Global Arc

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.

The international border looms large over current national and international political debates. While this course will consider borders across the world, it will focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, and then on the Guatemala-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border. This course examines the history of the formation of the U.S. border from the colonial period to the present. Borders represent much more than just political boundaries between nation states. The borderlands represents the people who live between two cultures and two nations. This course will also study those individuals who have lived in areas surrounding borders or crossed them.

This course covers the history of African American families. It traces the development of family life, meanings, values, and institutions from the period of slavery up to recent times. The course engages long-standing and current debates about black families in the scholarship across disciplines and in the society at large. The course will look at the diversity of black family arrangements and the way these have changed over time and adapted to internal and external challenges and demands. It will also situate the history of black families within a broader cross-cultural context.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a wave of revolutions swept across the Atlantic world. They shook the empires that had controlled this area of the globe, launched bold new experiments in democratic politics, challenged or overthrew existing social, cultural and religious hierarchies, and were accompanied by considerable violence. This course will examine this remarkable period in world history, concentrating on the American, French and Haitian revolutions, and devoting significant attention to issues of gender and violence, the overall global context, and theories of revolution.

World War II was the crucible of much of the world we now know, not just in geopolitics and economics but also in science and technology. This course focuses three key military technologies that emerged to prominence then: nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and digital computers. Each would define its own "Age" - Atomic, Space, and Information - in the popular imagination. That popular vision is often highly Americanized, located paradigmatically at Norad, Cape Canaveral, and Silicon Valley. As an exercise in interrogating that teleology, we will examine the USSR's own distinctive "Ages" from the end of the war to the post-Soviet era.

Although the word "scientist" was coined in the 1830s, it caught on slowly. Even in 1924, the British journal Nature preferred the term "men of science." This seminar explores the history of how practitioners of science, from Isaac Newton to Neil deGrasse Tyson, sought to define themselves and their research activities. The themes we will discuss include science in the field and lab, the professionalization of science, science on the international stage, gender and science, and the political activism of scientists.