PROSPECTUS - FALL 2008
100-level, 200-level, 300-level, 400-level
304-01 - HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ADVANCED METHODS (1:30 MR)
Course Description: In this course, students will focus on how historians build their arguments and engage in historiographical debates. After a short review of HIST 204, the course will examine historiographical discussions, their evolution, and the state of the research agenda on a given theme, topic, or field. Students will typically produce a substantial essay. Prerequisite: 204
Instructor: Regina Sweeney, Associate Professor of History. Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley. Professor Sweeney teaches courses on modern Europe, France, and women's history. Her research on French cultural history focuses on gender, music, nationalism, and war.
Availability: This course is taught every semester.
311-01 - US MILITARY HISTORY (5-6:15 TR)
Course Description: This survey of US military history will examine not only the conduct of the nation's wars, but also the evolution of American military institutions and their interaction with civilian authority and society. Readings will cover topics ranging from the experience on the battlefield to the formulation of national defense policies. To become familiar with military operations and images, students will closely examine the Battle of Antietam and MacArthur's generalship. In addition, a number of film excerpts will be used to probe the complex interaction between American public perceptions and military realities.
Instructor: Conrad Crane, Adjunct Professor of History, Ph.D., Stanford University. He is a retired Army officer and former Professor of History at West Point where he taught American and military history for twelve years. He has lectured widely, including in Europe and Asia, and has written or edited books on the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Korea. He has special interests in military ethics, airpower, generalship, and the experience of combat.
Availability: This course is offered every other year.
315-01 - ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM & RADICALISM (3 TR)
Course Description: This course examines the evolution of Islamic fundamentalist discourse and practice from its beginnings in the 19th century to the present. Special emphasis will be given to the rise of the radical Islamist trend in the last part of the 20th century.
Instructor: Itzchak Weismann. Visiting Professor of History. Ph.D., University of Haifa. Professor Weismann's research deals with currents in modern Islamic
thought, including fundamentalism, modernism, and Sufism, primarily in Syria and Iraq. His most recent book is The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy
and Activism in a World-Wide Sufi Tradition.
Availability: This is the only time this course will be offered.
315-02 - COMPARATIVE ORAL HISTORIES (1:30 MR)
Course Description: This course includes the history of oral history, historiography, two cultures of white supremacy, indigenous leadership in liberation movements, and patterns of comparative oral testimonies. It focuses on field methods of interviewing, filming, transcribing, and the production of oral sources. Students will write papers, produce two life-history projects, and will prepare them for electronic publication/dissemination. Limit fifteen students.
Instructors: Jeremy Ball, Assistant Professor of History. Ph.D., UCLA. Professor Ball teaches courses in African political and ecological history, apartheid, the Atlantic slave trade, and human rights. His research focuses on the labor and business history of Angola, Portuguese colonialism, and oral history.
Kim Rogers, Professor of History. Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Her teaching interests center on recent U.S. history, African-American history, and gender and family history. Research interests include biography and autobiography, oral history, and life-course analysis. Professor Rogers’ most recent book is Life and Death in the Delta. She has also published a book entitled Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement, and has edited collections of essays on oral history interviewing, and trauma and autobiography.
Availability: This is the first time this course will be offered.
372-01 - ISLAM (10:30 TR)
Course Description: This course will fall into three main sections. First, we will examine the formative phase of Islam in seventh century Arabia, with a focus on the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. We then turn to classical religious forms of piety, mysticism, and law. The final part will consider how classical conceptions of law, gender, and jihad have assumed new forms in modern times.
Instructor: Itzchak Weismann. Visiting Professor of History. Ph.D., University of Haifa. Professor Weismann's research deals with currents in modern Islamic thought, including fundamentalism, modernism, and Sufism, primarily in Syria and Iraq. His most recent book is The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a World-Wide Sufi Tradition.
Availability: This course is offered occasionally.
377-01 - CONSUMERISM, NATIONALISM, AND GENDER (9 TR)
Course Description: This reading seminar examines the development of consumerism and nationalism in Europe and America beginning in the late 18th century and continuing on into the postWWII era from American Revolutionary boycotts to French fast food establishments. We will look for overlaps or polarities between the movements and the way gender interacted with both of them. Students may be surprised at the gendered aspects of both movements. We will consider, for example, the historical development of the image of women loving to shop, and we will study propaganda from the two world wars with men in uniform and women on the "home front." Our readings will include both promoters and critics of each movement.
Instructor: Regina Sweeney, Associate Professor of History. Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley. Professor Sweeney teaches courses on modern Europe, France, and women's history. Her research on French cultural history focuses on gender, music, nationalism, and war.
Availability: This course will be offered every two or three years.
389-01 - NATIVE PEOPLES OF EASTERN NORTH AMERICA (9 TR)
Course Description: A survey of major development among Native Americans east of the Mississippi River from approximately A.D. 1500 to the present, using the interdisciplinary methodologies of ethnohistory. Topics to be addressed include 16th and 17th century demographic, economic, and social consequences of contact with European peoples, 18th century strategies of resistance and accommodation, 19th century government removal and cultural assimilation policies, and 20th century cultural and political developments among the regions’ Indian communities.
Instructor: Christopher Bilodeau, Assistant Professor of History. Ph.D., Cornell. He teaches courses in the fields of colonial North America and American Indian History. His research and teaching interests include European (especially English and French) contact with Indians on the borders of North American empires during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the Atlantic World; the role of violence in colonialism; and the history of religious missions.
Availability: This course is offered occasionally.
404-01 - TOPICS IN CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY (1:30 TR)
Course Description: This seminar will explore advanced topics in U.S. constitutional history, including questions about original intent, freedoms of the press and religion, civil rights and liberties, criminal procedure, the separation of powers, and the electoral process.
Instructor: Matthew Pinsker, Pohanka Chair for Civil War History. DPhil., Oxford University. His research interests include U.S. political history, the Civil War era, and Abraham Lincoln. He teaches courses in U.S. political, legal and diplomatic history. His research focuses on the career of Abraham Lincoln, partisanship in the Civil War era, American constitutionalism, the Underground Railroad and the history of U.S. campaigns and elections.
Availability: Senior seminars are offered every semester.
404-02 - SOCIETY, CULTURE, ISLAM (3 MW)
Course Description: This course presents major concepts in the social sciences and cultural studies, such as civil society and the public sphere, discourse and identities, and their application to the study of modern Islam.
Instructor: Itzchak Weismann. Visiting Professor of History. Ph.D., University of Haifa. Professor Weismann's research deals with currents in modern Islamic thought, including fundamentalism, modernism, and Sufism, primarily in Syria and Iraq. His most recent book is The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a World-Wide Sufi Tradition.
Availability: Senior seminars are offered every semester.