History Topics Courses
Fall 2012
HST 204 The Atlantic World: History of Piracy 1650-‐1725 (Instructor: Richard Burg)
Course is designed for students who are self-‐motivated and able to work on their own. There are required readings, but in addition to these materials, students will be expected to complete a personal information assignment, participate in class discussions, and delve into the
unparalleled richness of the World-‐Wide Web to examine articles, documents, and
controversies relevant to the period under study. In addition to websites, you may also use any books, articles, library resources, and whatever other materials you select to complete the modular assignments. Over the semester, you will come to understand more than simply what occurred in the Atlantic world and the Caribbean during the seventy-‐five years from the time the first buccaneers established themselves on Hispanola to final suppression of piracy in the western Atlantic and the Caribbean in the 1720s. When you have completed HST-‐204, you will have a deeper and more complete understanding of the forces and processes that created and directed, and ultimately destroyed piracy of the sort practiced by men such as Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, Long Ben Avery, and Bartholomew Roberts.
History 204 War and American Society (Instructor: Brooks Simpson)
How do Americans go to war? How do they wage war? What does the American way of war tell us about Americans, American values, and American society? We’ll explore these and other questions in this course, which takes a thematic look at the American way of war with readings offering concrete case studies that integrate several of these themes. This is not a course in American military history, although much of it is grounded in understandings about military history.
HST 300 Salem Witch Trials (Instructor: Catherine O’Donnell)
This course explores history in two senses of the word: as a set of past events and as an intellectual discipline. Our focus will be an incident that has long intrigued and disturbed American historians: the witch trials and executions of 1692. We will study the tragic events themselves, as well as some of the ways seventeenth-‐century colonists and 20th-‐ and 21st-‐ century historians have sought to explain and make use of them. Students will also read more broadly in European and in early American history, as part of exercises designed to introduce them to the historian’s craft. As they fulfill the varied requirements of the course, students will gain an understanding of the uses of primary sources, a capacity to discern, evaluate, and develop historical arguments, and greater understanding of the uses and pitfalls of online information and databases. Students will work to improve their writing as well as their research and analysis, and they will be evaluated regularly and rigorously in all areas.
HST 300 France in World War II (Instructor: R. Fuchs)
This course will acquaint students with the historical method through a study of France during World War II, from the fall of France in 1940 through liberation in 1945. We will consider the nature of collaboration and resistance. Who was a collaborator? What did it mean to be in the Resistance? What did it mean to be a traitor? What did it mean to be a patriot? French
behavior during the war years is one of the most important and controversial topics in history. Few events have inspired more intense debate. Historical writing on the era is vast, and numerous novels and films depict the experience in France during those years. Furthermore, many primary documents, including diaries, political treatises, and memoirs are available in translation. Together, these sources create an ideal vehicle for learning how scholars study and write history, for evaluating divergent interpretations in the historical literature, and for using primary sources to draw your own conclusions. Each student will participate in the Occupation and Vichy governments of W.W. II through reading and interpreting the records left by the participants themselves and the accounts of others about them. As part of the course, we will stage debates on several historical questions of the era. Students will write a paper based on their position in the debate and a final research paper on a related topic. HST 300 is a writing-‐ intensive course that is required of all history majors. By the end of the semester students should not only have a better idea of how to write history but also of what is and is not good history.
HST 300: Urban Rebellion (Instructor: Matthew Whitaker)
The many urban rebellions that rocked U.S. cities and forced Americans to confront inequity and injustice embedded in our nation can be looked upon as causative components of myriad dynamic and influential movements. These movements include the black freedom struggle, the Chicano and American Indian Movements, protests against U.S. military action in Vietnam, the Feminists Movement, contemporary conflicts ignited by racial tensions and allegations of police brutality, and more clandestine acts of individual and collective resistance. This course will examine that which has inspired, and continues to inspire, the cultural and tactical responses to various forms of marginalization, exploitation, and discrimination in twentieth century America on the one hand, and systemic and societal constructs that create and perpetuate racial, economic, gender, and political disunity and inequality in urban America on the other. By analyzing this history, and referencing core “American” values, such as freedom, the desire for self-‐determination, and resistance to oppression, this course ultimately seeks to help students develop a more holistic intellectual base from which to evaluate the importance and limitations of urban rebellion as a device to secure and maintain justice and freedom.
HST 304 The Shoah: History, Memory, and Representation (Instructor: Anna Cichopek-‐Gajraj) In this course, we will study one of the central events in modern Jewish history – the Holocaust or Shoah – the systematic murder of Jews in Nazi-‐occupied Europe. We will start by examining the rise of modern racial antisemitism – the texts, images, and ideas which lay at the
foundation of the Nazi ideology. We will then answer the question “why Germany?” by looking at the political, social, and cultural history of Germany at the turn of the 20th century. We will study Hitler’s rise to power and the unfolding of events which led to WWII and the “Final Solution”. When discussing the genocide, we will ask questions about “ordinary men” turning into killers, stratagems of survival, the relationship between war and genocide, the significance of gender and, the meanings of resistance, collaboration, and indifference. Rather than ending our examination in 1945, we will study the ways in which the memory and the memorialization
will ask whether the Holocaust was unique in relation to other genocides. Throughout the course, we will make sure to historicize and contextualize the Holocaust, breaking with the notion of the inevitability and inexplicability of the event.
HST 306 The Civil Rights Movement (Instructor: Matthew Whitaker)
This course examines the African American struggle for civil and human rights in America from the end of World War II (1946), to the present. Although this course will focus primarily on the Black freedom struggle in the United States, it will also connect this struggle for justice and equality to similar movements that were influenced by America’s Black freedom struggle (i.e. the Chicano Movement, the Native American Movement, the Feminist Movement, and Anti-‐ colonial movements in Africa, etc.). In doing so, this course will closely examine the
transformation and transitions of African Americans and emphasizes their creation of a unique culture of struggle and resistance as they sought to give meaning to freedom. Students will analyze the Civil Rights Movement by exploring challenges to the nation’s “separate-‐but-‐equal’ doctrine, “Jim Crow,” disfranchisement, political marginalization, and economic exploitation.
HST 306 Race & Law in U.S. History (Instructor: T. J. Davis)
The course pursues the contours of legal doctrines and social practices from the framing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 to the 21st Century. It examines the roles of law in creating, sustaining, or negating racial identity. Also, it examines the roles of law in promoting progressive or
repressive treatment of racial groups. In that regard, the course pays particular attention to "legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group," as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black put it in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 216 (1944), which treated U.S. internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II (1939-‐1945). The core readings for the course are contained in Thomas J. Davis, Race Relations in America (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).
HST 306 American Cultural History (Instructor: Karin Enloe) ONLINE HISTORY PROGRAM ONLY This course treats the most important period in our immigration history, and will view
immigration from the perspective both of those who arrived and those already in the United States. The first part of the course will be dedicated to establishing the theme and primary documents each student will use for your final paper. Those who do not have an established line of inquiry will use the rich sources that Professor Gratton has collected. In the second part, seminarians will read and discuss jointly the immigration history of the period, exploring basic and theme specific secondary sources. In the third part, students will write a research paper of about 20 pages, and present their findings to the class.
HST 394 Greece: Bronze Age Through High Classical (Instructor: Christopher Welser) A survey of ancient Greece from prehistory through the end of the fifth century B.C. Topics include the development of ancient Greek culture, the rise of the city-‐state, the growth of Athens and Sparta, and the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. Class lectures and discussions are based on extensive readings from original Greek sources, including the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides.
HST 394 Rome: Foundations and Republic (Instructor: Christopher Welser)
A survey of Roman history from its legendary beginnings to its emergence as the greatest power of the ancient world. The second half of the course is devoted to the last century of the Republic (133-‐31 B.C.) and the careers of such figures as Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, and
Cato. Other topics include the Roman army, the structure of Roman society and government, and the social changes and class struggles that ultimately led to the Republic's
collapse. Lectures will be based on ancient sources, including Livy, Polybius, Cicero, and Plutarch.
HST 498 World War I and the American Home Front (Instructor: Gayle Gullet)
Primary objective of this senior seminar is to teach students how to write a paper based on original research. The secondary objective is to involve students in the historiographical debates about the effect of World War I upon American society. Both objectives rest upon the same tenet of educational philosophy: everyone learns by doing. Course uses the historical experience of World War I in the United States to ask questions about the relationship between democracy and modern warfare. Students will develop their own answers to these questions through two different types of assignments. They will read the views of various historians and debate these views in class. Students will also write a research paper that is related to one of the two broad questions discussed in class; the paper must be based on primary documents.
HST 498 American South in the Nineteenth Century (Instructor: Calvin Schermerhorn)
This senior seminar offers the opportunity to research and write an original historical argument covering some aspect, event, or process in the nineteenth-‐century American South. Far from cultural myth and Hollywood legend, the South was as dynamic as it was modern. By 1860, it contained one of the most profitable economies in the world and also held in bondage nearly four million African Americans. Emancipation came as a result of the Civil War, but the end of Reconstruction left freedom unfinished as the New South rose from the ashes of the old. In the first several weeks of the class, we will have common readings covering some of the major themes of southern history, including commerce, culture, politics, race, slavery, and war. Most of the rest of the course is devoted to your research project culminating in a 25-‐page essay arguing a thesis supported by historical evidence. Beyond that major requirement, participants will workshop drafts of their essays and offer suggestions and feedback to others enrolled in the course. By the end of the course, students will be able to conceptualize, research, write, and finish a significant independent historical project.
HST 498 The Black Death: Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World (Instructor: Monica Green)
The Black Death (1335-‐53) is the name given to one of the most severe pandemics in human history. Although total mortality may have been higher from the 1918-‐19 flu or the current HIV/AIDS pandemic, as a percentage of population the mortality from the Black Death (estimated between 40 and 60%) is the highest of any large-‐scale catastrophe known to humankind, which makes it odd that we still know so little about the Black Death. This course will look at the scientific work (in genetics and bioarcheology) that has helped reconstruct the
the pandemic as a historical event and explore plague from a present-‐day perspective, asking what we need to know about this disease that still lies endemic among wildlife in the deserts of Arizona. This will be a multidisciplinary endeavor, making use of whatever methods (genomics, GIS, linguistic analysis, mathematical modeling) seem to best lead us to our goal of
understanding this moment in history. All students will produce an original research project; in some cases, this may be a traditional research paper, but other projects (such an interactive web designs) may be explored upon permission from the instructor.
HST 498 Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States, 1880 to 1930 (Instructor: Brian Gratton)
This course treats the most important period in our immigration history, and will view immigration from the perspective both of those who arrived and those already in the United States. The first part of the course will be dedicated to establishing the theme and primary documents each student will use for your final paper. Those who do not have an established line of inquiry will use the rich sources that Professor Gratton has collected. In the second part, seminarians will read and discuss jointly the immigration history of the period, exploring basic and theme specific secondary sources. In the third part, students will write a research paper of about 20 pages, and present their findings to the class.
HST 498 The U.S. Constitution at War (Instructor: T. J. Davis)
A required, advanced course of study, the semester offers students the opportunity to demonstrate their competence at conceptualizing, constructing, and completing a piece of writing based on primary sources and publishable as an article or a research note in a scholarly historical journal or as a chapter or essay in a scholarly anthology or collection. The factual framework for the semester's inquiry treats constitutional challenges and conflicts related to the federal government's exercising war powers or powers related to war within the United States. The sweep of attention allows research into U.S. Supreme Court cases determining the federal government's reach and restrictions under the Constitution to secure the nation at home while fighting a war.
