PROSPECTUS - SPRING - 2009

304-01 - HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ADVANCED METHODS (1:30 W)

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: Jeremy Vetter, Assistant Professor of History. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. He teaches the history of science and technology, environmental history, and the American West. His current research focuses on environmental knowledge production in the U.S. Great Plains and Rocky Mountains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Availability: This course is taught every semester.

304-02 - HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ADVANCED METHODS (3 TR)

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: This course is taught every semester.

311-01 - VIOLENCE AND COLONIALISM (1:30-4:30 R)

Course Description: This course will place, in a comparative perspective, the key role of violence in European colonization of numerous parts of the world. Four geographical locations will be analyzed (North America, South America, Europe, and Africa) and four imperial powers (English, French, Spanish, and German) over the period of the 16th through 20th centuries. The goal is not a comprehensive look at the roles of violence in colonialism, but an episodic analysis of the ways in which violence manifests itself in colonial situations across time and space. Topics will include (among others) theories of violence, the origins of colonial violence, the roles of violence in colonizing versus colonized societies, overt resistance to colonial domination, and the power and persistence of symbolic violence.

Instructors: 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.

315-01 - MULTIPLE IDENTITIES IN CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM WORLD (3 TR)

Course Description: The Muslim world is not made of one piece. Stretching over vast territories the Middle East and North Africa; Central, South and Southeast Asia; Sub-Saharan Africa and the Balkans; and today also Western Europe and North America, it is a complicated and extremely diverse world. In this course, we will explore this diversity through the socio-cultural concept of identity and the problematics it raises for the modern and postmodern eras. With its help, we will examine the frontiers and interactions between such factors as national ideologies and ethnic groups, religious and secular elites, Islamic orthodoxies and sects, Sufis and Fundamentalists, gender issues, ecological differences, and diasporas.

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. His most recent book is The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a World-Wide Sufi Tradition.

Availability: This is the first time this course has been offered.

315-02 - 20th C ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA (1:30 MW)

Course Description: This course traces the economic policy and corresponding growth patterns in modern Latin America. Salient developments in the external economic and political spheres prompted the region to move from an agricultural and primary goods-based export model to selectively exploring innovative industrialization opportunities, which depended for their effectiveness a) on market size and financial incentives and b) by protective state fiscal and monetary policies for their impact. The course examines the causes and effects of the major setbacks characterized by the global OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s and the debt default of the 1980s. How the region adjusted itself to the end of the cold war and was inserted into the current interdependent global economy will be an important element in this review.

Instructor: William Visser, Visiting Assistant Professor of History., Ph.D. George Washington University. His research interest revolves around the macro-economic history of Latin America, especially Venezuelan and Brazilian.

Availability: This is the first time this course has been offered.

315-03 - MILITARISM IN MODERN LATIN AMERICA (3 TR)

Course Description: Authoritarian leaders have always been a pre-eminent feature of Latin America’s politics. The historical determinants and consequences of this phenomenon are examined in this course to gain insights into their present-day manifestations. These include an analysis of the military leaders of the independence movements of early 19th century, the subsequent caudillo culture, the role of the military sector as guardians of the constitution, and their evolving responsibilities in national security as expressed in their anti-revolutionary defense strategies, shifting cold war alliances and finally, at the present time engineers of economic development and legitimate social change. The place of the institutional military mindset in a growing democratic context will deserve special attention throughout the course.

Availability: This is the first time this course has been offered.

358-01 - 19TH-20TH CENTURY EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY (11:30 MWF)

Course Description: This course will cover European diplomatic history from the Congress of Vienna through World War II and the origins of the Cold War.

Instructor: Regina Sweeney, Associate Professor of History. Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley. Professor Sweeney teaches courses on early modern and modern Europe, France, and women’s history. Her research on French cultural history focuses on gender, music, nationalism, and war.

Availability: This course is offered occasionally.

373 - ECOLOGICAL HISTORY OF AFRICA (1:30 MW)

Course Description: This course provides an introduction to the ecological history of Africa. We will focus in some detail on demography, the domestication of crops and animals, climate, the spread of New World crops (maize, cassava, cocoa), and disease environments from the earliest times to the present. Central to our study will be the idea that Africa's landscapes are the product of human action. Therefore, we will examine case studies of how people have interacted with their environments. African ecology has long been affected indirectly by decisions made at a global scale. Thus we will explore Africa's engagement with imperialism and colonization and the global economy in the twentieth century. The course ends with an examination of contemporary tensions between conservation and economic development.

Instructor: 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

Availability: This course is taught occasionally.

404-01 - THE CRUSADES (10:30 TR)

Course Description: While warfare has always played an important role in Western life, beginning in the latter part of the eleventh century there emerged new ideas about the purpose of war, against whom it should properly be conducted, and its importance for those who engaged in it. Referred to as the crusades, these wars were presented as a moral and righteous struggle against the enemies of God. Indeed, as a holy undertaking, the crusades were not merely justified, but justifying and spiritually beneficial for those who participated in them. By reading primary sources from the four groups involved in the crusades, Western Christians, Jews, Byzantine Greeks, and Moslems we shall address a number of questions about this phenomenon. What, if anything did the crusades achieve? Was the Church and Christianity improved or harmed by its involvement in the crusades? Does extreme idealism inevitably lead to extreme intolerance and fanaticism?

Instructor: Stephen Weinberger, Professor of History. Ph.D., University of Wisconsin. His teaching interests center on Medieval and Renaissance history, and European intellectual history, and the history of film. His current research involves conflict in medieval society, and censorship in the American film industry.

Availability: Senior seminars are offered every semester.