Global Arc

Explores the 300-year history of what has been described as an "impossible but inevitable city." Settled on perpetually eroding swampland at the foot of one of the world's great waterways, this port city served as an outpost of three empires and a gateway linking the N. American heartland with the Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Atlantic World. A unique crossroads of capitalism and cultures, New Orleans is, as one writer puts it, "an alternative American history all in itself." From European and African settlement through Hurricane Katrina, we'll consider how race, culture, and the environment have defined the history of the city and its people.

The prison is a growth industry in the U.S.; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

An in-depth exploration of a topic in American legal history. In some years the course will investigate an event, such as a famous or infamous trial or case. In other years the course will explore historical dimensions of a particular legal concept, such as "rights," "coercion," "dependency," the "family," or "property." One three-hour seminar.

This seminar course examines how people during the early Middle Ages defined their existence through negotiated boundaries of gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and the human condition. Our work will curate the contributions of marginalized groups to decenter traditional narratives. Students will leave this course with a broad understanding of early medieval history, an appreciation of historical work done by people often omitted from our histories, and a mastery of historical and interdisciplinary tools for promoting awareness and understanding marginalized groups.

Knowledge is produced by people in conflict. In this course we will read across the seventeenth century's broad intellectual currents to consider artistic, philosophic, and historical knowledge as products of opposition and rivalry. What does it mean to stake out a radical or a conservative position in the seventeenth century? Can one be a reactionary without a concept of progress? Does the concept of progress exist in Europe before the Enlightenment? What role does representation play in these issues? We will investigate major figures including Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Perrault, Rubens, and Velazquez.

Do you ever wonder how and why the objects and landscapes you pass every day or see from a plane got to be as they are now? This seminar teaches you how to "read" things and built and unbuilt landscapes, and how historical archaeologists, anthropologists, historical ecologists and historians have used the material realm to understand the past in ways they could not through written records alone. The course is local and global in focus, covering different epochs of human societies in Princeton, its environs, and the broader world. You will be able to practice new material literacy skills in field trips and in projects for public audiences.

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.