Global Arc

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.

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.