* HIST 0106a / HSHM 0005a, Medicine and Society in American History  Rebecca Tannenbaum

Disease and healing in American history from colonial times to the present. The changing role of the physician, alternative healers and therapies, and the social impact of epidemics from smallpox to AIDS. Enrollment limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
TTh 1:05pm-2:20pm

* HIST 0117a, American Indians in Higher Education: Introduction to the Indigenous History of American Education  Ned Blackhawk

Education remains an essential element in Native American history, a complex arena full of conflict, resistance, adaptation, and social change. Charting the centuries-long relationships between Native Americans and Euro-American institutions of higher education, this seminar seeks to expose students to the educational history of Native North America. Through in-class assignments, discussion, and sets of experiential campus and off-campus tours, this class both introduces the educational history of Native North America and links it with the broader political history of federal Indian law and policy.  Enrollment limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 0430b / EAST 0320b, Tokyo  Daniel Botsman

Four centuries of Japan's history explored through the many incarnations, destructions, and rebirths of its foremost city. Focus on the solutions found by Tokyo's residents to the material and social challenges of concentrating such a large population in one place. Tensions between continuity and impermanence, authenticity and modernity, and social order and the culture of play. Enrollment limited to first-year students.   WR, HU
TTh 1:05pm-2:20pm

* HIST 0567a, A Pan-Amazonian History of a Rainforest  Manoel Rendeiro Neto

This course examines the contested history of the largest rainforest on the planet and one of the world’s most complex fluvial ecosystems: Amazonia, in equatorial South America, from its pre-human history to the present day struggles over Indigenous autonomy, land reclamation by Afro-Indigenous and Maroon communities, extractivist industries of oil and mining, and environmentalism debates. The course includes readings and discussions on the region’s ecological origins; the social history of its diverse Indigenous populations, immigrant groups, and African-descended populations; exploration myths and European colonial projects; and more recent efforts to exploit and protect Amazonia’s extraordinary natural and human resources. The course uses tools and resources from archaeology, anthropology, biology, and social and cultural history, and also examines popular representations of the Amazon through novels, newspapers, and film. Enrollment limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
MW 4pm-5:15pm

* HIST 0623a / HUMS 0360a / JDST 0035a / RLST 0035a, Jerusalem: Judaism, Christianity, Islam  Sarit Kattan Gribetz

The Old City of Jerusalem is just 0.35 square miles large, about half the size of Yale’s campus. Have you ever wondered what makes this tiny city so beloved to—and the object of continual strife for—Jews, Christians, and Muslims? Through engagement with a wide range of sources—including biblical lamentations, archeological excavations, qur’anic passages, exegetical materials, medieval pilgrim itineraries, legal documents, maps, poetry, art, architecture, and international political resolutions—students develop the historiographical tools and theoretical frameworks to study the history of one of the world’s most enduringly important and bitterly contested cities.  Students encounter persistent themes central to the identity of Jerusalem: geography and topography; exile, diaspora, and return; destruction and trauma; religious violence and war; practices of pilgrimage; social diversity; missionizing; the rise of nationalism; peace efforts; the ethics of storytelling; and the stakes of studying the past. Enrollment limited to first-year students.   HU  RP
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

* HIST 0701a, Empire of Coffee  Zeinab Azarbadegan

It is estimated that 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed daily worldwide, making it one of the most popular beverages, second only to water.  How did coffee conquer the world in a span of a few centuries? In this course, we study coffee’s origins from Ethiopia and Yemen to its spread across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Americas, and Africa from the sixteenth to the twenty first centuries. We consider the intertwined history of coffee with religious practices, imperial expansions, renaissance, exchange houses, industrialization, colonialism, slavery, revolutions, civil wars, decolonization, genocides and much more! We examine politics and economics of coffee production, processing, and consumption by considering the spaces within which these activities happen. From farms to plantations, ports to factories, and coffee houses to coffee shops, we study the significance of coffee in the lives of billions of people throughout the world and history. The final project for this course is a podcast, where you get to research and present your study of one country’s history of coffee. Enrollment limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* HIST 0722a, What History Teaches  John Gaddis

An introduction to the discipline of history. History viewed as an art, a science, and something in between; differences between fact, interpretation, and consensus; history as a predictor of future events. Focus on issues such as the interdependence of variables, causation and verification, the role of individuals, and to what extent historical inquiry can or should be a moral enterprise.  Enrollment limited to first-year students.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 0724a / CLCV 0531a, The Age of Cleopatra  Joseph Manning

This course introduces students to historical method using a pivotal and fascinating period in Mediterranean history. This course goes far beyond the typical framework, mainly from Roman sources, to examine Egypt in the age of Cleopatra, 50-30 BCE and the much wider world. We examine the reception of Cleopatra through the lens of women's history.  Enrollment is limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* HIST 0737a / SAST 0210a, History of Indian Ocean Crossings  Nurfadzilah Yahaya

This seminar explores the history of the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea region to South Asia, and onward to Southeast Asia through two creative works by Amitav Ghosh. The first work is In an Antique Land, an autobiographical account of his time in Egypt as an anthropologist in the late twentieth century that he interspersed with that of the history of a Jewish merchant in Aden and Malabar in the twelfth century when Indian Ocean trade formed the backbone of international economy. The second book, Sea of Poppies is the first novel in his epic trilogy on the Indian Ocean, which traces the journey of a diverse group people from the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia and China during the nineteenth century. This seminar breaks out of conventional regional fields by closely following historical actors on the ground. Each session explores several core themes for historical research namely commerce, mobility, labor, climate, cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and modernization. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
TTh 1:05pm-2:20pm

* HIST 0772b, The History of World History  Valerie Hansen

How the great historians of ancient Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic world, and nineteenth-century Europe created modern historical method. How to evaluate the reliability of sources, both primary and secondary, and assess the relationship between fact and interpretation. Using historical method to make sense of our world today. Strategies for improving reading, writing, and public speaking skills. Enrollment limited to first-year students.   WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* HIST 0798a or b, Little Ice Ages: Climate Crises and Human History  Fabian Drixler

Anthropogenic global warming is one of the defining crises of our time. Before the 20th century, it was cooling and drought that posed the greatest challenges to human flourishing. Temperatures could drop for centuries, such as in the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300-1850). Volcanic winters typically lasted only a year or two but rattled the ecological foundations of many societies. Through a focus on such periods of climatic disruption, this seminar serves as an introduction to the broader study of climate history. This is a rapidly developing field that combines methodologies across many disciplines, from ice core analysis and volcanology to tree rings and the analysis of written records. Our readings are often authored by multi-disciplinary teams, but our focus is on how historians understand the past interactions of human beings and the climate. The scope of the course is global and ranges from the collapse of ancient societies to the prospects for (deliberately) engineering the climate of the future. Our temporal center of gravity is the early modern period─already exquisitely documented but still highly vulnerable to changes in temperature. Enrollment limited to first-year students.   WR, HU
HTBA

HIST 1109a / EVST 1109a, Climate & Environment in American History: From Columbian Exchange to Closing of the Frontier  Staff

This lecture course explores the crucial role that climate and environmental conditions have played in American history from the period of European colonization to the end of the 19th century. Its focus is on the dramatic changes brought about by the encounters among Indigenous, European, and African peoples in this period, the influence of climate and climate change on these encounters, and the environmental transformations brought about by European colonization and conquest and the creation of new economies and polities (including chattel slavery). The lectures offer a new framework for organizing and periodizing North American history, based on geographical and environmental conditions rather than traditional national and political frameworks. The course provides a historical foundation for understanding contemporary American (and global) climate and environmental issues.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

HIST 1114a / HSHM 2060a, Histories of American Reproductive Health, Rights, and Activism from 1800  Megann Licskai

Are all politics reproductive politics? This course traces the reproductive history of the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Questions about reproduction–and about not reproducing–are deeply tied to questions of gendered and racial rights; of bodily autonomy; of American expansion and empire; and of who counts as a citizen, or even as a human being. In the past few years, we’ve encountered new stories about everything from new and restrictive abortion laws, to immigrant woman who were sterilized without their consent, to new technologies in male birth control, to the inequitable childcare burden that falls to women during times of hardship, to the racist roots of foster care and residential school systems. In this course, we come to understand the historical changes in American reproduction to better understand the complicated roots of our current moment. By analyzing articles in newspapers and scientific journals, advertisements, film, patient and physician narratives, and exhibitions and material culture, students will understand reproduction as a site for empowerment and activism, as a site of medical professionalization, and as a site of health disparity. We examine reproduction capaciously, including pregnancy and childbirth, birth control and abortion, assistive reproductive technologies, and adoption and foster care. Our analysis is intersectional, and we consider what different identities meant for reproduction historically, as well as in our current moment.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1116a, The American Revolution  Staff

The American Revolution from the perspective of the colonists; their shifting identities as English subjects, colonial settlers, revolutionaries, and Americans. Readings include contemporary correspondence and eyewitness accounts.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 2:30pm-3:20pm

HIST 1125a / AMST 1197a / ARCH 2600a / HSAR 3219a / URBN 1101a, American Architecture and Urbanism  Staff

An introduction to the field of American architecture and urbanism: the study of buildings, architects, designs, styles, and urban landscapes, viewed in economic, political, social, and cultural contexts. Organized chronologically, from pre-Colonial times to the present, as well as thematically, the course studies the formation and meaning of the built environment in America. The many topics encountered along the way include the public and private investment in the built environment; history of housing in America; transportation and infrastructure; architectural practice; and the social and political nature of city building and urban change. Attention also paid to the transnational nature of American architecture—the role of colonialism, the global exchange of architectural ideas, and the international careers of some architects. We will take advantage of our local setting, New Haven, as a cross-section of American architectural and urban history and a storehouse of key examples of building types, urban landscapes, and architectural styles. Upon completion, students should be expected to grasp the basic periods, trends, and processes in American architectural history and their connection to urban patterns. This course aims to give students the tools to appreciate and interpret the built environments that surround them, from impressive monuments to ordinary structures  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

HIST 1128b / AMST 2228b / GLBL 2201b, Origins of U.S. Global Power  David Engerman

This course examines the causes and the consequences of American global power in the “long 20th century,” peeking back briefly into the 19th century as well as forward into the present one. The focus is on foreign relations, which includes but is not limited to foreign policy; indeed, America’s global role was rooted as much in its economic and cultural power as it was in diplomacy and military strength. We study events like wars, crises, treaties, and summits—but also trade shows and movie openings. Our principal subjects include plenty of State Department officials, but also missionaries, business people, and journalists. We pay close attention also to conceptions of American power; how did observers in and beyond the United States understand the nature, origins, and operations of American power?  HU  0 Course cr
MW 10:30am-11:20am

HIST 1167a, The First World War  Staff

This class explores the causes and consequences of the First World War. In doing so, we emphasize the ways in which the story of the war, far from constituting a series of military battles, is a political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental history, focusing on the experience of the war for everyday soldiers and citizens. While the First World War started in Europe, we also delve into the experiences of places outside Europe. The readings and course materials are primary sources produced during the war period, as well as cultural artifacts that allow us to explore its memory.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

HIST 1199a / AMST 1199a / EVST 1199a / HSHM 2070a, American Energy History  Staff

The history of energy in the United States from early hydropower and coal to present-day hydraulic fracturing, deepwater oil, wind, and solar. Topics include energy transitions and technological change; energy and democracy; environmental justice and public health; corporate power and monopoly control; electricity and popular culture; labor struggles; the global quest for oil; changing national energy policies; the climate crisis.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1219a / ER&M 2519a / JDST 2000a / MMES 1149a / RLST 1480a, Jews and the World: From the Bible through Early Modern Times  Ivan Marcus

A broad introduction to the history of the Jews from biblical beginnings until the European Reformation and the Ottoman Empire. Focus on the formative period of classical rabbinic Judaism and on the symbiotic relationships among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jewish society and culture in its biblical, rabbinic, and medieval settings. Counts toward either European or non-Western distributional credit within the History major, upon application to the director of undergraduate studies.  HU  RP  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

HIST 1220b / JDST 2001b / RLST 1490b, Modern Jewish Politics: The Last Four Centuries  David Sorkin

A broad introduction to the history of Jewish culture from the late Middle Ages until the present. Emphasis on the changing interaction of Jews with the larger society as well as the transformation of Judaism in its encounter with modernity.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
MW 2:35pm-3:25pm

HIST 1236a / HIST 236 / HSHM 2260a / HUMS 2260a, The Global Scientific Revolution  Ivano Dal Prete

The material, political, cultural, and social transformations that underpinned the rise of modern science between the 14th and 18th century, considered in global context. Topics include artisanal practices and the empirical exploration of nature; global networks of knowledge and trade, and colonial science; figurative arts and the emersion of a visual language of anatomy, astronomy, and natural history.   HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1260a / CPLT 2530a / HUMS 2550a / RSEE 2312a / RUSS 2312a, Tolstoy's War and Peace TR  Staff

This course is a semester-long study of the quintessential big Russian novel, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869).  Set against the backdrop of Napoleon’s failed 1812 Russian campaign, the novel is a sweeping panorama of nineteenth-century Russian society and an unforgettable gallery of artfully drawn characters.  It also poses profound philosophical and moral questions.  What are the limits of individual agency, both in private life and in grand political arenas?  Do historical events have identifying causes?  What is a meaningful, well-lived life?  We also explore Tolstoy’s strategies for fictionalizing history.  What myths does he destroy and construct?  And how is this patriotic war epic also an imperial novel?  Reading the novel closely, we situate it both in its historical context and in our contemporary world.  Secondary materials include readings in history, political theory, philosophy, international relations, and literary criticism. All readings and class discussions in English.  No prerequisites required.   HU  Tr  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1275a / EVST 2270a / HSHM 2270a, Botanical Bodies: Plants, Medicine and Colonial Science  Staff

Plants weave their way into every aspect of our lives. From the food that we eat to our growing obsession with houseplants, from the pharmaceutical industry to recent meditations on queerness and reproductive freedom, plants are inescapable, offering both practical and metaphoric roots, tendrils, and blossoming ideas about our own bodies and our engagement within changing social, political, and cultural structures. This course considers the ways that plants (and fungi) have shaped ideas about gender, sexuality, race, health, medicine, capitalism, power, and consciousness from the early modern period to the present, moving chronologically to examine our complicated relationships with the natural world. Working within the (broadly construed and ongoing) colonial context, we follow plants and their collectors, cultivators, and stewards across oceans and continents, charting the rise of plantation agriculture and specious ways of classifying species to twentieth-century focuses on breeding and genetics, attempts to patent plants as medicines, and, in recent years, calls to use plants as models for new (or, perhaps, very old) models for kinship that upturn these very systems of power.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1281a / RLST 2680a, Christian Mysticism, 1200–1700  Staff

An introductory survey of the mystical literature of the Christian West, focusing on the late medieval and early modern periods. Close reading of primary texts, analyzed in their historical context.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1407b / EAST 2302b, The Making of Japan's Great Peace, 1550–1850  Fabian Drixler

Examination of how, after centuries of war in Japan and overseas, the Tokugawa shogunate built a peace that lasted more than 200 years. Japan's urban revolution, the eradication of Christianity, the Japanese discovery of Europe, and the question of whether Tokugawa Japan is a rare example of a complex and populous society that achieved ecological sustainability.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1453a or b, 20th Century Japan: Empire & Aftermath  Staff

In 1905, in a victory which shocked the world, Japan defeated Imperial Russia in a regional conflict over control of Korea. To many in Asia and the non-Western world, Japan looked like a new model of anti-Western, anti-imperial modernity. However, the ensuing decades would see this image contested. The expansion of Japan’s political and economic power into East Asia over the first half of the twentieth century has shaped the region in ways still visible today. This course is split into three parts, each covering roughly two decades. First, we look at the legacies of Japan’s Meiji Restoration and the development of what has been called an “Imperial Democracy” in early 20th century Japan. Next, we look at the crises which rocked Japan in the 1930s and marked a new era. Finally,  we deal with the aftermath of empire—both in the immediate “postwar” era for Japan, and in the debates over imperial legacies and history which still reverberate in Japan and many of its former colonies today.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 11:35am-12:25pm

HIST 1486b / SAST 2240b, India and Pakistan since 1947  Rohit De

Introduction to the history of the Indian subcontinent from 1947 to the present. Focus on the emergence of modern forms of life and thought, the impact of the partition on state and society, and the challenges of democracy and development. Transformations of society, economy, and culture; state building; economic policy.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

HIST 1498a, The History of History in China  Staff

From the earliest extant written evidence on bronze and bone archaeological materials to blockbuster films, creation myths, divination manuals, manifestos, cosmological treatises, ritual guides, and philosophical battles for legitimacy, this course explores how history has been written, recorded, and contested in the Chinese tradition. Sources of the pre-imperial, imperial, and post-imperial historical traditions of China will serve as rich material for a semester-long discussion on the nature of historiography: the practice and the theory of writing history.   0 Course cr
TTh 1:05pm-2:20pm

HIST 1645b / JDST 3265b / MMES 1148b / RLST 2020b, Jews in Muslim Lands from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries  Ivan Marcus

Jewish culture and society in Muslim lands from the time of the Prophet Muhammad to that of Suleiman the Magnificent. Topics include Islam and Judaism; Jerusalem as a holy site; rabbinic leadership and literature in Baghdad; Jewish courtiers, poets, and philosophers in Muslim Spain; and the Jews in the Ottoman Empire.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

HIST 1681a / MMES 1102a / NELC 1020a / SOCY 1002a, Introduction to the Middle East  Jonathan Wyrtzen

Introduction to the history, politics, societies, and cultures of the Middle East. Topics and themes include geopolitics, environment, state formation, roles of Judaism/Christianity/Islam, empire&colonialism, nationalism, regional & global wars, Palestine-Israel conflict, US and other Great Power intervention.  HU, SO  0 Course cr
MW 9am-10:15am

HIST 1700b / CLCV 2402b, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World  Joseph Manning

The history and culture of the ancient world between the rise of Macedonian imperialism in the fourth century B.C.E. and the annexation of Egypt by Augustus in 30 B.C.E. Particular attention to Alexander, one of the most important figures in world history, and to the definition of "Hellenism."  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1733a / GLBL 1433a, The Twentieth Century: A World History  Staff

For most people, almost everywhere, the twentieth century was a time of profound and accelerating change. Someone born in the 1890s could, if they lived a long life, have experienced two world wars, a global depression, collapse of empires, the enfranchisement of women and young people, and the rise of the United States to global power.  They could have witnessed the first cars, the first planes, the first radios and TVs, and the first computers. They could have been among the first to swear allegiance to one (or several) of 130 new states, almost twice the number that existed in 1900. They would have been certain to witness massive ecological destruction, as well as unparalleled advances in medicine, science, and the arts. The twentieth century was, as one historian puts it, an age of extremes, and in this class we explore some of these aspects of the age. The class is not intended to be a complete history nor is it one that provides an integrative interpretation of historical events. The aim is rather to enable students to know enough to think for themselves about the origins of today’s world and about how historical change is created.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 10:30am-11:20am

HIST 1735a / HUMS 2765a, Historiography (The Ends of History)  Staff

This is a lecture course about how to think about history as a form of intellectual life, especially for those entering or exploring it as a major. Is it natural to think historically, or does history itself have a history? Is history a science, dedicated to the discovery of the real truth about the past, or is it an unending contest of different interpretations? Is the best history “objective”? What does that mean? Today in the United States, the uses of history are impossible to escape in our public, political life. Invocations of the legacies of slavery and colonization; warnings about the threat of fascism; appeals to tradition or a return to ‘better’ times: history is everywhere, and it is being put to various, and often conflicting, ends. This discussion-heavy lecture class invites students to think about the ways we can and should use the practice of history in society. Why does history matter? What can it do for us? What do we use it for, and are we using it for the right goals?  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

HIST 1752b / HSHM 2140b, Extraterrestrials in History  Ivano Dal Prete

The notion of extraterrestrials and "radical others" in history and culture from antiquity to the present. Topics include other worlds and their inhabitants in ancient Greece; medieval debates on the plurality of worlds; angels, freaks, native Americans, and other "aliens" of the Renaissance; comet dwellers in puritan New England; Mars as a socialist utopia in the early twentieth century; and visitors from space in American popular culture.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 10:30am-11:20am

* HIST 1755a / ARCH 2105a / HSHM 2390a / URBN 3320a, Reckoning Environmental Uncertainty: A Global History since 1100  Anthony Acciavatti

How have people made decisions about the future when the environment is uncertain? This lecture class provides a global perspective on how societies have tried to understand and live with an unpredictable world. Beginning in 1100, we examine a series of historical episodes when communities faced environmental dangers, uncertain futures, and how they managed risk. Case studies include water and landscape management in the Song Dynasty, navigation across the Pacific Ocean, utopian cities in the Americas, agricultural and urban systems in South Asia, environmental design in West Africa, and the global rise of weather observatories to monitor atmospheric changes. Rather than telling a linear history of progress or decline, the course asks a more fundamental question: how do people claim to know the environment, and how does uncertainty shape that knowledge? Throughout the semester, we examine how different cultures develop their own strategies for understanding a world that has never been entirely predictable. Drawing on the histories of science, technology, architecture, and the environment, students see how debates about risk, planetary health, and expertise have deep historical roots.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 4pm-5:15pm

HIST 1765a / EVST 2090a / HSHM 2090a, Making Climate Knowledge  Deborah Coen

This course explores the history of scientific knowledge of Earth’s climate from Europeans’ first encounters with the Americas to the politics of climate knowledge in the 2020s. We see how scientists learned to track interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary, and how they conceived the ambition of predicting and even controlling the climate system. Ironically, the rise of modern climate science depended on the very processes of industrialization that it later called into question. It was also indelibly shaped by European imperialism and by the theories of human difference that Europeans used to justify colonization and enslavement. Coming to terms with the historical entanglement of climate science with colonialism and racial capitalism is a necessary step towards climate justice. To make vivid the multiplicity of ways of knowing climate, the course includes visits to the Yale Farm, the Medical Historical Library, and the Center for British Art.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1772b / ER&M 2772b, Colonialism, 1492-Present  Omnia El Shakry

This course is a thematic exploration of colonialism as an historical, political, cultural, and psychological experience. We highlight struggles between Europeans and colonized peoples and think historically about global structures of inequality, that is to say, the exploitation of human differences within capitalism and colonialism. Topics may include: Columbus and ‘the cannibals’; the Spanish conquest of Mexico; the Atlantic slave trade; racial capitalism and modernity; the Haitian Revolution; British colonialism in India and Egypt; the Belgian Congo; the relation between Self and Other in the colonial encounter; the ideology of race and racism; anticolonial nationalism and decolonization, with special attention to the Algerian War of decolonization; and U.S. Imperialism in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The emphasis is on a discursive understanding of colonialism, rather than comprehensive chronological and geographical coverage. We engage a diverse array of primary and secondary sources, novels, art, and films in our exploration.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 10:30am-11:20am

* HIST 2140b / AMST 0028b / WGSS 0028b, US Queer History  Talya Zemach-Bersin

This interdisciplinary course offers a critical overview of queer history in the United States from the colonial era to the present, exploring the lives and experiences of LGBTQ individuals and emphasizing the broader historical evolution of ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender that constitute the ever-changing landscape of queer history. Through an intersectional lens, students analyze how gender, sexuality, race, and class have shaped LGBTQ identities, cultures, and political movements. Drawing heavily from primary sources including historical texts, literature, visual culture, and popular media, we investigate how queer lives and experiences have been represented, constructed, and contested across time.  HU
TTh 4pm-5:15pm

* HIST 2158b / AMST 3398b / ER&M 3508b, American Indian Law and Policy  Ned Blackhawk

Survey of the origins, history, and legacies of federal Indian law and policy during two hundred years of United States history. The evolution of U.S. constitutional law and political achievements of American Indian communities over the past four decades.  HU
T 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 2196b / AMST 2233b / ER&M 3536b / WGSS 2235b, Another “Other” – Introducing Critical Theories and Histories of Disability  Jiya Pandya

What is disability? How has its definition changed over time? How do people “become” disabled and how does one inhabit a disabled body? In what ways has the disabled body become a site for enacting imperial, national, and resistant politics? Where and how are alternate, radical visions of health being developed? This introductory course in Disability Studies poses answers to these and other related questions through an overview of key texts and debates in the growing field of disability studies. Students learn about the transnational history of disability and disability rights, think about the intersections of disability, race, sexuality, gender, and citizenship, and engage with questions of accessibility and activism that already exist in spaces around you.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

HIST 2211b, The Birth of Europe, 1000-1500  Hussein Fancy

Europe during the central and late Middle Ages, from the feudal revolution to the age of discoveries. Europe as it came to be defined in terms of national states and international empires. The rise and decline of papal power, church reform movements, the Crusades, contacts with Asia, the commercial revolution, and the culture of chivalry.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

HIST 2214a, The Early Middle Ages  Staff

This course focuses on the “Early Middle Ages” in the Mediterranean, European, and Middle Eastern worlds. This course takes us through a number of events that have long been considered great ruptures: the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West and growth of Barbarian Europe, the collapse of the Persian Empire and Rise of Islam, and the Christianization of the Roman world and dominance of Abrahamic religions in the Mediterranean and Middle East. We consider in what way these phenomena served as historical ruptures, and in what other ways we see continuities threaded across the centuries and across diverse locales. At the same time, we learn how vibrant this world was, where political configurations changed and developed, intellectuals battled with essential questions about the nature of God, and the fundaments of the modern world were laid. We consider these subjects and many more in considering both the creative and diverse medieval world, and the ways in which scholars conceptualize its different aspects.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

* HIST 2221b / HELN 2221b / PLSC 3474b / SOCY 2221b, Modern Greek History  Charalampos Minasidis

This seminar examines Modern Greek History from the 18th century to the early 21st century, focusing on the political, social, economic, and cultural transformations that have shaped the Greek world. It explores the turbulent experiences of Greeks both within and beyond the borders of the modern state, paying particular attention to the violent events and historical ruptures that defined this period. The course traces the evolving idea of Hellenism by analyzing competing visions, political movements, and ideological projects that influenced its development. It investigates the origins, impact, and legacy of key historical changes, reconstructing the formation of Greek statehood, society, and identity. Special emphasis is placed on events with global resonance, including the Greek Revolution, the 1923 compulsory population exchange, and the Greek Civil War. The seminar also introduces students to major historiographical debates, conceptual frameworks, and methodological tools, while building familiarity with the key events, timelines, and figures of Modern Greek History.  WR, HU, SO
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

HIST 2225a / CLCV 2575a, Roman Law  Staff

Basic principles of Roman law and their applications to the social and economic history of antiquity and to the broader history of international law. Topics include the history of persons and things, inheritance, crime and tort, and legal procedure. Questions of social and economic history and the history of jurisprudence from the fifth century B.C.E. to the present.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

* HIST 2231a / HELN 2230a / PLSC 3144a, The Greater War (1911–1923)  Charalampos Minasidis

The concept of the Greater War expands the chronological and geographical scope of the study of the Great War (1914–1918). It focuses on the social, economic, political, and cultural developments that either influenced or were a direct consequence of the Great War. It includes all conflicts and fronts from the Italian-Ottoman War of 1911 and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 that initiated a new era of imperialism and nationalism with weaker empires as victims, to the mobilization of states and people across the globe from 1914 onwards, the continuation of the violence after 1918, up until the end of the Russian Civil War and the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923 that marked a new era for the relationship between states and their citizens. The seminar offers a “from above” and a “from below” view of the Greater War, examining how the war influenced, shaped, and reshaped both the states and their societies. It aims to familiarize the students with its fundamental chronology, events, and actors by exposing them to the new historiography of war, its questions, and concepts.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 2240b / HELN 2240b / MMES 2240b / NELC 2950b, Late Ottoman History  Charalampos Minasidis

This seminar explores the Ottoman Empire from the late 18th century until its dissolution in 1923. It examines the Late Ottoman period through a historical lens, focusing on the political, social, economic, and cultural transformations that shaped the empire from the failed reforms of Selim III and the Greek Revolution, to the Tanzimat reforms, the autocracy of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and the regime of the Young Turks. The course analyzes the origins, impact, and legacy of these changes, reconstructing the contours of Ottoman statehood, society, and culture. It pays particular attention to the rise of competing imperialisms and nationalisms among the empire’s diverse populations, as well as the experiences of ethno-religious minorities. Special focus is given to the emergence of ethnonational majoritarianism and its radicalization, which culminated in genocide and the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The seminar aims to familiarize students with the key chronology, events, and figures of the Late Ottoman Empire, while introducing them to current historiographical debates, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 2248b / HSAR 4358b / HUMS 3937b / JDST 3237b, Antisemitic Visual Culture since the Middle Ages  Staff

This course examines the stereotyped, mythologized, and much-maligned figure of the Jew in visual culture throughout history, from the medieval period to the present day. How has this antisemitic archetype shaped the world we see around us, and how has it in turn been shaped by that same world? During the course, we will explore the shifting contributions of visual culture to the creation and dissemination of antisemitic tropes, including forms like cartography, architecture, political cartoons, theater, and film. The course will be primarily discussion-based and include significant in-class use of primary source material, as well as opportunities for students to critically investigate areas of personal interest.
TTh 4pm-5:15pm

* HIST 2251a / HELN 3050a / PLSC 3470a, The Age of Revolutions  Charalampos Minasidis

This seminar examines the “dual revolution,” namely the industrial and political revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that reshaped the world. It investigates the Age of Revolution in historical perspective by focusing on selective cases from the American and French Revolutions to that of Greece, Haiti and the unsuccessful ones of 1848. It studies their origins, their impact, and their legacies. It examines the emergence of republicanism, constitutionalism, nationalism, capitalism, socialism, feminism and the movements and political projects these ideas formed across Europe and North America. The seminar offers a “from above” and a “from below” view of the Age of Revolution, examining how it influenced, shaped, and reshaped both the states and their societies. It aims to familiarize the students with its fundamental chronology, events, and actors, by exposing them to the new historiography, its questions, and concepts.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 2367a / AFST 3366a / EP&E 305 / EP&E 4305a / PLSC 3403a, Bureaucracy in Africa: Revolution, Genocide, and Apartheid  Jonny Steinberg

A study of three major episodes in modern African history characterized by ambitious projects of bureaucratically driven change—apartheid and its aftermath, Rwanda’s genocide and post-genocide reconstruction, and Ethiopia’s revolution and its long aftermath. Examination of Weber’s theory bureaucracy, Scott’s thesis on high modernism, Bierschenk’s attempts to place African states in global bureaucratic history. Overarching theme is the place of bureaucratic ambitions and capacities in shaping African trajectories.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 2510a / LAST 2321, Environmental Insurgency, Dispossession, and Slavery in Latin America  Staff

Exploration of when, how, and why processes of dispossession and enslavement have been shaped by environmental insurgency amidst  European colonization of Latin America. This lecture course emphasizes on correlated human and nature interventions in the shaping of colonial societies and the disputes over domesticated environments in Latin America by Indigenous peoples and Afro-descended communities.Therefore, this course adopts various scales of analysis, from local and regional to hemispheric, to approach key themes of colonial Latin American history (15th-19th centuries) from an environmental lens to adress policies and social mobilization over colonization, dispossession, enslavement, environmental degradation, but also adaptive usages of emancipatory technical knowledge to navigate exploitation and unfreedom regimes.    HU  0 Course cr
TTh 9am-10:15am

* HIST 2578a / AFAM 3375a / AMST 4465a / CPLT 3770a / FREN 3650a, Haiti in the Age of Revolutions  Marlene Daut

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was an event of monumental world-historical significance. This class studies the collection of slave revolts and military strikes beginning in August of 1791 that resulted in the eventual abolition of slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and its subsequent independence and rebirth in January of 1804 as Haiti, the first independent and slavery-free nation of the American hemisphere. Considering Haiti's war of independence in the broader context of the Age of Revolutions, we cover topics such as enlightenment thought, natural history, the workings and politics of the printing press, and representations of the Haitian Revolution in art, literature, music, and in various kinds of historical writings and archival documents. Students develop an understanding of the relevant scholarship on the Haitian Revolution as they consider the relationship of this important event to the way it was written about both as it unfolded and in its long wake leading up to the present day.  WR, HU
T 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 2635a / HUMS 2035a / JDST 2512a / NELC 1170a, Antisemitism and its opponents in the Muslim world  Staff

Antisemitism, as well as opposition to it, has long been a part of social, political, and intellectual life in Muslim-majority societies. These societies have also long included significant Jewish minorities, especially before the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. This course takes a historical approach, carefully examining antisemitisms of various types in various periods as well as opposition to them by Jews, Muslims, and others in the Islamicate world.  HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 2706b / HELN 3040b / PLSC 3476b / SOCY 3040b, Civil Wars  Charalampos Minasidis

This seminar introduces students to the study of civil wars, examining the underlying ideas, dynamics, and motivations that drive such internal conflicts. Drawing on a broad range of geographically diverse case studies, from the French Religious Wars to civil wars in Greece, Colombia, Kenya, and El Salvados, it explores key thematic issues in the historical development of civil wars and interrogates the blurred boundaries between civil wars and other forms of warfare, including (counter-)revolutionary, (anti-)colonial, partisan, and genocidal conflicts. The course further investigates the global interconnections and enduring legacies of civil wars through a comparative and relational analytical framework. By conceptualizing various forms of warfare as civil wars, the seminar enables a nuanced examination of the political, social, national, ethnic, separatist, and colonial dimensions of violence. At the same time, its transnational and comparative approach challenges exceptionalist interpretations traditionally found in the study of civil wars.  WR, HU, SO
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

HIST 2756b, Europe and the World, 1500-1900  Lauren Benton

This course draws on historical sociology and comparative legal history to examine European overseas empires and global ordering between 1500 and 1850. It evaluates theoretical approaches to the study of empires and uses case studies to analyze global processes such as early modern state formation, raiding and captive taking, the rise and rule of trading companies, and the exercise and limits of patrimonial power. Other themes receiving in-depth attention include legal frameworks for imperial-Indigenous and inter-imperial relations, and revolts and rebellions by enslaved and Indigenous peoples. The course is global but not comprehensive in scope, and readings and lectures address problems in both primary and secondary sources.  HU
MW 2:35pm-3:25pm

* HIST 2787b / RLST 3470b / SOCY 3331b / WGSS 2291b, Sexual Minorities from Plato to the Enlightenment  Igor De Souza

This interdisciplinary course surveys the history of homosexuality from a cross-cultural, comparative  perspective. Students study contexts where homosexuality and sodomy were categorized, regulated, and persecuted and examine ancient and medieval constructions of same-sex desire in light of post-modern developments, challenging ideas around what is considered normal and/or natural. Ultimately, we ask: what has changed, and what has remained the same, in the history of homosexuality? What do gays and lesbians today have in common with pre-modern sodomites? Can this history help us ground or rethink our sexual selves and identities? Primary and secondary historical sources, some legal and religious sources, and texts in intellectual history are studied. Among the case studies for the course are ancient attitudes among Jews, early Christians, and Greeks; Christian theologians of the Middle Ages; Renaissance Florence; the Inquisition in Iberia; colonial Latin America; and the Enlightenment’s condemnation of sodomy by Montesquieu and Voltaire, and its defense by Bentham.  HU
HTBA

* HIST 3102a / AMST 3375a / ER&M 3502a, Asian Americans and the Law in 20th C. U.S. History  Mary Lui

This junior history seminar explores 20th century Asian American history through the themes of law and justice.  Specifically, we examine the ways in which U.S. laws and legal institutions have defined race and belonging for Asian Americans by focusing on three topics―education, housing, and criminal justice.  These broad themes allow us to understand historic changes in Asian migration, family and community formation, political organizing, and social justice activism as well as situate Asian American history in the broader context of Civil Rights struggles throughout the 20th century. The course also explores a wide array of primary sources and historical methods used to develop a research project based on Asian American encounters with the U.S. legal system.  WR, HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

* HIST 3110b / HSHM 4960b, Childbirth in America, 1650-2000  Rebecca Tannenbaum

This course considers the ways childbirth has been conducted in the United states over three centuries.  Topics include the connections between childbirth and historical constructions of gender, race, and motherhood, as well as changes in the medical understanding and management of childbirth.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3123b, Reagan’s America  Beverly Gage

This course examines U.S. politics in the 20th century through the life and times of Ronald Reagan. This is not a course about biography. Instead, the course uses the major political events of Reagan’s lifetime−from his years as a New Deal-era labor leader to his presidency in the 1980s−in order to explore the political history of the era. The course emphasizes intersections between domestic and foreign policy, as well as between high politics (the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court) and grassroots social movements. Topics include liberalism, conservatism, civil rights, communism and anticommunism, California politics, presidential power, AIDS activism, abortion politics, immigration, foreign policy, and the Cold War.  WR, HU
M 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3131a / ER&M 1691a, Urban History in the United States, 1870 to the Present  Jennifer Klein

The history of work, leisure, consumption, and housing in American cities. Topics include immigration, formation and re-formation of ethnic communities, the segregation of cities along the lines of class and race, labor organizing, the impact of federal policy, the growth of suburbs, the War on Poverty and Reaganism, and post-Katrina New Orleans.  WR, HU
M 4pm-5:55pm

* HIST 3135a, The Age of Hamilton and Jefferson  Joanne Freeman

The culture and politics of the revolutionary and early national periods of American history, using the lives, ideas, and writings of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton as a starting point. Topics include partisan conflict, political culture, nation building, the American character, and domestic life.  WR, HU
W 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3138a, The History Wars: Problems in Public Memory  David Blight

This junior research seminar is an exploration of the interpretive dimensions of the study of "memory" among American historians, as well as in the broad public. Several case studies are examined in depth: the long struggle over Civil War memory and the Lost Cause; how immigration caused bitter debates about school curriculums; anti-Communism and teaching American history; the National History Standards crisis of the 1990s; the Smithsonian conflict over how to commemorate the use of the atomic bomb, also in 1990s; debate over the American Indian Museum in Wash., DC; and debates today over the 1619 Project on slavery and its critics.    WR, HU
W 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3139a / HSHM 4450a, Fetal Histories: Pregnancy, Life, and Personhood in the American Cultural Imagination  Megann Licskai

In our twenty-first-century historical moment, the fetus is a powerful political and cultural symbol. One’s fetal politics likely predicts a lot about how they live their life, vote, worship, and even about how they understand themselves. How, then, has the fetus come to carry the cultural significance that it does? Are there other ways one might think of the fetus? And what is happening in the background when we center the fetus up front? This course examines the many cultural meanings of the fetus in American life: from a clump of cells, to a beloved family member, to political litmus test, and considers the way that these different meanings are connected to questions of human and civil rights, gender relations, bodily autonomy, and political life. We look at the history of our very idea of the fetus and consider how we got here. Each of us may have a different idea of what the fetus is, but every one of those ideas has a particular history. We work to understand those histories, their contexts, and their possible implications for the future of American political life.  WR, HU
Th 4pm-5:55pm

* HIST 3149a, A History of the Border Wall: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in US History  Greg Grandin

Ever since the US’s founding, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to United States identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, the frontier made possible the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation—democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, the country has a new symbol: the border wall. This course focuses on both the current crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border, which has consumed the country’s attention and challenged its public morality and national identity, and the long history that has led to the crisis. After an introductory period focused mostly on the history of the U.S. border (with indigenous peoples, Spain, and Mexico), we alternate between issues pertaining to the current moment and the larger historical context. We read about and discuss events of the moment, related to the immediate causes of migration, the rise of nativism in the U.S., along with calls for building a border wall, family separation and child detention policies, and the activity of the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, as we continue to set the current crisis in historical context.   HU
T 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3151a / AMST 4422a / ER&M 3507a, Writing Tribal Histories  Ned Blackhawk

Historical overview of American Indian tribal communities, particularly since the creation of the United States. Challenges of working with oral histories, government documents, and missionary records.  WR, HU
Th 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3154a, Neighboring Democracies: Representative Politics in the United States and Canada, 1607-Present  Brendan Shanahan

This seminar examines how representative politics have evolved in the United States and Canada from the turn of the seventeenth century to the present. Students learn diverse ways in which forms of liberal democracy—republicanism and constitutional monarchy in particular—have emerged in North America, how processes of democratization have operated, and the degree to which representative governments in Canada and the U.S. borrow from and emerge out of common and/or disparate contexts. Special emphasis is placed on—but is not limited to—the history of suffrage and voting rights in the United States and Canada.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3156b / AMST 3316b, Capitalism, Labor, & Class Politics in Modern U.S.  Jennifer Klein

History of American capitalism from the mid-19th century through the 21st century. This course examines different modes of capitalist accumulation and creation of landscapes, territories, boundaries. Readings address how regionalism, race, and class power shaped the development of American capitalism. We consider the continuum of free and coerced labor well after the end of slavery in the U.S. We read about indigenous communities, the environment, energy politics, and on-going struggles with the state. This mix of labor history, social theory, intellectual history, business history, social history, and geography also impel us to imagine the workings of American capitalism beyond the borders of the nation—to think about how capitalists and workers move through space and reshape space; the exchange of workers, ideas, technologies, and resources across national, imperial, and oceanic boundaries.  WR, HU
HTBA

* HIST 3164a, Foxes, Hedgehogs, and History  John Gaddis

Application of Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between foxes and hedgehogs to selected historical case studies extending from the classical age through the recent past.   WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3165a, Yale and America: Selected Topics in Social and Cultural History  Jay Gitlin

Relations between Yale and Yale people—from Ezra Stiles and Noah Webster to Cole Porter, Henry Roe Cloud, and Maya Lin—and American society and culture. Elihu Yale and the global eighteenth century; Benjamin Silliman and the emergence of American science; Walter Camp, Dink Stover, and the all-American boy; Henry Luce and the information age; faith and ideology in postwar Yale and America.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3168a, Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present  Jay Gitlin

The evolution of Canada from the Constitutional Act of 1791 to Confederation to the emergence of modern Canada in the era of Pierre Trudeau. There is an emphasis on the place of Quebec, but we do not neglect B.C. and Alberta. Topics include the Rebellions of 1837-1838, the role of empire, the Québécois diaspora in New England, language legislation, and the debate over sovereignty. Readings include Lord Durham’s Report, Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater,” and a novel by Michel Tremblay.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3169a or b / AFAM 3165b / BLST 3165a, What is Racial Capitalism?  Destin Jenkins

This seminar starts from the position that the historical movement, settlement, and hierarchical arrangements of the racial subaltern and even those deemed ‘white’ are inseparable from regimes of capital accumulation. But is that all there is to racial capitalism? What more can be said about these regimes? And what of the varied responses to racial capitalism, from accommodation to the Black Radical Tradition to other forms of subterfuge? Major topics and themes include: war, money, ecology, crime and punishment. The course also exposes students to the various sources, archives, methods, theoretical frameworks, and narrative strategies employed by scholars in the field.  WR, HU
HTBA

* HIST 3170b / HSHM 4090b, Community Histories: Reproductive Health in New Haven  Megann Licskai

How does a local focus help us to understand the history of reproductive health, and how does reproductive health help us to understand local history? As a project within Yale’s Community Histories Lab, students join a team of Yale researchers and community partners committed to producing new knowledge about the history of health in New Haven. Students collaboratively build an archive of reproductive health histories in New Haven. This archive will be a site of academic interest, developed in response to community needs as we consider how to leverage historical research to imagine a better future. The first unit provides students with targeted methodological training in oral historical and traditional archival methods in preparation of the collection of oral histories and compilation of paper archives. The remainder of the seminar engages these methods in project work. Students use their training to build a publicly accessible reproductive health archive housed at Yale, to develop their own research questions coming out of this nascent archive, and to support New Haven organizations that can use these histories to serve their communities.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3179a / HSHM 4580a, Scientific Instruments & the History of Science  Paola Bertucci

What do scientific instruments from the past tell us about science and its history? This seminar foregrounds historical instruments and technological devices to explore how experimental cultures have changed over time. Each week students focus on a specific instrument from the History of Science and Technology Division of the Peabody Museum: magic lantern, telescope, telegraph, astrolabe, sundial, and more!  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3190a / PLSC 3211a, Congress in the Light of History  David Mayhew

This reading and discussion class offers an overview of U.S. congressional history and politics from 1789 through today, including separation-of-powers relations with the executive branch. Topics include elections, polarization, supermajority processes, legislative productivity, and classic showdowns with the presidency.  Emphasized is Congress's participation in a sequence of policymaking enterprises that have taken place from the launch of the nation through recent budget difficulties and handling of climate change. Undergrads in political science and history are the course's typical students, but anyone is welcome to apply.  SO
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3191b / WGSS 3354b, Women, Gender, and Grassroots Politics in the United States after World War II  Jennifer Klein

American politics and grassroots social movements from 1945 to the present explored through women's activism and through gender politics more broadly. Ideas about gender identities, gender roles, and family in the shaping of social movements; strategies used on the local, regional, national, and international levels. Connections between organizing and policy, public and private, state and family, and migration, immigration, and empire.  WR, HU
M 4pm-5:55pm

* HIST 3197b / HSAR 4375b / HSHM 4410b, Museums: Power and Politics  Elaine Ayers

Museums are in a state of crisis. From calls for decolonization and repatriation to protests over human remains collections and unethical donor policies, museums and related cultural institutions find themselves at a crossroads, reckoning with their violent colonial histories while handling ongoing concerns about workers’ rights, systemic inequality, and their role in shaping knowledge in the public sphere. Whether addressing climate change policy, Black Lives Matter protests, fights for unionization, or Indigenous representation, it’s clear that museums are rich sites for critique in the history of science and beyond. How did we get here, and where do we go from here? Beginning with early modern cabinets of curiosity and moving through nineteenth century encyclopedic museums, controversial anatomical collections, and more recent natural history institutions, we investigate how museum politics and power produce knowledge, from the depths of their archives to sensationalized exhibits while questioning what an ethical, holistic museum might look like in the future. Amidst ongoing debates over controversial collections like the Benin Bronzes, human remains stored in universities across the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2023 admission of looting practices, and the American Museum of Natural History’s shallow apology for its eugenic past, the role of museums has expanded beyond the bounds of the academy, stoking universal struggles around human rights, international repatriation policies, and the politics of preservation, display, and loss. We bridge the classroom and the collection, visiting institutions around New Haven, practicing skills like provenance research and ethical handling of difficult objects while working towards a practice-based final project that suggests ways forward for museums and collections.  WR, HU
F 4pm-5:55pm

* HIST 3210b / HUMS 4124b, Hobbes and Galileo: Materialism and the Emergence of Modernity  William Klein

Hobbes considered himself a disciple of Galileo, but as a systematic philosopher and ideologue during a period of civil unrest in England, he no doubt produced something that Galileo, a Tuscan astrophysicist and impassioned literary critic, was not entirely responsible for: an absolutist theory of the modern state situated within an eschatological time frame. In this course we will reflect on the relation between Galileo’s anti-Aristotelian physics and Hobbes’ system by reading key texts by Galileo and Hobbes along with an array of interpretations and criticisms of Hobbes that will serve to situate Hobbes in early modern currents of thought in science, religion and politics, while at the same time situating us in contemporary ideological debates about the origins of modernity.    HU
HTBA

* HIST 3214a, History of the Night  Maria Jordan

This seminar is dedicated to the reality and the perception of the night across time and in different cultures. We explore how religious and philosophical beliefs, political and economic forces, changes in technologies of lighting, human biology, and the shift from rural to urban and agrarian to industrial societies affected attitudes toward time in general and the night in particular. These changes influenced the perceptions, uses, and the ways different groups experienced nocturnal time, and how we act, sleep, work, interact, and even dream. The traditional binary view of day and night is questioned by presenting a more complex "and dynamic face" of the night. Nightfall provides multiple opportunities for dissent and rebellion and becomes an ideal space for marginal and subordinate people. Historical analysis, literary texts, medical and scientific writings, and primary sources provide the class with a cross-disciplinary approach to examine how the night became the abode of the ghost, the devil, the witch, and the dead, and how the night became criminalized, commercialized and even politicized. In our time, improvements in lighting changed the nocturnal world, but also had detrimental effects on sleep and dreams, and caused contemporary movements–aesthetic and scientific–to "rescue" the night.  WR, HU
T 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3226b / JDST 3470b / RLST 2310b, How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe 800-1500  Ivan Marcus

Students study how Jews and Christians interacted on a daily basis as medieval Europe became more restrictive and antisemitic, a contributing factor to the Holocaust. In this writing seminar, students discuss a variety of primary sources in class–laws, stories, chronicles, images–while researching and writing their own seminar paper structured by sessions on topics, bibliographies, and outlines.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3232a / HUMS 4430a / JDST 3270a / MMES 3342a / RLST 2010a, Medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims In Conversation  Ivan Marcus

How members of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities thought of and interacted with members of the other two cultures during the Middle Ages. Cultural grids and expectations each imposed on the other; the rhetoric of otherness—humans or devils, purity or impurity, and animal imagery; and models of religious community and power in dealing with the other when confronted with cultural differences. Counts toward either European or Middle Eastern distributional credit within the History major, upon application to the director of undergraduate studies.  WR, HU  RP
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3242a / CLCV 3691a / HELN 3000a / WGSS 2293a, The Olympic Games, Ancient and Modern  George Syrimis

Introduction to the history of the Olympic Games from antiquity to the present. The mythology of athletic events in ancient Greece and the ritual, political, and social ramifications of the actual competitions. The revival of the modern Olympic movement in 1896, the political investment of the Greek state at the time, and specific games as they illustrate the convergence of athletic cultures and sociopolitical transformations in the twentieth century.  HU
W 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3245a / GLBL 3289a / PLSC 3468a, War and Peace in Northern Ireland  Bonnie Weir

Examination of theoretical and empirical literature in response to questions about the insurgency and uneasy peace in Northern Ireland following the peace agreement of 1998 which formally ended the three-decade long civil conflict known widely as The Troubles and was often lauded as the most successful of its kind in modern history. Consideration of how both the conflict and the peace have been messier and arguably more divisive than most outside observers realize.  SO
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3253a / LAST 3253a, Dissidence and Control in Early Modern Spain and its Empire  Maria Jordan

Aspects of Spanish culture and society in the Golden Age (c. 1550–1650) that demonstrate discontent, dissidence, and suggestions for reform. Emphasis on the intersection of historical and literary sources and the dynamic between popular and elite cultures.  WR, HU
Th 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3260a / HSHM 4680a, Sex, Life, and Generation  Ivano Dal Prete

Theories and practices of life, sex, and generation in Western civilization. Politics and policies of conception and birth; social control of abortion and infanticide in premodern societies; theories of life and gender; the changing status of the embryo; the lure of artificial life.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3269a or b, History and Holocaust Testimony  Carolyn Dean

This course focuses on Holocaust testimony to ground students in the history of how victims’ experiences are narrated and assessed by historians and other interpreters who shape the afterlives of historical events. Class readings underscore how Holocaust memory has changed over time, including how it belatedly became an event primarily about the genocide of European Jewry. We read histories, testimonies, and work on the relationship between the historical memories of the Holocaust and of European Imperialism.  WR, HU
HTBA

* HIST 3366a / AFST 3368a / EVST 3690a, Commodities of Colonialism in Africa  Robert Harms

This course examines historical case studies of several significant global commodities produced in Africa to explore interactions between world market forces and African resources and societies. Through the lens of four specific commodities–ivory, rubber, cotton, and diamonds–this course evaluates diverse industries and their historical trajectories in sub-Saharan Africa within a global context from ~1870-1990s. Students  become acquainted with the historical method by developing their own research paper on a commodity using both primary and secondary sources.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3383a / AFST 4481a / BLST 2213 / HSHM 4810a, Medicine and Race in the Slave Trade  Carolyn Roberts

Examination of the interconnected histories of medicine and race in the slave trade. Topics include the medical geography of the slave trade from slave prisons in West Africa to slave ships; slave trade drugs and forced drug consumption; mental and physical illnesses and their treatments; gender and the body; British and West African medicine and medical knowledge in the slave trade; eighteenth-century theories of racial difference and disease; medical violence and medical ethics.  HU
F 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3402b / EAST 3322b, Korea and the Japanese Empire in Critical Contexts  Hannah Shepherd

This course addresses critical moments of contact, conflict, and connection in the modern histories of Korea and Japan. Each week our discussion and readings focus on a specific event, before looking at the wider contexts involved and historical debates they have produced. This is not a comparative study of the histories of the different countries, but a chance to focus on themes—nationalism, colonial oppression, collaboration, war, identity—which continue to shape both relations between Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and the work of historians today.  WR, HU
HTBA

* HIST 3441a / ENGL 4838a / SAST 4740a, The Novel and the Nation: Reading India in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy  Priyasha Mukhopadhyay and Rohit De

This course pairs two interconnected phenomena: the rise of the Indian Republic and the birth of the postcolonial novel. Over the course of the semester, we read a single primary text: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993). Set in the 1950s in the aftermath of India’s Independence and Partition, Seth’s encyclopaedic novel is the story of four families brought together by a mother’s search for a “suitable boy” for her daughter to marry. In the process, it builds a microcosm of an Indian society coming to terms with postcolonial statehood and weighing the aftereffects of British colonialism. Entwined in its plot about marriage, love, and relationships are some of the most urgent cultural and political concerns facing the new nation: legislative changes and land reforms, the violent aftermath of the Partition, secularism tainted by communal tensions, the disintegration of courtly forms of sociality, the reconstruction of city life, and the fate of the English novel in the postcolonial classroom. We read A Suitable Boy as literary critics and historians, pairing close readings of language and literary form with historical scholarship. Over the course of our discussions, we address the following questions: what is the relationship between the nation, the novel, and identity in the postcolonial world? How do we read narratives of “nation building” as literary and cultural constructions? What do we make of “literature” and “history” as disciplinary categories and formations? The seminar introduces students to methods of literary criticism and textual studies, and teaches them how to read a range of primary sources, from legislative debates, bureaucratic reports, newspapers, poetry, cinema, and radio.  HU
T 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3458b, The History of The Chinese Communist Party  Arne Westad

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ruled mainland China since 1949 and has been a key part of Chinese politics since the 1920s. This seminar provides an introduction to the history of the CCP from its founding in 1921 up to the 2020s. We look at some of the concerns that have stayed with the party and its leaders since it was set up and at questions that have animated the party in particular phases of its development.  The seminar discusses issues relating both to domestic and international affairs and pays particular attention to turning points in the party’s history.  WR, HU
Th 4pm-5:55pm

* HIST 3498a / MMES 3300a / RSEE 3329a / RUSS 3329a, Introduction to Modern Central Asia  Claire Roosien

An overview of the history of modern Central Asia—modern-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. This course shows Central Asia to be a pivotal participant in some of the major global issues of the 20th and 21st centuries, from environmental degradation and Cold War, to women’s emancipation and postcolonial nation-building, to religion and the rise of mass society. It also includes an overview of the region’s longer history, of the conquests by the Russian and Chinese empires, the rise of Islamic modernist reform movements, the Bolshevik victory, World War II, the perestroika, and the projects of post-Soviet nation-building. Readings in history are supplemented by such primary sources as novels and poetry, films and songs, government decrees, travelogues, courtly chronicles, and the periodical press. All readings and discussions in English.  HU
TTh 1:05pm-2:20pm

* HIST 3525b, Engineering Colonial Latin America: Environments in (De)Construction  Manoel Rendeiro Neto

This seminar offers students the opportunity to develop further reading, writing, and research skills in the environmental history of domesticated and built landscapes in Colonial Latin America. The course questions colonial tropes of pristine wilderness and environments untouched by mankind in Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of the world with historic ties to these regions during colonial times (15th-19th centuries). By adopting the notion of engineering, this course emphasizes correlated human and nature interventions in the shaping colonial societies and already domesticated environments in Latin America by Indigenous peoples and Afro-descended communities. On top of that, engineering allows us to rethink technological tools concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, structures, and policies for colonization, dispossession, enslavement, environmental degradation, but also adaptive usages of emancipatory technical knowledge to navigate exploitation and unfreedom regimes. Therefore, this course adopts various scales of analysis, from local and regional to hemispheric, to approach key themes of Colonial Latin American historiography from an environmental lens, including Indigenous histories; colonialism, extractivism, and slavery; Afro-Latinx histories; environmental humanities and justice.  WR, HU
T 4pm-5:55pm

* HIST 3545b / ER&M 3559b, Gender and the State in Latin America and the Caribbean  Anne Eller

This seminar offers an introduction to historical constructions of gender identity and gendered polities in Latin America and the Caribbean from pre-colonial native societies into the twentieth century. We begin with an analysis of gender in the Inca empire and several lowland societies, focusing on spirituality, agriculture, and land tenure particularly. The arrival of Spanish colonialism brings tremendous and complex transformations to the societies that we consider; we analyze discourses of honor, as well as how various subjects navigated the violence and the transforming colonial state. Our readings turn to Caribbean slavery, where studies of gendered experiences of enslavement and resistance have grown considerably in recent decades. Building on these insights, we analyze the gendered experiences of abolition and inclusion into contentious new Latin American and Caribbean nations of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, we consider some of the most salient analyses of the growth of state power, including dictatorships, in multiple sites. Throughout we maintain an eye for principle questions about representation, reproduction, inclusion, political consciousness, sexuality, migration, kinship, and revolutionary struggle through a gendered lens.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3575a, Latin American Intellectual History  Sergio Infante

In his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Gabriel García Márquez described Latin America as a place of feverish imagination: “a reality not of paper,” but of lived experience, “an unbridled reality” that, when transplanted to the page, seems hallucinatory and unreal. This course puts García Márquez’s dictum to the test. An introduction to the last two centuries of Latin American intellectual production, our seminar follows attempts by pensadores and letrados y letradas to set Latin American realities down on the page—and to govern by means of the written word. The thinkers are many and of many stripes—politicians, novelists, theologians, and economists, to name a few—but most have received comparatively little attention from intellectual historians, who continue to have a sweet tooth for “philosophers” rather than “essayists” (the latter are more common in Latin America). Intellectual historians also largely study the European and North American contexts, consigning Latin Americans to the status of interlocutors with other regions’ ideas. Latin America’s Black and indigenous intellectuals got an even rawer deal. Ignored by many of their compatriots, their writings were nevertheless of crucial importance to the cultural life and organization of the polities they inhabited. We consider them, too, addressing the silences of the archive when necessary.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3703b / HSHM 4730b, Vaccination in Historical Perspective  Jason Schwartz

For over two centuries, vaccination has been a prominent, effective, and at times controversial component of public health activities in the United States and around the world. Despite the novelty of many aspects of contemporary vaccines and vaccination programs, they reflect a rich and often contested history that combines questions of science, medicine, public health, global health, economics, law, and ethics, among other topics. This course examines the history of vaccines and vaccination programs, with a particular focus on the 20th and 21st centuries and on the historical roots of contemporary issues in U.S. and global vaccination policy. Students gain a thorough, historically grounded understanding of the scope and design of vaccination efforts, past and present, and the interconnected social, cultural, and political issues that vaccination has raised throughout its history and continues to raise today.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3710b, Money and Its Crimes: Forgers, Schemers, and Conmen  Vanessa Ogle

For as long as it has existed, people spending, producing, earning, legislating, or saving money have been confronted with its potential for deception. We look at the evolution of money through different forms (credit systems; coins, paper money) in the pre-modern era and then move forward from the 19th century, when arguably the wider availability of paper money, now firmly established financial markets, central banking, joint stock companies, and the principle of limited liability ushered in distinctly new and modern ways of understanding and encountering money. This new landscape of money also opened the doors to new criminal enterprises: Forgers who used the advent of paper money as an opportunity to produce counterfeit bills; conmen who lured gullible fellow citizens into their get-rich-quick schemes; dubious entrepreneurs who praised endless opportunities in the emerging markets of that time and age, in Latin America and the colonial world; and men like Charles Ponzi, after whom the notorious pyramid investment fraud is named, among other examples. How did societies historically view those engaging in such criminal activity, and what kind of laws, safeguards, and investigative tools were put in place to protect people from money crimes? How did understandings of what constituted such crimes, and what, accordingly, should be made illegal, change over time? How do we view what is now often referred to as “white collar crime” today, and what does the future of money crimes look like in the age of cryptocurrencies? Over the course of the semester, we combine different historical perspectives on these topics and questions.   WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3716b, The Art of Biography  John Gaddis

A comparative examination of successful as well as unsuccessful biographies, intended to identify both principles and pitfalls.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3728a / HSHM 4770a / HUMS 3463a / RLST 4370a, Critical Theories of Science and Religion  Noreen Khawaja and Joanna Radin

This course is an introduction to new thinking about the relationship of science and religion in global modernities. This semester, we study how frameworks of secularization and enchantment affect our theoretical and lived approaches to matter, media, and meaning. In particular, we explore the Catholicism of key thinkers shaping the field of contemporary science and technology studies, including Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Marshall MacLuhan, and their many critics. Social science since Weber has abounded in models to think about the interplay of secular culture and Protestant spirituality. What tools might we need to think about the kind of world Catholic science has made? What is a world, and who gets to define it?   HU
M 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3737b / AMST 3037b / ER&M 4049b / HSHM 4460b, Globalizing Disability: Histories and Theories from the Non-West  Jiya Pandya

Is disability a universal identity? Who decides who is disabled and how they get treated? How do experiences of illness, disability, access, and care differ in different modern global contexts? Can (and should) disability – as identity, rights, and pathology – be decolonized? We tackle these and other questions in this course, which offers students insight into historical and theoretical contributions from the growing fields of disability studies and mad studies. We focus primarily on ideas and critiques that emerge from scholars and practitioners working in and on the complex geographies that are given the uneven labels of the non-West, Third World, Developing World, and Global South. Tracing histories across multiple countries and regions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we examine how the forces of colonialism, post-colonial nation-building, and international governance shaped the lives of people who were labeled or came to identify as disabled. Structured thematically, we read historical, anthropological, critical theory, and cultural studies interventions into topics such as global medicine, humanitarianism, rights, war, welfare, and mental health. Even as we read widely, we center disability (and its intersections with race, gender, sexuality, and class) as a political methodology and a form of radical embodiment. Students from all disciplinary backgrounds may take this class, which both works alongside and builds on WGSS 2235’s broader introduction to disability studies.  WR, HU
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* HIST 3744a, Early Photography: Global Tech, Local Histories 1839-1914  Zeinab Azarbadegan

Photos are windows onto known and unknows places; they are an inseparable part of how we see and understand the world. In the age of Instagram, smartphones, and #Filter-#NoFilter we are all photographers, our very own curators of visual microcosms. We produce and consume photographic images almost constantly. We are now simultaneously master, subject, and audience in a transnational consumerist visual culture. This is remarkable seeing as the technology of photography has only been around for the past 180 years. No one could have foreseen the selfie as a potential technological application. The advent of photography in 1839 as a means of visual knowledge production was entangled with the rise of modern disciplines of ordering and categorizing knowledge about both people and places. Going beyond looking at photography merely as a technology invented in and disseminated from Europe, this course attempts to analyze “other histories” of photography, by looking at how this global technology was appropriated locally in Asia, Africa and the Americas. It is thus a global social history of the technology of photography. This course endeavors to give students the tools to analyze photos contextually, materially, and in terms of their content by looking at the first sixty years of photography. Specifically, this course looks at the intertwined histories of early photography and the formulation of modern disciplines by focusing on how early non-European anthropologists, geographers, and archaeologists incorporated photography in their methods of picturing place and the populace. Through thematic analysis and examination of different types of archival photos, students learn how to analyze photos both in the larger context of other visual sources, such as paintings, as well as textual sources.
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W 9:25am-11:20am

* HIST 3747b / HSHM 4670b / WGSS 4465b, History of the Body  Ziv Eisenberg

What does it mean to have a “bad hair day?” How should you care for your skin? What happens when you eat a burger and drink wine? How are babies made? What happens when you die? The answers depend not only on who provides them, but also on where and when. This seminar examines historical production of systems of corporeal knowledge and power, as well as the norms, practices, meanings, and power structures they have created, displaced, and maintained. Structured thematically, the course familiarizes students with major topics in the history of the body, health, and medicine, with a particular focus on US history.  WR, HU
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* HIST 3749a / EVST 4490a / HSHM 4490a / HUMS 3446a / URBN 3312a, Critical Data Visualization: History, Theory, and Practice  Bill Rankin

Critical analysis of the creation, use, and cultural meanings of data visualization, with emphasis on both the theory and the politics of visual communication. Seminar discussions include close readings of historical data graphics since the late eighteenth century and conceptual engagement with graphic semiology, ideals of objectivity and honesty, and recent approaches of feminist and participatory data design. Course assignments focus on the research, production, and workshopping of students’ own data graphics; topics include both historical and contemporary material. No prior software experience is required; tutorials are integrated into weekly meetings. Basic proficiency in standard graphics software is expected by the end of the term, with optional support for more advanced programming and mapping software.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3755a, Planet of the Apes: Primates in Human History  Staff

Throughout human history, we have lived side by side with other primates. This course studies the human relations with monkeys, apes, and other primates through history, focusing on how simian others have been used to construct ideas about human society, morality, and psychology.  HU
W 4pm-5:55pm

* HIST 3758b / SAST 4210b, Environmentalism from the Global South  Sunil Amrith

Most histories of the environmental movement still privilege the American and European experience. This research seminar examines the diverse forms of environmental thought and activism that have emerged from the global South—drawing examples from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America—since the early twentieth century. The course examines: the environmental legacies of colonialism, the role of ecology in anticolonial movements, early articulations of environmental justice in the 1970s, the role of violence and repression in state responses to environmental activism, the rise of increasingly networked environmental movements from the Global South that made themselves heard at the Rio Earth Summit of 1992—which took place 30 years ago, and the moral and political histories that underpin the negotiating stance of countries of the Global South in climate change negotiations. This class makes extensive use of primary sources, including material from the Yale collections and it straddles the boundaries between environmental, intellectual, and political history.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3761b / HSHM 4380b, Unnatural History: Colonialism and Inequality in the Making of Nature  Elaine Ayers

Penetrated jungles, “mother” nature, and quests to preserve the redwoods – for hundreds of years, colonial agents have characterized environments in racialized, gendered, sexualized, classist, and ableist terms, anthropomorphizing nature along ongoing systems of inequality.  This class traces shifting conceptualizations of nature from the early modern period to the present, focusing on how naturalists and scientists have described, collected, and displayed “new” environments and peoples while building extractive and exploitative natural history collections, from cabinets of curiosity to Yale’s own Peabody Museum. By analyzing methodologies like classification, conservation, and scientific communication, we will discuss how divisions between the “natural” and “unnatural” were created in western cultures along unequal ideas about human bodies. Critical analyses of sources across multiple disciplines will inform conversations about knowledge production with the goal of interrogating how these power structures have silenced voices and enacted long-lasting violences on both environments and the peoples inhabiting them. Using both primary and secondary sources while conducting original research, students will learn how binary and reductive categories have been used and abused in colonial science and beyond. This class will include visits to museums around Yale’s campus and beyond, with two of your assignments focused on the Peabody Museum.  WR, HU
W 4pm-5:55pm

* HIST 3768b / JDST 3451b / PLSC 3464b / RLST 3240b, The Global Right: From the French Revolution to the American Insurrection  Elli Stern

This seminar explores the history of right-wing political thought from the late eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on the role played by religious and pagan traditions. This course seeks to answer the question, what constitutes the right? What are the central philosophical, religious, and pagan, principles of those groups associated with this designation? How have the core ideas of the right changed over time? We do this by examining primary tracts written by theologians, political philosophers, and social theorists as well as secondary literature written by scholars interrogating movements associated with the right in America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Though touching on specific national political parties, institutions, and think tanks, its focus is on mapping the intellectual overlap and differences between various right-wing ideologies. While the course is limited to the modern period, it adopts a global perspective to better understand the full scope of right-wing politics.  HU, SO
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3771b, Women Who Ruled  Winston Hill

The range of the course is broad. We’re going to go all the way from ancient Egypt to the present day, and around the world once or twice. As we do that, you get familiar with queens from Wu Zetian to Njinga of Angola to Elizabeth II, and gain some understanding of just how massive the sweep of history is. In the course, we try to answer two key historical questions: What parts of these queens’ lives and experiences are made different by the particular conditions of their societies and cultures? Do gender, race, and power interact in similar ways across time and space? By the end of the course, we should have some answers. We also closely consider the question of this history’s relevance today. What roles do the stories of these politically powerful women play in our present, and in the presents of cultures across the globe? And how can we learn to be critically literate consumers of history in pop culture?  WR, HU
M 7pm-8:55pm

* HIST 3781b, Time Machines: Reimagining the Past  John Gaddis

This course explores how representations of the past can help us to reimagine it, and thereby to “travel” there. We explore the concept of time machines and the means by which they might be–or are–constructed. This involves a quick review of the physics involved; some ways historians have used archives to reconstruct times past; the extent to which novelists complement, contradict, or complicate the work of historians; the possibility of “animating” past visual representations, whether through art, film, or computer simulation; and as individual student projects the reading of some digitally available newspaper for some particular place in some particular year.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 3783a / GLBL 3344a / PLSC 3125a, Studies in Grand Strategy II  Mary Sarotte

The study of grand strategy, of how individuals and groups can accomplish large ends with limited means. During the fall term, students put into action the ideas studied in the spring term by applying concepts of grand strategy to present day issues. Admission is by application only; the cycle for the current year is closed. This course does not fulfill the history seminar requirement, but may count toward geographical distributional credit within the History major for any region studied, upon application to the director of undergraduate studies. Prerequisite: PLSC 321. Previous study courses in political science, history, global affairs, or subjects with broad interdisciplinary relevance encouraged.  SO  0 Course cr
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* HIST 4994a, Individual Writing Tutorial  Anne Eller

For students who wish, under the supervision of a member of the faculty, to investigate an area of history not covered by regular departmental offerings. The course may be used for research or for directed reading. It is normally taken only once. The emphasis of the tutorial is on writing a long essay or several short ones. To apply for admission, a student should present the following materials to the director of undergraduate studies on the Friday before schedules are due: a prospectus of the work proposed, a bibliography, and a letter of support from a member of the History department faculty who will direct the tutorial. A form to simplify this process is available from the office of the director of undergraduate studies.
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* HIST 4995a and HIST 4996a, The Senior Essay  Mary Lui

All senior History majors should attend the mandatory senior essay meeting in early September at a time and location to be announced in the online Senior Essay Handbook. The senior essay is a required one- or two-term independent research project conducted under the guidance of a faculty adviser. As a significant work of primary-source research, it serves as the capstone project of the History major. Students writing the one-term senior essay enroll in HIST 497 (see description), not HIST 495 and 496. The two-term essay takes the form of a substantial article, not longer than 12,500 words (approximately forty to fifty double-spaced typewritten pages). This is a maximum limit; there is no minimum requirement. Length will vary according to the topic and the historical techniques employed. Students writing the two-term senior essay who expect to graduate in May enroll in HIST 495 during the fall term and complete their essays in HIST 496 in the spring term. December graduates enroll in HIST 495 in the spring term and complete their essays in HIST 496 during the following fall term; students planning to begin their essay in the spring term should notify the senior essay director by early December. Each student majoring in History must present a completed Statement of Intention, signed by a department member who has agreed to serve as adviser, to the History Department Undergraduate Registrar by the dates indicated in the Senior Essay Handbook. Blank statement forms are available from the History Undergraduate Registrar and in the Senior Essay handbook. Students enrolled in HIST 495 submit to the administrator in 237 HGS a two-to-three-page analysis of a single primary source, a draft bibliographic essay, and at least ten pages of the essay by the deadlines listed in the Senior Essay Handbook. Those who meet these requirements receive a temporary grade of SAT for the fall term, which will be changed to the grade received by the essay upon its completion. Failure to meet any requirement may result in the student’s being asked to withdraw from HIST 495. Students enrolled in HIST 496 must submit a completed essay to 211 HGS no later than 5 p.m. on the dates indicated in the Senior Essay Handbook. Essays submitted after 5 p.m. will be considered as having been turned in on the following day. If the essay is submitted late without an excuse from the student's residential college dean, the penalty is one letter grade for the first day and one-half letter grade for each of the next two days past the deadline. No essay that would otherwise pass will be failed because it is late, but late essays will not be considered for departmental or Yale College prizes. All senior departmental essays will be judged by members of the faculty other than the adviser. In order to graduate from Yale College, a student majoring in History must achieve a passing grade on the departmental essay.
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* HIST 4997a, One-Term Senior Essay  Mary Lui

All senior History majors should attend the mandatory senior essay meeting in early September at a time and location to be announced in the online Senior Essay Handbook. The senior essay is a required one- or two-term independent research project conducted under the guidance of a faculty adviser. As a significant work of primary-source research, it serves as the capstone project of the History major. Seniors writing a two-term senior essay do not register for HIST 497; instead, they register for HIST 495 and HIST 496 (see description). History majors may choose to write a one-term independent senior essay in the first term of their senior year and register for HIST 497; however, students who choose the one-term senior essay option are not eligible for Distinction in the Major. The one-term essay must include a substantial research paper of no more than 6,250 words (approximately twenty-five pages) based on primary sources, along with a bibliographic essay and bibliography. Seniors enroll during the fall term of senior year; only History majors graduating in December may enroll during the spring term (or seventh term of enrollment). In rare circumstances, with the permission of the adviser and the Senior Essay Director, a student enrolled in HIST 497 during the fall term may withdraw from the course according to Yale College regulations on course withdrawal and enroll in the spring term. Each student enrolled in HIST 497 must present a completed Statement of Intention, signed by a department member who has agreed to serve as adviser, to the History Department Undergraduate Registrar by the dates indicated in the Senior Essay Handbook. Blank statement forms are available from the History Undergraduate Registrar and in the Senior Essay Handbook, available on the History department Web site. Additional details about the senior essay, including the submission deadlines are included in the Senior Essay Handbook. Essays submitted after 5 p.m. on the due date will be considered as having been turned in on the following day. If the essay is submitted late without an excuse from the student's residential college dean, the penalty is one letter grade for the first day and one-half letter grade for each of the next two days past the deadline. No essay that would otherwise pass will be failed because it is late. All senior departmental essays will be judged by members of the faculty other than the adviser. In order to graduate from Yale College, a student majoring in History must achieve a passing grade on the departmental essay. Permission of the departmental Senior Essay Director and of the student’s faculty adviser is required for enrollment.
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