Global Arc

Using the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami as case studies, this course seeks to understand the history of Latinos in urban places. Casting a geographically broad net and focusing largely on the 20th century, this course will comparatively analyze Latinos of different national origins (e.g. Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans). In addition, the course will look at a broad cross-section of the Latino community to get at changing understandings of gender, class, race, and immigration status. This course will include readings from traditional historical monographs and autobiographies.

This class will cover the broad sweep of California History. How did the "Golden State" come to loom so large in the global consciousness? How did it come to wield such economic and political power? Who built the state, and at what cost? As we look for historical answers to those questions, we will discuss topics such as: Indigenous sovereignty, Spanish colonization, the Gold Rush, Pacific immigration, urbanization, Prop 13, agriculture, Silicon Valley, surfing and more.

This class will examine the presidency of George W. Bush in historical perspective. Beginning with the bitterly contested election of 2000, moving through the traumatic events of 9/11 and ending with the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008, we will analyze the key turning points, accomplishments and failures of this presidency. We will also place the Bush administration and its legacy in the context of larger trends in American history, including the rise of the conservative movement and the evolution of presidential power. The class will include guests who worked in or wrote about the Bush administration.

This seminar will examine the origins, evolution and accomplishments of the civil rights movement, with special attention to the political context and consequences at every stage of its development.

This seminar uses the history of medicine in China over two millennia to explore a set of essential questions faced by all societies: What kind of persons with special skills and quality should we entrust with the care of the sick, and how to raise and allocate resources to foster the growth of medicine as an intellectual and social enterprise? In this class, we explore the health-related issues and challenges still facing governments and the general public today by looking back in time, and also discover how the history of medicine can illuminate aspects of social life and human experiences marginalized in conventional historiography.

This course examines the role of Africa in the advent of the science of conservation. The course looks at the complex ways in which the origins of conservation were shaped by racialized ideas about humans and the relationship between culture and nature, as well by asymmetrical power relations. Readings include autobiographies and government reports. Students will consider the potentially taboo question of whether Africa needs conservation.

This course takes up the twentieth-century Vietnam wars as a subject of international history, with a cast of actors ranging from Vietnam and the United States to France, China, and the Soviet Union. It is a subject that sheds light on some of the most significant dynamics of political, economic, and social change at work in the twentieth-century world. Themes include self-determination and imperialism, colonialism and counterinsurgency, social revolution and state control, liberalism and communism, policymaking and diplomacy, memory and legacy, and literature and history.

The 1980s was one of the critical decades in twentieth-century U.S. history and, even now, one of the most controversial. The seminar is designed to explore the key shifts in economy, politics, society, and ideas that marked the decade, from the stagflation crisis of the late 1970s to the collapse of the cold war and emergence of a "culture war " at home. Using a mix of primary documents and analytical readings, our task will be to treat this period as history: to map the actual contours of change, to sort through competing explanations for the era's transformations, and to think critically about its legacy.

Today, only a dreamer like John Lennon can "imagine no possessions." However, the idea of society without property has recurred with persistent regularity since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Property has not always been what it seems today, a natural, even inevitable feature of human society. It has a history, and this course will trace that history, showing the ways in which events, politics, and culture shaped property regimes and how property regimes in turn shaped the way people lived.

Today, we can easily imagine science as a way of knowing and film as a medium of communication. Yet throughout the history of science and film, their fates have been woven together. This class explores their histories from the 19th-century origins of film as an experimental tool of visualization and scientific research, through to 21st-century cinematic depictions of scientific theories and adventure. Along the way, we will attend to three major themes: the development of new forms of perception, the politics of representation, and the power to engage and explain. Weekly assignments for the course include both textual and filmic sources.