RESEARCH IN EARLY AMERICA TO 1763
56:512:509:01
M 6:00 pm – 8:50 pm
Professor Shankman
History 509 is an early American Research seminar open to graduate students who have taken one or more of the following readings classes: History 504, History 505, History 506. Graduate students will write an article-length (approximately 10,000 to 12,000 words-30 to 35 pages) essay based on original research from within the time period of the pre-20th century North American/US readings class or classes they have taken.
READINGS IN THE CULTURAL
HISTORY OF CAPITALISM
56:512:522:01
M 2:05 pm – 4:55 pm
Professor Woloson
The solidification of American capitalism during the 19th century was far from seamless and uncontested. This class focuses on how the process of capitalism changed culture and society during its formative years in America. We will focus on how people acceded to and contested the logic of capitalism as it increasingly permeated even non-commercial parts of people’s lives. In addition to being a source of financial gain for some and a force of oppression for others, how did capitalism change the way people acted, how they felt, and what they believed in? Further, how did economic, cultural, and social systems overlap and intertwine, becoming contingent upon one another? We will read key works of scholarship in the of the cultural history of capitalism, broadly considered.
COLLOQUIUM IN RACE AND ETHNICITY
56:512:524:01
TH 6:00 pm – 8:50 pm
Professor Thomas
This course takes a comparative approach to examining the complex history of racial and ethnic difference in the Americas, from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century. We will explore how difference defined by physical and cultural markers of descent (“race” and “ethnicity”) have operated as social categories – differently in different regions – throughout the history of the Americas. We will investigate how the experiences of racial and ethnic difference varied across time, place, and group in the history of the region, and how hierarchies of race and ethnicity across time have shaped social and political outcomes. Finally, we will look at responses to racist ideologies in a variety of societies, tracking how scholars and others have conceptualized the legacies and ongoing realities of racism throughout the Americas.
RESEARCH IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY
56:512:543:01
T 6:00 pm – 8:50 pm
Professor Boyd
Research course on the principal themes and issues in African American History.
GENOCIDE IN GLOBAL HISTORY
56:512:555:01
W 2:05 pm – 4:55 pm
Professor Marker
In this graduate global readings course, we will consider the phenomenon of genocide in modern history from an explicitly global perspective. The core case study at the center of the course is the Holocaust, but we will think deeply about its historical connections to its primary precedents – the colonial genocides in German Southwest Africa in the early 1900s and the Armenian genocide during World War I. We will also explore how Holocaust memory has shaped our understanding of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Finally, we will examine the history and politics of labeling mass killings and atrocities as genocide in the past and the present.
CENTENNIAL HISTORY
56:512:590:01
W 6:00 pm – 8:50 pm
Professor Goodman
This course explores how the public has commemorated centennial events in the nation’s history. How did these key moments—and the array of events, programs, and material culture produced to commemorate them—reflect and seek to resolve the nation’s shifting values, conflicts, and self-conception? With a particular focus on the nation’s 1876 Centennial Exposition, the Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926, the nation’s Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, and the forthcoming semi quincentennial of 2026, we will use the lens of centennials to delve into the history of memory and public history in America.