Global Arc

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality from 1900 to the present, with emphasis on both regulation and resistance. Topics include early homosexual subcultures; the commercialization of sex; reproduction and its limitation; sex, gender, and war; cold war sexual containment; the feminist movement; conservative backlash; AIDS politics; same-sex marriage; Hillary; Trump 2.0; and many others.

From colonial settlement to the present, this course weaves a comprehensive history of American cities. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of "melting pots" and innovation, as well as crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; downtown and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course will serve as an intensive historical survey on the rise of mass popular culture and entertainment from roughly 1800 to 1980 and will investigate the ways multiethnic American popular culture (photography, rock 'n' roll, jazz, sports, film, radio, and other forms of multimedia and expressive culture) was influenced by and shaped the American political landscape, race relations, labor, gender, sexuality, technology, and urbanization. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

In our contemporary world, science, technology, and medicine enjoy tremendous cultural and intellectual authority. This class introduces a set of analytical tools historians use to understand the origins and consequences of these ways of knowing, across space and time. We will discuss a variety of ideas and methods that describe the social, cultural, and intellectual conditions of possibility for creating knowledge about the natural world. In addition, the class materials invite students to reflect on the cultural and intellectual constraints that shape how societies determine which knowledge is worth pursuing and why.

This course examines ebbs and flows in U.S. drug policy, and how issues of race and identity inform the creation, implementation, impact, and dismantling of substance control policy. From "Chinese opium" in the 19th c. to "Hillbilly heroin" (as OxyContin was once labeled) and from "crack" cocaine to menthol cigarettes and marijuana, we examine the forces shaping drug policies, how policies are transformed, why they change, and what drug laws reveal about society. We also examine how social, political, and economic circumstances shape drug policies, and how the US built a vast system governing people and the substances they can and cannot use.

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.