Thematic History

This interdisciplinary one-semester, 3-unit, readings and discussions seminar is designed for upper division undergraduate students with interests in history, geography and cartography. It offers broadly-based coverage of major topics in the history of cartography, including the theoretical turn in the "new cartography," the cultural history of cartography, and the role of GIS. Using case studies from the Anglo-European world, we will examine the role of maps in exploration, colonization, and imperialism; cartographic representation of the New World from European and indigenous perspectives; Humboldtian traditions in the Americas; nation-state border projects; and various genres of mapping. Throughout we will examine maps as evidence, develop skills in spatial analysis and interpretation, and consider how maps can be used by historians and other scholars.

This course addresses the larger chronological and spatial framework around the year 1968. We explore the evolution of political ideas from decolonization to urban renewal, from labor to civil rights. We look at the formation of new categories, new political subjects like student organizations, gender and ethnic-based groups. We follow the effects that the political upheaval of the 1960s had on intellectuals and on political theories. Finally, we investigate the exhaustion and consumption of this global political event in memory and popular culture. The course also questions whether there is a global historical sense to "the sixties." What links these events besides the fact that they are happening in the same decade?

This course examines the historical context against the theoretical, cultural, political, social, and economic elements of sudden revolutionary upheaval. Revolutions from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 will be studied.

Daily we watch, seemingly helplessly, as people are displaced from their communities, homelands, and countries and subsequently seek asylum around the world, sometimes within our own local southwest communities; is this new, or is there a history to mobility and suffering? Key causes of displacement, such as war, violence, persecution, and modes of terror, and the ensuing consequences of violent displacement, such as poverty, disease, physical and psychological trauma, and vulnerability to human rights abuses, all have historical antecedents. In this course, we explore history of human rights, citizenship and refugee by exploring their relationship with nationalism, imperialism, war and displacement. We consider various local and global schemes to safeguard the dignity of human populations with domestic, regional, and international law, policy, and humanitarian action. A focus on the historical evolution of citizenship law and the nation state will provide clues as to the historical practices of displacement and resettlement.

International history of a topic of the instructor's choice.

Why should we study women's work? Is work the key to women's power or to their continuing subordination? What defines "women's work" and do only women do it? Are gendered divisions of labor an inescapable fact of nature, or do they have a history? What types of work have women performed from society to society, across time and space? How have historical and cultural contexts affected women's work? In this course we will examine women's work in a variety of societies in the past and present, asking how women's lives were shaped by their work, and how their work in turn made a difference in shaping their societies. We will also attempt better to understand what may be common to women and their work in different places and times, and how to account for the many differences. Like other upper-division history courses, this one demands substantial reading and writing

History of work, cross-culturally and over time, including slavery, agricultural, artisanal, and industrial work, unions and workers' political movements, and labor market segmentation by gender and race, sweatshops and migration.

Examines how twentieth-century writers debated the role of the intellectual: whether to be politically committed in order to advocate positive change, or to remain ¿above the fray¿ and strive for objectivity? Considers how historical context (war and genocide, social transformations) shaped the role of the intellectual in European societies. Readings may include Woolf, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Arendt, Havel, Said.

In this course we will trace the evolution of sexualities in historical context and the way human societies around the World construct their notions of sexualities over time. We will survey important developments in the history of sexuality from approximately 5000 B.C.E. to the present. We will concentrate on human beings' changing perceptions of the meaning of sexualities and how they relate to the dynamics of the political, cultural, and social movements that dominated World history throughout this period. In the modern period, people have attached meanings to sexualities that reflect deep social divisions between states and societies about the assignment of sexual and gender norms, regulation, criminalization, and sexual politics. We will try to ascertain the historical development of these contested meanings.

The course will examine a range of instances of slavery, including in ancient and medieval Europe, in medieval and modern South Asia, in Africa, the Caribbean world, and in North and South America. The emphasis will be on historicizing individual instances of the phenomenon, that is, understanding why particular forms of the institution appeared in certain contexts, and other forms in other contexts.