This course will explore the major issues that have shaped the Caribbean since 1791, including: colonialism and revolution, slavery and abolition, migration and diaspora, economic inequality, and racial hierarchy. We will examine the Caribbean through a comparative approach--thinking across national and linguistic boundaries--with a focus on Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. While our readings and discussions will foreground the islands of the Greater Antilles, we will also consider relevant examples from the circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora as points of comparison.

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 critically examines the development of the southern Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the Black Power insurgency from the end of World War II through the end of the 1960s. We will examine historical research, oral histories, literature, documentaries and other kinds of primary and secondary documentation.

In this course, we will examine archaeological evidence for and art historical depictions of plagues and pandemics, beginning in antiquity and ending with the COVID-19 Pandemic. The course will explore bioarchaeological investigations of the Black Death, the Justinianic Plague, and other examples of infectious diseases with extremely high mortalities, and students will complete six "Pandemic Simulation" exercises throughout the semester. We will also consider the differing impact of plagues during the medieval, early modern, and modern periods: themes in art; the development of hospitals; and the changing ideas of disease and medicine.

How did a farming community on the banks of the Tiber River grow into one of the largest and most densely populated territorial empires in world history? We will study the contexts, causes, and consequences of a small republican city-state's rise to imperial domination, through analysis of primary sources in translation and discussion of recent archaeological findings. Our emphasis will be on the development of Roman society, the growth and transformation of republican government, and the Republic's afterlives in modern politics and culture.

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 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 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.

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.

Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor notes the word "indian" is a "colonial enactment" that "has no referent in tribal languages or cultures." But as a trope it has long provided Western culture with a vision of romantic primitivism, of savage cruelty, or of the doomed victims of colonial expansion. This course will examine eighteenth-century transatlantic representations of North American Indigenous people and consider the cultural functions of these representations and their role in settler colonialism. In addition to literary texts, we will also examine art and visual culture, collected objects, and philosophical writing from the period.

Does the body have a history? Considering the body from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, this course challenges assumptions about what we take to be deeply natural and stable over time and space - our bodily selves. We will pay particular attention to the constitution of the body in relation to historical configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality; race and racialization; (dis)ability, normalcy, and fitness; and discipline and surveillance. Attending to the enduring force of those histories, we will also consider the operations of power on and in the body in the present moment.

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.

Until the First World War, empire was the most common form of rule and political organization. This lecture course focuses on the story of the biggest empire in world history, the British Empire, and uses it as a lens through which to examine the phenomenon of empire more broadly. How was a small set of islands briefly able to establish global predominance? What roles did war, race, religion, migration - and luck - play in the process? What was the impact on literature, art, gender, and ways of seeing? And how far do the great powers of today, the USA, China and Russia, retain some of the characteristics of empires in the past?

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.

Africa is both the Mother and Father Continent: it gave birth to Humankind (as a biological species) and our African ancestors created Human history, Culture, and Civilization. Human and Global History developed literally 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, for example, genetics and biodiversity and languages and cultures. Moreover, as the course demonstrates, Africa and its societies were never isolated from the rest of the world. Rather, the continent and its peoples remain very much at the center of global history.

This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.

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, 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 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.

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 examines the history of modern Brazil from its independence in the 1820s to the present day. The lectures, readings, and discussions chart conflict, change, and continuity within Brazilian society, highlighting the role played by disenfranchised social actors in shaping the country's history. Topics include the meanings of political citizenship; slavery and abolition; race relations; indigenous populations; uneven economic development as well as Brazil's experiences with authoritarianism and globalization.

This course charts the history of international order from the 1815 Congress of Vienna to today's world system. It is a saga of grand schemes for world parliaments and universal peace, as well as imperial domination and dismal violence. Can the globe be governed? Can great power politics be squared with global ethics? And how do the rights of states relate to the rights of individuals? We will investigate shifting answers to these questions in conversation with figures like Kant, Marx, Wilson, Ho Chi Minh, Arendt. As we track the struggle between power and morality from Metternich to the IMF, we uncover the origins of the world we know today.

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."

To explore the development of institutions and theories of government in England from the Norman Conquest to about 1700.

In the twentieth century, Europe underwent a range of wrenching social and political upheavals that brought into question received truths about subjectivity, the nature of society, the forms and purpose of politics, the role of religion, the relationship between the sexes, and the place of Europe within the wider world. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of intellectual movements--Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, existentialism, structuralism, and postmodernism--examining how European thinkers responded to the historical events happening around them.

This class views legal history broadly as the relationship between formal law, popular legal culture, state governance, and social change in the U.S., from the colonial period to the present. We will examine changing conceptions of rights, equality, justice, the public interest. We also will consider questions about the operation of law in U.S. history: How is law made? What do people expect from law? Who controls law? How did that change over time? These questions open up a rich, layered past in which the law was a source of authority that mediated social and political conflicts, even as those conflicts ultimately changed the law.

This course covers the history of US foreign relations from the American revolution to the present day. Lectures take up questions of diplomacy, foreign policy, ideology and culture, empire and anti-imperialism, and revolution and counterrevolution. Precepts emphasize primary sources, from the writings of Tom Paine, George Washington, William Jennings Bryan, Ho Chi Minh, Phyllis Schlafly, Elaine Scarry, and more.

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.

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.

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.

This course will explore the entangled histories of the USA and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union/Russian Federation from the American Revolution up to the present time. Starting from the late eighteenth century, many observers paid attention to striking similarities and sharp contrasts between the two countries. We will study them on three different levels: 1) foreign policy and international rivalries 2) mutual perception, stereotypes, and "cultural diplomacy" 3) recent interpretations of several common features in American and Russian trajectories of development (frontier, slavery vs serfdom, ethnic and racial conflicts, nationalism, etc.)

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?

This course explores histories of race, labor, and empire in the United States from Late 19th century to the present from a transnational perspective. In doing so, we will examine the history of race as a product of modernity and colonization. By the end of this course, students will have a keen understanding of how racial constructions (in intersection with gender, sexuality, and class) are deeply intertwined with histories of empire, labor, and immigration. Yet, we will also discuss how groups have resisted, survived, and thrived. We will engage a wide range of sources including legal documents, court rulings, newspapers, and literature.

In this course, we analyze the diversity of encounters between European imperial power and Muslim communities in South Asia. We focus particularly on how Muslim-led social, political, and religious movements negotiated the colonial encounter. Students will explore changing models of religious education, new forms of engagement with pilgrimages, shifting ideas of legality, and rearticulated relationships across sects and with other religious communities. Students will develop historical analytical skills through the study of primary source documents authored by South Asian Muslims with divergent social and political views.

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.

How do representations of men and women, past and present, intersect with popular memories of and attitudes towards gender and sexuality? Thinking through this question with reference to India, this course will entail a close reading of one Bollywood film (with English subtitles) each week alongside an engagement with scholarly studies of the histories of gender and sexuality and of film in South Asia. Students will learn to be critical and historically sensitive viewers of film. They will also reflect critically on the crafting and re-crafting of popular memory, placing remembered pasts in dialog with scholarly approaches.

Who is a Hindu? Or, for that matter, who is a Muslim or an untouchable? Like today, these were vexed questions in pre-modern South Asia. This seminar will think through the history of social inequality and cultural difference in India from the earliest Muslim presence in South Asia until the region's conquest by the English East India Company in the Eighteenth Century. By juxtaposing modern-day scholarly writing on these subjects with primary-source material that circulated in a popular milieu, the seminar will encourage students to explore pre-modern responses to hierarchy, conflict, discrimination, and persecution.

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.

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.

Working with Princeton's Western Americana collections, students will explore what archives are and how they are made. Who controls what's in them? How do they shape what historians write? Using little studied collections, students will produce online "exhibitions" for the Library website, and research potential acquisitions for the Library collections. Significant time will be devoted to in-class workshops focused on manuscript and visual materials (all digitized for the class). Special visitors will include curators, archivists, librarians, and dealers.

In 1917, a new socialist state emerged from the ruins of the old Romanov Empire, and the dreams of several generations of Russian radicals came true. This seminar explores the history of revolutionary ideas and movements in Russia from the 1860s, through the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the emergence of new order in the early 1920s. We will read memoirs of terrorists, as well as cult novels of Russian revolutionary youth and political pamphlets of Russian Marxists and Bolsheviks. We will also analyze the role of women in the radical movement and the dynamics of mass political protests among workers, soldiers and peasants.

This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the Roman Jurists of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD 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 in Europe and the Middle East. We will trace how legal thought and practice evolved across these areas and think about how law and law-like norms both shape and are shaped by society and social practices.

The Reconstruction of the Union, following the American Civil War, remade the United States. This course will examine how Reconstruction set the stage for rest of the Nineteenth century in all its contradictions. One big theme for the course is how the Civil War and Reconstruction shaped American political philosophy, especially how later debates of the Progressive Era over the size of the government and over laissez-faire capitalism developed out of Reconstruction. We will examine some of the major Constitutional and political changes that occur during the aftermath of the Civil War.

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.

In this course we will explore various examples of "the dictator novel," attempting to make sense of the genre in its overlapping historical and world-literary contexts. Each week our focus will be on a specific novel, which is to be read alongside scholarly work and other writing as we consider the aesthetic, political, and cultural significance of this strikingly global literary form. We will strive to understand the complex relationship between literature and politics; more specifically, the representation of state power, authoritarian rule, and struggles for human freedom in--and through--cultural production. All readings are in English.

The prison is a growth industry in the U.S.; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. 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.

This seminar will examine the origins, evolution and accomplishments of the civil rights movement, with special attention to the political context and consequences at every stage of its development.

This course examines the role of Africa in the advent of the science of conservation. The course looks at the complex ways in which the origins of conservation were shaped by racialized ideas about humans and the relationship between culture and nature, as well by asymmetrical power relations. Readings include autobiographies and government reports. Students will consider the potentially taboo question of whether Africa needs conservation.

This course considers the history of collective violence in America. We will define "collective violence" broadly to encompass people acting on behalf of the U.S. government (i.e., police, soldiers, militiamen, and immigration officers) and people acting as civilians (i.e., slaveholders, vigilantes, terrorists, and protestors). A series of case studies (drawn primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries) will introduce disparate forms of violence, including vigilantism, slavery, massacre, imperialism, riot, segregation, and terrorism.

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.

Attention lies at the nexus of perception and action, aesthetics and ethics, wealth and power. Whose eyes (and minds) are where? And for how long? These are central questions driving the evolution of "surveillance capitalism" (not to mention social life itself). New technologies, and new practices, are reshaping our understanding of the attentional subject -- with consequences for learning, politics, and collective existence. This course will take up these problems, delving the history of changing ideas about attention in the modern period.

A review of recent thinking/writing about objects; an effort to experiment with activations of this work. Our course will explore approaches to material culture from the early modern period to the present, with particular attention to new philosophical and anthropological perspectives. Historical questions will be paramount, but aesthetic and epistemological problems will also be engaged. Guided by diverse readings, we will endeavor to heed Wordsworth's bold injunction--to "see into the life of things."

Where does property come from? Is it a right grounded in nature or a human invention? This class considers these big questions as we look at key moments in the history of property. These range from the emergence of property rights in early Modern Europe to the very modern communist project of building a society without private property. Other episodes include property rights of women, the emergence of patent rights and the protection of scientific innovations, the formation of laws on inheritance and the rise of new forms of property, such as ownership of genetic capitals, identity, or airspace.

Common statements about Marxism: economic determinism at its worst; simplistically teleological; The Communist Manifesto sums it all up. Such assessments are common not just in the public sphere but also in learned environments. Let's test them. Let's take Karl Marx seriously, reading fundamental works by him and others to understand the method and properly assess it. This course first focuses on key works by Marx, Frederick Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin. After that, we investigate how scholars in different fields of history as well as in other disciplines have used the Marxist method to explain key processes in their domains.

The seminar explores the cultural history of Europe from the 9th to the 12th c. and the emergence of a cultural convergence that allowed to imagine the Latin West as the Latin West. Our window into this process is the codification of various subjects in books and libraries and in the collection, arrangement and transmission of history books, legal handbooks, patristic, hagiographical or liturgical collections. In so doing the course introduces students to paleography, codicology, basic techniques of editing texts and the study of Latin manuscripts, scriptoria and libraries.

Reading and research seminar on thirteenth-century France.

This course intensively investigates the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, with a strong focus on primary sources.

The seminar looks at the way political revolutions have been defined and understood throughout modern history, surveys major theories of revolution, examines key elements of revolutions such as violence and the transformation of social structure, and takes an in-depth look at two case studies: the French and Haitian Revolutions. The seminar complements the Davis Seminar theme of 'revolutionary change,' and students are encouraged to attend the Davis Seminar weekly.

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 explores the inter-connected histories of Britain and the British Empire from the even broader perspective of global history, and in so doing examines the rise and fall of the British nation and empire as world hegemon. Topics to be covered include industrial revolutions, citizens, subjects and constitutions, empire and race, the First and Second World Wars as imperial conflicts, and the collapse of British world power thereafter.

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.

A broad survey of major works and recent trends in the history of medicine, focusing on the cultural politics of disease and epidemics from tuberculosis to AIDS, the relationship of history of medicine to the history of the body and body parts, the politics of public health in comparative national perspective. Surveying key controversies at the intersection of biology and medicine, the intellectual and political logic of specialization in fields such as genetics, health and political activism, and the relationship of class, race, and gender to shifting notions of disease and identity.

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.

What counts as an experiment and how did experiment become the arbiter of scientific discovery? Certain experiments have achieved iconic status: Galileo's pendulum, Boyle's air pump, Newton's 'crucial experiments.' But what happens when we reevaluate these from the perspective of 'borderline' practices: anatomical dissections, chemical recipes, medical cases, craft techniques? We draw on ancient, medieval and early modern sources, as well as the modern historiography of experiment, to explore the challenge of observing and testing nature. As far as possible, we attempt to recreate practices in class, from glassworking to alchemy.

This seminar explores the changing intellectual grounds on which ideas about natural environments were forged, from the 18th century to the present day. The readings interweave accounts of how some places were deemed "natural" and came to be objects of scientific study and political concern together with attention to landscapes as places of refuge and a basis for social transformation. The aim of the seminar is to introduce a series of conceptual tools for analyzing these meanings, across a range of times and places - after all, the meanings cultures invest in ideas like natural, global, or environmentalism are far from stable or singular.

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, as well as give them an understanding of the historical shifts in power that took place across the Near East over the past millennium. 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.

Did the invention of cities give rise to the invention of writing? Is it true that the printing press made the Reformation possible? Has social media destroyed democracy? This course will attempt to answer these questions in weekly discussions that explore how "revolutions" in communications' technologies--from ancient cuneiform to modern coding--have altered the course of human history. In complementary weekly "digital practica" we will examine cutting-edge digital archives and learn how to wield the new digital tools that are transforming how historians engage with the past in the wake of our latest digital communications "revolution."

This course explores Latin America's multiple interconnections with the rest of the modern world, highlighting the way people, influences, and ideas have constantly flowed into and out of the region. Using both primary sources and secondary literature, we will follow the struggles of enslaved people in the Age of Revolutions, and the impact of global climate trends in the late nineteenth century; we will explore the region's changing position in the world economy and US-Latin American relations; and we will consider Latin America's cultural and political impact during the Cold War, as well as contemporary debates around migration and borders.

Despite living in an increasingly globalized society, the notion of different and opposing civilizations is still used as a way to add meaning and definition to our world. In this course, we will critically evaluate what is at stake when employing the concept of civilization. Using historical contexts from "Western" and "Near Eastern" civilizations, we will explore civilizational encounters from the Afroasiatic roots of Classical Civilization to America's culture wars. With one foot in the past and one in the present we will seek to understand whether civilizations exist and why civilizational paradigms endure despite drawing controversy.

Each week we'll take up a major theme--creation, the problem of evil; what's human/inhuman/ divine; apocalypse--and explore how their stories, embedded in western culture, have been interpreted for thousands of years--so far! Starting with creation stories from Babylon, Israel, Egypt and Greece, we'll consider how some such stories still shape an amazing range of cultural attitudes toward controversial issues that include sexuality, "the nature of nature," politics, and questions of meaning.