Global Arc

This course covers the history of Native Americans until 1838 (the end of forced Removal). It has two central goals: to emphasize the variety of Native American societies and cultures that existed (and exist) in North America, and to highlight the centrality of Native American history to North American history as a whole. Readings will include: the accounts of the travels of Cabeza de Vaca and of John Smith, the Jesuit Relations, the Life of Black Hawk, the journals of Lewis and Clark, several captivity narratives, and Cherokee documents written during Removal.

This course will explore the entangled histories of the USA and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union/Russian Federation from the American Revolution up to the present time. Starting from the late eighteenth century, many observers paid attention to striking similarities and sharp contrasts between the two countries. We will study them on three different levels: 1) foreign policy and international rivalries 2) mutual perception, stereotypes, and "cultural diplomacy" 3) recent interpretations of several common features in American and Russian trajectories of development (frontier, slavery vs serfdom, ethnic and racial conflicts, nationalism, etc.)

Research and reading on topics related to economic development and political change with attention to specific national contexts, such as authoritarian state and society in Argentina and Brazil; revolution and social change in Mexico, Cuba, and Chile; problems in Latin American foreign relations. One three-hour seminar.

This course explores the ways that law structured women's lives and how women shaped the law in U.S. history, from the colonial period to the present. While tracing changes in women's legal status over time, this course is also concerned with those issues, it also considers law as a lived aspect of people's lives: how it structured identities, relationships, and material circumstances. It also deals with diversity among women, in terms of race, class, and sexuality. You will leave with a greater understanding of women's relationship to law and current legal issues facing all Americans, not just women.

This seminar will explore the relationship between revolution and culture in the modern Middle East, with specific reference to the literature and history of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Iran. Readings will consist primarily of novels and memoirs written in the midst of revolution or revolutionary movements in the twentieth and early-twenty-first century in addition to secondary sources on history, social change, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. All readings are in English, though students who wish to read work in Arabic or Persian may do so through consultation with the instructor.

This seminar will examine this global history of anticolonial, anti-racial, and postcolonial thought during the twentieth century. We will read the works by key 20th century anticolonial thinkers and activists - Mahatma Gandhi, WEB Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Edward Said, and others. Will read these historical texts critically and ask: How do they understand colonialism and its relationship between colonial domination and race, culture, and economy? How do they understand colonialism as a global system? How do they think of liberation and world transformation?

What do you know about Marxism? Public discourse and academia in the U.S. often dismiss Marx and the Marxist method: economic determinism at its worst; simplistically teleological; Marxists ignore race, gender, culture, and the environment; the Communist Manifesto sums it all up; Soviet totalitarianism proved its utopian failure. Is all this true? Let's test it. Let's take Marxism seriously. This course begins with fundamental works by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Lenin and then expands to study how social and natural sciences have used the method to explain key processes in their domains.

This seminar will explore how historians can read, interpret and use individual testimonies of different kinds: memoirs, diaries and autobiographies. We will focus on writings of this sort by men and women in Britain and the American Colonies/United States from c.1650 to the First World War. Why did these sorts of texts become increasingly popular on both sides of the Atlantic during that period, and what kinds of challenges and opportunities do they present to historians now?

In this course, we analyze the diversity of encounters between European imperial power and Muslim communities in South Asia. We focus particularly on how Muslim-led social, political, and religious movements negotiated the colonial encounter. Students will explore changing models of religious education, new forms of engagement with pilgrimages, shifting ideas of legality, and rearticulated relationships across sects and with other religious communities. Students will develop historical analytical skills through the study of primary source documents authored by South Asian Muslims with divergent social and political views.

This seminar examines Gandhi's political life extending from his campaign for the rights of Indians in South Africa to his role in the struggle for Indian independence from British rule. Focus on those historical processes that turned M. K. Gandhi into a major 20th-century figure--the Mahatma. Issues relating to imperialism and nationalism form the context in which the seminar looks at Gandhi's life and seeks to understand Gandhian ideology and its different--often conflicting--historical appropriations. One three-hour seminar.