Thematic History

This course examines the difficulties and promises of bringing history into the courtroom and the way historians have informed public policy and jurisprudence. Students will identify and assess the major problems of the "historian as expert witness" phenomenon by exploring broad case studies such as: 1) cultural heritage issues such as the Nazi theft of artwork during World War II and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in the United States; 2) big tobacco and public health in the United States and Canada; 3) historical memory and reconciliation in the post-dictatorship political and social contexts of Spain, Argentina, and Chile; and 4) the living legacies of Spanish and Mexican natural resource law in the United States.

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 can we discover their origin? 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 geographical regions in the past and the 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 features and meanings may be common to women and their work in different places and times, and how to account for the many differences.

Food and cuisine are foundational to knowledge of the human past and link the past with the present. In this course we explore the importance of food in its various roles (alimentary, cultural, economic, environmental, religious, social, political, etc.) in shaping the history of the late antique, medieval, and early modern world (ca. 300 to 1700).

This course is designed to introduce students to the theoretical and practical dimensions of public history. Public history is history written primarily for the public and not an academic audience. We will study the work of historians within and outside of the academy who are engaged in educating the public in the places where the majority of people learn history: universities, museums, zoos, YouTube, archives, libraries, film, Wikipedia, social media and on tours. We will also study the ways in which the public is questioning the authority and ownership of history through the creation of their own historical projects.

From the time of our stone-age ancestors, violence has been a common feature of human societies. Variously expressed as the organized violence of warfare, the smaller-scale conflict of tribes or clans, or the actions of lone individuals, violence is a depressingly-common feature of the human experience. This course analyzes the impact and function of violence from the late-Neolithic onwards, culminating with the more-complex state structures, legal systems, and military bureaucracies that have emerged in the modern age. Topics of particular focus will include the role and function of technology; the impact of warfare on civilian populations; the effect of violence on individuals; legal efforts to frame and define "legitimate" violence; and the mythologizing of violence in historical memory. Students will gain a broad understanding of warfare and violence as expressed in a variety of Western and non-Western contexts including Europe, Africa, the Near East and the Americas. By taking this course, students will develop a greater understanding of the concept of violence as a historical phenomenon, and be better prepared to analyze the place and function of modern/contemporary expressions of violence, both between and within human societies.

In this course we start with an exploration of some of the formal prohibitions of "subversive" texts, images, and sounds. We then move on to identify multiple types of censorship aimed at controlling the circulation of information within different societies. We compare changing historical contexts in which political or religious leaders banned information or activities of individuals and groups and examine the usefulness of dichotomies that juxtapose censorship and freedom. How can the lens of censorship help us explore constructions of political power? What were some of the changing political interest or fears that triggered acts of censorship? What were different forms of violence that accompanied such acts? How can we identify the gendered aspect of censorship, and in what way was censorship shaped by such categories as race, ethnicity, class, geography, age, and experience? Under what circumstances were people prepared to resist censorship, either individually or collectively? Themes include censorship and self-censorship in people's religious practices, politics, and corporate censorship. We will examine evidence from the worlds of art, humor, public rituals, mass media, and education.

The modern bicycle has been present in human lives for less than a century and a half. Yet in that brief period of time it has spread throughout the world and its popularity is near-universal. In this course we will trace the evolution of the bicycle in four distinct ways: as a transportation device, with a gendered component; as a site for the development of human technology; as a commodity for economic development; and as a device for human pleasure, leisure time, and exercise. We will explore its invention, growth, and development from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries in societies around the world. We will survey important developments in the history of the bicycle from approximately 1850 to the present.

This course will examine histories of memories during the “long” nineteenth century (1789-1918) through the institutions and technologies that facilitate recall: museums, photography and cinema, print media and visual culture, as well as academic disciplines which emerged in western civilizations to study memory phenomena, such as history, psychology, archaeology, paleontology and more – many of which were created in the 19th century.  The emergence of modern notions of time and its rapid pace of change will be considered alongside practices of preservation, conservation and the creation of memorials and monuments. Topics may include: the human body as a site of memory (tattoos, funerary practices); Napoleonic and Civil War memorials; theories of extinction; the first public museums; time capsules; tourism and souvenirs; the foundations of the modern university.

A colloquium or small lecture class intended for majors and upperclassmen; topics vary by instructor.

Introduction to historical thinking from antiquity to the present, with emphasis on ideas in European and North American historical writings during the modern and contemporary eras.