2019-2020 Academic Year

Spring 2020

HIST 117 American Hist 1607 to 1877
This course covers colonial, revolutionary, and national America through Reconstruction. Include attention to historical interpretation. Multiple sections offered.

HIST 211 Food and American Environment
This class examines the ways that the culture and politics of food have reshaped North American landscapes and social relations from colonial to modern times. We will explore, for example, how the new taste for sweetness fueled the creation of plantations worked by enslaved, the ways that the distribution of frozen meat helped build cities and clear rangeland, and the ways that the eating of fresh fruit came to depend on both a new population of migrant laborers and a new regime of toxic chemicals. Other topics will include catastrophes such as the Dustbowl, the controversial transformations of the Green Revolution, and the modern debates about the obesity epidemic.

HIST 313 Scientific Revolution?
In this writing intensive class, we will investigate the development of the powerful ways of knowing we call science. Focusing on the pivotal periods often called “revolutions” we will examine topics from the decline of natural magic and alchemy and the changing meaning of monsters, to the invention of concepts of objectivity and factuality, to the imperial expansion of natural history and the origins of evolutionary thought, to the development of big science and the rise of cold war physics. In doing so we will better understand our own ways of looking at the world.

HIST 500 Independent Study