History department releases spring 2010 course information
Spring 2010 History Courses by Category
United States
100: Introduction to Historical Thinking:
- The Invasion of the Americas
- Church and State in Early America
- Political Speech from Jefferson to Lincoln
- Lincoln
- Scottsboro
- Health in American History
201: The American Revolution
215: The United States and the World since 1945
299-1: Sectionalism and Nationalism before the Civil War
307: Intellectual History of the American Founding
399: Legal History
Europe
100: Introduction to Historical Thinking
- The Crusades
- Luther and Marx
111: Ideas and Institutions of Western Civilization II
223: The Roman Empire
225: Medieval Italy
237: The Last Soviet Generation
245: The Modern Balkans
249: Twentieth-Century Europe
299-1: Reformation Europe
299-2:Napoleon and His Era
Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa
100: Introduction to Historical Thinking
- Changing Africa
281: Africa, 1500-1900
380: Women and Gender in African History
Comparative and International
290: The British Empire and Commonwealth
Research seminars
400-01: Seminar: The U.S. Constitution
400-02: Seminar: Americans Abroad
400-03: Seminar: Food, Self, and Society
History 100 Course Descriptions
The purpose of this course is not to cover a certain amount of ground, but to introduce students to the nature of historical interpretation. To do that, individual instructors will chose a topic that will show students the various ways historians interpret their evidence and allow them to practice interpretation on their own. Whatever the topic, the central aim is for students to come away from the course with a better understanding of the nature and limits of historical evidence, the various legitimate ways of approaching it, and the art of making persuasive claims about it. The individual course titles for spring 2010 are:
Changing Africa: An examination of how Africans and outsiders have tried to re-make Africa during the 20th Century—a century characterized by conquest, emancipation, colonial state-building and social engineering, new ideas of family, work, faith and wealth, and struggles for independence, survival, and resources have characterized this century.
Church and State in Early America: An exploration of the historical roots behind the concept of the separation of church and state through exposure to primary sources (sermons, essays, letters, diaries, news articles, laws, and constitutions) drafted around the time of the nation’s founding and secondary readings.
The Crusades: An examination of the roots of the Crusading Movement in Western Christian societies; the ways the crusades brought three world cultures (The West, Byzantium, Islam) into contact and confrontation; the vitality of the crusading idea in Western Europe; the different perspectives on the crusades found in contemporary sources; and the movement of crusade history from a very Christian-centered view to one taking into account the experiences of non-Christians encountering the crusaders.
Health in American History: An exploration of how historical perspectives on illness and wellness can illuminate such questions as: What is health? Is American society more or less healthy today than in the past? Topics will include the social histories of disease; the development of medical institutions; professionalization and its impact upon doctor-patient relationships; the evolution of the relationship between health and social structure; and popular ideas about the body and healing.
Ideas in Motion: Luther and Marx: An investigation of why and how ideas can change the world through comparison of the two cases of Martin Luther’s sixteenth-century critique of the Catholic Church and Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century critique of industrial society. Questions to be considered include: Where do such transformative ideas originate? How do they catch on and spread? What happens to them once they are in play? What is their long-term influence?
The Invasion of the Americas: An examination of the European invasions of the Americas in pursuit of wealth and power following in the wake of Christopher Columbus' voyages across the Atlantic. The emphasis will be on the consequences of violence and colonization and the impact conquest had on the peoples of the Old and New Worlds between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Lincoln: A study of Abraham Lincoln’s life in the broader historical perspective of the western movement, social mobility, party politics, the legal profession, the sectional crisis, and the Civil War. Roughly equal time will be devoted to Lincoln’s pre-presidential and Civil War years.
Political Speech from Jefferson to Lincoln: An examination of how the meaning of free speech in America changed from the Revolution to the Civil War, when Americans argued about the proper role of dissent in a republic and grappled with how to determine whether speech was acceptable or endangered the nation. Topics addressed will include the role of dissent, the limits on speech (written and spoken) in times of peace and war, and the efforts to balance liberty with order, and security.
The Scottsboro Trials: An examination, in its historical context, of a famous 1931 legal case in which nine black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama.
Posted October 23, 2009