Schedule of Classes

This course explores the social, political, and cultural history of violence, crime, criminal law, policing, and punishment in the United States from the Colonial period to the present.

Surveys the transnational history of the Americas and the United States to 1877. Emphasizes globally significant trends and systems such as colonialism, mercantilism, nationalism, and the slave trade. Investigates the relevance of systems and their supporting beliefs to the growth and limits of democracy.

Surveys the transnational history of the Americas and the United States since 1877. Emphasizes globally-significant trends and systems such as migration, imperialism, liberalism, progressivism, and consumption economies. Investigates the relevance of systems and their supporting beliefs to the growth and limits of democracy.

History of the Middle East from the time of the prophet Muhammad to the present. Pre-modern, modern, and contemporary Middle East.

The rise of modern Japan: The growth of Japanese power and its influence in the world economy.

Russian and Soviet history from its origins to the present. Major features of pre-modern, modern, and contemporary Russian civilization.

U.S. history 1830-1877: events and developments leading to civil war, the war itself, and efforts to reconstruct the Union after 1865.

Explores the evolution of early national and state governments and the various attempts at practicing democracy in a nation that incorporated chattel slavery and limited suffrage. Investigates how individuals and groups employed democratic ideals to gain access to power. Analyzes civic ideals and practices with particular attention to Native Americans, African Americans, and women. Contextualizes the coming of the Civil War.

Explores the major social movements of recent U.S. history. Study of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, Chicano and American Indian movements, campus and counterculture radicalism, anti-war protests, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, environmentalism, and the nuclear freeze movement, with an examination of how activists crafted a politics of protest as they fought for greater equality and justice. Analyzes the roles that social movements played in strengthening democratic ideals and practices by expanding the role of the citizen in the community, the nation, and the world.

Investigates the historical development, change, and expression of gender ideals that Americans have labeled manhood, manliness, or masculinity. Incorporates methodologies from history, gender studies, literary studies, and the social sciences to explore how disparate gender ideals have articulated with distinctions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Applies an interdisciplinary approach to provide students with an awareness of the historically and culturally contingent nature of masculinity and how notions of masculine ideality have reinforced or challenged structures of privilege and exclusion. Develops skills of interdisciplinary gender analysis in the study of historical documents and artifacts.

Topics of special interest which may vary each time course is offered. Topic stated in current Schedule of Classes. May be repeated under a different topic for a maximum of 6 hours credit.

Describes the rise and fall of Japan's warrior class and the bushido ethos. The long history of the samurai begins in the 8th century and continues to the present. Focus on two interrelated themes: the historical reality of the samurai and the construction of mythology in both Japanese popular culture and the Western imagination. Topics include warfare, training, values, literature, and family life. Visual sources, including film, are used extensively.

Analytical and comparative survey of the formative stages of early non-Western civilizations in five geographical regions. The basic cultural patterns and geographical patterns that emerged between approximately 3500 BCE and 1500 CE will be studied, compared, and related to present developments.

A reading and discussion-intensive exploration of the "long 19th century" from the French Revolution to the First World War, with an emphasis on social, political, cultural, and artistic change. Subjects discussed include the following: the political agenda established by the French Revolution, and ideological responses to it (liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, and socialism); the rise of industrial capitalism and its attendant social and political divisions; competing ways of building and controlling the nation-state; democratizing movements of labor and feminism; everyday family life, gender relations, and sexuality; nationalism/imperialism; cultural and artistic movements from Romanticism to Realism to Modernism.

Digital Humanities (DH) is the application and creation of computing and digital tools and formats to and for questions and problems in the humanities disciplines. Students will approach the field through an introduction to its historical development and an examination and evaluation of current projects within the field that demonstrate how the humanities can utilize and shape digital media.

An analysis of the interaction between science, technology, and society since the 1600s. The first part addresses the Scientific Revolution, the second the Industrial Revolution, and the third the contemporary scientific and industrial revolutions. In the third part of the course, the examples of the earlier scientific and industrial revolutions, insofar as they affected religious views, daily living conditions, and the meaning of philosophy and science, provide material for comparison as a means of understanding the contemporary situation. Particular attention is given to how social values and assumptions determine the direction of scientific and technological developments.

Directed reading by qualified students with faculty guidance. For history majors primarily. May be repeated for maximum of 6 hrs. credit.

Special study of individual topics in history with faculty supervision. For history majors primarily. May be repeated for maximum of 6 hrs. credit.

Research paper required employing primary sources in U.S. history. May be repeated under different topic for a maximum of 6 hours