read a number of famous thinkers and actors in their own words: Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. Students will leave this class with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the ideas and the thinkers who have shaped the nation's politics and culture.

The history of modern America, with particular focus on domestic political and social changes. Topics include the Roaring 20s; the Great Depression and the New Deal; the homefront of World War II and the Cold War; the civil rights movement and the Great Society; the Vietnam War; the sexual revolution; the Silent Majority, the Nixon administration, and Watergate.

A course intended as an introduction to the general problem of historical consciousness. How has the past been conceived in different times and places? How has knowledge of the past been sought, expressed, and conveyed? How does the past remain "present" - practically, politically, psychologically? What are the implications (existential, ethical, epistemic) of our being historical creatures? By means of readings in disciplinary history, creative literature, and philosophy, and through select encounters with works of visual art and film, this class will investigate the history (and diversity) of historical reflection.

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.

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 and is taken in the fall of the junior year. Students may choose from a range of topics. Seminar topics will tend to be cross-national and comparative.

This advanced undergraduate seminar explores themes of revolution, violence, and gender in modern Arabic literature and culture. Our focus will be on close readings and viewings of novels, poetry, and film. We will also read widely in the scholarly literature on modern Middle East and North African history; theories of revolution, violence, and gender and sexuality; and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. All readings are in English, though students who would like to work with materials in Arabic are encouraged to do so in consultation with the instructor.

Whether as arranged marriage or as untouchability, why does caste persist into the present? And what is the relationship between lived experiences of caste and religion? Caste as an order of hierarchy and inequality exists throughout South Asia and across all religions practiced in this region. This seminar will explore the history of caste and untouchability as well as the history of the effort to annihilate caste. It will travel from the pre-modern period into the present, dwelling along the way on political and autobiographical writings and other compositions of anti-caste thinkers, including Dalits (those formerly deemed "Untouchable").

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.

This course will examine the U.S. West's place, process, idea, cultural memory, conquest, and legacies throughout American history. The American West has been a shifting region, where diverse individuals, languages, cultures, environments, and competing nations came together. We will examine the West's contested rule, economic production, and mythmaking under Native American Empires, Spain, France, England, individual filibusters, Mexico, Canada, and United States.

Studies of war and society rarely address environmental factors and agency. The relationship between war and environment is often either reduced to a simple environmental determinism or it is depicted as a war against nature and ecosystems, playing down societal dynamics. The seminar explores the different approaches to the war-environment-society nexus and highlights how and why the three spheres should be studied in conjunction. The objective is to assess how and why environmental and societal factors and forces caused and shaped the conflicts and how in turn mass violence shaped societies and how they used and perceived their environments.

This seminar explores Mexico's history from independence (1821) to the contemporary era. We delve into the contentious process of nation building, the explosive outbreak of the first major social revolution of the 20th century, and the creation of a remarkably durable one-party state that was far from revolutionary. Readings focus on the political, social, and cultural negotiations that shaped these processes. Key themes include indigeneity, political violence and dissent, migration, urbanization, capitalism and the environment, and Mexico's relationship with the U.S. We will also visit the university museum to analyze revolutionary art.

This course, designed for seniors and juniors in the History Department but open to others, will offer an introduction to the discipline of history. Through a series of case studies, students will learn how historians frame problems, ranging in scale from the history of the world to the lives of individuals, and in time from millennia to single years; examine the kinds of evidence and argument that historians employ; study the intellectual and literary problems involved in constructing a substantial piece of historical writing; and investigate the relations between history and memory in the late twentieth century.

This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

Every morning around the world, millions of people wake up and, in some form or another, pour heated water over dark brown soil-like grounds to brew coffee. Yet how many people are aware of the historical processes that spread coffee from the forests of Southwest Ethiopia across the globe? Focusing primarily on Ethiopia and its national and regional networks, this course explores the rise of coffee as a commodity with significant global intersections. During Fall Break, students in this course will travel to Ethiopia and examine the cultural history of coffee in the context of the development of the coffee industry.

This course takes up the twentieth-century Vietnam wars as a subject of international history, with a cast of actors ranging from Vietnam and the United States to France, China, and the Soviet Union. It is a subject that sheds light on some of the most significant dynamics of political, economic, and social change at work in the twentieth-century world. Themes include self-determination and imperialism, colonialism and counterinsurgency, social revolution and state control, liberalism and communism, policymaking and diplomacy, memory and legacy, and literature and history.

Who were the Manchu people, who once ruled the mighty Qing empire (1636-1911) over China? Alternatively celebrated and villainized in Sinocentric historiography, the Manchus have become a complex symbol for imperial China's last glories and humiliations. This seminar questions the dominant narratives of racialization and cultural assimilation by exploring the formation of Manchu ethnicity over four hundred years. Using revisionist scholarship and primary sources, the course seeks to de-mystify Manchu history and culture by critically examining the ideological scaffolding of ethnic identity and its constitutive human experiences.

How do women in Asia become "gendered" in times of war-as caregivers, as refugees, as sex workers, as war brides? This course offers an introductory survey of American wars in Asia from 1899 to the present, taking the perspectives not of Americans but of the historically marginalized. Students will be challenged to rethink and reimagine war histories through voices on the ground across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii, and Guam. foregrounding written testimonies and oral histories of women against the backdrop of war, militarism, and empire, the course will also make broader connections across the Asia pacific.

In premodern Europe, almost everyone believed in the literal existence of an afterlife. This class asks how thinking about Heaven, Hell, and the apocalypse shaped attitudes towards the physical world from late antiquity to the 18th century. We trace how poets and natural philosophers dealt with these realms, and ask how ideas about nature and the body in turn shaped religious views. Topics include the challenge of squaring scientific texts with Scripture; the spiritual implications of medicine, astrology, alchemy, and magic; the physics of angels; demonic possession and mental health; and whether Heaven and Hell existed in physical space.

A colloquium to introduce the beginning graduate student to the great traditions in historical writing, a variety of techniques and analytical tools recently developed by historians, and the nature of history as a profession.

We cover the history, historiography and theory of Latin America's early modernity. Canonical works are compared to recent literature in economic, social, political, environmental, and cultural history. Key questions: Why and how do historiographical modes change? Is colonization a class, national, or ethnic phenomenon? Why does Spanish colonization in the Americas differ from French, English, and Portuguese? Why did the peasantry survive in Latin America and not elsewhere in the continent? Was race structuring? How did Latin America become capitalist? Welcome, students of early modernity, empires, the Americas, global history, and pedagogy.

The course assesses the paradigms and models underlying the analysis and description of environmental change and explores alternative ways of understanding environmental change beyond the current linear and homogenizing Nature-to-Culture conceptualizations.

Topics include the relationship between society and warfare in pre-modern and modern Africa, the impact of violence on society (for example, population displacement, disease, and genocide) and post-conflict recovery (i.e. demobilization, return and resettlement of internally displaced persons and refugees, the transition from emergency aid to development aid) and reconciliation (for example, truth- and/or reconciliation commissions and war crimes/humanitarian courts) as well as the memorialisation of the violence and peace-building.

Readings in Japanese political, social, and economic history. Topics include transwar continuity and change, political economy, labor, gender issues, culture and state, religion, Japanese expansion and colonialism, the Allied Occupation of Japan and "social management." Some readings in Japanese (optional for those who do not specialize in Japanese history).

This seminar introduces students to major historiographical issues and methodological issues in China's twentieth-century history. The content is divided evenly between the Republic period and PRC history, with occasional forays back to the Qing dynasty. Topics reflect theoretical debates and empirical questions, including: nationalism, civil society, urban life, gender and sexuality, war and revolution, science, law.

This seminar considers Islam and mobility across the Indian Ocean, discussing ways that Southeast Asians, Africans, and Indians have created their distinct communities while nonetheless declaring themselves to be of one discrete entity: the Umma. Alongside discussions of knowledge creation, orientalism and nationalism, the seminar also explores issues relating to global projects for religious and political reform, using Indonesia as a primary example.

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 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.

The course examines financial innovation and its consequences from the early modern period to present: it examines the evolution of trading practices, bills of exchange, government bonds, equities, banking activity, derivatives markets, securitization. How do these evolve in particular state or national settings, how are the practices regulated, how do they relate to broader processes of economic development and to state formation? What happens as financial instruments are traded across state boundaries, and how does an international financial order evolve? What are the effects of international capital mobility?

This seminar covers major topics of Russian history from the late 17th century to 1917: political cultures and the institutions of autocracy; Russia in the age of Enlightenment; Nationalism and the policy toward non-Russian nationalities; Russian Empire in comparative perspective; Church and State in Imperial Russia; Russian village before and after the emancipation of peasants; social, legal, and cultural reforms; revolutionary movement and the development of Russian political thought.

Through its governmental institutions, the Roman state developed one of the first complex systems of civil law and formal adjudication in which the law was interpreted and applied. It is this systemic law that lies at the basis of most European and Common law jurisdictions today. The seminar places emphasis on understanding the developed structure of the Roman civil law, the development of its legal principles and arguments, and with how the law was applied in daily life.

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.

This course gives students an overview of the historiography and historical issues in the field of legal history, with an emphasis on: the relationship between law and society; the influence of scholarship in women's history, African American history, and labor history on legal history; the ways that legal historians have conceived of the exercise of power; and the relationship of people to law and legal institutions.

This course examines the historical approaches to multiracial and multiethnic interactions in the United States. By focusing on the constructions of race and ethnicity through a comparative lens, privileges and societal hierarchy becomes more pronounced and difference more nuanced. Some of the central themes of the course are identity, empire, citizenship, and migration. The majority of readings are from 1850 to the present.

This readings course considers the dispersals, political movements, cultural production, social bonds, and intellectual labors that together have constituted and continually re-configured the modern African diaspora, from the emergence and collapse of the Atlantic slave system through the late twentieth century. The course tracks the evolution of diaspora as an idea and analytical framework, highlighting its intersections with concepts of Pan-Africanism, black nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and citizenship.

This seminar surveys dynamic new research on the role of law in imperial and international orders. If recent scholarship has recast empires as forms of international ordering, and, conversely, international orders as adaptions of imperial governance, law has figured prominently in these interpretive departures. Ranging across the modern period, the seminar's themes include sovereignty and quasi-sovereignty; legal pluralism and extraterritoriality; citizenship and colonial subjecthood; imperial constitutions and international organizations; human rights and "juridical humanity"; self-determination, decolonization, post-imperial worldmaking.

A comprehensive introduction to the literature and problems of American History from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s.

In the face of a power vacuum caused by the struggle between the German Empire and the Papacy, dozens of cities of medieval Italy formed autonomous communes governed by popularly elected assemblies. These flourished for centuries, laying the foundations for the culture of humanism and the Renaissance. In the later Middle Ages, however, most of these communes were taken over by autocrats - only a few survived as self-governing republics into the modern era. A comparison of these examples can offer a basis for understanding the fate of democratic governments in succeeding periods and today.

What does it mean to trace a 3000-year history of Hellenism? This course takes a critical approach by examining the construction of narratives of identity, belonging, and continuity from antiquity through Byzantine and Ottoman periods to today. We explore the grounds on which claims to Greekness have been based-from language and culture to religion, race, and territory-while considering how these claims play into distinctions like east-west and civilization-barbarism. Our critical inquiry into the 3000-year history of Hellenism allows us to contend with the political and intellectual stakes of the very premise that such a history could exist.

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.

What is the exact relationship between literature and history? What does it mean to read literature historically and history as a work of art? The course explores these and related questions through texts from antiquity to the present. We will explore the claim that literature is both more and less than "what really happened"; literary works as an escape from, but also remedy for, historical predicaments; modes of interpretation that allow one to read a single text simultaneously both as historical and fictional; and instances when literature followed historical events or, inversely, served as their blueprint.

This class explores medieval Islamic history from the bottom up -- through everyday documents from Egypt used by men and women at all levels of society: state decrees, personal letters, business letters, contracts, court records, wills, and accounts. Even the smallest details of these everyday writings tell us big things about the world in which they were written. Each week examines a different topic in medieval Egyptian social history. We'll cover politics, religion among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, social class, trade, family relationships, sex, taxes, and death, among other subjects.

The major Near Eastern diplomatic crises and the main developments in internal Near Eastern history. The focus will be upon the possible connections between diplomatic crises and the process of modernization. Oral reports and a short paper.

The course examines the history of financial innovation and its consequences. It examines the evolution of trading practices, bills of exchange, government bonds, equities, banking activity, derivatives markets, and securitization. How do these evolve in particular state or national settings, how are the practices regulated, how do they relate to broader development? What happens as financial instruments are traded across state boundaries, and how does an international financial order evolve? What are the effects of international capital mobility? How is resulting conflict and instability managed, on both a national and international level?