Class Schedules

How can history help us understand the landscape of global public health today? This history-of-the-present course will help you situate contemporary global health topics in a broader historical perspective and show you how skills from the historian's toolkit can be instrumental in helping build better public health systems. Global Health Histories is organized around three topic-focused units that vary by semester. Possible topics include: pandemics; disease control and eradication; racism and health; vaccines and vaccine hesitancy; health and colonialism; international health organizations; family and child health; and the intersections between public health and eugenics and/or population control. Community and Global Health concentrators and students majoring in the natural sciences are very welcome in this course, including folks without previous history experience. For History majors, this course meets the global and/or comparative requirement, the post-1800 requirement, and can count towards the following fields: "Race and Indigeneity;" or "Law and Social Justice," or "Global/Comparative."

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course offers a general survey of the complex and heterogeneous region we somewhat reductively term Latin America. It follows a roughly chronological approach, beginning with the eve of encounter and continuing through the contemporary era. Discussions will consider themes such as the institution and legacy of colonialism, the search for new national identities, and the onset of modern racial and political strife. The course will emphasize the import of global economic, political, and cultural trends on the formation of the region. Meets the global and/or comparative history requirement. Can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Latin American/Caribbean" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The course examines the post-World War II Civil Rights Movement led by African Americans in the United States.  In the class, students will analyze key people, issues, events, and debates within movement history, including, but not limited to, gender and leadership; struggles for civil rights in the south, west, and urban north; the impact of the Cold War on race relations; student activism; movement strategies; and the emergence of Black Power.  Throughout the semester, students will read a wide variety of primary and secondary texts to illuminate the activities and life stories of individual participants as well as the broad historical forces that characterized this long era of insurgency.   Can count towards "Gender," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice," or "North America" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is designed to introduce students to the history of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines major themes relating to change in the colonial period such as European conquest and imperialism, the development of the colonial economy, African responses to colonialism and the rise of nationalist movements that stimulated the movement towards independence. Students will examine these themes by applying them to case studies of specific geographic regions of the continent. Meets the post-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice" or "Africa & Atlantic World" fields. This course is appropriate for first years.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Religion and Law in Africa is an intermediate cross-listed history and religion course designed to teach students how to think like historians and assess how the legal systems of indigenous African societies have been shaped by their respective religions and cosmologies. This course also explores how Arab migration and European colonization in different parts of Africa imposed new legal systems that were influenced by either Islam or Christianity. The major themes of this class include African agency, indigenous African forms of knowledge and periodization, the interconnectedness of religious, legislative, and judicial facets of African societies, and diversity among African regions, societies, ethnic groups, religions, and languages. It counts toward the Legal Studies and African Studies concentrations. For history, it meets either the pre-1800 or post-1800 requirement and can count towards the "Law & Social Justice," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Africa & Atlantic World" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The American West is central to the construction of America's identity and popular culture.  The mythology of the American West, built on a narrow foundation of Euro-American settlement and conquest, is critical to understanding the role of the West in the national narrative of American history. Using a variety of materials, including films, art and photography, literature, and historical sources, this course will examine how writers, artists, actors, settlers, and government officials, among others, shaped the creation of the mythic West.  This course will investigate what - and who - is and is not considered part of this mythology, as well as the ways in which these constructs attempted to make sense of the diverse populations converging in the West. Can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," -and or "North America" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines Native history since 1871, the year Congress unilaterally chose to stop making treaties with Native nations. By focusing on Native sovereignty, resistance, and the exercise of treaty rights, this course highlights histories and contemporary experiences of Native people in what is now the United States. Meets the post-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice," and or "North America" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

People have always had to contend with the natural world, but only recently have historians begun to explore the changing relationships between people and their environment over time. In this course, we will examine the variety of ways that people in North America have shaped the environment, as well as how they have used, labored in, abused, conserved, protected, rearranged, polluted, cleaned, and thought about it. In addition, we will explore how various characteristics of the natural world have affected the broad patterns of human society, sometimes harming or hindering life and other times enabling rapid development and expansion. By bringing nature into the study of human history and the human past into the study of nature, we will begin to see the connections and interdependencies between the two that are often overlooked. Meets History's post-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Environment," or "Law and Social Justice," or "North America" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines the tumultuous changes that define the postwar era in U.S. society and culture. Themes of the course will vary depending on instructor. Topics may include: cultural tensions of the Cold War era, the civil rights movement and Black Power, the women-s movement, postwar prosperity, suburbanization, the Vietnam War, and the New Right. Meets the post-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Gender," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice," or "North America" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Events of the distant European past continue to shape our modern attitudes towards religion, magic and science. How did people in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Atlantic world use these frameworks to make sense of the world around them? In this course we will journey back to the period of the "Scientific Revolution" to investigate how and why people began to distinguish sharply between the three systems. Who lost, and who profited, from this transition? What similarities between religion, magic and science persisted? To understand this turning point, we will compare contemporaneous cases of individuals who practiced magic, science and religion and ran afoul of authorities. Their trials highlight how the three spheres began to diverge. Cases we will consider might include the 1633 trial of Galileo, and the 1663  witchcraft trial of Tempel Anneke in Germany. Meets the pre-1800 and the global and/or comparative history requirements, and can count towards "Law and Social Justice," or "Global/Comparative" fields.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, successive waves of immigration created the vibrant, multicultural Europe that we know today. New arrivals and their descendants, however, were not always welcomed with open arms. This course explores the history of these diverse communities and unpacks the prejudices that evolved to exclude them, including racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. We will also consider movements to combat discrimination in European societies as communities work together to imagine a more equitable and inclusive future. All students are welcome in this course, including first-year students and folks without previous history experience. For History majors, this course can count towards the following fields: "Race and Indigeneity" or "Law and Social Justice" or "Europe" or "Colonization and Empire".

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A study of leading institutions and movements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Major emphases include the impact of Western imperialism, intellectual and cultural changes, the transformation of peasant society through revolution, the rise of Mao Tse-Tung, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the rise of China as a world power. Special attention will be given to China's international relations. Meets the post-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice," or "Asia" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This advanced course is required for majors. It examines the various forms of analysis used by historians through a study of different kinds of historical texts and sources. It provides an opportunity for students to develop the skills and habits of thinking essential to practicing the discipline of history. This course invites students to address some of the myriad questions and controversies that surround such historical concepts as "objectivity," "subjectivity," "truth," "epistemology," and thereby to develop a "philosophy" of history. At the same time, it stresses the acquisition of such historical tools as the use of written, oral, computer and media sources and the development of analytical writing skills. The subject matter for study changes each year. Recent themes of the course have been memory, empires, and class formation.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Russia’s relations with the West often overshadow its deep connections with its eastern neighbors. From the 17th century onward, Russia - and later the Soviet Union - developed strategic approaches to control Siberia and the so-called Far East and assert its power in the Pacific, where it confronted other regional powers, such as China, Japan, and Korea. Given the current shifts in the global political order, understanding the historical connections between Russia, China, Japan, and Korea is more important than ever. This course examines the complexities of these relationships, with a particular emphasis on foreign policy. Key course themes include imperial Russian expansion into the Pacific region; colonization of indigenous populations; modernization projects (the Trans-Siberian Railway as a geopolitical tool); the clash of imperial interests in the Far East; the Russo-Japanese War; the 1917 revolution and its effect on China, Korea, and Japan; the White Movement in the Far East; the Soviet Union and Mongolia; the Pacific front during WWII; the Korean War and later relations with South and North Korea; Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960-80s; and the fragile partnerships after the fall of the Soviet Union. Fields: post-1800, Global/Comparative, Colonization and Empire.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

No river looms larger in north American history than the Mississippi, which meanders within acouple miles of Macalester’s tree-lined campus. Flowing through the geographic heart of thecontinent, the Mississippi has shaped the region’s economic, social, political, and cultural historysince before the U.S. existed. This course will examine the river’s environmental history – howthe river’s physical form has changed and been changed over time, and what those changes havemeant for people’s livelihoods and worldviews. We will dig into the geologic and geographicforces that shaped the river valley, Indigenous views of the river past and present, slavery and thecommercialization and industrialization of the river, and 20th -century stories of agriculturaldevelopment, pollution, flooding, dams and levees, and conservation. Using interdisciplinaryhistorical tools, we’ll examine case studies from the river north and south, from Itasca to NewOrleans, but with special attention to Minnesota and Midwest histories. Fields: Environment, North America, Colonization and Empire, Race and Indigeneity

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

America’s most long-lasting impact overseas has often come through environmental manipulations. This course will start in the early 20th century examining U.S. consumption of bananas, coffee, and oil and centering the people and landscapes that produced those commodities. Next, we will examine how Americans have shaped landscapes and communities overseas through warfare: we will visit battlefields and “militarized landscapes” in Normandy, Hiroshima, Korea, and Vietnam -- but also, surprisingly, in Hanford, Washington, Love Canal, New York, and hundreds of PFAS sites around the U.S. To tell global stories of American empire, we will zoom in on interwoven local ecosystems and communities, mostly overseas, often in Asia, but some within U.S. borders. We will also examine how nature shaped and often limited or foiled the U.S. “superpower.” Nature was often exploited and reconfigured, bombed and bulldozed, but it was no passive actor. Fields: Environment, Asia, Global Comparative, Colonization and Empire

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Much about the mainstream narratives of queerness and gender transgression have been determined by powerful, cis-dominated institutions, still even to this day: the media, schools, police, the law, doctors and psychiatrists. These are institutions structured by a racialized, heteronormative gender binary, and for whom trans people pose a problem to be managed. Oral history offers the possibility for queer and trans people to tell their own stories, and, in doing so, give more nuanced, complex analysis of identity, activism, and of the intersectional operations of systems of power. Oral history also makes room for the complex interplay of joy, playfulness, grief, anxiety, and connection that makes queer and trans life so valuable. In this course, students will have hands-on experience building an archive of queer and trans oral histories in the context of the pandemic and uprisings for racial justice. In this community-engaged course we will work closely with the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota, learning about oral history methodology, interview techniques, and having the opportunity to conduct oral history interviews and contribute to an online archive of queer and trans oral history. In particular, this semester, students will have the opportunity to work on an ongoing collaborative research project entitled "The Long Fire at Lake and Minnehaha," which uses oral history and archival research to grapple with the layers of history at the Lake/Minnehaha intersection in South Minneapolis, from the legacies of colonialism, to the intersecting systems of racialized capitalism that unevenly expose some members of the community to homelessness, policing, and violence, to the narratives of racialized gender that animate these struggles over space.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In the minds of many Americans, cities are places where nature is absent-places where nature exists only in the crevices and on the margins of spaces dominated by technology, concrete, and human artifice. This course confronts this assumption directly, drawing on the scholarship from the relatively young field of urban environmental history to uncover the deep interconnections between urban America and the natural world. Among the other things, we will examine how society has drawn upon nature to build and sustain urban growth, the implications that urban growth has for transforming ecosystems both local and distant, and how social values have guided urbanites as they have built and rearranged the world around them. Using the Twin Cities has a backdrop and constant reference point, we will attempt to understand the constantly changing ways that people, cities, and nature have shaped and reshaped one another throughout American history. Meets the History post-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Environment," or "North America" fields.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This seminar-style class examines the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the history of medicine and health in the U.S. Our diverse topics for study include eugenics, sexuality, midwifery, cultural/spiritual healing methods, pandemics, race- and gender-based ailments and medical experiments (such as the science and politics of the birth control pill and the infamous U.S Public Health Service syphilis experiment in Tuskegee), gender reassignment surgery, and sex-testing in the Olympics. This wide range of topics will prepare students to explore a research topic of their own choosing for a final paper. Can count towards "Gender," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice," or "North America" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course introduces students to the ways history is being practiced in the public sphere. We will examine a wide array of topics that fall under the rubric of public history including the study of archives, museums, and oral histories. The course may also consider historical reenactment, commemoration, digital history, and the preservation of historical sites. As we explore these topics we will be asking larger questions about who practices history, the role of audience, and the relationship between history and memory. Can count towards "Public History" field.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course introduces the cultures and societies of China, Japan and Korea from the earliest times to the present day. Primarily an introductory course for beginners in East Asian civilization, this course considers a variety of significant themes in religious, political, economic, social and cultural developments in the region. Meets global and/or comparative history requirement. Can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice," or "Asia" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines the history of childhood and youth in the United States. The historical voices and perspectives of childhood that we study will pay close attention to the significance of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, time periods, and social settings. Some questions we will consider relevant to the study of history: Do children have agency? What is the role of children as subjects in history? How has childhood been socially and historically constructed? Why are children such galvanizing social and political symbols? How is identity shaped in childhood and what impact does this have on adult society at certain historical moments?

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course offers a general survey of the complex and heterogeneous region we somewhat reductively term Latin America. It follows a roughly chronological approach, beginning with the eve of encounter and continuing through the contemporary era. Discussions will consider themes such as the institution and legacy of colonialism, the search for new national identities, and the onset of modern racial and political strife. The course will emphasize the import of global economic, political, and cultural trends on the formation of the region. Meets the global and/or comparative history requirement. Can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Latin American/Caribbean" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A study of the history of Africa before 1800, this course covers the major themes relating to the development of African societies and cultures from the earliest times. Students will engage with themes of state-building, trade and religion as catalysts for change and learn how historians have reconstructed the history of early Africa. This course will provide students with knowledge of specific case studies from North, South, East, West, and Central Africa. Meets the pre-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Africa & Atlantic World" fields. This course is appropriate for first years.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The objective of this course is to explore the role that women have played in the development of African history and to understand the major issues that define their experience as women from this region of the world. This course introduces students to the ways in which gender is studied in African history and to the major "break-through" works on women in African history. An important component of this course is the study of life histories of women from various geographical regions of the continent. Can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Gender," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Africa & Atlantic World" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

People have always had to contend with the natural world, but only recently have historians begun to explore the changing relationships between people and their environment over time. In this course, we will examine the variety of ways that people in North America have shaped the environment, as well as how they have used, labored in, abused, conserved, protected, rearranged, polluted, cleaned, and thought about it. In addition, we will explore how various characteristics of the natural world have affected the broad patterns of human society, sometimes harming or hindering life and other times enabling rapid development and expansion. By bringing nature into the study of human history and the human past into the study of nature, we will begin to see the connections and interdependencies between the two that are often overlooked. Meets History's post-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Environment," or "Law and Social Justice," or "North America" fields.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This class examines the Atlantic commerce in enslaved Africans that took place between 1500 and 1800. We will explore, among other topics, transatlantic commerce, the process of turning captives into commodities, the gendered dimensions of the slave trade, onboard experiences, resistance to the trade, Africans in the Americas, and the abolitionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Students will read a range of primary and secondary sources in order to gain a more complex understanding of the trade and how it changed over time. Meets the global and/or comparative history requirement. Meets the pre-1800 requirement, and can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Race and Indigeneity," or "Law and Social Justice," or "Africa & Atlantic World" fields within the History major.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The Russian Revolution took place in 1917. But can we reduce the Russian revolutionary experience and its role in Russian and world history to this year? This course explores the nature of the revolutionary process in late imperial Russian and Soviet history from the late nineteenth century to the 1990s. We will trace the development of the revolutionary processes in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (modernization, the revolutionary movement of the 19th century, 1917, Stalin’s Revolution, the Quiet Revolution, and Gorbachev’s Perestroika) and how ordinary people experienced them. We will focus on the relationship between revolutionary dreams and everyday realities, the coercive nature of revolution, and its attempts to introduce equality and participatory mechanisms.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The First and Second World Wars altered the political, social, economic, and cultural landscape of Europe in profound ways. This course explores those transformations from the perspective of humans who lived through the wars, but also through the eyes of subsequent generations of Europeans as they grappled with the ongoing reverberations of these two global conflicts. Over the course of the semester we will engage with a broad range of themes and questions. We will, for example, seek to understand the origins of totalitarianism in Europe and its relationship to imperialism. We will explore how the wars transfigured Europe's place on the global stage. Finally, we will consider how both conflicts shifted understandings of gender, ignited anticolonial movements in Europe's global empires, and laid the foundations for European integration. Class time will be devoted to short lectures, film screenings, in-depth discussion, and a range of hands-on activities—including some history detective work! Your writing for this class will take the form of three collaborative in-class History Lab projects and one in-class exam at the end of the semester. All students are welcome in this course, including first-year students and folks without previous history experience. For History majors, this course meets the post-1800 requirement and can count towards the following fields: "Colonization and Empire" or "Europe" or "Law and Social Justice."

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

We won’t be traveling to a galaxy far, far away, but we will examine the creation of the U.S. empire – and historical and contemporary resistance to the impositions of empire. We’ll begin with encounters with Indigenous nations in the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawai’i before traveling to Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other U.S.-held territories. This class will focus on discussions of race and imperialism, citizenship and belonging, and inclusion and exclusion, centering on federal policies and performances of race on national and international stages. We will also examine how these attempts were often (and continue to be) subverted and undermined by these supposed subjects who continually resist and redefine imperialist ambitions.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences
U.S. Identities and Differences
Writing WA
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How did gender beliefs influence the development of modern science? How did women shape modern science? This course explores the intersection of gender and science from the early modern period to the late twentieth century. It focuses on the Western scientific tradition, with special attention to Russian and Soviet experiences. In this course, we will examine the following topics: early modern beliefs about nature, science, and gender; women’s participation in modern science; the development of modern scientific institutions; and biographies of women scientists.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores how same-sex desire, eroticism, and gender variance were understood in pre-modern Islamicate societies before the emergence of modern sexual identities such as “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” Drawing on literary texts, legal treatises, medical writings, visual culture, and modern scholarship, students examine how desire was conceptualized in relation to gender, age, power, ethics, and social order. Rather than asking whether “gay people existed” in the past, the course asks how desire itself was structured, interpreted, and regulated and how modern categories of sexuality reshape our reading of pre-modern cultures. The course places Islamicate societies in global conversation with Greek, Christian, and modern European thought, emphasizing historical difference, cultural specificity, and the politics of interpretation.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course focuses on dance in the United States from the early 20th century to today. The historical study of dance as an embodied art form supports an intersectional examination of how gender, race, ethnicity, and class experiences both reflect and shape individual and collective identities. We will read seminal texts in dance and cultural studies, analyze dance videos and live performances, and write short papers that critically consider an array of theatrical dance forms and traditions.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Russia’s relations with the West often overshadow its deep connections with its eastern neighbors. From the 17th century onward, Russia - and later the Soviet Union - developed strategic approaches to control Siberia and the so-called Far East and assert its power in the Pacific, where it confronted other regional powers, such as China, Japan, and Korea. Given the current shifts in the global political order, understanding the historical connections between Russia, China, Japan, and Korea is more important than ever. This course examines the complexities of these relationships, with a particular emphasis on foreign policy. Key course themes include imperial Russian expansion into the Pacific region; colonization of indigenous populations; modernization projects (the Trans-Siberian Railway as a geopolitical tool); the clash of imperial interests in the Far East; the Russo-Japanese War; the 1917 revolution and its effect on China, Korea, and Japan; the White Movement in the Far East; the Soviet Union and Mongolia; the Pacific front during WWII; the Korean War and later relations with South and North Korea; Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960-80s; and the fragile partnerships after the fall of the Soviet Union.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Between 1450 and 1850, people started to venture farther outward into oceans that had previously been understood as dangerous and hostile environments. This course takes the Age of Sail as a starting point to track changes in human approaches to boundless waters. We will consider two questions in particular: How have oceans functioned as a means of global integration rather than division? How are historians using oceans to further the study of world (versus regional) history? Readings will cover and compare the Atlantic, pacific, and Indian Oceans, and address themes of diaspora, port cities, banditry, trade, and imperial encounters. Every other year. This course fulfills the global/comparative requirement for the history major. Meets the global and/or comparative history requirements, and can count towards "Colonization and Empire," or "Environment," or "Global/Comparative" fields. Prerequisite(s): One 100- or 200- level history course or consent of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What does the theory and practice of oral history have to offer in today's world of video chatting, social media, and the ability of anyone, anywhere to record and broadcast their own version of reality? What is oral history, exactly, and why is it important to formally record, transcribe, and preserve the memories and narratives of people involved in both historical and current events? This course provides students with a theoretical understanding of oral history as well as the opportunity to practice interviewing, transcribing, and interpreting events, memories, and narratives through a variety of projects. Can count towards the Public history, North America/Modern US history fields.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The senior seminar is taught every fall on themes that cross chronological and geographic lines. Past themes have included Memory, Migration, Gender and Micro-History.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials