PERSPECTIVES ON HISTORY- CLEOPATRA: GENDER, POWER, RACE AND HISTORY
50:509:299:01
M/W 9:35 am – 10:55 am
Professor Jewell
Course will be taught remotely, synchronou using Canvas and zoom
Fulfills Gen Education Code: Writing Course (W)
This course is primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors; it should be taken in the sophomore year for history majors. It is designed to teach skills–critical reading, effective analysis of arguments, research using primary and secondary sources, persuasive writing, and the production of various forms of historical scholarship. The course will focus on Cleopatra. Students will read deeply in the subject, complete a variety of assignments, and take turns leading discussions of the readings and films presented in class.
This course will focus on the historical Cleopatra and her reception in later historical periods. A polarizing figure, Cleopatra has attracted the attention of ancient and modern historians alike since her death, as well as countless renditions by poets, playwrights, novelists, film directors, and in even more recent pop culture, such as music videos. Students will focus first on reading and analysis of the ancient sources detailing her life—themselves divided in their opinion—and her place in the history of the Ptolemaic dynasty, a group of Macedonian kings and queens that ruled an empire primarily based in Egypt, but that at one time extended to Cyprus and Syria. Students will then examine how Cleopatra’s image and legacy shifted under the pressure of certain revisionist debates and cultural contexts in other historical periods from the Renaissance to the present day, especially in relation to the question of her gendered power as a female ruler, and more recently, the question of her ethnicity or race. The course involves the writing of one major paper, which students work on throughout the semester through multiple stages of drafting. As a result, students will become familiar with the foundational research, writing and analysis skills of an historian.
PUBLIC HISTORY PRACTICE
50:509:300:01
By arrangement
Professor Mires
Course will be taught remotely, using Sakai
Get your hands on history: This is an individualized opportunity to gain knowledge of local and regional history while contributing to a public history project based at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden. The options include historic house research and curatorship for the Cooper Street Historic District and research and digital publishing for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. In addition to readings in local and regional history, students will be provided with training and ongoing supervision and feedback while working approximately six hours per week on-site on their selected projects. This course is by arrangement, with permission of the instructor, and is open to juniors and seniors with a GPA of 3.0 and above.
UNDERGRADUATE INTERNSHIP
50:509:475:01
By Arrangement
Professor Woloson
A supervised internship, usually unpaid, at a museum, historical society, archive, or library.
WESTERN CIVILIZATION II
50:510:102:01
M/W 12:30 pm – 1:50 pm
Professor Demirjian
Course will be taught remotely, synchronously, using Canvas, and Big Blue Button
Fulfills Gen Ed Requirements: HAC (Heritage and Civilizations)
Through lecture, primary source documents, and occasional films, this course examines the political, economic, intellectual, cultural, and military history of Europe from the onset of the Thirty Years’ War until the Cold War. Topics will include the rise of nation-states, mercantilism, industrial capitalism, modern liberalism, imperialism, communism, and fascism. The course will also look closely at the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, and both World Wars. Students will be evaluated based upon a series of quizzes, mid-term, final exam, and participation.
SPECIAL TOPICS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY RISE OF ROME: FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE
50:510:380:01
M/W 2:05 pm – 3:25 pm
Professor Jewell
Course will be taught remotely, synchronous, using Canvas and zoom.
At the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Gaius Octavius (better known as Augustus, the first emperor) finally conquered the last of the Greeks—and the Romans as well. This course explores the rise of Rome and its empire in the provinces on either side of this watershed moment. From the emergence of Rome as a Mediterranean power in the late 200s BCE with the defeat of the Carthaginian empire, down to the early principate of the Roman emperors, students will study the major developments in Roman imperialism in this course. In addition to a chronological survey, students will discuss the impact of Roman rule on social, religious, economic and legal developments throughout Europe, Northern Africa, and the Near East, as well as interactions with regions beyond Roman control (e.g. India). Special consideration will be paid to how life differed for people in the empire according to their region and place (e.g. urban vs rural), local pre-Roman culture, social and legal status (e.g. slave, free or freed), religion, gender and other factors. In part, students will approach the topic of Roman imperialism through a unique Roman persona assigned to them at the beginning of the semester, as well as engaging closely with primary sources, such as art, architecture, archaeology and texts in translation, as well as some modern scholarship.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNITED STATES I
50:512:201:01
M/W 9:35 am – 10:55 am
Kim Martin
Course will be taught remotely, synchronously and asynchronously, using Canvas, Zoom and Webex.
Fulfills Gen Education Requirements: USW (United States in the World )
This course traces the path of American history from before European colonization through the colonial period, the Imperial Crisis, Revolution, Civil War, and Reconstruction. We will examine the most important political, economic, social, and cultural developments of the 17th – 19th centuries, and observe how different groups of people shaped and were affected by such developments. Learning about the past involves a careful effort to understand the ideas and beliefs that motivated people to act in certain specific ways, within particular historical circumstances. Development of the U.S. I is an introductory course, intended to acquaint students with various ideas, events, and people from this particular segment of America’s past, and to introduce students to some of the questions and debates that animate the study of early American history.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNITED STATES II
50:512:202:01
T/TH 11:10 am – 12:30 pm
Professor Demirjian
Course being taught synchronously, using Canvas and Zoom
Fulfills Gen Education Requirements: USW (United States in the World )
This course examines the political, economic, social, and military history of the United States from the 1860s through the 1970s. The course will also examine the roles played by ethnicity, race, gender, class, the development of a national market economy, and the emergence of a powerful national state in shaping ideas about American identity and its place in the world.
African-American History II
50:512:204:01
T/TH 3:35 pm – 4:55 pm
Professor Boyd
Course is being taught remote asynchronously, using Canvas and Zoom
Fulfills Gen Education Requirements: USW (United States and the World)
This course provides an overview of the major events and developments in African-American history from 1865 to the present, tracing black leadership and cultural development through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights revolution. The course traces African Americans’ quest for freedom through periods including World War I, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and World War II. It then examines key political, social, and cultural developments of the post-war period focusing on social movements such as the Long Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Black Feminism, and the Prisoners’ Rights movement. We will end with a discussion on race in the Obama years and the Black Lives Matter movement.
WORLD WAR II
50:512:285:01
M/W 3:45 pm – 5:05 pm
Professor Epstein
Course will being taught in class. Also taught remotely, synchronously and asynchronously, using Canvas
Fulfills Gen Education Requirements: USW (United States and the World)
World War II never loses its fascination. The greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, it caused the deaths of some 60 million people, the large majority of whom were civilians. To understand the origins of the war, we will begin with World War I, and then trace the collapse of the fragile postwar peace in the 1920s and 1930s. By the time the United States entered World War II, it had been raging for years in Asia and Europe. We will study the famous battles, campaigns, weapons, and leaders familiar from popular accounts of the war. But we will also examine how the combatants mobilized their economies and societies, how they developed the logistical capacity to project combat power across oceans and continents, how everyday people and soldiers experienced the war, how the war and the Holocaust were related, and how the war generated new calls for decolonization and human rights. Last but not least, we will explore how the war changed the international order: vaulting the United States to superpower status, hastening the end of the European empires, leading to the establishment of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, and setting the stage for the Cold War.
The course is designed to be both accessible to non-History majors and rewarding for History majors.
EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC
50:512:315:01
T/TH 2:00 pm – 3:20 pm
Professor Shankman
Course is being taught in class. Also synchronously.
This course investigates the origins of the modern United States. Why and how did a nation conceived in liberty quickly promote the vast expansion of slavery? Why did a society that revolted against British style social and economic inequality end up producing more inequality than had ever existed in the thirteen colonies? How did a nation that few in 1789 believed could survive for even two decades come to dominate the North American continent in the next fifty years? Why did the very way it achieved this domination create the conditions that tore the nation apart in a civil war of unprecedented violence and bloodshed? Do you like your historical figures colorful and crazy? Why by 1793 did Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson hate each other and have no doubt the other was a traitor and a spy? Why did as many people despise and denounce George Washington as praise him by the time he finished as President? Why did President Andrew Jackson destroy the nation’s central bank? And why did he name his favorite horse after a drunkard who died by jumping off a cliff. Why did thousands pay to see watermen send a barge full of animals hurtling over Niagara Falls in 1827? Hey, it’s the early republic. Take the course and find out.
SPECIAL TOPICS IN HISTORY: THE GREAT MIGRATION
50:512:380:01
T/TH 11:10 am – 12:30 pm
Professor Boyd
Course taught remotely asynchronously using Canvas
The Great Migration was the mass movement of more than six million African Americans out of the U.S. South between 1910 and 1970. This black diaspora had numerous implications for urban development, black culture, and black economic and political participation in the twentieth century. This course explores the various experiences African Americans had throughout the Great Migration, and the impact the migration had on different regions in the United States. We start the course by examining the first great migration of blacks to the West in the late 19th century. The course then follows the various waves of the migration—the first wave around World War I, the lull and return migration during the Great Depression, the second wave around World War II and the post-war period, and reverse migration beginning in the 1970s. Key questions we will seek to answer in the course include: How did gender and class shape African Americans’ Great Migration experience? How did Northern and Western cities change as a result of the migration? What is the cultural legacy of the Great Migration?
U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS TO 1914
50:512:387:01
M/W 12:30 pm – 1:50 pm
Professor Epstein
Course will being taught in class. Also taught remotely, synchronously and asynchronously using Canvas.
Fulfills Gen Education Requirements: USW (United States and the World) and WRI (Writing)
Today, the United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Two hundred years ago, however, it was a relatively weak nation hoping to climb the global power rankings and challenge the European great powers—not unlike China today. When the thirteen colonies declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, they saw their new nation as a beacon of liberty in a world of oppressive European empires. But over the course of the next century, the United States itself became an empire—first continental, then global. Then as now, the growing assertiveness of the United States in the world occasioned debate: while some Americans welcomed it, others saw it as a betrayal of the nation’s revolutionary legacy. Was the United States a new kind of empire—an “empire of liberty,” in Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase—or did becoming an empire make it impossible to remain the land of liberty? This course will examine those questions and others.
UNDERGRADUATE PUBLIC HISTORY INTERNSHIP
50:512:475:01
By Arrangement
Professor Woloson
A supervised internship, usually unpaid, at a museum, historical society, archive, or library.
LATIN AMERICAN II SURVEY
50:516:212:01
T/TH 9:35 am – 10:55 am
Professor Thurner
Taught remotely, synchronously and asynchronously, using Canvas, Zoom and Omeka
Fulfills Gen Education Requirements: GCM (Global Communities)
This course is a general survey of Latin American history from 1800 to the present, providing students familiarity with the region and preparing them for future, more specialized studies. While Latin America is united by a common history of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism, it is also an incredibly diverse region, presenting myriad problems for historical analysis. In this course, we will focus on popular politics and how different groupings of people found ways to campaign for rights and resources through the political and economic transformations of the last 200 years. Key themes addressed will include national identity and citizenship; gender, sexuality, and race; and globalization, human rights, and migration.