History

HIST UN1002 Ancient History of the Middle East. 4.00 points.

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the ancient histories of the region in western Asia that is today called the Middle East. There we find the earliest cultures in world history documented with an abundance of sources, including numerous written texts, which allows us to study the first attestations of many elements of life we take for granted, such as writing, cities, laws, empires, and much more. The course aims to provide you with a knowledge of the most important empirical data about these histories and to confront you the impact some of the developments made on human life as well as the difficulties we confront trying to study them

HIST UN1010 ANCIENT GREEK HIST, 800-146 BC. 4.00 points.

A review of the history of the Greek world from the beginnings of Greek archaic culture around 800 B.C. through the classical and hellenistic periods to the definitive Roman conquest in 146 B.C. with concentration on political history, but attention also to social and cultural developments.Field(s): ANC

HIST UN1786 History of the City in Latin America. 4.00 points.

This course covers the historical development of cities in Latin America. Readings, lectures, and discussion sections will examine the concentration of people in commercial and political centers from the beginnings of European colonization in the fifteenth century to the present day and will introduce contrasting approaches to the study of urban culture, politics, society, and the built environment. Central themes include the reciprocal relationships between growing urban areas and the countryside; changing power dynamics in modern Latin America, especially as they impacted the lives of cities’ nonelite majority populations; the legalities and politics of urban space; planned versus unplanned cities and the rise of informal economies; the way changing legal and political rights regimes have affected urban life; and the constant tension between tradition and progress through which urban society was formed. There are no prerequisites for this course. Attendance at weekly Discussion Sections required

HIST UN2072 DAILY LIFE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 4.00 points.

This course is designed as travellers guide to medieval Europe. Its purpose is to provide a window to a long-lost world that provided the foundation of modern institutions and that continues to inspire the modern collective artistic and literary imagination with its own particularities. This course will not be a conventional history course concentrating on the grand narratives in the economic, social and political domains but rather intend to explore the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants, and attempts to have a glimpse of their mindset, their emotional spectrum, their convictions, prejudices, fears and hopes. It will be at once a historical, sociological and anthropological study of one of the most inspiring ages of European civilization. Subjects to be covered will include the birth and childhood, domestic life, sex and marriage, craftsmen and artisans, agricultural work, food and diet, the religious devotion, sickness and its cures, death, after death (purgatory and the apparitions), travelling, merchants and trades, inside the nobles castle, the Christian cosmos, and medieval technology. The lectures will be accompanied by maps, images of illuminated manuscripts and of medieval objects. Students will be required to attend a weekly discussion section to discuss the medieval texts bearing on that weeks subject. The written course assignment will be a midterm, final and two short papers, one an analysis of a medieval text and a second an analysis of a modern text on the Middle Ages

HIST UN2213 Early Russian History (to 1800). 4 points.

Early Russian History is the first semester of a full-year survey of Russian history; the second semester, Modern Russian History (Since 1800), will be offered in 2017-18. (Each may also be taken independently.) During this semester, we will first look at societies in the Black Sea region and Eurasian plain – their formation, evolution, and sometimes demise – until the emergence of an early modern empire centered in Moscow. The history of the Russian Empire proper begins with the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in 1552, and culminates in the modern European empire of Peter I and Catherine II. We will examine, in turn, the Black Sea civilizations of antiquity and the medieval age; the Mongol Empire and its westernmost projection, the Golden Horde; the city of Moscow and the Muscovite Empire (15th –17th centuries) over which it presided; and, finally, the new imperial capital of St. Petersburg and the monarchs, the empire, the foreign policy and society of the eighteenth century. We will pay special attention to religion, cultural interaction, myth, monarchy, empire – all themes essential to current historical scholarship.

HIST UN2310 European Intellectual History. 4.00 points.

This course provides an introduction to some of the major landmarks in European cultural and intellectual history, from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the 1970s. We will pay special attention to the relationship between texts (literature, anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, art, and film) and the various contexts in which they were produced. Among other themes, we will discuss the cultural impact of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialism, colonialism, modernism, the Russian Revolution, the two world wars, decolonization, feminism and gay liberation movements, structuralism and poststructuralism. In conjunction, we will examine how modern ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, imperialism, fascism, totalitarianism, neoliberalism) were developed and challenged over the course of the last two centuries. Participation in weekly discussion sections staffed by TAs is mandatory. The discussion sections are 50 minutes per session. Students must register for the general discussion (“DISC”) section, and will be assigned to a specific time and TA instructor once the course begins

HIST UN2344 World economy, Empire ＆ War: 1900-50. 4.00 points.

World economy, Empire and War: 1900-1950 covers the dramatic upheavals in the world economy that brought nineteenth-century era of globalization to an end an initiated a new era of national economics and global geopolitics. The course will cover the age of imperialism, the crises of the interwar period, the arms race of the 1930s, World War II and the Cold War

HIST UN2353 Shadow of the Sun King: Early Modern France. 4.00 points.

This course will offer a survey of French history from the Wars of Religion to the Revolution, when the kingdom was the predominant power in Europe. Topics to be addressed include the rise of the Bourbon monarchy, the crystallization of absolutism as a political theology, the spectacular rise and collapse of John Law’s financial system, the emergence of the philosophe movement during the Enlightenment, and the gradual de-legitimation of royal power through its association with despotism. Thematically, the course will focus on shifting logics of representation—that is, the means by which political, economic, and religious power was not only reflected, but also generated and projected, through a range of interrelated practices that include Catholic liturgy, courtly protocols, aristocratic codes of honor, financial experimentation, and the critical styles of thinking and reading inculcated by the nascent public sphere

HIST UN2523 HEALTH INEQUALITY: MODERN US. 4.00 points.

Through assigned readings and a group research project, students will gain familiarity with a range of historical and social science problems at the intersection of ethnic/racial/sexual formations, technological networks, and health politics since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; benign neglect; urban renewal and gentrification; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; and environmental justice. There are no required qualifications for enrollment, although students will find the material more accessible if they have had previous coursework experience in United States history, pre-health professional (pre-med, pre-nursing, or pre-public health), African-American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, or American Studies

HIST UN2533 US LESBIAN ＆ GAY HISTORY. 4.00 points.

This course explores the social, cultural, and political history of lesbians, gay men, and other socially constituted sexual and gender minorities, primarily in the twentieth century. Since the production and regulation of queer life has always been intimately linked to the production and policing of “normal” sexuality and gender, we will also pay attention to the shifting boundaries of normative sexuality, especially heterosexuality, as well as other developments in American history that shaped gay life, such as the Second World War, Cold War, urbanization, and the minority rights revolution. Themes include the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as categories of experience and identity; the changing relationship between homosexuality and transgenderism; the development of diverse lesbian and gay subcultures and their representation in popular culture; the sources of antigay hostility; religion and sexual science; generational change and everyday life; AIDS; and gay, antigay, feminist, and queer movements

HIST UN2535 HIST OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. 4.00 points.

HIST UN2660 LATIN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION I. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

This course aims to give a portrait of the development of Latin America from the first contact with the Europeans to the creation of independent states. We will focus on society and interaction among the various ethnic and socio-economic groups at the level of daily life. For each class, students will have to read sections of a core text as well as a primary source, or document, from the period; before the end of every class there will be 15 minutes to discuss the document together. In addition, students will enroll in discussion sections held by TAs

HIST UN2701 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

This course will cover the seven-century long history of the Ottoman Empire, which spanned Europe, Asia, and Africa as well as the medieval, early modern, and modern period. The many levels of continuity and change will be the focus, as will issues of identities and mentalities, confessional diversity, cultural and linguistic pluralism, and imperial governance and political belonging of the empire within larger regional and global perspectives over the centuries. The course also seeks to cultivate appreciation of the human experience through the multifarious experiences culled from the Ottoman past

HSWM UN2761 GENDER ＆ SEXUALITY IN AFRICA. 4.00 points.

Required discussion for HSWM UN2761 lecture "Gender ＆ Sexuality in Africa"

HIST UN2772 West African History. 3 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

This course offers a survey of main themes in West African history over the last millenium, with particular emphasis on the period from the mid-15th through the 20th century. Themes include the age of West African empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay); re-alignments of economic and political energies towards the Atlantic coast; the rise and decline of the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves; the advent and demise of colonial rule; and internal displacement, migrations, and revolutions. In the latter part of the course, we will appraise the continuities and ruptures of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Group(s): C Field(s): AFR 

HSME UN2810 HISTORY OF SOUTH ASIA I. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Graduate students must register for HIST G6998 version of this course.

This survey lecture course will provide students with a broad overview of the history of South Asia as a region - focusing on key political, cultural and social developments over more than two millennia. The readings include both primary sources (in translation) and secondary works. Our key concerns will be the political, cultural and theological encounters of varied communities, the growth of cities and urban spaces, networks of trade and migrations and the development of both local and cosmopolitan cultures across Southern Asia. The survey will begin with early dynasties of the classical period and then turn to the subsequent formation of various Perso-Turkic polities, including the development and growth of hybrid political cultures such as those of Vijayanagar and the Mughals. The course also touches on Indic spiritual and literary traditions such as Sufi and Bhakti movements. Near the end of our course, we will look forward towards the establishment of European trading companies and accompanying colonial powers

HIST UN2851 Making Modern Korea. 4.00 points.

This course explores Korea’s history from the late nineteenth century to the present with a particular focus on caste/class, gender, war and industrialization. Using primary and secondary texts as well as documentary film and literary ephemera, the seminar analyses such topics as the relationship between imperialism and rebellions in the nineteenth century; the uneven experience of Japanese colonial rule; Korea’s early feminist movement; how North Korea became a communist society; the deep scars of the Korean War; cultures of industrialism in South and North Korea; counter-cultural movements in 1970s, 1980s and 1990s South Korea; and contemporary challenges facing the peninsula. This course will give students a thorough grounding in modern Korean history and introduce them to major interpretative currents in the study of Korean history

HIST UN2953 WAR ＆ SOCIETY SINCE 1945. 4.00 points.

This course surveys the second half of the most violent century in human history. It examines the intersection of war and human society in the years after 1945 by focusing on two monumental and intertwined historical processes: Decolonization and the Cold War. While the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union would fail to produce any general wars between two belligerents, this superpower rivalry would help to make the global process of decolonization in the developing a particularly violent affair

HIST UN3023 Mobility and Identity in the Roman World. 4.00 points.

This course considers how identity increased, limited, controlled, or otherwise shaped the mobility of individuals and groups in the Roman world, including women, slaves, freedpeople, and diaspora communities. We will identify the structures that produced differences in mobility and consider how such groups understood and represented themselves in a variety of media as possessing a specific, shared identity and community. The course will draw on a range of primary sources, including inscriptions and literary texts (both poetry and prose), and cover the period from the second century BCE to the third century CE

HIST UN3277 History of Urban Crime and Policing in Latin America in Global Perspective. 4 points.

This seminar will examine the social construction of criminality and the institutions that developed to impose and enforce the criminal law as reflections of Latin American society throughout the region’s history, with a particular emphasis on the rise of police forces as the principal means of day-to-day urban governance. Topics include policing and urban slavery; policing the urban “underworld”; the changing cultural importance of police in urban popular culture; the growth of scientific policing methods, along with modern criminology and eugenics; policing and the enforcement of gender norms in urban public spaces; the role of urban policing in the rise of military governments in the twentieth century; organized crime; transitional justice and the contemporary question of the rule of law; and the transnational movement of ideas about and innovations in policing practice. In our readings and class discussions over the course of the semester, we will trace how professionalized, modern police forces took shape in cities across the region over time. This course actually begins, however, in the colonial period before there was anything that we would recognize as a modern, uniformed, state-run police force. We will thus have a broad perspective from which to analyze critically the role of police in the development of Latin American urban societies—in other words, to see the police in the contemporary era as contingent on complex historical processes, which we will seek to understand.

AMHS UN3462 IMMIGRANT NEW YORK. 4.00 points.

For centuries, New York City has served as a primary gateway city for immigrants to the United States. In the early twentieth century, according to the 1910 Census, New York City’s population was roughly 40％ foreign-born. The problems these immigrants presented to government officials, doctors, religious leaders, industrialists, the police, and educators in New York City transformed not only the local debate on immigration but the national discussion of “Americanization” as well. According to the most recent census, approximately 40％ of the city's population is foreign-born. Like their predecessors at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary immigrants, arriving from the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, Asia, and Europe, have posed serious challenges to the civic, educational, and political institutions of New York City. How are these foreign-born residents reshaping the city today? This seminar explores the intersection of immigration, race, culture, and politics in New York City, both from the perspective of history and in relation to contemporary realities as it explores the forces shaping the century-old encounter between immigrants and New York City

HIST UN3518 COLUMBIA UNI ＆ SLAVERY. 4.00 points.

In this course, students will write original, independent papers of around 25 pages, based on research in both primary and secondary sources, on an aspect of the relationship between Columbia College and its colonial predecessor Kings College, with the institution of slavery

HIST UN3645 Jews in Early Modern Europe, 1492-1750. 4.00 points.

A seminar on the historical, political, and cultural developments in the Jewish communities of early-modern Western Europe (1492-1789) with particular emphasis on the transition from medieval to modern patterns. We will study the resettlement of Jews in Western Europe, Jews in the Reformation-era German lands, Italian Jews during the late Renaissance, the rise of Kabbalah, and the beginnings of the quest for civil Emancipation. Field(s): JWS/EME

HIST UN3712 African Climate and History. 4.00 points.

This course examines how Africa’s climate has changed in the past and with what consequences for the people living on the continent. It looks at the scope, duration and intensity of past climate events and their impacts, while using these historical climate events to teach fundamental climate concepts. Central to the course is the human experience of these events and the diversity of their responses. The major question underpinning this course is, therefore, how have people responded to past climate events, whether short-term, decadal or longer in scope? This question is predicated on the complexity of human society and moves away from the binary of collapse vs. resilience that dominates much thinking about the impact of climate changes on past societies. This framing recognizes the significance of climate for food production and collection, as well as trade and cosmologies. It does not take climate to be the determining factor in history. Rather it foregrounds the myriad ways people acted in the face of, for example, multi-decadal below average rainfall or long periods of more reliable precipitation

HIST UN3836 Law and Society in Colonial India. 4.00 points.

This course explores the relationship between law and society in colonial India. It features cases relating to marriage and divorce, property and inheritance, sedition and criminal conspiracy woven through the lives of ordinary people in nineteenth and twentieth century India. Through a range of materials, we will explore how British colonial officials reformulated what “law” was and how it was to be interpreted. We will also explore how these interpretations were understood and challenged. We will encounter judges, lawyers, and notaries that mediated the relationship between law and society, courts, and litigants, while catching a fascinating glimpse of what arguments, evidence, and sentencing looked like in these courts. As we go through our readings and attend classes, we might ask: how does this perspective from India shape our understanding of the relationship between law and colonialism, and what are its contemporary implications?

HIST UN3928 SLAVERY/ABOLITION-ATLANTC WRLD. 4.00 points.

This seminar investigates the experiences of slavery and freedom among African-descended people living and laboring in the various parts of the Atlantic World. The course will trace critical aspects of these two major, interconnected historical phenomena with an eye to how specific cases either manifested or troubled broader trends across various slaveholding societies. The first half of the course addresses the history of slavery and the second half pertains to experiences in emancipation. However, since the abolition of slavery occurs at different moments in various areas of the Atlantic World, the course will adhere to a more thematic and less chronological structure, in its examination of the multiple avenues to freedom available in various regions. Weekly units will approach major themes relevant to both slavery and emancipation, such as racial epistemologies among slaveowners/employers, labor regimes in slave and free societies, cultural innovations among slave and freed communities, gendered discourses and sexual relations within slave and free communities, and slaves’ and free people’s resistance to domination. The goal of this course is to broaden students’ comprehension of the history of slavery and freedom, and to promote an understanding of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Americas as creating both continuities and ruptures in the structure and practices of the various societies concerned

HIST GU4218 The Black Sea in History. 4 points.

      We are used to thinking of history in national terms, or at least in reference to major civilizations (“Western civilization,”  “Near Eastern civilization,” etc.). In  “real life,” however, interactions among people, linguistic communities, and cultures frequently cut across political divisions. Water – rivers, streams, seas – is often an invitation to settlement, commerce, and conquest. This course offers a look (inspired in part by Fernand Braudel's Mediterranean) at a body of water – the Black Sea – and the lands around it, in sweeping historical perspective. Focus is on those moments when the various civilizations and empires that originated and flourished around the Black Sea met and intersected in friendship or in enmity. We will look at ancient civilizations, Greek colonization, Byzantine-Slav interactions, the period of Ottoman dominance, Russian-Turkish rivalry, and decolonization and wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. We hope that we will be able to pay particular attention to questions of ecology, language, religion, and cultural interaction throughout.

HIST GU4281 CULTURE IN POLISH LANDS. 4.00 points.

Few places in the world have witnessed the shift from a multiethnic territory to a nationally homogeneous nation-state as profoundly as the Polish lands. A crucial site of the collapse of Central and Eastern European empires, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansings, Nazi occupation, Soviet-style socialism, and accession to the European Union, Poland’s twentieth-century and contemporary culture has developed in the shadow of catastrophe and political and economic revolutions. This seminar investigates shifting meanings of cultural difference and sameness from 1918 to the present, including Polish debates on multiculturalism spurred by the ongoing European refugee crisis. We will examine meanings attached to people, things, and landscapes - Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, German, Nazi or Soviet - through the lens of visual arts, everyday objects, scholarly discourses, and urban and rural topographies. While we will pay special attention to the historiography of twentieth-century Eastern Europe, the course relies on interdisciplinary approaches and welcomes students interested in the history of art and architecture, literature, social history, anthropology, cultural studies, and critical museology

HIST GU4363 Pascal and the Modern Self. 4.00 points.

This seminar is one of the series “History of the Modern Self” which includes Montaigne, Rousseau, and soon Nietzsche. This semester will focus on Pascal’s conception of the self as revealed by his humanistic case for religious faith in response to the skeptical challenge of Montaigne. The aim is to understand all the implications of this encounter for the history of modern Western thought about human psychology, religion, and politics

HIST GU4389 Stalinism. 4.00 points.

The quarter century during which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union witnessed some of the twentieth century's most dramatic events: history's fastest plunge into modernity, an apocalyptic world war, and the emergence of a socialist state as a competitive world power. This tutorial will offer students a deep dive not only into the historical depths of the Stalin era but into the gloriously complex historiographical debates that surround it. Some of the questions that will animate the readings, writings, and discussions that students will engage in are as follows: Did Stalin depart from or represent a continuation of the policies introduced by his predecessor Vladimir Lenin? Did he rule in a totalitarian fashion or in ways comparable to other twentieth century regimes? Were his policies destructive or possibly productive? And perhaps most boggling of all: why did no one resist Stalinist rule?

HIST GU4435 Democracy and its Technocrats. 4.00 points.

Science and technology have become increasingly central to the basic functioning of democratic societies The administrative state, both on the local and national level, is dependent on technological systems to ensure democratic rule and deliver services: from voting machines and welfare databases to passport scanners and the laboratory equipment necessary to set environmental standards. Just as necessary are the numerous experts – engineers, statisticians, epidemiologists, and environmental scientists – who either work for or advise the state in its dealings. How should we think about the technocratic nature of modern democracy? Is it an inevitable and necessary pre-condition for governing modern mass society? Or is it an alarming aspect, an undemocratic impulse, that undermines the promise of democratic rule?The course will examine the coproduction of science and politics. In the first part of the semester, students will gain conceptual tools with which to rethink the connection between science, technology, power, politics, policy, and democracy. They will consider the role of expertise in modern politics, as well as the construction of the public. In the second part of the semester we will consider in greater detail the way technocratic governance developed in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment

HIST GU4527 Topics in U.S. Foreign Relations History. 4.00 points.

This course will explore various topics in the History of U.S. foreign relations. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly writings, we will explore the history of the United States and the world with an eye toward the impact of American power on foreign peoples. Students will also use the semester to design, research, and write a substantial essay that draws on both primary and secondary sources on a topic chosen in consultation with the professor

HIST GU4632 Jews in the Ancient City: Politics and Materiality. 4.00 points.

This course will examine the experience of Jews in the cities of the eastern Roman Empire, offering a challenge to modern hypotheses of Jewish corporate stability in that setting and contributing to modern discussions of the relations between the Roman state, Greek cities, and Jewish and Christian subjects

HIST GU4660 Indigenous Worlds in Early Latin America. 4.00 points.

This seminar deals with the presence of indigenous peoples in Latin American colonial societies and aims to analyze indigenous responses to conquest and colonization. How did indigenous people see themselves and interact with other groups? What roles did they play in shaping Latin American societies? What spaces were they able to create for themselves? These and similar questions will guide our discussion through the semester. Every week, we will read documents written by the indigenous people themselves, as well as academic studies of their cultures and societies. The course will offer a survey of the main indigenous groups; however, the case studies are by necessity just a selection. The seminar is conceived for students interested in race and ethnic relations and in the mechanisms of colonization and responses to it, as seen through the lenses of Latin America, between the 16th and the 18th centuries

HIST GU4693 WRITERS ON HISTORY: THOMAS MANN. 4.00 points.

This seminar is devoted to examining the work of writers who address the nature and course of history in their imaginative and non-fiction work. This semester we will be exploring the work of Thomas Mann in the context of the First and Second World Wars. This will include his relation to the German “conservative revolution,” the Weimar political experience, and the United States, where he spent several years in exile. We will pay particular attention to his conceptions of modern history as expressed in his novels

HIST GU4713 Orientalism and the Historiography of the Other. 4 points.

This course will examine some of the problems inherent in Western historical writing on non-European cultures, as well as broad questions of what itmeans to write history across cultures. The course will touch on therelationship between knowledge and power, given that much of the knowledge we will be considering was produced at a time of the expansion of Western power over the rest of the world. By comparing some of the "others" which European historians constructed in the different non-western societies they depicted, and the ways other societies dealt with alterity and self, we may be able to derive a better sense of how the Western sense of self was constructed. Group(s): C Field(s): ME

HIST BC1062 Introduction to the Global Middle Ages. 4.00 points.

This course introduces students to medieval history and the methods historians use to study and communicate about the past. Medieval history has traditionally centered on Western Europe, but this course also integrates new approaches to the Global Middle Ages, including attention to connectivity, comparative studies across contexts, and a survey of world literatures. Topics include Late Antique transformations to the Roman world, the Germanic migrations, and the rise of Christianity; the Islamic Conquests, the Carolingian Renaissance, and the Viking expansion; the Crusades, the Black Death, and the rise of early modern empires. Students will learn to read primary sources, assess scholarly arguments, and incorporate interdisciplinary approaches. This course will require visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Met Cloisters

HIST BC1402 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1865. 4.00 points.

Examines the major social, political, economic, and intellectual transformations from the 1860s until the present, including industrialization and urbanization, federal and state power, immigration, the welfare state, global relations, and social movements

AFRS BC2004 INTRODUCTN TO AFRICAN STUDIES. 3.00 points.

Interdisciplinary and thematic approach to the study of Africa, moving from pre-colonial through colonial and post-colonial periods to contemporary Africa. Focus will be on its history, societal relations, politics and the arts. The objective is to provide a critical survey of the history as well as the continuing debates in African Studies

HIST BC2199 A History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. 3.00 points.

This lecture course examines the social, cultural, and legal history of witchcraft, magic, and the occult throughout European history. We will examine the values and attitudes that have influenced beliefs about witchcraft and the supernatural, both historically and in the present day, using both primary and secondary sources. This course will pay specific attention to the role of gender and sexuality in the history of witchcraft, as the vast majority of individuals charged in the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were indeed women. We will also study accusations of witchcraft, breaking down the power dynamics and assumptions at play behind the witch trials, and the impacts of these trials on gender relations in European society. This class will track the intersections of magic and science throughout the early-modern period, and the reconciliation of belief systems during the Enlightenment. We will carry our analysis into the modern period, touching on Victorian spiritualism and mysticism, McCarthyism in the United States, and contemporary goddess worship. We will conclude the semester with an investigation into the role of witchcraft in discussions of gender, race, and sexuality in popular culture

HIST BC2321 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS. 3.00 points.

Examines the shaping of European cultural identity through encounters with non-European cultures from 1500 to the post-colonial era. Novels, paintings, and films will be among the sources used to examine such topics as exoticism in the Enlightenment, slavery and European capitalism, Orientalism in art, ethnographic writings on the primitive, and tourism

HIST BC2385 Global Environmental History. 3.00 points.

This class introduces students to the field of environmental history from a global perspective. Environmental history is the study of the relationship between nature and society over time. It deals with the material environment, cultural and scientific understandings of nature, and the politics of socio-economic use of natural resources. The class combines the study of classic texts that were foundational to the field with modern case studies from all over the world. It addresses questions of global relevance, such as: how did the environment shape human history? How did humans shape the natural environment? How are power relations of class, race and gender embedded in the environment we live in? The class welcomes students from the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. The goal of the course is to understand how the relationship between environment and society in history led to the current climate crisis

HIST BC2401 PLTCS CRIME＆ POLICING IN U.S.. 3.00 points.

This course will examine the historical development of crime and the criminal justice system in the United States since the Civil War. The course will give particular focus to the interactions between conceptions of crime, normalcy and deviance, and the broader social and political context of policy making

HIST BC2413 UNITED STATES 1940-1975. 3.00 points.

Emphasis on foreign policies as they pertain to the Second World War, the atomic bomb, containment, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam. Also considers major social and intellectual trends, including the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture, feminism, Watergate, and the recession of the 1970s

HIST BC2567 Women, Race, and Class. 3.00 points.

Using an intersectional framework, this course traces changing notions of gender and sexuality in the 20th century United States. The course examines how womanhood and feminism were shaped by class, race, ethnicity, culture, sexuality and immigration status. We will explore how the construction of American nationalism and imperialism, as well as the development of citizenship rights, social policy, and labor organizing, were deeply influenced by the politics of gender. Special emphasis will be placed on organizing and women's activism

HIST BC2803 Gender and Empire. 3 points.

Examines how women experienced empire and asks how their actions and activities produced critical shifts in the workings of colonial societies worldwide. Topics include sexuality, the colonial family, reproduction, race, and political activism.

HIST BC3098 Margins of the Middle Ages. 4.00 points.

This seminar course examines how people during the early Middle Ages defined their existence through negotiated boundaries of gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and other aspects of the human condition. Our work will curate the contributions of marginalized groups to decenter traditional narratives. Students will leave this course with a broad understanding of early medieval history, an appreciation of historical work done by people often omitted from our histories, and a mastery of historical and interdisciplinary tools for promoting our awareness and understanding of marginalized groups. Work will include two research papers, including one focused on a manuscript selected from the Columbia collections

HIST BC3193 SCIENCE, MEDICINE AND THE BODY. 4.00 points.

This seminar course explores the relationship between science, medicine, and the body in a historical context. We will look at this relationship from a global perspective, with particular attention to understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and embodiment. To ground ourselves in the historiography, we will begin by studying various methodologies and approaches to histories of science, medicine, and the body. In doing so, we will consider the following questions: What does it mean to do a history of the body? Is there a universal concept of “the body” to study? What gets included in the history of science? What constitutes medicine? And who gets to determine these definitions? We will then move to specific themes and topics, including the categorization of bodies, dissection, public health, the impacts of colonialism, the medical marketplace, patients and practitioners, healing spaces, and disability studies. The course closes be critically examining global health initiatives and the politics and intimacies of healthcare on a global scale

HIST BC3327 CONSUMER CULTURE IN MOD EUROPE. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required.
The development of the modern culture of consumption, with particular attention to the formation of the woman consumer. Topics include commerce and the urban landscape, changing attitudes toward shopping and spending, feminine fashion and conspicuous consumption, and the birth of advertising. Examination of novels, fashion magazines, and advertising images

HIST BC3557 Climate and Global Migrations. 4.00 points.

This course explores the deep historical roots of climate-related migration. Before the categories of climate and environmental refugees emerged in recent decades, climate variability, environmental disasters, and ecological change have often shaped human mobility. Building on case studies from across the world and a timeline spanning from antiquity to the present, the class will examine the relationship between human migrations, environmental crises, economic transformations, and political conflicts. Since displacement disproportionately affects vulnerable communities that rely on less resilient environments, the class also sheds light on global inequality by looking at the politics of freedom of movement, nativism, and the connection between anti-immigration backlash

HIST BC3589 Anti-Apartheid Solidarity Movement. 4.00 points.

This course examines the struggle against South African apartheid with a particular focus on the global solidarity movement in the 20th century. The class will examine key turning points in the movement, its connection with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, gendered constructs of apartheid and feminist leadership in the movement, and the circulation of theories of racial capitalism. Students will understand how and why apartheid became a global concern. Students will work on a project using the primary source material available on the African Activist Archive Digital Project at Michigan State University

CSER UN3928 COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Enrollment limited to 22.

Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructors permission. This course explores the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world, emphasizing cross-cultural and social contact, exchange, and relations of power; dynamics of conquest and resistance; and discourses of civilization, empire, freedom, nationalism, and human rights, from 1500 to 2000. Topics include pre-modern empires; European exploration, contact, and conquest in the new world; Atlantic-world slavery and emancipation; and European and Japanese colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The course ends with a section on decolonization and post-colonialism in the period after World War II. Intensive reading and discussion of primary documents

AMST UN3930 Topics in American Studies. 4 points.

Please refer to the Center for American Studies website for course descriptions for each section. americanstudies.columbia.edu

CPLS GU4685 Theory from the South. 4.00 points.

Typically, a course in social theory or political philosophy might be taught with two different emphases—as intellectual history, or as a theoretical tradition. In the first approach canonical texts are examined in relation to their political, social, economic and cultural contexts. In the second approach “classic” texts are systematically compared to one another to show both similarities and differences in their approach, and to place them in some developmental sequence. In either case, the textual corpus tends to focus on the historical experiences of the North Atlantic as both normative and universal. Instead, this seminar focuses not merely on the placement of social theory in global contexts but rather, has as its explicit focus texts generated by thinkers who seek to theorize the geohistorical complexities of modern worldmaking through social forms and lifeworlds that stand askew to dominant approaches to the study of capitalist modernity. The South is conceived here as a set of relations and not as a place, less as a geographical location than a heuristic tool that might reorient discussion on fundamental questions about equality and difference, politics and personhood as these have taken shape as world historical questions of our time. The seminar is particularly interested in the interface between subaltern and minority pasts as these confront material contexts of resource extraction and labor exploitation, and the distinctive manner by which embodied difference intersects social inequality. That is, we will think about the relationship between historical identities and their material substrate. Broadly speaking, the seminar will bring into conversation work generated in the Americas, especially African American scholarship that engages questions of slavery and subjectivity, black vitality, and Afropessimism together with approaches addressing problems of anticolonial politics, postcolonial sovereignty, ideas of Islamic universality, and global Marxisms. That is, we seek to direct the energies of social thought toward questions of translation, alterity, and historical comparison. A broad familiarity with colonial histories, anticolonial thought, and/or with canonical texts of social theory would be helpful, but not necessary. The seminar will focus on key concepts such as anticolonial thought; racial capitalism, primitive accumulation; caste-race comparison; political aesthetics; and left and right populism. Readings for the seminar will include a mix of recent texts of social theory and political philosophy, and monographs in history, sociology, and anthropology

HIST UN1501 Introduction to American History to 1865. 4.00 points.

This course, designed for newcomers to American history, tells three interconnected stories. The first is about the European colonization of North America between the 1500s and the 1750s. The second is about the wars for empire and independence that reshaped the North American continent between 1754 and 1815. The third story is about the creation of the United States and its destruction and remaking during the US Civil War. At the end of the class, you will be able to tell these stories and talk about why they matter. Along the way, you will meet all kinds of people from North America's past: enslaved voyagers, visionary women, costumed parade-goers, and land-hungry presidents. You will get a sense of how they made early America such a wild and unusual place, and at the same time, how they shaped the United States that we live in today

HIST UN1512 The Battle for North America: An Indigenous History of the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. 4.00 points.

This course will explore the struggle to control the continent of North America from an Indigenous perspective. After a century of European colonization Native peoples east of the Mississippi River Valley formed a political confederation aimed at preserving Native sovereignty. This Native confederacy emerged as a dominant force during the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812. At times Native political interests aligned with the French and British Empires, but remained in opposition to the expansion of Anglo-American colonial settlements into Indian country. This course is designed to engage literature and epistemology surrounding these New World conflicts as a means of the colonial and post-colonial past in North America. We will explore the emergence of intersecting indigenous and European national identities tied to the social construction of space and race. In this course I will ask you to re-think American history by situating North America as a Native space, a place that was occupied and controlled by indigenous peoples. You will be asked to imagine a North America that was indigenous and adaptive, and not necessarily destined to be absorbed by European settler colonies. Accordingly, this course we will explore the intersections of European colonial settlement and Euro-American national expansion, alongside of the emergence of indigenous social formations that dominated the western interior until the middle of the 19th century. This course is intended to be a broad history of Indigenous North America during a tumultuous period, but close attention will be given to use and analysis of primary source evidence. Similarly, we will explore the necessity of using multiple genres of textual evidence – archival documents, oral history, material artifacts, etc., -- when studying indigenous history

HIST UN1942 The Year 1000: A World History. 4.00 points.

This course is designed to introduce students to the study of premodern history, with a substantive focus on the variety of cultures flourishing across the globe 1000 years ago. Methodologically, the course will emphasize the variety of primary sources historians use to reconstruct those cultures, the various approaches taken by the discipline of history (and neighboring disciplines) in analyzing those sources, and the particular challenges and pleasures of studying a generally “source poor” period. The course queries the concepts of “global history” and “world history” as applied to the “middle millennium” (corresponding to Europe’s “medieval history”), by exploring approaches that privilege connection, comparison, combination, correlation, or coverage

HIST UN2215 MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY. 4.00 points.

An introductory survey of the history of Russia, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union over the last two centuries. Russia’s role on the European continent, intellectual movements, unfree labor and emancipation, economic growth and social change, and finally the great revolutions of 1905 and 1917 define the “long nineteenth century.” The second half of the course turns to the tumultuous twentieth century: cultural experiments of the 1920s, Stalinism, World War II, and the new society of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Finally, a look at very recent history since the East European revolutions of 1989-91. This is primarily a course on the domestic history of Russia and the USSR, but with some attention to foreign policy and Russia’s role in the world

HIST UN2222 NATURE ＆ POWER: ENV HIST NORTH AMERICA. 4.00 points.

Environmental history seeks to expand the customary framework of historical inquiry, challenging students to construct narratives of the past that incorporate not only human beings but also the natural world with which human life is intimately intertwined. As a result, environmental history places at center stage a wide range of previously overlooked historical actors such as plants, animals, and diseases. Moreover, by locating nature within human history, environmental history encourages its practitioners to rethink some of the fundamental categories through which our understanding of the natural world is expressed: wilderness and civilization, wild and tame, natural and artificial. For those interested in the study of ethnicity, environmental history casts into particularly sharp relief the ways in which the natural world can serve both to undermine and to reinforce the divisions within human societies. Although all human beings share profound biological similarities, they have nonetheless enjoyed unequal access to natural resources and to healthy environments—differences that have all-too-frequently been justified by depicting such conditions as “natural.”

HIST UN2319 Breadbasket, Borderland, Battleground: Economy, Space, ＆ Power in Ukraine, ca. 750 BCE – 2026. 4.00 points.

Adopting a long-term perspective that centers on the dynamic interplay of economy, space, and political power, this course investigates how Ukraine's geography – its richness in natural resources and trade routes; its centrality as a crossroads between sea, settlement, and steppe, and between rival religious, imperial, and national projects; its vastness, which fostered divergent developmental trajectories and deep regional diversity; and its openness, which offered few natural barriers to contact and conquest – have shaped the country’s history from antiquity to the present

HIST UN2323 Nineteenth-Century Britain. 3 points.

This course covers all aspects of British history – political, imperial, economic, social and cultural – during the century of Britain’s greatest global power.  Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of liberalism as a political and economic system and as a means of governing personal and social life.  Students will read materials from the time, as well as scholarly articles, and will learn to work with some of the rich primary materials available on this period.

HIST UN2336 Everyday Communism. 4 points.

This lecture course comparatively and transnationally investigates the twentieth-century communism as a modern civilization with global outreach. It looks at the world spread of communism as an ideology, everyday experience, and form of statehood in the Soviet Union, Europe, Asia (Mao’s China), and post-colonial Africa. With the exception of North America and Australia, communist regimes were established on all continents of the world. The course will study this historical process from the October Revolution (1917) to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986), which marked the demise of communist state. The stress is not just on state-building processes or Cold War politics, but primarily on social, gender, cultural and economic policies that shaped lived experiences of communism. We will closely investigate what was particular about communism as civilization: sexuality, materiality, faith, selfhood, cultural identity, collective, or class and property politics. We will explore the ways in which “ordinary people” experienced communism through violence (anti-imperial and anti-fascist warfare; forced industrialization) and as subjects of social policies (gender equality, family programs, employment, urban planning). By close investigation of visual, material and political representations of life under communism, the course demonstrates the variety of human experience outside the “West” and capitalist modernity in an era of  anti-imperial politics, Cold War, and decolonization, as well as current environmental crisis.

HIST UN2398 POLITICS OF TERROR:FRENCH REV. 4.00 points.

This course examines the political culture of eighteenth-century France, from the final decades of the Bourbon monarchy to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Among our primary aims will be to explore the origins of the Terror and its relationship to the Revolution as a whole. Other topics we will address include the erosion of the kings authority in the years leading up to 1789, the fall of the Bastille, the Constitutions of 1791 and 1793, civil war in the Vendee, the militarization of the Revolution, the dechristianization movement, attempts to establish a new Revolutionary calendar and civil religion, and the sweeping plans for moral regeneration led by Robespierre and his colleagues in 1793-1794

HIST UN2432 U.S. ERA OF CIVIL WAR ＆ RECON. 4.00 points.

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the American Civil War as an event in the making of the modern United States and, indeed, of the western world. Indeed the American Civil War and Reconstruction introduced a whole series of dilemmas that are still with us. What is the legacy of slavery in U.S. history and contemporary life? What is the proper balance of power between the states and the central government? Who is entitled to citizenship in the United States? What do freedom and equality mean in concrete terms? This course surveys the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in all of its aspects. It focuses on the causes of the war in the divergent development of northern and southern states; the prosecution of the war and all that it involved, including the process of slave emancipation; and the contentious process of reconstructing the re-united states in the aftermath of Union victory. The course includes the military history of the conflict, but ranges far beyond it to take the measure of the social and political changes the war unleashed. It focuses on the Confederacy as well as the Union, on women as well as men, and on enslaved black people as well as free white people. It takes the measure of large scale historical change while trying to grasp the experience of those human beings who lived through it

HIST UN2540 HISTORY OF THE SOUTH. 4.00 points.

A survey of the history of the American South from the colonial era to the present day, with two purposes: first, to afford students an understanding of the special historical characteristics of the South and of southerners; and second, to explore what the experience of the South may teach about America as a nation

HIST UN2611 JEWS ＆ JUDAISM IN ANTIQUITY. 4.00 points.

  Field(s): ANC

HIST UN2709 Medieval Middle East. 4.00 points.

This course is an introduction to the medieval Middle East, starting from the Abbasid caliphate at its peak and ending with the establishment of the Timurid empire. It explores political, social, and intellectual trends that configured the region’s later history, emphasizing both its complexity and interconnectedness. The course will feature not only on the Middle East and North Africa, but also other regions such as North India and Andalusia, considering the role of the Islamicate world in global history. Special attention will be given to political formations, intellectual and social diversity, and Islam as a cultural system. Students will be introduced to a large number of primary sources from different regions, languages, and religious communities, including objects, art, and music. Students will learn to analyze these materials and understand how history is written and made. This course does not presume any foreknowledge of the topic

HIST UN2717 The Ottoman Empire and the West in the 19th Century. 4.00 points.

“The Ottoman Empire and the West” is a course designed to familiarize undergraduate students with the major developments concerning the Ottoman Empire’s relations with the West throughout the ‘long’ nineteenth century, roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The course will adopt a predominantly chronological structure but will address a wide range of themes, from politics and ideology to economics and diplomacy, and from religion and culture to gender and orientalism

HIST UN2820 A History of the Indian Ocean, 19th Century to the Present. 4.00 points.

This lecture course explores the Indian Ocean worlds of the nineteenth century and twentieth century by tracing networks of trade, labor, capital, pilgrimage and science. It offers an overview of how these networks were forged and who formed them, mapping their ebbs and flows across Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Zanzibar, Oman, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Indonesia, and Australia. It begins with a brief overview of the premodern Indian Ocean and the seaborne empires of sixteenth centuries and the first encounters with Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonization and then looks at a range of different topics from the spice trade and caravan routes in the age of sail to the abolition of slavery and establishment of indenture as steamships began to take over oceanic journeys. We look at the travels of botanical specimens scrounged from tropical forests in the nineteenth century to the surveying of the ocean floor in the twentieth. At the end of the lectures, which will also feature active learning components using primary sources, we will learn how to reframe regional histories through the lens of oceanic mobilities

HIST UN3011 THE SECOND WORLD WAR. 4.00 points.

This course surveys some of the major historiographical debates surrounding the Second World War. It aims to provide student with an international perspective of the conflict that challenges conventional understandings of the war. In particular, we will examine the ideological, imperial, and strategic dimensions of the war in a global context. Students will also design, research, and write a substantial essay of 15-18 pages in length that makes use of both primary and secondary sources

HIST UN3021 THE GREEK INVENTION OF HISTORY. 4.00 points.

HIST UN3120 Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Early Modern Europe. 4 points.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission. SEE UNDERGRADUATE SEMINAR SECTION OF THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT'S WEBSITE.

In this course we will examine theoretical and historical developments that framed the notions of censorship and free expression in early modern Europe. In the last two decades, the role of censorship has become one of the significant elements in discussions of early modern culture. The history of printing and of the book, of the rise national-political cultures and their projections of control, religious wars and denominational schisms are some of the factors that intensified debate over the free circulation of ideas and speech. Indexes, Inquisition, Star Chamber, book burnings and beheadings have been the subjects of an ever growing body of scholarship. Field(s): EME

HIST UN3339 Faiths, Feelings, Communities – Nations, Churches and Religions in Central and East Europe (1790–1918). 4.00 points.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the highly heterogeneous ethnic and religious relations of Central and Eastern Europe and the interrelationship between them. By Central and Eastern Europe, I mean primarily the territory of the former Habsburg Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its neighbors. The end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century were, for all ethnic groups, a time of both the birth of modern nations and the general secularization. Religions and churches played different roles in the birth of each nationalism. During the semester, students will learn about the most important religions and denominations, their history, spread, structure, teachings, role in the organization of societies: Roman Catholic Church, Greek Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox Church; Protestantism (Calvinist, Lutheran, Unitarian Churches); Judaism and Neo-Protestant denominations. Students will learn how the role of Catholicism in Polish or Croatian nationalism, Greek Orthodoxy in Serbian nationalism, and the presence of several dominant denominations in the Hungarian, Romanian or Slovakian nations became decisive. Conflicts between denominations often expressed conflicts of an ethnic, social or political nature. The laws enacted by the state made several attempts to ensure the coexistence of the denominations. Until 1918, all this took place within the framework of the Habsburg Empire, hence the importance of the relationship of the Empire and the Churches (especially the Catholic Church) to the state, and the phenomenon of Josephinism

HIST UN3421 The US-Mexico Borderlands. 4.00 points.

This reading and writing-intensive course explores the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through prisms including those of race, labor, politics, gender and sexuality, the environment, the law, indigeneity and citizenship, and migration and mobility. What is the definition of a “borderland” and who or what creates one, physical or imagined? What makes the U.S.-Mexico borderlands a unique space, and how has it changed from the Spanish colonial period to the present day? By the end of the semester students will have enough experience in analyzing primary documents and secondary sources to produce their own original research papers related to some aspect and era of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history

HIST UN3429 TELLING ABOUT THE SOUTH. 4.00 points.

A remarkable array of Southern historians, novelists, and essayists have done what Shreve McCannon urges Quentin Compson to do in William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!--tell about the South--producing recognized masterpieces of American literature. Taking as examples certain writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, this course explores the issues they confronted, the relationship between time during which and about they wrote, and the art of the written word as exemplified in their work. Group(s): D Field(s): US Limited enrollment. Priority given to senior history majors. After obtaining permission from the professor, please add yourself to the course wait list so the department can register you in the course

HIST UN3490 THE GLOBAL COLD WAR. 4.00 points.

The superpower competition between the US and the USSR dominated international affairs during the second half of the twentieth century. Though this Cold War was born from ideological differences and initially focused on Europe, it soon became entangled with the concurrent global process of decolonization. In this way, the US-Soviet rivalry shaped events on every continent. This course will examine the intersection of the superpower competition and the emergence of the postcolonial world. Through course readings and class discussion, students will examine the global dimensions of the Cold war. Each student will prepare a research paper on a topic to be chosen in consultation with the instructor.

HIST UN3502 The Struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty in the Early American Republic. 4.00 points.

The United States was founded on Indigenous land and in conversation with Indigenous nations who shared possession to most of the territory claimed by the republic. The expansion of the U.S. beyond the original thirteen states happened in dialogue, and often in open conflict with the Native peoples of North America. This course will examine the creation and expansion of the American nation-state from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous history. Most histories of the Republic equate the founding of the U.S. with the severance of colonial ties to Great Britain and the proceed to characterize America as a post-colonial society. We will study the U.S. as the first New World colonial power, a settler society whose very existence is deeply intertwined with the Indigenous history of North America

HIST UN3517 The Historical Imagination in Caribbean Literature. 4.00 points.

Caribbean literature offers complicated and vivid portrayals of the Caribbean’s past, and grapples with difficult histories lived by its people that compromised colonial archives can only partially capture. Literary works far exceed the limited narratives of Caribbean history by imagining entire worlds that official documents could never contain, rich selves, cultures and communities built by many generations of Caribbean people. This course is aimed at bringing forth a broader understanding of Caribbean history by examining a body of creative works by feminist and womanist writers that continuously remain attuned to the complexities of the past, which are either underrepresented or absent in the record. Chosen literary texts will also be paired with historical works that will illuminate and contextualize the multiple themes with which these Caribbean authors frequently engage, including slavery, and colonialism, racism and colorism, migration and immigration, gender and sexuality, poverty and globalization. From these pairings, students will explore both the divergences and alignments in how writers and historians approach the work of retelling the past, and will acquire reading and writing skills that will foster thoughtful critical analysis of the ever-changing contours of the Caribbean’s history

HIST UN3571 Left and Right in American History. 4.00 points.

This course examines 20th-century American political movements of the Left and Right. We will cover Socialism and the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century; the Communist Party and right-wing populists of the 1930s; the civil rights movement, black power, and white resistance, 1950s-1960s; the rise of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s; the Women's liberation movement and the Christian right of the 1970s; and finally, free-market conservatism, neoliberalism, white nationalism and the Trump era. We will explore the organizational, ideological and social history of these political mobilizations. The class explores grass-roots social movements and their relationship to “mainstream” and electoral politics. We will pay special attention to the ways that ideas and mobilizations that are sometimes deemed extreme have in fact helped to shape the broader political spectrum. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the present political dilemmas of our country in light of the history that we study

HIST W3644 Modern Jewish Intellectual History. 4 points.

This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to 1939. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish life, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include: the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, Zionism, Jewish socialism, and Autonomism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and Ultra-Orthodoxy.

HIST UN3644 MOD JEWISH INTELLECTUAL HIST. 4.00 points.

This course analyzes Jewish intellectual history from Spinoza to the present. It tracks the radical transformation that modernity yielded in Jewish thought, both in the development of new, self-consciously modern, iterations of Judaism and Jewishness and in the more elusive but equally foundational changes in "traditional" Judaisms. Questions to be addressed include: the development of the modern concept of "religion" and its effect on the Jews; the origin of the notion of "Judaism" parallel to Christianity, Islam, etc.; the rise of Jewish secularism and of secular Jewish ideologies, especially the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah), modern Jewish nationalism, and Zionism; the rise of Reform, Modern Orthodox, and Conservative Judaisms; Jewish neo-Romanticism and neo-Kantianism, and American Jewish religious thought

HIST UN3784 Material Culture and Africa's Neglected Histories. 4.00 points.

For many centuries, historians have adhered to an unwritten rule – history is made by using textual documents. But how can we uncover the histories of those not included in the textual sources, and how can we complement and enrich the textual archives? This course interrogates one answer to these questions – that of material culture, and narrate the history of Africa through things. Borrowing methods from a variety of disciplines, most notably women’s and gender studies, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, historians have begun to use artifacts and objects to uncover the untold historical narratives. The course refers to the entire African continent, challenging the common division between North Africa (which is usually more closely associated with the Middle East in modern scholarship) and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as many other divisions. In response to its decades-long marginalization in modern scholarship, Africa, in all its various subdivisions, is places at the center. As the course unfolds, the centrality of Africa in the international movement of things will become clear

HIST UN3829 Citizenship: Regional and Global Histories from South Asia. 4.00 points.

This seminar explores the making and unmaking of citizenship, adopting regional and global histories from South Asia. Beginning with a brief overview of early twentieth century debates over imperial citizenship involving the Britain, its colonies, and North America and the making of a global color line in the years leading up to the formal end of empires, we look at how important political events (the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, the 1971 War of independence for Bangladesh among others) were important inflection points in the rethinking of the relationship between national identity, belonging and formal-legal citizenship and its impact on people’s understanding of citizenship. Our discussions of citizenship after empire will include readings on citizenship debates involving the former Portuguese and French possessions in India in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a discussion of the broader debates over citizenship and belonging involving the South Asian diaspora in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will also look at how debates over indigeneity and authenticity mark citizenship debates in Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka as well as parts of Southeast Asia, and how this shapes global citizenship and refugee regimes. Returning to India, we consider how unmaking citizenship affects both people who stay behind and engage with state structures as well as those who are on the move, pursuing education or employment opportunities beyond it, shaped by uneven access to rights and shaping their social and political identities

HIST UN3839 SENIOR THESIS SEMINAR. 4.00 points.

A year-long course for outstanding senior majors who want to conduct research in primary sources on a topic of their choice in any aspect of history, and to write a senior thesis possibly leading toward departmental honors. Field(s): ALL

HIST GU4223 Hist of Russian Thought: Faith ＆ Reason. 4.00 points.

Priority given to majors and concentrators, seniors, and juniors.

Prerequisites: the instructor's permission.
Russian ideas are familiar to the world through Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels. In this course, we will examine key texts in the intellectual tradition that forms the backdrop to these famous works. Emphasis is on close textual readings; but also on how Russian ideas have been read and interpreted across national and cultural boundaries, including in recent English-language works like Tom Stoppard’s play, Coast of Utopia. Thinkers include Schellingians and Hegelians, Slavophiles, Populists and Pan-Slavists, and Vladimir Soloviev

HIST GU4231 EASTERN EUROPE'S COLD WAR. 4.00 points.

This seminar explores the Cold Wars impact on Eastern Europe (1940s-1980s) and Eastern Europes Cold War-era engagements with the wider world. We will address the methodologies used by historians to answer questions like these: What was the Cold War? What did it mean, and for whom? We will also look at the Cold War as something more than a series of events; we will consider its value, uses, and limits as a device for framing the second half of the twentieth century

HIST GU4334 Debating the Holodomor. 4.00 points.

Why did millions of Ukrainians starve under Stalin? In this seminar, we will engage with the contentious historiography of the famine of 1932-34 – a defining event of Soviet and Ukrainian history, and an essential touchstone for understanding the Russo-Ukrainian War today. Without losing sight of the famine’s human tragedy, we will focus especially on questions of causality, intent, and agency at multiple levels, from the Kremlin to the village. Drawing on studies of other famines within and outside the Soviet context (Russia, Kazakhstan, and China), participants will develop a robust comparative toolkit. The seminar aims to highlight historiographical advances, explore newly-available primary sources, and identify the remaining gaps in our understanding

HIST GU4355 Free Trade and Protection in the Global Nineteenth Century. 4.00 points.

This course introduces you to the rich history of international political economy in the nineteenth century, a period often described as the ‘first age of globalization’. You will gain a foundational grounding in classic theories of free trade, protectionism, and autarchy, from well-known thinkers like Adam Smith and Friedrich List. You will also, however, have a change to engage with a range of heterodox and critical voices in Marxist and anti-colonial economics, and explore some of the real-world, on-the-ground situations where economic theories were inspired, implemented and contested

HIST GU4387 Fascism. 4.00 points.

This course aims to familiarise students with the extraordinarily rich historiography on fascism. Its goal is to enable a more critical approach to the subject, to parse its conceptual and historical ambiguities and to engage with theoretical framings of the subject through an immersion in the main case studies. Focusing on the emergence of fascist regimes in interwar Italy and Germany, it will range across countries and time, distinguishing fascism from other forms of the authoritarian Right, exploring the extent to which the Second World War marked a watershed in fascism’s fortunes, and asking to what extent the term remains a useful one in the early twenty-first century. Course readings will include contemporary documents, classic articles and major monographs on the subject. Students will be expected to read widely

HIST GU4481 CULTURE, MEMORY, CRISIS IN US. 4.00 points.

This course examines how Americans have used culture as a means to respond to, interpret, and remember acute social crises over the last century. Why do some periods of social upheaval create breaks in cultural forms and practices while others encourage an impetus to defend cultural practices, thereby facilitating the “invention of tradition”? How are the feelings released in such moments—whether trauma, outrage, rage, insecurity, or fear—turned into cultural artifacts? What is at stake in how they get memorialized? To answer these questions, this course examines responses to the lynching of black Americans, the Great Depression, World War II and the black freedom struggle during the postwar period. We will examine a wide range of individually and collectively produced artifacts about these events, including photography, plays, songs, movies, comic books, novels, government sponsored programs, and world fairs

HIST GU4699 Medieval Franciscans and their World. 4.00 points.

This course will offer an examination of the birth and development of the Franciscan Order between 1200-1350. The topics will include Francis of Assisi, the foundation of the three orders of Franciscans, education, poverty, preaching, theology internal strife, antifraternalism, and relations with secular governments and papacy

HIST GU4716 Imag(in)ing the Ottoman Empire: A visual history, 18th-20th centuries. 4.00 points.

“Imag(in)ing the Ottoman Empire: A visual history, 18th-20th centuries” is an undergraduate/graduate seminar focusing on visual representations of the Ottoman Empire during the last two centuries of its existence, from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The objective is to study the development of visual representations both by and about the Empire, from Ottoman miniatures to early European paintings, and from the surge of Western illustrated magazines to the local uses of photography. The seminar’s chronological thread will be complemented by a thematic structure designed to explore different aspects and influences concerning the production and diffusion of images: curiosity, documentation, exoticism, propaganda, orientalism, modernity, self-fashioning, eroticism, policing, to name just a few

HIST GU4747 Engineering the Modern Middle East: Histories of Science, Technology and Medicine. 4.00 points.

This course examines the history of science, technology and medicine in the modern Middle East. We will consider a number of themes from energy infrastructures and communication and transportation systems to modern medical, agricultural and environmental developments

HIST GU4752 Memory, Media, and Modern Iran. 4.00 points.

What does nationalism do to memory, and how do those memories get telegraphed, circulated and preserved? This research seminar brings together media history and memory studies towards an exploration of how Iran’s history has been written, remembered, and mediated inside and outside Iran over the course of the modern period. It investigates the kinds of knowledge production involved in maintaining or rejecting a national history, and the forms of visual media harnessed to deploy such historical narratives from both government and grassroots perspectives. This course will consider the different forms of media mobilized in public history, national and institutional histories, and personal histories, all of which speak to the preservation and suppression of the past. This course follows a general chronological timeline and examines how these different narratives often center Tehran while also looking towards alternate histories that offer regional or provincial perspectives, as well as texts speaking to global trends and theoretical interventions. By examining photography, archives, museums, architecture, and other forms of new media production alongside academic historical texts and personal memoirs, this course investigates at the various ways different historiographical trends have been broadcast and institutionalized with regards to Iran’s modern history

HIST GU4769 HEALTH ＆ HEALING IN AFRICA. 4.00 points.

Africa has long been construed in the Western mind as a place of disease – from the ‘White Man’s Grave’ of West Africa in the Atlantic Era through the colonial epidemics of sleeping sickness and syphilis and to the recent past the AIDS pandemic and most recently outbreaks of Ebola and the COVID-19 pandemic. Colonial medical officials presented themselves as introducing biomedicine to the continent as part of the “civilizing mission.” The post-colonial flourishing of humanitarian and medical non-governmental organizations has in large part continued this self-projection. As such, ‘traditional’ or non-biomedical healers have found themselves alternatively the target of campaigns to prevent them from working and of efforts to bring them into the medical system by rationalizing their work through efforts such as the scientific evaluation of herbal medicines. This course seeks to chart the history of health and healing from a perspective interior to Africa. We explore changing practices and understandings of disease, etiology, healing and well-being from pre-colonial times into the post-colonial. A major theme running throughout the course is the relationship between medicine, the body, power and social groups. We will explore changing understanding of disease and practices of healing through specific themes and case studies

HIST GU4779 AFRICAN FRANCE, FRENCH AFRICA. 4.00 points.

This seminar explores a tradition of historical writing (historiography) that constructs “Africa and France,” or “France and Africa,” or “FrançAfrique” as an historical object and as an object of knowledge. That body of writing accounts in various and sometimes contadictory ways for the peculiar, intense, and historically conflictual relationship that exists between France and the sub-Saharan nation-states that are its former African colonies

HIST GU4811 Encounters with Nature: The History and Politics of Environment, Health and Development in South Asia and Beyond. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

This course offers an understanding of the interdisciplinary field of environmental, health and population history and will discuss historical and policy debates with a cross cutting, comparative relevance: such as the making and subjugation of colonized peoples and natural and disease landscapes under British colonial rule; modernizing states and their interest in development and knowledge and technology building, the movement and migration of populations, and changing place of public health and healing in south Asia. The key aim of the course will be to introduce students to reading and analyzing a range of historical scholarship, and interdisciplinary research on environment, health, medicine and populations in South Asia and to introduce them to an exploration of primary sources for research; and also to probe the challenges posed by archives and sources in these fields. Some of the overarching questions that shape this course are as follows: How have environmental pasts and medical histories been interpreted, debated and what is their contemporary resonance? What have been the encounters (political, intellectual, legal, social and cultural) between the environment, its changing landscapes and state? How have citizens, indigenous communities, and vernacular healers mediated and shaped these encounters and inserted their claims for sustainability, subsistence or survival? How have these changing landscapes shaped norms about bodies, care and beliefs? The course focuses on South Asia but also urges students to think and make linkages beyond regional geographies in examining interconnected ideas and practices in histories of the environment, medicine and health. Topics will therefore include (and students are invited to add to these perspectives and suggest additional discussion themes): colonial and globalized circuits of medical knowledge, with comparative case studies from Africa and East Asia; and the travel and translation of environmental ideas and of medical practices through growing global networks

HIST GU4842 The City ＆ the Archive. 4.00 points.

How to write the city? What is an archive for writing the city? What liminal and marginal perspectives are available for thinking about writing the city? What is the place of the city in the global south in our historical imagination? Our attempt in this seminar is to look at the global south city from the historical and analytical perspectives of those dispossessed and marginal. Instead of ‘grand’ summations about “the Islamic City” or “Global City,” we will work meticulously to observe annotations on power that constructs cities, archives and their afterlives. The emphasis is on the city in South Asia as a particular referent though we will learn to see Cairo, New York, and Istanbul

HIST GU4872 North Korean History, Culture and Politics. 4.00 points.

North Korea is widely regarded as a country without a history; as enigmatic as it is isolated. Dispensing with this cliché, this course invites students to engage with North Korean history using a variety of primary and secondary sources. We begin in the medieval period to trace the distinct features of the northern region that made it uniquely receptive to outside ideas. Understanding the north as a frontier zone of experimentation and adaption allows us to examine the attractive power of modernity in the north during the early twentieth century via the influence of Christianity, capitalism and communism. Utilizing texts and materials made in North Korea and internationally, including feature and documentary films, women’s magazines, graphic novels, literary fiction and testimony, the course investigates the conditions within which knowledge about North Korea has been produced, circulated and repressed. Key topics to be explored include the history of Christianity and capitalism in Pyongyang and the northern provinces, communist cadres in the 1930s, the allure of the North in the 1940s, the Korean War and the purges that followed, North Korea’s relations with neighbors and the world, and the high cost its citizens pay for the country’s brutal sanction economy

HIST GU4933 American Radicalism in the Archives. 4.00 points.

“American Radicalism in the Archives” is a research seminar examining the multiple ways that radicals and their social movements have left traces in the historical record. Straddling the disciplines of social movement history, public humanities, and critical information studies, the seminar will use the archival collections at Columbia University’s Rare Book ＆ Manuscript Library to trace the history of social movements and to consider the intersections of radical theory and practice with the creation and preservation of archives

HIST BC1402 INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1865. 4.00 points.

Examines the major social, political, economic, and intellectual transformations from the 1860s until the present, including industrialization and urbanization, federal and state power, immigration, the welfare state, global relations, and social movements

HIST BC1760 INTRO AFRICAN HIST:1700-PRESNT. 4.00 points.

Survey of African history from the 18th century to the contemporary period. We will explore six major themes in African History: Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World, Colonialism in Africa, the 1940s, Nationalism and Independence Movements, Post-Colonialism in Africa, and Issues in the Making of Contemporary Africa

HIST BC2099 Making Vikings. 3.00 points.

Between the 700s and 1000s, pirates known as Vikings raided much of Europe. Some were linked to merchant groups reaching into Central Asia, while others joined diaspora communities that sailed across the Atlantic. They made their worlds in many ways—through texts, images, artifacts, and behaviors. In this class, students will accomplish the same, guided by the principle that making is best studied by doing. This will be accomplished through a series of creative assignments accompanied by written discussions drawing on scholarship and historical materials. The course will culminate in a written proposal for a museum exhibit allowing students to explore chosen narratives or thematic interests. Through this work, students will learn how Viking-Age peoples made their world and consider how we recreate and represent that world today

HIST BC2195 Gender and Sexuality in European History. 3.00 points.

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality in Europe, from the Renaissance to the present day. We will take a thematic approach, tracing the shifting operations, definitions, and understandings of both gender and sexuality within European culture and society. Topics include: Renaissance visual culture, the witchcraft trials, Enlightenment philosophy, European imperialism and colonialism, revolutions (both political and sexual), moral reform campaigns, the birth of sexology, queer and trans histories, sex work, and the politics of control. Central to this course is an examination of the ways gender and sexuality function at the intersections of class, race, nation, ethnicity, and religion, and how these intersections speak to dynamics of social, cultural, and political power. In our work throughout the semester, we will draw from a range of sources, including film, painting, photography, literature, and music. We will regularly engage with primary sources, which will allow students to learn the skills and techniques necessary for the work of historians. Throughout the course, students will examine how historians write, interpret, and construct histories of gender and sexuality, and question what place these histories have in our contemporary world

HIST BC2375 Fascism in European History. 3.00 points.

What was Fascism? What kind of appeal did authoritarianism and dictatorship have in interwar Europe? How did the Fascist “New Order” challenge liberal democracies and why did it fail in World War II? What was the common denominator of Fascist movements across Europe, and in particular in Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, culminating in Nazi Germany? This class examines the history of Fascism as an ideology, constellation of political movements, and authoritarian regimes that aimed at controlling the modernization of European societies in the interwar period. Thus, the course focuses in particular on the relationship between politics, science and society to investigate how Fascism envisioned the modernity of new technologies, new social norms, and new political norms. The class will also explore Fascism’s imperialist goals, such as the calls for national renewal, the engineering of a new race, and the creation of a new world order

HIST BC2477 RACE, CLASS, AND POLITICS IN NEW YORK CITY. 3.00 points.

The objectives of this course are: to gain familiarity with the major themes of New York History since 1898, to learn to think historically, and to learn to think and write critically about arguments that underlie historical interpretation. We will also examine and analyze the systems and structures--of race and class--that have shaped life in New York, while seeking to understand how social groups have pursued change inside and outside of such structures

HIST BC2681 WOMEN AND GENDER IN LATIN AMERICA. 3.00 points.

Examines the gendered roles of women and men in Latin American society from the colonial period to the present. Explores a number of themes, including the intersection of social class, race, ethnicity, and gender; the nature of patriarchy; masculinity; gender and the state; and the gendered nature of political mobilization.

HIST BC2699 Latin American Civilization II. 4.00 points.

This course is intended to offer a survey of the history of a complex and vast region through two centuries. In order to balance the specificity of particular histories and larger processes common to Latin America, units will often start with a general presentation of the main questions and will be followed by lectures devoted to specific countries, regions, or themes. We will look closely at the formation of class and ethnic identities, the struggle around state formation, and the links between Latin America and other regions of the world. We will stress the local dimension of these processes: the specific actors, institutions and experiences that shaped the diversity and commonalities of Latin American societies. The assignments, discussion sections, and lectures are intended to introduce students to the key conceptual problems and the most innovative historical research on the region and to encourage their own critical reading of Latin American history

HIST BC2803 Gender and Empire. 3 points.

Examines how women experienced empire and asks how their actions and activities produced critical shifts in the workings of colonial societies worldwide. Topics include sexuality, the colonial family, reproduction, race, and political activism.

HIST BC2985 History of Global Economic Inequality. 3.00 points.

Economic inequality characterizes virtually every human society, informing deep social dynamics. And yet scholars and lay people alike hold vastly differing opinions about the effects that inequality has on the social fabric, and the need to combat it. The question of how wealth and income are distributed among the members of a national community as well as among nations has acquired center stage in analyses about fundamental issues such as the causes of the progress and decline of societies and the dynamics of globalization. Inequality issues are at the heart of discussions about international economic relations, transnational phenomena such as migrations and the domestic economic platforms of political parties. This course will provide students with the critical instruments with which to analyze the main interpretations of economic inequality from the eighteenth century to the present. We will read and discuss authors who have addressed the question of inequality and distribution: how did they frame the issue? What visions of society emerged from their analyses? We will see how the concept of inequality has changed historically, how different dimensions (e.g., national and international) have appeared and disappeared, and how visions of national, international and global inequality inform debates about the foundational elements of the social compact

HIST BC3076 The Science of World History. 4.00 points.

This seminar prepares students to engage with material sciences used in historical studies. Students will examine how ice cores, tree rings, isotopes, bone morphology, genetic materials, and chemical compositions have all been used as keys into the human past, appraising successes and failures. Assignments will offer temporal depth and geographic breadth, ranging from the micro to the global. This course contributes to curricula for the Columbia Center for Science and Society, emphasizing connectivity, migration, and the environment to support the Climate Humanities minor while examining to how material studies are used in broader support of the Science and Society minor. Students from the sciences will meanwhile have an opportunity to develop skills in navigating and communicating within humanistic understandings of rigor. This course will culminate in students selecting a site, collection, or method to evaluate how studies have measured against apparent possibilities for scientific research and historical interpretation in that field

HIST BC3301 Science and Fascism. 4.00 points.

In 1942, the American sociologist Robert Merton described modern science as an intellectual enterprise that can produce truthful and factual knowledge only if inspired by democratic values. Yet such concept contrasted starkly with the reality of science in the interwar period and World War II, at the peak of the clash between liberal democracies and fascist dictatorships. What was the role of science in the global conflict between liberalism and the fascist ‘New Order’? What did science and technology look like under fascism? This class examines the relationship between science and fascism in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, and Salazar’s Portugal. During the Great War (1914-1918), science and technology were enlisted as critical assets for the war effort and the international scientific community was shattered across national lines. The Great War proved the importance of the scientific organization of society and state-controlled scientific advancement. Fascism developed this lesson in the interwar period to pursue its nationalist and imperialist goal: the creation of a new world order. Thus, the seminar explores the entanglement between science, technology and fascism by examining a wide range of disciplines, such as physics, medicine, eugenics, statistics, demography, agronomy, and engineering. Focusing in particular on fascism’s central themes of race and empire, the course examines the relationship between state power and scientific expertise, the persecution of Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and scientists’ critical competition in World War II ahead of the creation of the atomic bomb, which ushered in the new era of the Cold War

HIST BC3327 CONSUMER CULTURE IN MOD EUROPE. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required.
The development of the modern culture of consumption, with particular attention to the formation of the woman consumer. Topics include commerce and the urban landscape, changing attitudes toward shopping and spending, feminine fashion and conspicuous consumption, and the birth of advertising. Examination of novels, fashion magazines, and advertising images

WMST UN3514 HIST APPROACHES TO FEM QUESTNS. 4.00 points.

This course will provide students with a comparative perspective on gender, race, and sexuality by illuminating historically specific and culturally distinct conditions in which these systems of power have operated. Beginning in the early modern period, the course seeks to destabilize contemporary notions of gender and sexuality and instead probe how race, sexuality, and gender have functioned as mechanisms of differentiation embedded in historically contingent processes. Moving from “Caliban to Comstock,” students will probe historical methods for investigating and critically evaluating claims about the past. In making these inquiries, the course will pay attention to the intersectional nature of race, gender, and sexuality and to strategic performances of identity by marginalized groups. This semester, we will engage research by historians of sexuality, gender, and capitalism to critically reflect on the relationship between critical studies of the past and debates about reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and gay and lesbian rights in our contemporary moment

FRHS UN3572 French Algeria, 1830-1962. 3.00 points.

This course provides an introduction to the colonial history of Algeria and France in the 19th and 20th centuries, at the high point of European imperial expansion. It covers the violent conquest of the Regency of Algiers starting in 1830, followed by population removal and settlement by the French; successive political regimes, forms of legal discrimination, and attempts at turning this North African territory into an integral part of the French Republic; and finally the emergence of Algerian nationalism, leading up to the war of liberation and independence in 1962. Algeria was the jewel of the French Empire, its only real settler colony; its independence became a beacon of post-colonial struggles, inaugurating an era of entangled memories and forgetting that continues today

HIST BC3586 Ten Books to Understand Capitalism. 4.00 points.

In this seminar, we will read a selection of masterpieces in economics to explore how economic thought on capitalism has changed over time. Through weekly discussions, we will examine a number of must-read volumes that shape the field of economics and more broadly, the social sciences today. We will also develop a general understanding of the different epochs of economic thinking about the evolving capitalist system. We will analyze classics such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Capital, and John M. Keynes’ General Theory, as well as more recent classics that have deeply influenced social science thinking in the second half of the XX century. This seminar is intended both for students in history, the humanities and the social sciences who have an interest in understanding the evolution of the economics discipline in historical perspective, and for economics students who want to develop an historical understanding of their discipline

HIST BC3698 Mass-Mediated Politics in Modern Latin America. 4.00 points.

This undergraduate seminar offers an introduction to the study of mass media and politics in Latin America from the early 19th to the early 21st century. Throughout the course, the students will get acquainted with some of the key concepts, problems, and methods through which historians and communication scholars have probed the relationship between mass media and political power in the region. We will define and understand media broadly, but we will focus largely on printed media and, to a lesser extent, radio, cinema, and television. We will discuss both breaks and continuities between different media technologies, journalistic cultures, and political regimes. Knowledge of Spanish is welcome, but not mandatory

HIST BC3791 Lagos in Global Urban History: Records, Methods, Interpretations. 4 points.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required.

This course is a reading and writing intensive historical research seminar. In it we will learn about Lagos’s urban history from the eighteenth century to the present using social, spatial, economic, and cultural history approaches. The course examines themes including labor, migration, empire, urban space, and cultural life. Students will conduct original research and complete a history research paper based on primary sources.

HIST BC3825 RACE, CASTE, AND THE UNIVERSITY: B. R. AMBEDKAR AT COLUMBIA. 4.00 points.

B. R. Ambedkar is arguably one of Columbia University’s most illustrious alumni, and a democratic thinker and constitutional lawyer who had enormous impact in shaping India, the world’s largest democracy. As is well known, Ambedkar came to Columbia University in July 1913 to start a doctoral program in Political Science. He graduated in 1915 with a Masters degree, and got his doctorate from Columbia in 1927 after having studied with some of the great figures of interwar American thought including Edwin Seligman, James Shotwell, Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey. This course follows the model of the Columbia University and Slavery course and draws extensively on the relevant holdings and resources of Columbia’s RBML, [Rare Books and Manuscript Library] Burke Library (Union Theological Seminar), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture among others to explore a set of relatively understudied links between Ambedkar, Columbia University, and the intellectual history of the interwar period. Themes include: the development of the disciplines at Columbia University and their relationship to new paradigms of social scientific study; the role of historical comparison between caste and race in producing new models of scholarship and political solidarity; links between figures such as Ambedkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, W. E. B. Du Bois and others who were shaped by the distinctive public and political culture of New York City, and more. This is a hybrid course which aims to create a finding aid for B. R. Ambedkar that traverses RBML private papers. Students will engage in a number of activities towards that purpose. They will attend multiple instructional sessions at the RBML to train students in using archives; they will make public presentations on their topics, which will be archived in video form; and stuents will produce digital essays on a variety of themes and topics related to the course. Students will work collaboratively in small groups and undertake focused archival research. This seminar inaugurates an on-going, multiyear effort to grapple with globalizing the reach and relevance of B. R. Ambedkar and to share our findings with the Columbia community and beyond. Working independently, students will define and pursue individual research projects. Working together, the class will create digital visualizations of these projects

HSEA UN3862 THE HISTORY OF KOREA TO 1900. 4.00 points.

This course traces Korean history from the earliest recorded kingdoms to 1900, situating the development of Korean civilization within both East Asian and global contexts. Students will explore major political, social, intellectual, cultural, and diplomatic issues of premodern Korea through diverse interpretive approaches and a wide range of primary sources that illuminate both everyday life and broader historical transformations. No prior knowledge of Korean history is required, and all readings are in English

AMST UN3942 Ottoman Americana. 4.00 points.

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of the Ottoman Empire and the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through migration, mobility, and cultural exchange. It examines why diverse Ottoman subjects (Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Jewish, etc.) migrated to the United States and how they navigated life and contributed to the country’s evolving social and cultural fabric. Students will analyze migration experiences, community formations, and identity negotiations while considering how race, religion, class, and gender shaped the lives of transnational Ottoman communities in America. The course also investigates how Americans imagined the Ottoman world through missionary writings and journalism, and how Ottoman migrants themselves influenced these representations. Combining global and local perspectives, the seminar draws on historical, cultural, and sociological methods. Field-based learning, including visits to historic sites in New York City once home to Ottoman immigrant communities, complements classroom discussions

HSEA GU4888 WOMEN & GENDER IN KOREAN. 4 points.

While the rise of women's history and feminist theory in the 1960s and 1970s fostered more general reevaluations of social and cultural history in the West, such progressions have been far more modest in Korean history. To introduce one of the larger challenges in current Korean historiography, this course explores the experiences, consciousness and representations of women Korea at home and abroad from premodern times to the present. Historical studies of women and gender in Korea will be analyzed in conjunction with theories of Western women's history to encourage new methods of rethinking "patriarchy" within the Korean context. By tracing the lives of women from various socio-cultural aspects and examining the multiple interactions between the state, local community, family and individual, women's places in the family and in society, their relationships with one another and men, and the evolution of ideas about gender and sexuality throughout Korea's complicated past will be reexamined through concrete topics with historical specificity and as many primary sources as possible. With understanding dynamics of women's lives in Korean society, this class will build an important bridge to understand the construction of New Women in early twentieth-century Korea, when women from all walks of life had to accommodate their "old-style" predecessors and transform themselves to new women, as well as the lives of contemporary Korean women. This will be very much a reading-and-discussion course. Lectures will review the readings in historical perspective and supplement them. The period to be studied ranges from the pre-modern time up to the turn of twentieth century, with special attention to the early modern period.

CPLS GU4910 Reading Capitalism: Economization. 4.00 points.

Since the financial crisis of 2007-8, a growing body of interdisciplinary work in the social sciences and humanities has worked to situate the timeless logics of economics within processes of governing that constitute economic space, time and subjects. This 4000-level graduate seminar, open to senior undergraduates, brings key themes and methods in this literature on processes of ‘economization’ into conversation, streamlining prominent genealogies. Informed by attention to links across British imperial and contemporary neoliberal formations, the course highlights legal-governmental imaginaries and media that convey and create market value. Working in-between the study of practices of capitalism (formal and vernacular) and theories of capital, we will consider infrastructures that frame the drive for perpetual profit. After a review of foundational literature, the syllabus will foreground processes of financialization or the bolstering of financial value as primary means for profit-making. Reading capitalism as governing project with attention to subject-formation and sign-value, the course weaves the analysis of governmentality, legal and financial fictions, finance and society, approaches from the historical anthropology of economy and media, and science and technology studies. Themes will include: “the economy” as governing imaginary; the performativity of economics; incarnations of homo economicus; risk, speculation and the commodification of futurity; uncertainty and the “spirits” of capitalism; virtual value and instruments of securitization; money, the semiotics of value, and monetization. The course assumes basic background in social and political theory, and political economy