Global Arc

This seminar explores the history of Ukraine from the early 20th century through the present day. Though it covers a rather long period, this course is geared towards the contemporary events in the 21st century. We will try to understand how despite a relatively peaceful transition from communism to independence in the 20th century Ukraine became engulfed by a new war with unprecedented destruction. We start this seminar by setting up historical background of Ukrainian territories between the empire in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. We will end the course with discussion and analysis of most recent events in Ukraine.

Studies of war and society rarely address environmental factors and agency. The relationship between war and environment is often either reduced to a simple environmental determinism or it is depicted as a war against nature and ecosystems, playing down societal dynamics. The seminar explores the different approaches to the war-environment-society nexus and highlights how and why the three spheres should be studied in conjunction. The objective is to assess how and why environmental and societal factors and forces caused and shaped the conflicts and how in turn mass violence shaped societies and how they used and perceived their environments.

In 1917, a new socialist state emerged from the ruins of the old Romanov Empire, and the dreams of several generations of Russian radicals came true. This seminar explores the history of revolutionary ideas and movements in Russia from the 1860s, through the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the emergence of new order in the early 1920s. We will read memoirs of terrorists, as well as cult novels of Russian revolutionary youth and political pamphlets of Russian Marxists and Bolsheviks. We will also analyze the role of women in the radical movement and the dynamics of mass political protests among workers, soldiers and peasants.

From Antiquity to the late Renaissance, objects moved and were moved in the Mediterranean world. Trade goods crossed the ocean. Obelisks, statues and relics traveled great distances to be incorporated into new sacred sites. Automata amazed visitors to courts and awed worshipers in churches. In this course we will map the premodern Mediterranean's trade networks to try to understand how premodern men and women viewed and understood these objects in motion.

Focusing on work class histories on the Indian subcontinent - especially in cities and towns - this course studies the organization of labor from medieval towns to modern megacities. Students will analyze overarching shifts in the structural relationships between classes, as well as the diversity of working class experiences. We will also ask how laborers shaped the evolution of cities and towns across South Asia. Along the way, students will examine the rise of labor rights movements; the relationship between caste and class; the gendering of labor; and processes of urbanization, industrialization, and labor migration.

This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the Roman Jurists of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD and end with the rediscovery of Roman law in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries. Over the course of the intervening millennium, we will focus on pivotal moments and key texts in the development of the legal cultures in Europe and the Middle East. We will trace how legal thought and practice evolved across these areas and think about how law and law-like norms both shape and are shaped by society and social practices.

This seminar explores the history of modern Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict, from the late nineteenth century through the early 2000s. Our focus will be on reading a range of primary sources as well as engaging with scholarly debates. Topics covered include: the origins of Zionism and early Zionist colonization; the rise of Palestinian nationalism; the British Mandate; the war of 1948; regional aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict; the 1967 war and the occupation; Israeli and Palestinian politics, literature and popular culture; the involvement of the United States; and, strategies for reconciliation and peacemaking.

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This course asks you to examine the history of those aspects of United States government that have been called the national security state. This is a history course; it is also intended as something of an old-fashioned civics course, asking you to take part in an exercise of citizenship: to consider fundamental questions about the form of government under which you live and under which you wish to live.

The Reconstruction of the Union, following the American Civil War, remade the United States. This course will examine how Reconstruction set the stage for rest of the Nineteenth century in all its contradictions. One big theme for the course is how the Civil War and Reconstruction shaped American political philosophy, especially how later debates of the Progressive Era over the size of the government and over laissez-faire capitalism developed out of Reconstruction. We will examine some of the major Constitutional and political changes that occur during the aftermath of the Civil War.