Courses

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  • CAS HI 476: Technology in American Society
    Technology in American society from the colonial era to World War II. Topics include industrialization, scientific management, household technologies, and the auto age.
  • CAS HI 481: Looking East, Looking West: Mutual (Mis)Representations of Japan and the West
    Examines how understandings of the differences between "east" and "west" developed from ancients precedents through modern times as trade, missionary activity, and imperialism intensified contact and conflict in Japan's relations with western countries over the past 500 years.
  • CAS HI 482: Merchants, Pirates, Missionaries, and the State in Maritime Asia, 600-2000
    Oceans connected the peoples of coastal Asia, Africa, and Oceania for centuries before the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s. This course examines the commercial, religious, cultural, political, and military dynamics of maritime Asia up to the present, showing the region's historical and current importance.
  • CAS HI 485: Selected Problems in the Modern Middle East
    Major events in recent history of the Middle East: emergence of nationalism and intellectual awakening of the Ottoman Empire, impact of western economic penetration, effect of partition, and the seeds of conflict and Egyptian transformation under Nasser.
  • CAS HI 488: Interwar Japan and the Pacific War
    An examination of the cultural, social, and political impact of World War I on Japanese society; the nature of Taisho liberalism; 1930s militaristic nationalism, with emphasis on the role of the United States leading into and beyond World War II.
  • CAS HI 490: Blacks and Asians
    Exploration of historical encounters between Africans and people of African descent and Asians and people of Asian descent. How such people imagined themselves, interacted with each other, viewed each other, influenced each other, and borrowed from each other.
  • CAS HI 491: Directed Study
  • CAS HI 492: Directed Study
  • CAS HI 502: Drafts of History: Journalism and Historical Revisionism
    Considers episodes from U.S. history, comparing the "draft" of journalists to subsequent historical accounts. Analyzes how new evidence alters understanding of events, but also how different eras ask questions about the past, interrogate different sources, and appeal to different audiences.
  • CAS HI 503: Psychohistory
    Addresses the "Whys?" of history and focuses on the application of Freudian analysis and other psychological models to interpret past individual and group behavior. Emphasizes two key subfields: psychobiography and group psychohistory.
  • CAS HI 514: Enlightenment and Its Critics
    Explores how eighteenth-century criticisms of the Enlightenment have been taken up by twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Horkeimer, Adorno, Gadamer, and Foucault; discusses recent defenses of Enlightenment ideals of reason, critique and autonomy by Habermas and others. Also offered as CAS PO 693.
  • CAS HI 533: Empire and Power: British Foreign Policy, 1782-Present
    Examines the evolution of British foreign policy over time as well as the nature of Great Power rivalry. Key themes include formulation of national diplomatic strategies, policy coordination, diplomatic vs. military considerations, alliance politics, and policy over-stretch. Also offered as CAS IR 514.
  • CAS HI 537: World War II: Causes, Course, Consequences
    Begins with the origins of World War II in Asia and Europe, follows its major campaigns, and ends with its main consequences. Topics include diplomacy, grand strategy, command decisions, conditions of battle, and civilians in occupation and resistance.
  • CAS HI 549: Nationalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
    Nationalism as a major force in modern history. Origins of modern nationalism in Europe, the Middle East, former Soviet republics, east and south Asia. Special attention to the varieties of diaspora, ethnic revivalism, and globalization.
  • CAS HI 552: Topics in Jewish History
    Examines various aspects of Jewish culture, politics, and society. Topics vary from year to year. Topic for Fall 2009: Jewish Political Movements and Ideologies.
  • CAS HI 560: The American Transcendentalists
    Led by Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and others, the Transcendentalists constituted the first "counter-cultural" movement in American history. Seminar focuses on how and why they did so within the philosophical, religious, literary, antislavery, communitarian, and ecological currents they inhabited.
  • CAS HI 566: Ideas and American Foreign Policy
    Examines the intellectual foundations of U.S. foreign policy from the founding of the republic to the present. Also offered as CAS IR 522.
  • CAS HI 568: The Modern Metropolis: Approaches to Urban History
    Examines the development of the modern American metropolis during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Considers transformations in commercial life, popular entertainments, and the use of public spaces as well as social encounters across lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
  • CAS HI 575: The Birth of Modern America, 1896-1929
    The political, economic, social, and cultural history of the United States in the formative years of the early twentieth century. Topics include Progressivism, World War I, immigration, modernism, the Scopes Trial, suffrage, the Harlem Renaissance, and the emergence of modern business practices.
  • CAS HI 580: The History of Racial Thought
    Study of racial thinking and feeling in Europe and the United States since the fifteenth century. Racial thinking in the context of Western encounters with non-European people and Jews; its relation to social, economic, cultural, and political trends. Also offered as CAS AA 580.

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