His 506-1 Historiography of United States History Since 1877
Professor Elizabeth Payne
1:00 Tuesdays
Bishop 333
This historiographical seminar focuses on competing perspectives on major themes as well as periods in the history of the United States since 1877. Students will read a major work plus relevant articles each week on a crucial theme or period. They will write a four page critical review each week that is submitted prior to the class. In addition, students will choose one week in which he or she works with the professor to direct class discussion.
Topics include the Gilded Age, Populism, Imperialism, Progressivism, The New Deal, The Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, Cultural History, the New Right, and Labor history.
His 552-1 Historiography of European History Since 1789
Professor Chiarella Esposito
1:00 Wednesdays
Bishop 333
This course is an examination of major issues, interpretations and problems in European history since 1789. Examples of the course's weekly topics are: The French Revolution; the Industrial Revolution; Nationalism; Liberalism; Class Consciousness and Socialism; the German Sonderweg; Imperialism; Racism; Fascism and Nazism; the Holocaust; 20th Century Capitalism; the Reconstruction of Europe after 1945; Americanization; the European Union and Globalization. It is this instructor's intention not to limit the course to one type of history--e.g. social or political history--but to acquaint the students with all kinds of methodologies, ranging from traditional narrative histories to contemporary cultural histories.
Students are required to read approximately 250 pages each week and write two 10-15 page papers about two of the historiographical debates covered in class. Students will also make book presentations in class. Grading will be based both on written work and participation to discussions.
His 605-1 Readings in Early American History, 1607-1800
Professor Sheila Skemp
1:00 Mondays
Bishop 333
This course, aimed primarily but not exclusively to students who plan to take Ph.D. comprehensive exams in Early American History at some point down the line, will focus on an analysis of a combination of “old” and “new” books and articles related to important issues of the period.
Course Requirements:
Four “short” (8-10 pages) papers
One “long” (20-25 pages) historiographical essay.
His 606-1 Consumers, Race, and Southern History, 1890s-1960s
Professor Ted Ownby
4:00 Tuesdays
Barnard Obs 202
This graduate readings class will study the relationships between a national and international marketplace, race and ethnicity, and southern work and cultural life. Readings will cover topics beyond, but connected to, the history of the American South. Assignments will include book reviews, an exam, and a research proposal.
Readings will include the following:
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness
Gavin Campbell, Music and the Making of the New South
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White
Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land
Anthony Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy
Alexis McCrossen, ed., Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic
Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World
Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart
His 607-1/691-1 Secularization and Sacralization in the Americas
Professor Charles Wilson and Professor Douglass Sullivan-González
4:00 Thursdays
Honors 311
Purpose:
The principal purpose of this course is to sharpen our ability to think critically about the historical writing of religion in the Americas. We will focus on both substantive and methodological issues, and delve into the authors' presuppositions about humanity and society. We will explore how authors understand “religion”, “religiosity”, “civil/public religion”, “popular religion”, “institutional religion”, and we will reflect on the process known as “secularization” and “sacralization” in the context of articles and historical monographs. Given the dual “historical” and “sociological” dimensions of these interrogatives, we will explore related methodological questions regarding “interdisciplinarian studies.”
Students will be required to submit a short 2-page essay on seven of the nine assigned books; conduct 1 seminar based on one of the books; and turn in an extended review-essay centering on the same book for which they conducted the seminar discussion.
His 652-1 Waging Total War in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to Historiography of the First and Second World Wars
Professor Susan Grayzel
10:00 Saturdays
Bishop 333
Course Description: The World Wars of the Twentieth Century decisively reshaped the modern World. This course will not only offer students the opportunity to learn in more detail about these two global cataclysms, but will also provide them with a chance to engage with pertinent historical debates about the origins, conduct, and legacy of these conflicts. We will pay equal attention to both wars and to experiences of civilians as well as combatants because the involvement of the entire populations of participant nations in new forms of warfare was one of the most crucial aspects of these events. Students will be responsible for completing readings in academic books and articles that the instructor will assign. In addition to participating actively in the meetings, students will also be required to complete several brief essays based on the assigned readings.
His 692-2
Professor Bashir Salau
1:00 Tuesdays
TBA
Topic of this course will be determined in consultation between the students and Dr. Salau.
His 693-1 Enslaved Women and the Construction of American Notions Of Gender, Sexuality, and Race
Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens
4:00 Mondays
Bishop 333
This seminar examines the development, intersections, and complexities of race, gender, and sexuality in United States history from European conquest to the present. What is “race”? For example, how has it been constructed as a scientific object? What work does it do in defining “woman?” Using feminist theory and historical case studies, this course explores critically the cultural work of “race” in scientific and cultural constructions of “woman” with a concentration on colonial and antebellum America. As a historian of slavery and medicine, I argue that race and gender is deeply inscribed in the ways biomedicine conceives of and deals with women’s bodies, both white women and women of color. Rather than asking, “how has race affected women” - a question which leaves race unexamined - we will be turning a critical eye to the very notion of race itself, asking, “What kind of a category was and is race?” With this question as our starting point, we will unpack the history of changing claims for a biological underpinning for race and gender, and from there go on to untangle the work “race” has done to define difference among women, especially those distinctions rooted in sexuality. This is a very difficult task, not just because the relationship between race and gender is complex and fraught with tension, but also because the history of “race,” framed in this manner, remains largely unwritten. With the help of the readings and class discussion, the goal of this class will be to begin to piece together this still unfolding history, and to develop possibly new questions for doing so. To give our task focus, we will lay out solid historical and theoretical foundations, and consider a series of case studies that reveal how these categories are produced and contested over time while paying particular attention to political, social, economic, and cultural mechanisms of power, oppression, and resistance. We will analyze a variety of texts and primary sources, including legal and governmental documents, memoir, documentary and feature film, literature, material culture, visual cultures, and historical and theoretical works. The history of African-American women, in the words of one historian, “can shed the greatest light on our nation's dark past,” this course aims to analyze the strength of this maxim.
His 695-1 History of the Chinese Revolution(s)
Professor Joshua Howard
1:00 Thursdays
TBA
This seminar will explore major substantive themes and interpretive problems of China’s revolutionary history from the late Qing to 1949 with a focus on the relationship between ideology and revolution. Topics include: radical nationalism and the 1911 Revolution; China’s adaptation of Marxism-Leninism and the rise of Maoism; the proletarian arts movement; the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and social movements; Sino-U.S. relations and the “Who Lost China” debate; and the Chinese Civil War. Reading assignments will include selections from some “classic” works, more recent scholarship, primary sources (in translation), and a sampling of theoretical and comparative work on revolution and social movements. Each student in the course will present several oral book reviews, three written reviews, and one historiographical or problem paper of fifteen to twenty pages. For the first meeting, please read and be prepared to discuss Paul A. Cohen’s History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth.
His 696-1 Readings in Comparative Native American History
Professor Jeremy Mumford
1:00 Mondays
TBA
This class is designed for graduate students focusing on North American history who would like to develop a comparative, pan-American framework. Its starting point is the proposition that the Americas have a single, shared history, which we will investigate through the experience of indigenous peoples.
In countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Canada, and the United States, Native people have many cultures and histories. Catholic Spain and Portugal established different kinds of colonial societies than Protestant England did, and the people called “indígenas” in Latin America today carry a different historical legacy than Native Americans in the United States. But the shared experiences of conquest and colonization, resistance and adaptation, tell a shared, overarching story. First, in colonial times, Native Americans and Europeans struggled over the American landscape but each knew the
other was not going to go away. It was only after Independence that the new American republics (both North and South) tried to destroy American Indians completely, through war and assimilation. But in the last century Native peoples (both North and South) have reasserted their identity as separate peoples within the modern state: the “vanishing Indian” refused to vanish.
The class readings will focus on paired comparative case studies, but can be adjusted to fit the students’ individual needs and interests. The main emphasis of the class will be discussion of reading assignments; each student will give two oral presentations and write a 15-page historiographical essay.
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