Global Arc

How have Black healers and communities conceived of health and healing throughout history? Notions of health and healing and healing practices in the "Black Atlantic" (inclusive of Africa and the Americas) from the era of slavery to the present are the focus of this course. Students will engage with primary sources, historical and sociological scholarship, and historical documentaries concerning healing and Black life.

This is an undergraduate seminar about the urban experiences and representations of the modern city as society. Beginning with the premise that the "soft city" of ideas, myths, symbols, images, and psychic expressions are as important as the "hard city" of bricks and mortar, this course explores the experiences and imaginations of modern cities in different historical contexts. Among cities we will examine are Manchester, London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Algiers, Bombay, and Hong Kong. The course will use a variety of materials, but will focus particularly on cinema to examine different imaginative expressions of the urban experience.

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.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Ethiopia underwent rapid processes of expansion and modernization in the highlands of Northeast Africa, and at the same time became a beacon of hope for global Black movements, perhaps made most visible through Rastafarian culture and beliefs. This course introduces students to the history of the modern Ethiopian state and its role shaping moments and movements in global history. It highlights the way African histories are essential to, but often ignored (or erased) in the telling of modern world history. Students will engage with primary and secondary historical texts, literature, and film.

An examination of the emergence of biology as a scientific discipline since 1750, focusing on the cultural context and social impact of changes in biological knowledge. Particular attention will be paid to changing conceptions of life and how interactions with the physical sciences have shaped the life sciences. We will also interrogate how ideas of biological difference intersected with the normative ordering of humans, particularly along axes of race and gender. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

A survey of mental illness through the ages: how people have diagnosed, treated, and experienced mental illness. The course touches on psychiatric institutions, phrenology and neo-phrenology, Freud and psychoanalysis, the psychopharmacological revolution, global psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, and neuro-enhancement, amongst others.

Albert Einstein is the most renowned, and most recognizable, scientist of the twentieth century - and possibly of all time. (He also bears the even more impressive distinction of being Princeton's most famous resident.) In addition to covering Einstein's core scientific and philosophical contributions, this course uses his life as a frame to explore broader historical issues, including war and pacifism, Zionism and Nazism, civil rights, celebrity, gender, and the nuclear arms race.

The junior seminars serve to introduce departmental majors, in the fall of their junior year, to the tools, methods, and interpretations employed in historical research and writing. Students may choose from a range of topics; assignments to specific seminars are made on the basis of these choices at the beginning of the fall term. Seminar topics tend to be cross-national and comparative. All juniors must be enrolled in one of the seminars. One three-hour seminar.

This seminar covers (some of) the history of women in North America, from the 1600s until the 1960s. It has two central goals: to emphasize the variety of women's experiences that have occurred over four centuries of North American history; and to highlight the centrality of women's history to North American history as a whole. Along the way, we will complicate the category of "women," and come to understand how that category has changed during the period. Understanding the complex history of women in North America is crucial to any larger understanding of the formation and history of the United States - this course will seek to explain why.

The history of the Americas is indelibly marked by mass, violent, racialized enslavement. How did this come about - and how can, and should, we write about it? This class will explore different primary sources, consider the ethical issues they raise, and read brilliant recent work by leading historians of the subject. It will focus mainly on the overlooked epicenter of North American slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries: the islands of the British West Indies, Barbados and Jamaica. It is intended to be collaborative, and to strengthen students' ability to write successful junior and senior theses in history or in any other subject.