Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular term. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the MyBU Student Portal for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• CAS HI 426: Music and Ideas from Mozart to the Jazz Age
  This senior-level seminar considers music in its historical and cultural contexts. Masterworks from the eighteenth century to jazz are its subject. Topics include political and intellectual climates, evolving views of the artist, audiences, social criticism, and race. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Aesthetic Exploration.
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  • Aesthetic Exploration
• CAS HI 430: Comparative European Fascism
  Analyzes fascism as a political and social movement in Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and beyond. Emphasizes the creation of popular dictatorships through propaganda, repression, and racism, and ends with the fascist attempt to remake Europe through violence and genocide.
• CAS HI 434: Monarchy in Modern Britain
  A seminar probing seminal moments in the history of modern British sovereignty, when the politics of the court intersected with the politics of the people. Particular consideration is given to how monarchy has survived as an institution. Also offered as CAS WS 434. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Critical Thinking.
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  • Critical Thinking
  • Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy
  • Historical Consciousness
• CAS HI 444: Transformation and Trauma: Living in Post-Communist Russia
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar. - Using letters, diaries, oral histories, film, and fiction, course explores how ordinary citizens tried to rebuild on the ashes of the USSR, and why hope for a democratic Russia gave way to Putin. Effective Fall 2023, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Writing-Intensive Course.
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  • Writing-Intensive Course
• CAS HI 450: Topics in the History of Popular Culture
  May be repeated for credit if topic is different. Topic for Spring 2024, Section A1: The History of Stuff. This seminar explores American history in global context through material objects and commodities. How have historians used material objects to reveal important cultural, economic, social, and political processes? Topics include histories of sugar, cotton, meat, petroleum, rubber, uranium, and more.
• CAS HI 451: Fashion as History
  This seminar treats clothing and other products of material culture as historical documents. Explores what clothing can tell us about key developments in the modern period relating to trade and commerce, empire, gender, class, industry, revolution, nation-building, identity politics, and globalization. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Critical Thinking.
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  • Critical Thinking
  • Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy
  • Historical Consciousness
• CAS HI 457: Alternative America
  Explores groups who not only dissented from mainstream American society, but constructed entire alternative communities. Considers the ideas of freedom, religion, sex, family, community, justice, ecology, and survival that inspired such experiments from the country's beginnings to the present day. Effective Fall 2023 this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Social Inquiry I.
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  • Historical Consciousness
  • Social Inquiry I
• CAS HI 459: Paper Children and Tiger Parents: Capitalism and Asian American Families
  How does capitalism condition the bonds, structures, or feelings in Asian immigrant and diasporic families? Explores how patterns of empire, war, and immigration lead to new family formations and how families adapt to this trauma through interdisciplinary texts ranging from history, literature, psychology, and sociology. Through sources like memoirs, scholarly works, literature, and film, we discuss dynamics such as intergenerational trauma, sexuality, and childhood. Effective Spring 2025, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Oral and/ Signed Communication, Social Inquiry 1.
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  • The Individual in Community
  • Oral and/or Signed Communication
  • Social Inquiry I
• CAS HI 467: Postwar America: Issues in Political, Cultural, and Social History, 1945-69
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: First-Year Writing course (WR 120 or equivalent) - Exploring a variety of source materials, analytic methods, and modes of writing, students investigate how, after the upheavals of World War II, American fought over and refashioned new norms and ideals in politics, daily life, and the home, Topics include Cold War culture, youth rebellion, the African American freedom movement, liberalism, the Vietnam war, and the counterculture. Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing-Intensive Course, Research and Information Literacy.
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  • Research and Information Literacy
  • Writing-Intensive Course
• CAS HI 480: The Theater of History
  A practical workshop in the uses of history as source for theatrical productions including narrative films, television and other forms of performance arts, including dance, and the uses of such creative engagement as modes of historical imagination.
• CAS HI 482: Merchants, Pirates, Missionaries, and the State in Maritime Asia, 600-2000
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor. - Oceans connected the peoples of coastal Asia, Africa, and Oceania long before the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s. This course examines how commerce, piracy, religious contact, and imperialisms shaped maritime Asia, and how oceans facilitated our own era's global connections. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
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  • Digital/Multimedia Expression
  • Historical Consciousness
  • Research and Information Literacy
• CAS HI 488: Twentieth Century Japanese History
  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 489: The African Diaspora in the Americas
  History of peoples of African descent in the Americas after end of slavery from an international framework. Examines development of racial categories, emergence of national identities in wake of the wars of independence, diverse Black communities in the twentieth century. Also offered as CAS AA 489.
• CAS HI 490: Blacks and Asians: Encounters Through Time and Space
  This course comparatively explores how artists, writers, and activists of African descent and those of Asian descent have struggled against the political-economic, spiritual, psychological and cultural aggressions of global white supremacy and imagined and invented new modes of human liberation. Also offered as CAS AA 490.
• CAS HI 500: Topics in History
  May be repeated for credit as topics vary. Topics for Fall 2025-- Section A1: Global Philippines through Adobo. This seminar interrogates the limits and possibilities of telling the history of a place through food. How can reading about cooking and eating Philippine adobo reveal global histories of migration and colonialism from the early modern period through today? Section B1: The Photography of Persecution. Explores the use of photography by state and nonstate actors to criminalize, control, and crush vulnerable social groups. Examines claims of photographic objectivity, the circumstances of photographic production, and visual genres from mugshots to memes, memento mori to mass murder.
• CAS HI 504: The Civil War in American Memory
  From the immediate post-war years through very recent political conflicts, Americans have vigorously contested the memory of their Civil War. This course considers this question by exploring literature, film, and historical documents. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
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  • Historical Consciousness
  • Research and Information Literacy
• CAS HI 505: The American South in History, Literature, and Film
  Explores the American South through literature, film, and other sources. Considers what, if anything, has been distinctive about the Southern experience and how a variety of Americans have imagined the region over time. This course cannot be taken for credit in addition to the course with the same title that was previously numbered CAS HI 462. Also offered as CAS AM 505. Effective Spring 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
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  • Aesthetic Exploration
  • Historical Consciousness
• CAS HI 506: The Transformation of Early New England: Witches, Whalers and Warfare
  Explores how religious schisms and revival, warfare with native Americans, political revolution, and commercial development transformed New England from a Puritanical agricultural society into an urbanized, industrial society by the outbreak of the American Civil War. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Social Inquiry I.
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  • Historical Consciousness
  • Social Inquiry I
• CAS HI 507: Three Revolutions
  The course examines how the English civil wars, the Glorious Revolution, and the American Revolution altered Anglo-American political thought and encouraged the rise of a democratic order and changed the nature of governance. Writers from Hobbes and Milton to Burke and Jefferson grappled with these transformations that created political modernity. The course situates these changes within their broader social and spiritual contextes and explores the continuation of inequality within a democratic order. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Social Inquiry II.
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  • Historical Consciousness
  • Social Inquiry II
• CAS HI 514: Enlightenment and Its Critics
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor. - Explores how eighteenth-century criticisms of the Enlightenment have been taken up by twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Gadamer, and Foucault; discusses recent defenses of Enlightenment ideals of reason, critique and autonomy by Habermas and others. Also offered as CAS PO 592 and CAS PH 412.