Global Arc

The word 'ecology' evokes the scientific discipline that studies the interactions between and among organisms and their environments, and also resonates with the environmental movement of the sixties, green politics, and conservation.This course explores the historical development of ecology as a professional science, before turning to the political and social ramifications of ecological ideas. Throughout the course, we will situate the history of ecological ideas in their cultural, political, and social context.

This course covers key concepts and developments in the history of medicine from Ancient times to the present. We will explore ideas of health and disease in Antiquity, the rise of anatomy and dissection in the Renaissance, the fight against germs in the nineteenth century, and modern practices of health, life and death. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which changing medical views and practices were sustained by contemporary experience of the body. What did it mean to fall ill and get better? How did people understand their relationship to the environment? How could one prevent sickness by living a healthy life?

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.

Drawing on a mixture of historical sources and modern readings, this seminar examines the history of free speech as a western ideal and practice, and explores some of the major questions--philosophical, legal, and political--that its evolution raises for the present. The first six weeks trace its origins and development chronologically, from the 16th to the 19th century. Thereafter, we'll look thematically at key approaches and controversies in the past and present. From blasphemy to pornography, sedition, hate speech, and beyond, how has freedom of speech been defined and experienced in different times and places?

For the first seventy-five years of U.S. history, anti-slavery parties were confined to the radical fringe of national politics. Yet just six years after it was founded in 1854, the Republican Party became the only third party organization in U.S. history to capture the Presidency.The triumph of this new, avowedly anti-slavery was unprecedented: "the revolution of 1860," some called it. But who exactly were these Republicans? How did they rise so far, so fast, and against such mighty obstacles? And what sort of world did they want to build? Using both primary and secondary sources, this seminar will explore these and other vital questions.