How can we learn about the past? How do we tell stories about the past? How do we judge the truth of falsity of evidence? Writing History seminars introduce students to many different ways of interpreting and writing about the past, and to the wide range of sources that historians use: from diaries to tax rolls, from scraps of textile to films and advertisements. Topics and readings vary by section.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for HIST 1200 - FWS: Writing History

This course looks at Islam as a global phenomenon, both historically and in the contemporary world.  We spend time on the genesis of Islam in the Middle East, but then move across the Muslim would in various weeks (to Africa;Turkey; Iran; Eurasia; Southeast Asia; East Asia) and to the West to see how Islam looks across global boundaries.  The course tries to flesh out the diversity of Islam within the central message of this world religion.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for HIST 1402 - FWS: Global Islam

Is the United States a nation of freedom-loving individualists or club-joining conformists? Both, obviously. How, then, have Americans reconciled their enthusiasm for personal independence and individual conscience with their need for mutual aid and collective harmony? From the early days of the republic to our own digitally-mediated age, clergy, activists, psychologists, feminists, and social scientists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, bell hooks, Betty Friedan have grappled with this question. In this First-Year Writing Seminar, we will study their essays, sermons, and manifestos in both content and form, responding with our own reflective, comparative, and persuasive essays.

Full details for HIST 1412 - FWS: Alone in the Crowd: Self and Society in American Thought

For centuries, people have revered the places known as Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks. Artists, intellectuals, and nature lovers have devoted books, brochures, and picture essays to the natural splendor, biodiversity, and history of these places. In this course, we will read a variety of essays, books, and stories about Yosemite and Yellowstone to become familiar with different writing traditions about place and nature. We will learn about the Indigenous history, settler colonialism, and conservationist efforts in Yosemite and Yellowstone by reading historical monographs, fiction, long-form journalism, and primary sources. To improve your writing and reading skills, you will make several attempts at different genres of writing about nature and the environment.

Full details for HIST 1470 - FWS: Writing National Parks

America is finishing up two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. They have been the longest wars in American history and have ended amid much ambivalence about the US engagement in each place and the results. They are part of a series of wars that America has fought as a global power, with a global reach, sending its forces thousands of miles from home. That global reach is not new, and goes back all the way to 1898 and the Spanish-American War. This course will look at the American military experience from our first tentative steps onto the global stage in 1898, to the earth-spanning conflicts of World War I and II, to the nuclear tension of Cold War conflicts, and finish with the current Long War against terrorism, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1571 - American Defense Policy and Military History from the Two World Wars to the Global War on Terror

In 1868, samurai revolutionaries and their allies seized the reins of power and established a new capital they called Tokyo. Against all odds, this fragile regime survived and made Tokyo a center of power that would transform both Japan and the world. This survey of Japanese history explores the rise and fall of Japan as a modern imperial power; its foreign relations; its economic and scientific development from "feudalism" to futuristic technologies; and Japan's many modern revolutions, from the rule of the samurai to Westernization and democracy, from democratic collapse to fascism and World War II, and from Japan's postwar rebirth to the present. We will examine not only big events but also everyday life, including gender and sexuality, family and schools, and art and popular culture.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1622 - From Samurai to Superpower: Japan in World History II

This course explores the history of imperial China between the 3rd century b.c.e. and the 16th century c.e. with a focus on the following questions: How did imperial Chinese states go about politically unifying diverse peoples over vast spaces? How did imperial Chinese approaches to governance and to relations with the outer world compare with strategies employed by other historical empires? How did those approaches change over time? How did major socio-cultural formations — including literary canons; religious and familial lineages; marketing networks; and popular book and theatrical cultures — grow and take root, and what were the broader ramifications of those developments? How did such basic configurations of human difference as Chinese (civilized)-barbarian identity, high-low status, and male-female gender operate and change over time?

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1740 - Imperial China

On August 9-10, 1969, ex-convict, aspiring rock star, and charismatic leader Charles Manson ordered his so-called Family to brutally murder a few of LA's rich, white, "beautiful people" and leave clues implicating black radicals. The idea was to trigger an apocalyptic race war he called "Helter Skelter" (after a song by The Beatles). Today, these murders stand as the most infamous in twentieth-century U.S. criminal history and as synecdoche for the "end of the Sixties." They have also spawned a veritable Manson Industry in the popular realm: there are now Manson books, movies, TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, websites, music, comics, t-shirts, and even a tourist attraction (the Hollywood "Helter Skelter" tour). This course analyzes the history of the Manson murders as well as their incredible resonance in American culture over the past half century. Who was Charles Manson and who were the members of the Family? What was the Family's relation to the counterculture, to Hollywood, Vietnam, the Black Panther Party, and environmentalism? How might we fit the Manson murders into the long history of apocalyptic violence and terror? And what does it mean that the Manson murders have occupied our collective imagination for fifty years? To answer these and other questions, we will analyze a variety of sources including television and newspaper reports, trial transcripts, true crime writing, memoirs, interviews, novels, films and documentaries, podcasts and pop songs.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1850 - Thinking about History with the Manson Murders

By posing seemingly simple questions such as what is love and who has the right to love, this introductory-level lecture course surveys how love has been experienced and expressed from the pre-modern period to the present. Through case studies of familial and conjugal love in Africa, Asia, the US, Europe, and South and Latin America, the course will examine the debates about and enactment's of what constitutes the appropriate way to show love and affection in different cultures and historical contexts. Among the themes we will explore are questions of sexuality, marriage, kinship, and gender rights. A final unit will examine these themes through modern technologies such as the Internet, scientific advances in medicine, and a growing awareness that who and how we love is anything but simple or universal.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1930 - A Global History of Love

When did the 'Americas' come in to being? Who created 'them' and how? What other geographic units of analysis might we consider in thinking about what Iberian explorers and intellectuals initially called the 'fourth part' of the world? Given the scope and extent of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, could 'the Americas' extend from the Caribbean to the Philippines? This course takes up such questions as a means to explore the history of what would become-only in the nineteenth century-'Latin America.' We move from the initial "encounters" of peoples from Africa and Iberia with the "New World," the creation of long-distance trade with, and settlement in, Asia, and the establishment of colonial societies, through to the movements for independence in most of mainland Spanish America in the early 19th century and to the collapse of Spanish rule in the Pacific and Caribbean later that century. Through lectures, discussions and the reading of primary sources and secondary texts, the course examines the economic and social organization of the colonies, intellectual currents and colonial science, native accommodation and resistance to colonial rule, trade networks and imperial expansion, labor regimes and forms of economic production, and migration and movement.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 1950 - The Invention of the Americas

Waves of voluntary and forced migrants and their imposition on indigenous communities led to radically new societies in the Caribbean. Though popularized as tropical paradises, the Caribbean has one of the highest rates of emigration in the world. Revolutions, wars of independence and socio-economic and political marginalization has led to the formation of Caribbean diasporic communities in Central America, North America, Europe and Africa. These diasporic communities are also transnational spaces because emigrants retain important social, economic and political connections to their countries of origin. Drawing on specific case studies this course considers three interconnecting questions – What factors led to sustained emigration? Why did migrants' settle in specific countries? How have Caribbean diasporic communities reshaped their natal communities and their new homes?

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for HIST 1976 - Recreating the Caribbean: Migration and Identity in Contemporary Caribbean History

This course provides an overview of disastrous attempts at colonization in the Americas from ca. 1500 through ca. 1760. Over thirteen weeks, we will engage with the question of why some attempts at colonization failed and why some succeeded. We will also explore other early modern failures, from bankrupt monopoly trade companies to ill-fated buccaneer communities and entire cities destroyed by earthquakes and hurricanes. Exploring failures, rather than successes, will help students understand the contingent process of colonial expansion as well as the roles of Indigenous dispossession, African slavery, and inter-imperial trade networks to the success or failure of early modern colonies. Over the course of the semester, my lectures will cover broad themes in failed enterprises, while students will read several monographs and primary-source collections on specific disasters. Some central questions include: Why did some colonies fail and other thrived? What role did social factors like gender, race, and class play in colonial failures? What can we learn about colonialism and imperialism through a focus on when those processes ended in disasters?

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 1986 - Disasters! A History of Colonial Failures in the Atlantic World, 1450-1750

Independent Study based supervised reading with history faculty.  Student must complete Independent Study Form with faculty supervisor for determining requirements and for permission to enroll through the online system (https://data.arts.cornell.edu/as-stus/indep_study_intro.cfm).  Student then work with their faculty supervisor throughout the semester for successful completion and grading of the agreed upon requirements.

Full details for HIST 2001 - Supervised Reading - Undergraduate

Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University "the first American university," referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where "any person can find instruction in any study." The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university.

Full details for HIST 2005 - The First American University

This seminar will explore Asian American history through the methodology of oral history. Students will read Asian American historical scholarship that has relied on oral history methods, but they will also engage with theoretical and methodological work around the use of oral sources. Students will develop, research, and present oral history projects.  Themes include power and knowledge production, the role of oral history in documenting the Asian American past, and local and family histories as avenues through which to explore oral history methods.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2043 - Asian American Oral History

Founded by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, St. Petersburg was built expressly to advertise the triumph of enlightened absolutism at home and to display Russia's status as a major European power abroad. But for all of its neo-classical splendor, the image of imperial St. Petersburg has been consistently invoked as a critical touchstone for the expression of political discontent, social unease and spiritual anxiety. The most modern and "intentional" of Russian cities, Russia's northern capital has come to stand for everything that's wrong with modern life. In this seminar, we will approach St. Petersburg as a cultural text composed by an illustrious trio of Russian writers who saw the complicated history of their country through Peter's "window to the west" -- Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Andrei Bely.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2158 - St. Petersburg and the Making of Modern Russia

What is the American empire? Is empire even the right word to describe U.S. power in the world today or in the past? If so, is the American empire formal or informal, and is the United States a reluctant superpower or a belligerent hegemon? When did the empire begin? And is it in decline today? In addressing these questions, this seminar will offer an in-depth look at key moments in the history of the United States and its foreign relations, ranging from the American revolutionary war and historians' debates about the founders' thinking in relation to empire; the "imperial moment" of 1898, when the United States acquired overseas colonies for the first time; the beginnings of the national security state in 1917 with the entry of the United States into the First World War; the "American Century", or the post-World War II years when the United States was the most powerful nation in the world; and the era of unipolarity after the end of the Cold War and which culminated in the Wars on Terror. Throughout, we will draw upon primary and secondary sources to examine the ideas and practices which have shaped U.S. foreign relations, including continental expansion, the frontier, imperial anticolonialism, the open door, covert operations, extraordinary rendition, police action, and more. Taking both a chronological and thematic approach, this class offers an examination of the past in order to understand some of the key issues facing the United States, and the world, today.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2212 - The U.S. Empire

This course uses history and political theory to understand the fascist experience in the twentieth century. In the first part of the course, we will examine fascist ideology; its relation to democracy and dictatorship; whether fascism is best understood as another form of authoritarianism or as totalitarianism; the role of nationalism, race, religion, culture, gender, the family, and intellectuals in fascist regimes; and the institutional and economic foundations of fascist politics. The second half of the course covers the origins, development and defeat of fascist states in the mid-twentieth century. We will devote the most time to understanding what happened in Mussolini's Italy (1922-1945) and in Hitler's Germany (1933-1945), but will also examine fascist movements and regimes in Austria, Hungary, Romania, Spain and Portugal. We will finish the course by looking at the persistence of fascist movements and ideas beyond WWII and into the present, and ask how these are similar to historical fascism and in what ways they differ from that experience.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS) (HA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2285 - Fascism in the Twentieth Century: History and Theory

This seminar will introduce students to the expanding and dynamic historiography of the African diaspora. The most astute scholars of the African diaspora argue that diaspora is not to be conflated with migration for diaspora includes the cultural and intellectual work that constructs and reinforces linkages across time and space. Much of the early historiography of the African diaspora disproportionately focused on Anglophone theorists whose intellectual output engaged thinkers and communities in Anglophone West Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States. Recent interventions in the historiography of the African diaspora has significantly broadened its geographical conceptualization by including a larger segment of Western Europe, Latin America and Asia. In addition, scholars of Africa are increasingly exploring topics in the African diaspora. Using a range of archival and secondary sources, students will explore the material, cultural and intellectual factors that are remaking the historiography of the African diaspora.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2307 - Histories of the African Diaspora

In August 1945, Japan was a devastated country; its cities burned, its people starving, its military and government in surrender. World War II was over. The occupation had begun. What sort of society emerged from the cooperation and conflict between occupiers and occupied? Students will examine sources ranging from declassified government documents to excerpts from diaries and bawdy fiction, alongside major scholarly studies, to find out. The first half of the course focuses on key issues in Japanese history, like the fate of the emperor, constitutional revision, and the emancipation of women. The second half zooms out for a wider perspective, for the occupation of Japan was never merely a local event. It was the collapse of Japanese empire and the rise of American empire in Asia. It was decolonization in Korea and the start of the Cold War. Students will further investigate these links in final individual research projects. 

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2315 - The Occupation of Japan

At the end of the Great War, Europe has became the realm of a new relationship between violence, culture, and politics. From 1914 to 1945, the continent became the realm of an extraordinary entanglement of wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions, civil wars, and genocides, which could be summarized by the concept of "European Civil War". This course will analyze some features of this cataclysmic time by engaging political theory, cultural and intellectual history, and by scrutinizing novels, films, and intellectual productions.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2333 - The Culture of Violence: Europe 1914-1945

Corruption in politics and economics has become a significant issue in the modern world. This course introduces students to the study of corruption and collusion from the perspective of early America and the Caribbean from 1500 through 1800. By examining the historical evolution of corruption, the course addresses questions such as: What is corruption and, by contrast, what is good governance? Who creates law and when is it enforced? Can societies be corrupt or only institutions? And, does economic corruption help or hurt financial development? Our readings and discussion will examine the intersection of politics, culture, gender, and economics. We will reflect on how early Americans understood corruption and collusion and what that can tell us about similar modern issues. In the end, the course focuses on the concept of corruption as a complex social function through the lens of bribery, piracy, sex crimes, and other forms of social deviancy.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2381 - Corruption, Collusion, and Commerce in Early America and the Caribbean

The international boundary between Canada and the United is the longest, straightest border in the world. Although frequently cast as "boring" in juxtaposition to its southern counterpart, this viewpoint overlooks the U.S.-Canada border's longstanding history as a site and engine of trans-national tensions and controversies. This course addresses the complex histories of the 3,500 mile boundary separating the United States from Canada from its eighteenth century colonial antecedents to contemporary challenges related to drug smuggling, border fence construction, pandemic-related travel restrictions, immigration, commerce, environmental issues, Indigenous peoples' rights, and national identity construction. The instructor, a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, brings not only life experience of border-crossing, but also a recent background in legal testimony on border-related issues.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2392 - Where Fire Meets Ice: Histories of the U.S.-Canada Border Across Four Centuries

Maoism and Chinese Communism are not history after Mao's death in 1976. In China, Maoism holds the key to the enduring success of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one of the most remarkable organizations of the 20th and 21st centuries that has survived the collapse of communism in Europe and the USSR. With the beneficial transformation brought by capitalism and globalization in China, the end of the Cold War and the narrative of the "end of history" cannot explain the resurgence of Maoism.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2435 - Global Maoism: History and Present

This course will examine southern African definitions of freedom and methods and tactics used in the fight for freedom. It will investigate how different thinkers defined political and personal freedom and how they pursued it, paying careful attention to changing definitions and practices over time, and to the specificity of the southern African region, long a site of global and regional exchange. The course will consider major figures like Nelson Mandela but will also explore lesser-known histories of women's freedom struggles and grassroots and community movements to define a free society. It will emphasize the plurality and diversity of southern African theorizations of freedom. The course will engage with historiographical debates in the field of 'liberation histories', and will use diverse primary source materials, including trial documents, memoirs, political speeches and tracts, and novels.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2515 - Freedom Struggles in Southern Africa

For millennia, Buddhist monks, merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, and adventurers have moved around the Indian Ocean arena circulating Buddhist teachings and powerful objects. In doing so they helped create Buddhist communities in the places we now refer to as southern China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. The course explores these circulatory histories by focusing on case studies in each of four historical periods: premodern (esp. early second millennium A.D.); the era of 19th-century colonial projects; mid-20th-century nation-state formation in South and Southeast Asia; and contemporary (early 21st century) times. Drawing together materials from Indian Ocean studies, Buddhist studies, and critical studies of colonialism, modernity, and nation-state formation, this course attends to the ways in which changing trans-regional conditions shape local Buddhisms, how Buddhist collectives around the Indian Ocean arena shape one another, and how trade, religion, and politics interact.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2548 - Buddhists in Indian Ocean World: Past & Present

This course focuses on the human condition of Chinese women after 1949. In the name of the Women's liberation movement since the early 1900s, do Chinese women eventually hold up the half sky? From the cradle to the grave, what was most challenging in women's life? How did political, economic, and cultural forces frame women's professional careers and private life? No judgments nor imaginations. Using multi-media, such as Chinese independent documentary films, music, and photographs, students will discover the hidden stories behind the mainstream narratives. Workshops with film directors, pop music singers, and photographers offer students an unusual way of accessing all backstage field experiences.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2575 - Tyranny and Dignity: Chinese Women from the Cultural Revolution to the White Paper Revolution

This lecture course serves as an introduction to the historical study of humanity's interrelationship with the natural world. Environmental history is a quickly evolving field, taking on increasing importance as the environment itself becomes increasingly important in world affairs. During this semester, we'll examine the sometimes unexpected ways in which "natural" forces have shaped human history (the role of germs, for instance, in the colonization of North America); the ways in which human beings have shaped the natural world (through agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization, as well as the formation of things like wildlife preserves); and the ways in which cultural, scientific, political, and philosophical attitudes toward the environment have changed over time. This is designed as an intensely interdisciplinary course: we'll view history through the lenses of ecology, literature, art, film, law, anthropology, and geography. Our focus will be on the United States, but, just as environmental pollutants cross borders, so too will this class, especially toward the end, when we attempt to put U.S. environmental history into a geopolitical context. This course is meant to be open to all, including non-majors and first-year students.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2581 - Environmental History

This course focuses on the ideas and practices of Crusading, from its birth ca. 1100 to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1292. We explore the roots of Crusading in Christian Europe and in the Islamic Near East; the conquest, settlement, and loss of the Latin Levant; and the impacts and afterlives of Crusading. Central themes include the institutional, intellectual, and political histories of Christianity (Latin, Byzantine, and other) and Islam; military, social, and economic narratives of the period; and social, cultural, and environmental analysis, using both material and textual sources.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2590 - The Crusades

This course is a counter-history of modern humanitarianism, humanitarian law, and human rights, with perspectives from the Near East. Humanitarianism aspires to fulfill the promise of human rights. It envisions a world based on peace among nations, individual liberties, and the sanctity of life – and of markets. To that end, what means are justified? During this semester, we will critically analyze the ideology of human rights, examine the practices of humanitarian rescue, and question the necessity of humanitarian violence. We will scrutinise the ideological and material entanglements of humanitarianism with the forces of empire, nations, and markets, and how humanitarianism shaped the peoples and borders of the modern Near East. We will discuss how the demands for solidarity, equality, and justice challenge and subvert the work of humanitarianism. In doing so, we will consider how the atrocities of the past and the pursuit of justice haunt our turbulent present.

Full details for HIST 2637 - Humanitarianism: A Counter-History

Why is it that the age of emancipation which saw most of the world's Jews gain citizenship status and achieve unprecedented levels of socio-economic modernization, also witnessed a catastrophic assault on Jewish life? How do we explain the conjunction between the spread of liberal values and the exponential rise of anti-semitism? Most historians refer to the virulence of racism in accounting for the scale and brutality of anti-Jewish rhetoric which prepared the way for the destruction of European Jewry in the twentieth century. But this explanation fails to account for the fact that progressive democratic discourse which explicitly endorses ethnic diversity and emphatically repudiates racial prejudice remains susceptible to anti-Jewish animus even now. In this class, we will examine the complex relationship between emancipation and anti-semitism from the perspective of those who benefited from the former but had to contend with the reality of the latter – Europe's rising class of Jewish intellectuals. We will discover that their insights into the problem of modern Jew-hatred were both acute and prescient and have much to teach us about the current Jewish predicament.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for HIST 2656 - Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism in Historical Perspective

One thing many Americans think they know is their Indians: Pocahontas, the First Thanksgiving, fighting cowboys, reservation poverty, and casino riches. Under our very noses, however, Native American history has evolved into one of the most exciting, dynamic, and contentious fields of inquiry into America's past. It is now safer to assume, as Comanche historian Paul Chaat Smith has pointed out, that everything you know about Indians is in fact wrong. Most people have much to "unlearn" about Native American history before true learning can take place. This course aims to achieve that end by (re)introducing students to key themes and trends in the history of North America's indigenous nations. Employing an issues-oriented approach, the course stresses the ongoing complexity of Native American societies' engagements with varieties of settler colonialism since 1492 and dedicates itself to a concerted program of myth-busting. As such, the course will provide numerous opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking and reading skills.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for HIST 2660 - Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong: Unlearning Native American History

Following the conquests of Alexander, the ancient civilization of Egypt came under Greek rule. This period is best known for its famous queen Cleopatra, the last independent ruler of ancient Egypt. But even before Cleopatra's life and death, the Egypt that she governed was a fascinating place – and a rich case study in cultural interactions under ancient imperialism. This course explores life in Egypt under Greek rule, during the three centuries known as the Ptolemaic period (named after Cleopatra's family, the Ptolemaic dynasty). We will examine the history and culture of Ptolemaic Egypt, an empire at the crossroads of Africa, the Near East, and the Mediterranean. We will explore the experiences of Egyptians, Greeks, and others living in this multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-linguistic society. Finally, we will investigate the ways that Ptolemaic Egypt can shed light on modern experiences of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2688 - Cleopatra's Egypt: Tradition and Transformation

This course offers an introduction to the history of the Roman empire, from the prehistoric settlements on the site of Rome to the fall of the Western empire in the fifth century and its revival in the East with Byzantium. Lectures will provide a narrative and interpretations of major issues, including: empire building, cultural unity and diversity, religious transformations, changing relations between state and society. Discussion section will be the opportunity to engage with important texts, ancient and modern, about Rome.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2689 - Roman History

This course examines the history of Chile from the 1700s to the present, always with an appreciation for its place in a broader world but always also with attention to its regional and national specificities and its links to the Pacific. Lectures will be paired with readings from various genres: fiction, poetry, journalism, manifestos, speeches, historical monographs, and short stories.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2715 - A Global South: Chile, the Pacific and the World

This course considers how a small northern European kingdom acquired and then governed a vast global empire. Beginning with the navigators, pirates and settlers of the Elizabethan era, and ending with the process of decolonization after World War Two, we will explore the diverse character and effects of British imperialism in the Americas, in Asia, in Africa, and the Pacific, and consider the legacies of the British empire in the contemporary world. 

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2760 - The British Empire

In this course, we will learn about the history of the West. We will deconstruct popular myths about the West, as we engage with the major themes and significant debates that define the historical scholarship. This course will begin with Native origin stories and end with the 20th century. As a class, we will study the west from a multitude of perspectives, such as race, gender, and ethnicity, the environment, labor, politics and culture. This course is designed to increase our knowledge of the social, political and intellectual developments that have shaped our understanding of the West.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 2765 - The North American West

What is war? How has it changed over time? How and why do states engage in war and what social, economic and political factors determine when and what kind of war breaks out? Who fights wars and why? This class answers these questions by tracing the evolution of modern warfare from the beginnings of nationalism and state-formation in 16th century Europe to the present day. Focusing on questions of total war, revolution, insurgency and counterinsurgency, colonial war and wars of resistance, grand strategy and political economy, students will learn about conventional and irregular war across a span of almost four hundred years, from Europe and the Americas to China and Japan, the Middle East, and North and Central Africa.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS)

Full details for HIST 2905 - Global History of War from the 16th Century to the Present

In the course we will study the history of the lands, peoples, and states of Eastern Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries as an integral part of modern Europlean and global history. We will ask what the East European experience can teach us about larger questions of cause and effect, agency in history, continuties and ruptures, the interplay between institutions, states and individuals, and the relationship between culture and politics. The course will define the region broadly, to include the lands stretching from today's Ukraine to Poland and the Balkans. But given the constant flux in borders, demographics, and sovereignities of this region, we will have to continually reconsider what and where Eastern Europe was. We will survey key periods in the region's history, looking closely at cases from across Eastern Europe. We will learn about institutions, large-scale processes, personalities, events, cultural artifacts, and ideas using a combination of narrative history and literary essays, primary documents, works of fiction, and films.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 2958 - Empires and Vampires: History of Eastern Europe

Independent Study based supervised research with a history faculty member.  Student must complete an on-line Independent Study form with a faculty supervisor to determine requirements and for permission.  Students then work with their faculty supervisor throughout the semester for successful completion and grading of the agreed upon requirements.

Full details for HIST 3002 - Supervised Research - Undergraduate

This course examines the long, complicated history of Korea's relationship with China, focusing on the period from the fourteenth century to the present. Rather than having a nation-bound interpretation of history, the course explores how Korea's national identity–from the Chosŏn dynasty, through the colonial period, to the contemporary era of the two Koreas–has been shaped and negotiated in close relation to its interactions with China. By addressing various issues in Korean history that reflect Korea's strong ties and conflicts with China, the course not only offers a comprehensive understanding of Korean history from a broader comparative perspective but also contributes to the transnational history of East Asia.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 3021 - History of Korea-China Relations

This course explores the waves of rebellion, and reaction, that swept the globe in the 1960s. From Dakar to Havana, from Beijing to Paris, we will examine the events, social movements, actors, places and legacies of the 1960s. Each week will focus on a specific case study and a specific theme: we will be looking at the role of film in liberation, changing ideas of sex and the body, the role of drugs in global revolutionary movements, and what being a student meant in the 1960s. In many ways the 1960s set the tone for today's political and social debates. Over the next few months, we will try to understand how. This should help us get a better grasp of what has been happening on our campus and across the world this past year.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 3345 - Global 1960s: Revolution from the College Campus to the Battle Grounds

A survey of the turning point of US. history: The Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath, Reconstruction (1865-1877). We will look at the causes, the coming, and the conduct, of the war, and the way in which it became a war for freedom. We will then follow the cause of freedom through the greatest slave rebellion in American history, and the attempts by formerly enslaved people to make freedom real in Reconstruction. And we will see how Reconstruction's tragic ending left questions open that are still not answered in U.S. society and politics.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 3430 - History of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction

Sufism, popularly understood as Islamic mysticism, is a loose name given to a broad and diverse collection of beliefs, practices and groups that range and vary across time and space. Going from a small and largely secretive group of mystical practitioners to a mainstream form of piety in the late medieval period, Sufism has a fascinating history, filled with intrigue, controversy, conflict and interesting characters. In this course, students will delve deep into the history of Sufism and read widely from across the Sufi and anti-Sufi traditions. Concentration will be given to practical questions of how Sufis saw themselves and their relationship to God and the world, how they built mystic community, spurned or embraced family life, interacted with mainstream society, and engaged in controversial erotic practices. Across the course, we will read Sufi histories and biographies, poetry, introductory treatises, as well as anti-Sufi polemics and stories.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 3448 - Islamic Mysticism: Life, Love, and History

In the conditions of strict censorship and numerous limitations on various forms of political organization and activism, literature and cinema, especially Iran's internationally acclaimed art cinematography, have been the major outlets through which the social and political concerns of the Iranian society have been voiced throughout the modern period. The course explores major themes and periods in Iran's transition from the secular state of the Pahlavi dynasty to the religious state of the Islamic Republic in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will focus on social as well as political themes including the Anglo-Russo-American Occupation of Iran, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, U.S.-Iranian relations, Iraq-Iran War, the Green Movement and the crisis of Islamic government, Images of the West in Iran, Modern Youth Culture, Gender segregation, and the struggle between modernity and traditionalism in contemporary Iran. We will watch selected Iranian documentary and feature films and draw on modern Persian literature but will approach them not as art forms but as reflections of major socio-economic, political, and religious phenomena in Iran's modern history. We will read and watch what the Iranians wrote and produced, read and watched, in order to view and explain Iran and its relations with the West through the Iranian eyes. We will examine how the Iranians perceived themselves and the others, how they viewed their own governments and the West, what issues inspired and shaped their outlook outside the official censorship during the period in question. All readings are in English translation and the films are with English subtitles. The course includes lectures deconstructing political, religious, and social evolution of modern Iran as well as regular class discussions where we will address the issues in question from a variety of perspectives.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 3519 - History of State and Society in Modern Iran: Through Literature and Film

This course provides a critical historical interrogation of what Black Marxism author Cedric Robinson called "the Black Radical Tradition." It will introduce students to some of the major currents in the history of black radical thought, action, and organizing, with an emphasis on the United States after World War I. It relies on social, political, and intellectual history to examine the efforts of black people who have sought not merely social reform, but a fundamental restructuring of political, economic, and social relations. We will define and evaluate radicalism in the shifting contexts of liberation struggles. We will explore dissenting visions of social organization and alternative definitions of citizenship, progress, and freedom. We will confront the meaning of the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality in social movements.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 3590 - The Black Radical Tradition in the U.S.

This course examines the history of culture in North America from the pre-contact era to present. We will examine how Native, African, European, Asian, and Latino/a influences, along with colonization, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and consumerization, reshaped the development of American culture, including its architecture, literature, music, visual art, and practices of religion, leisure, and consumption. We will also gain a basic familiarity with the theory and methods of cultural history. Intended for upper-division undergraduate students, the course provides practice in the analysis of historical sources, historiography, and written and oral expression.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 3602 - Cultural History of North America

This course examines war and revolution as drivers of migration from Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean to the United States and Canada. From the War of 1898 to the wars in Central America, war and revolution have displaced millions of people, prompting internal and cross-border migration. This history underscores how migration is multicausal—that is, produced by a wide and complex range of intersecting drivers. War and revolution disrupt livelihoods, produce scarcity, and create the insecurity that makes it impossible to exercise a basic human right to stay home. The course also examines how Latinos have become actors in U.S. wars and interventions in their countries of ancestry.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 3801 - War and Revolution in 20th Century Latino History

We will consider two basic questions: did the ancient Greeks and Romans have a concept of race or racial identity? If not, what were the dominant collective identities they used to classify themselves and others? We will explore the causes and conditions that gave rise to collective identities that can be described as ethnic and (in some cases) possibly as 'racial' and how these identities worked in their given cultural and political contexts. We will start with Greek identity in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, then moving to Macedonian identity and the conquests of Alexander the Great, and finally, to the Roman world, where we will explore the question of race and ethnicity within the context of inclusive citizenship. In each of these cultural contexts, we will briefly focus on slavery, examining whether slave identity was at all racialized.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 3802 - Race and Ethnicity in the Ancient World

Across twentieth-century history, race and war have been dynamic forces in shaping economic organization and everyday livelihoods. This course will approach labor and working-class history, through a focus on global war as well as 'wars at home.' Racial and warfare events often intersect—in the histories of presidents and activists, business leaders and industrial workers, CIA agents and police, soldiers and prisoners, American laborers abroad and non-Americans migrating stateside. In this course, we'll consider how race and war have been linked—from the rise of Jim Crow and U.S. empire in the 1890s, to the WWII 'Greatest Generation' and its diverse workplaces, to Vietnam and the civil rights movement, to the Iraq wars and immigrant workers, to debates about what has been called a 'military-industrial complex' and a 'prison-industrial complex'.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 3884 - Race and War in History: Workers, Soldiers, Prisoners, Activists

Surveys the modern history of Southeast Asia with special attention to colonialism, the Chinese diaspora, and socio-cultural institutions.  Considers global transformations that brought "the West" into people's lives in Southeast Asia.  Focuses on the development of the modern nation-state, but also questions the narrative by incorporating groups that are typically excluded.  Assigns primary texts in translation. 

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 3960 - Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century

This seminar is an introduction to the theory, practice, and art of historical research and writing. One key purpose of this course is to prepare students to work on longer research projects—especially an Honors Thesis. We will analyze the relationship between evidence and argument in historical writing; assess the methods and possible biases in various examples of historical writing; identify debates and sources relevant to research problems; think about how to use sources creatively; and discuss the various methodological issues associated with historical inquiry, analysis, and presentation.  This course is required for all students wishing to write an Honors Thesis in their senior year.  It should be taken in either semester of the junior year, or in spring of the sophomore year if you are planning to be abroad in your junior year.  NOTE: you do NOT need to be enrolled in the Honors Program in order to sign up for this course.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 4000 - Introduction to Historical Research

This course is designed to facilitate student's successful completion of their History Department Honors theses through regular deadlines and small group writing workshops.

Full details for HIST 4002 - Honors Research

Since Columbus's arrival to the Americas, a number of commodities have bound together Europe, Africa, and the Americas, drastically changing the lives of many people on both sides of the Atlantic. Covering nearly five hundred years of history, this seminar invites students to explore the history of the Atlantic World through the "lives" of commodities such as gold, silver, sugar, cacao, tobacco, cotton, cochineal, indigo, bananas, and more. Tracing commodities from their production site to the moment of consumption, students will be able to understand the possibilities that the commodity-chain approach offers to historical research. As part of this seminar students will write a research paper (using primary sources) that will explain the commodity chain of a specific commodity.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 4041 - Atlantic Commodities

This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other "undesirable" areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to "Black" heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for HIST 4112 - The Historical Geography of Black America

The premise of this senior seminar in European cultural-intellectual history is that we can learn some of the most crucial aspects of the historian's craft through just one book: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Benjamin is normally seen as a philosopher, cultural critic, literary critic, art historian, media theorist, essayist, and translator, but he was one of the most original and influential historical thinkers of the modern era, and the Arcades Project is one of the key texts of 20th-century European intellectual history. Studying this book will teach you modern European history (esp. late 18th – early 20th c.), but also how to read, research, and write history more creatively. The structure of the seminar is straightforward: we will make our way through the Arcades Project's "convolutes," which means we will cover topics such as architecture, photography, fashion, poetry, prostitution, capitalism, communism, conspiracy, revolution, Marx, Nietzsche, modernity, and more, like boredom for example, or theories of progress and knowledge. Your research projects will take shape as you learn to recognize and make connections between the great variety of ideas and sources united in this magisterial and magical text.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 4277 - Modern European Cultural-Intellectual History through Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

This course explores the method of oral history in theory and practice, across different topics, contexts, and geographic/national terrains. It will consider questions like: what sorts of insights do oral histories enable? How can oral history as a method supplement, destabilize, and enrich existing historical accounts? What are the challenges and risks of oral histories, and how can historians mitigate those risks? What theoretical assumptions underlie oral historical work? Are certain topics more appropriate than others to oral historical investigations, and if so, why? We will explore these questions through reading a wide range of texts, hearing from oral historians about their work, and workshopping methods in class, as well as through independent research.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 4422 - Oral History: Theory, Practice, and Method

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other "minority" experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for HIST 4520 - Jewish Cities

Full details for HIST 4556 - Gender, Race, and Law in Global Political Economy

A wave of revolutions swept through Europe and the Caribbean, beginning with the French Revolution (1789-1815) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), and eventually upending traditional laws and societies on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first part of the semester, we will read and discuss books related to these revolutions, and in the second part, students will undertake original research in preparation for writing a substantial research paper related to the theme of the class: either an in-depth study of one revolution or a comparative exploration of revolutionary movements.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 4629 - The Age of Revolution in Europe and the Caribbean: 1789 to 1815

'Violence' has become an unavoidable - and urgently troubling - buzzword in contemporary Western culture. We worry about its manifestations and representations in our own civilization, we scan foreign societies with which we interact for any sign of it, we fantasize about consummating it or construct our utopias around its absence. This course is intended as an opportunity for students working on a variety of topics, periods and areas in premodern Europe to investigate its relevance to their own studies. Through an examination of readings on violence in particular historical contexts, from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, we will seek to elicit reflection on what is meant by the concept, to prompt consideration of distinctions among forms of violence, and to sample a variety of analytical approaches and tools.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for HIST 4910 - Approaches to Medieval Violence

Theories of modernization have inspired, informed, and plagued histories of middle and late imperial China. For the Song-Qing eras (roughly 10th-19th centuries), comparative studies have variously found and sought to explain modernization emerging earlier than in Europe, an absence of modernization, or alternative paths of modernization.  Regional models have argued for pan-East Asian systems and patterns of modernization. Global models have argued that China had a vital role in European development as a provenance of modernizing institutions and ideas, as a source of exploited resources, or otherwise as an integral part of global systems. In this course we explore these historiographical debates and develop critical perspectives, including approaches to escaping Eurocentric and teleological frameworks.

Full details for HIST 4963 - China's Early Modern

This seminar is devoted entirely to the writing of a substantive research paper, the dissertation prospectus, or fellowship proposal. Students will share research proposals, annotated bibliographies, outlines and portions of rough drafts. Class meetings will be devoted to discussing what students have produced, and general issues associated with constructing the dissertation prospectus and research papers.

Full details for HIST 6000 - Graduate Research Seminar

This workshop-style course provides a weekly opportunity for graduate students across all the fields of History and related disciplines to learn about different skills and competencies to succeed in graduate school. Some weeks, we will focus on how to do research in archives, taking notes and organizing sources, grant-writing, preparing an article for a journal, applying for jobs, writing a cover letter, compiling a CV and writing an annual report. Students will also have opportunities to practice giving conference presentations, job talks, and participating in video interviews.  The aim is to create a secure space where graduate students learn how to succeed in graduate school.

Full details for HIST 6002 - Professional Development Seminar

This course is a forum, organized jointly by students and the Director of Graduate Studies, for the reading and discussion of precirculated papers, written mainly by graduate students in the History program. Students registering are expected to attend regularly.

Full details for HIST 6006 - History Colloquium Series

A research colloquium designed for European history graduate students. The colloquium will offer a forum for students to present papers and to discuss the work of Europeanists at Cornell as well as visiting scholars.

Full details for HIST 6010 - European History Colloquium

Since Columbus's arrival to the Americas, a number of commodities have bound together Europe, Africa, and the Americas, drastically changing the lives of many people on both sides of the Atlantic. Covering nearly five hundred years of history, this seminar invites students to explore the history of the Atlantic World through the "lives" of commodities such as gold, silver, sugar, cacao, tobacco, cotton, cochineal, indigo, bananas, and more. Tracing commodities from their production site to the moment of consumption, students will be able to understand the possibilities that the commodity-chain approach offers to historical research. As part of this seminar students will write a research paper (using primary sources) that will explain the commodity chain of a specific commodity.

Full details for HIST 6041 - Atlantic Commodities

This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other "undesirable" areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to "Black" heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.

Full details for HIST 6112 - The Historical Geography of Black America

This course calls into question the public use of history. The past is permanently mobilized according to the culture and the problems of the present. Over the last decades, "memory" - a general concept used as a synonym for remembering, history, imagination, or representations of the past - arose at the heart of the public sphere, becoming an object of struggles.  In some historical circumstances, the past is suddenly "reactivated" and irrupts in the present by claiming its "rights," the end of oblivion, and rescue of the vanquished.  Considering some well-known controversies about slavery, colonialism, fascism, communism, civil wars, the Holocaust, etc., the course aims at exploring how collective memories are interwoven with cultural industry, public policies (museums, commemorations, laws, etc.), and history writing.

Full details for HIST 6225 - The Politics of Memory: Uses of the Past

Sufism, popularly understood as Islamic mysticism, is a loose name given to a broad and diverse collection of beliefs, practices and groups that range and vary across time and space. Going from a small and largely secretive group of mystical practitioners to a mainstream form of piety in the late medieval period, Sufism has a fascinating history, filled with intrigue, controversy, conflict and interesting characters. In this course, students will delve deep into the history of Sufism and read widely from across the Sufi and anti-Sufi traditions. Concentration will be given to practical questions of how Sufis saw themselves and their relationship to God and the world, how they built mystic community, spurned or embraced family life, interacted with mainstream society, and engaged in controversial erotic practices. Across the course, we will read Sufi histories and biographies, poetry, introductory treatises, as well as anti-Sufi polemics and stories.

Full details for HIST 6448 - Islamic Mysticism: Life, Love, and History

This graduate-level seminar will introduce students to the latest historical methodologies and debates in the legal history of modern imperialism and colonialism. Readings will focus mainly on the legal history of the modern British empire, and will include studies of legal pluralism in empire, law in slave societies, imperialism and international law, colonial penal regimes, and legal theory in empire.

Full details for HIST 6509 - Law and Empire: New Approaches to Legal History

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other "minority" experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.

Full details for HIST 6520 - Jewish Cities

Full details for HIST 6554 - Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on Work Law: Race, Gender, and Capital

Full details for HIST 6556 - Gender, Race, and Law in Global Political Economy

America is finishing up two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. They have been the longest wars in American history and have ended amid much ambivalence about the US engagement in each place and the results. They are part of a series of wars that America has fought as a global power, with a global reach, sending its forces thousands of miles from home. That global reach is not new, and goes back all the way to 1898 and the Spanish-American War. This course will look at the American military experience from our first tentative steps onto the global stage in 1898, to the earth-spanning conflicts of World War I and II, to the nuclear tension of Cold War conflicts, and finish with the current Long War against terrorism, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Full details for HIST 6571 - American Defense Policy and Military History from the Two World Wars to the Global War on Terror

A wave of revolutions swept through Europe and the Caribbean, beginning with the French Revolution (1789-1815) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), and eventually upending traditional laws and societies on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first part of the semester, we will read and discuss books related to these revolutions, and in the second part, students will undertake original research in preparation for writing a substantial research paper related to the theme of the class: either an in-depth study of one revolution or a comparative exploration of revolutionary movements.

Full details for HIST 6629 - The Age of Revolution in Europe and the Caribbean: 1789 to 1815

Full details for HIST 6715 - A Global South: Chile, the Pacific and the World

'Violence' has become an unavoidable - and urgently troubling - buzzword in contemporary Western culture. We worry about its manifestations and representations in our own civilization, we scan foreign societies with which we interact for any sign of it, we fantasize about consummating it or construct our utopias around its absence. This course is intended as an opportunity for students working on a variety of topics, periods and areas in premodern Europe to investigate its relevance to their own studies. Through an examination of readings on violence in particular historical contexts, from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, we will seek to elicit reflection on what is meant by the concept, to prompt consideration of distinctions among forms of violence, and to sample a variety of analytical approaches and tools.

Full details for HIST 6920 - Approaches to Medieval Violence

Surveys the modern history of Southeast Asia with special attentions to colonialism, the Chinese diaspora, and socio-cultural institutions. Considers global transformations that brought "the West" into people's lives in Southeast Asia. Focuses on the development of the modern nation-state, but also questions the narrative by incorporating groups that are typically excluded. Assigns primary texts in translation.

Full details for HIST 6960 - Transnational Local: Southeast Asian History from the Eighteenth Century

Theories of modernization have inspired, informed, and plagued histories of middle and late imperial China. For the Song-Qing eras (roughly 10th-19th centuries), comparative studies have variously found and sought to explain modernization emerging earlier than in Europe, an absence of modernization, or alternative paths of modernization.  Regional models have argued for pan-East Asian systems and patterns of modernization. Global models have argued that China had a vital role in European development as a provenance of modernizing institutions and ideas, as a source of exploited resources, or otherwise as an integral part of global systems. In this course we explore these historiographical debates and develop critical perspectives, including approaches to escaping Eurocentric and teleological frameworks.

Full details for HIST 6963 - China's Early Modern

The Proseminar in Peace Studies offers a multidisciplinary review of issues related to peace and conflict at the graduate level. The course is led by the director of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and is based on the Institute's weekly seminar series, featuring outside visitors and Cornell faculty. 

Full details for HIST 7937 - Proseminar in Peace Studies

Independent Study based supervised reading with a history faculty/field member.

Full details for HIST 8004 - Supervised Reading

Independent Study based supervised reading with a history faculty/field member.

Full details for HIST 8010 - Independent Study-PIRIP