Global Arc

The course deals with four main topics: the Greek city-state, the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, the formation of medieval European society, and the Renaissance and Reformation. Emphasis will be laid on those social, political, intellectual, and religious developments that contributed most directly to forming modern European civilization. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The emergence of modern societies from the Europe of the Old Regimes. Emphasis on problems and themes, including the French and Industrial Revolutions, nationalism, science and its discontents, popular culture, the mass movements of revolution and war. Intended as an introduction to Europe for students with little background in history. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Until the First World War, empire was the most common form of rule and political organization. This lecture course focuses on the story of the biggest empire in world history, the British Empire, and uses it as a lens through which to examine the phenomenon of empire more broadly. How was a small set of islands briefly able to establish global predominance? What roles did war, race, religion, migration - and luck - play in the process? What was the impact on literature, art, gender, and ways of seeing? And how far do the great powers of today, the USA, China and Russia, retain some of the characteristics of empires in the past?

This course offers a chronological and topical overview of one of the world's most diverse and contested spaces. Sketching the deep linkages between East Africa, the Subcontinent and Southeast Asia, short focused readings and in-depth precepts will highlight such issues as the spread of Buddhism and Islam, the rise of colonialism, the importance of nationalist and third-worldist movements, the struggles for exclusive ethno-religious enclaves and the consequences for diasporic communities with ever-tightening links to the Americas, Europe and Australasia.

Africa is both the Mother and Father Continent: it gave birth to Humankind (as a biological species) and our African ancestors created Human history, Culture, and Civilization. Human and Global History developed literally for hundreds of thousands of years in Africa before it spread worldwide. The depth of Africa's history explains the continent's enormous diversity in terms of, for example, genetics and biodiversity and languages and cultures. Moreover, as the course demonstrates, Africa and its societies were never isolated from the rest of the world. Rather, the continent and its peoples remain very much at the center of global history.

Capitalism has been the dominant form of social and economic organization since the industrial revolution, defining what we eat, what we wear, and how we work. Since its dawn, capitalism has also fueled discontent and revolution. How does a historical perspective give insights for the future? This course is about the history of economic life around the world, from peasant communities in the nineteenth century to fashionistas and wealth managers in the twenty-first century. It looks especially at the technological, institutional, and intellectual forces governing how people survive, flourish, and struggle.

An introduction to the history of the Middle East from the late eighteenth century through the turn of the twenty-first, with an emphasis on the Arab East, Iran, Israel, and Turkey.

This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.

This course is designed to introduce students to the historical processes and issues that have shaped the lives if Indigenous Americans over the past five centuries. We will explore the ways that the diverse peoples who lived in the Americas constructed different kinds of societies and how their goals and political decisions shaped the lives of all those who would come to inhabit the North American continent. The course requires students to read and analyze historical documents and contemporary literature, and includes a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

The course focuses on unconventional historical sources and approaches including oral, spatial, computational, and digital history. Conventional written sources typically reflect the biases of a small elite. Oral history can be used to recapture the history of individuals, groups, and phenomena that written sources have erased. Spatial history (through the use of Geographic Information Systems or GIS), digital history, and computational history greatly enrich the study of the past by adding new types of data and by offering platforms to integrate a great variety of sources in new multi-dimensional, multi-media, and interactive formats.