History

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the ancient histories of the region in western Asia that is today called the Middle East. There we find the earliest cultures in world history documented with an abundance of sources, including numerous written texts, which allows us to study the first attestations of many elements of life we take for granted, such as writing, cities, laws, empires, and much more. The course aims to provide you with a knowledge of the most important empirical data about these histories and to confront you the impact some of the developments made on human life as well as the difficulties we confront trying to study them.

Required discussion section (DISC) for HIST 1002 (Ancient History of the Middle East)

A review of the history of the Greek world from the beginnings of Greek archaic culture around 800 B.C. through the classical and hellenistic periods to the definitive Roman conquest in 146 B.C. with concentration on political history, but attention also to social and cultural developments.Field(s): ANC

Christianity is a one-semester introduction to the history of classical forms of Christianity, The Church and society in western Europe from its origins to the 16th century Reformation, with emphasis on Western developments (early Christianity, persecutions, heresies, monasticism, Crusades, popular piety, cults of saints, mendicants, universities, civic religion, mysticism, papal authority, Pre-reformation and Reformation), including its interactive dimensions with Islam, Judaism, distant Eastern worlds, and Global contexts.

Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “History of Christianity from the Origins to the Reformation” lecture (HIST 1071)

Themes include Native and colonial cultures and politics, the evolution of American political and economic institutions, relationships between religious and social movements, and connecting ideologies of race and gender with larger processes such as enslavement, dispossession, and industrialization.

This class introduces students to the field of environmental history from a global perspective. Environmental history is the study of the relationship between nature and society over time. It deals with the material environment, cultural and scientific understandings of nature, and the politics of socio-economic use of natural resources. The class combines the study of classic texts that were foundational to the field with modern case studies from all over the world. It addresses questions of global relevance, such as: how did the environment shape human history? How did humans shape the natural environment? How are power relations of class, race and gender embedded in the environment we live in? The class welcomes students from the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities. The goal of the course is to understand how the relationship between environment and society in history led to the current climate crisis.

This course will examine the historical development of crime and the criminal justice system in the United States since the Civil War. The course will give particular focus to the interactions between conceptions of crime, normalcy and deviance, and the broader social and political context of policy making.

Emphasis on foreign policies as they pertain to the Second World War, the atomic bomb, containment, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam. Also considers major social and intellectual trends, including the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture, feminism, Watergate, and the recession of the 1970s.

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the American Civil War as an event in the making of the modern United States and, indeed, of the western world.  Indeed the American Civil War and Reconstruction introduced a whole series of dilemmas that are still with us.  What is the legacy of slavery in U.S. history and contemporary life?  What is the proper balance of power between the states and the central government? Who is entitled to citizenship in the United States?   What do freedom and equality mean in concrete terms?

This course surveys the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in all of its aspects.  It focuses on the causes of the war in the divergent development of northern and southern states; the prosecution of the war and all that it involved, including the process of slave emancipation; and the contentious process of reconstructing the re-united states in the aftermath of Union victory.  The course includes the military history of the conflict, but ranges far beyond it to take the measure of the social and political changes the war unleashed.  It focuses on the Confederacy as well as the Union, on women as well as men, and on enslaved black people as well as free white people.  It takes the measure of large scale historical change while trying to grasp the experience of those human beings who lived through it. 

Through assigned readings and a group research project, students will gain familiarity with a range of historical and social science problems at the intersection of ethnic/racial/sexual formations, technological networks, and health politics since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; benign neglect; urban renewal and gentrification; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; and environmental justice. There are no required qualifications for enrollment, although students will find the material more accessible if they have had previous coursework experience in United States history, pre-health professional (pre-med, pre-nursing, or pre-public health), African-American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, or American Studies.

This course explores the ways organized sport constitutes and disrupts dominant understandings of nation, race, gender, and sexuality throughout the Americas. Working from the notion that sport is “more than a game,” the class will examine the social, cultural and political impact of sports in a variety of hemispheric American contexts from the 19th century until the present. While our primary geographic focus will be the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, the thrust of the course encourages students to consider sports in local, national, and transnational contexts.  The guiding questions of the course are: What is the relationship between sport and society? How does sport inform political transformations within and across national borders? How does sport reinforce and/or challenge social hierarchies? Can sport provide alternative visions of the self and community? Throughout the semester we will examine such topics as: the continuing political struggles surrounding the staging of mega-events such as the Olympics and World Cup, the role of professional baseball in the rise and fall of Jim Crow segregation, the impact of football on the evolution of masculine identities in the U.S., the impact of tennis on the Second-Wave feminist movement, and the role of sports in the growth of modern American cities. Course materials include works by historians, sociologists, social theorists, and journalists who have also been key contributors to the burgeoning field of sports studies. Thus, the course has three objectives:

1) To deepen our understanding of the relationship between sport and society

2) To encourage students to examine the sporting world beyond the frame of the nation-state

3) To consider the promises and challenges of sport as a site of social theory and knowledge production

What is the relationship of sport to politics, the economy, and social change? The current crisis provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement have made this question even more urgent. This course explores the ways organized sport has constituted and disrupted dominant understandings of nation, race, gender, and sexuality throughout the Americas. Working from the notion that sport is “more than a game,” the class will examine the social, economic, cultural, and political impact of sports in distinct hemispheric American contexts from the late 19th century until the present. While our primary geographic focus will be the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, the course encourages students to examine sports in other local, national, and transnational settings. During the summer session we will focus on three themes that exemplify the ways the sporting realm illuminates some of the pressing problems of our time: the conflicts engendered by the staging of mega-events such as the Olympics and World Cup; the impact of sports on the implementation of Title IX, and understandings of gender and sexuality; and football’s impact on the evolution of masculine identities in the U.S.. Course materials include works by historians, sociologists, social theorists, and journalists who have also been key contributors to the burgeoning field of sports studies.

This course aims to give a portrait of the development of Latin America from the first contact with the Europeans to the creation of independent states. We will focus on society and interaction among the various ethnic and socio-economic groups at the level of daily life. For each class, students will have to read sections of a core text as well as a primary source, or document, from the period; before the end of every class there will be 15 minutes to discuss the document together. In addition, students will enroll in discussion sections held by TAs.

This course is an introduction to the medieval Middle East, starting from the Abbasid caliphate at its peak and ending with the establishment of the Timurid empire.  It explores political, social, and intellectual trends that configured the region’s later history, emphasizing both its complexity and interconnectedness. The course will feature not only on the Middle East and North Africa, but also other regions such as North India and Andalusia, considering the role of the Islamicate world in global history. Special attention will be given to political formations, intellectual and social diversity, and Islam as a cultural system. Students will be introduced to a large number of primary sources from different regions, languages, and religious communities, including objects, art, and music. Students will learn to analyze these materials and understand how history is written and made. This course does not presume any foreknowledge of the topic.

Required zero-point/ungraded discussion section for “Medieval Middle East” lecture (HIST 2709)

This course will cover the history of the Middle East from the 18th century until the present, examining the region ranging from Morocco to Iran and including the Ottoman Empire. It will focus on transformations in the states of the region, external intervention, and the emergence of modern nation-states, as well as aspects of social, economic, cultural and intellectual history of the region. Field(s): ME

Unsettling Science invites students to do exactly that: ask big questions about science and interrupt preconceived ideas about what science is and who does it. This course is an introductory dive into the interplay between science, technology, health, environment, and society. By offering deep historical and contemporary perspectives, this course equips students with skills essential to critically exploring not only longstanding questions about the world but also urgent issues of our time. Unsettling Science will provide students with the critical and methodological tools to think creatively about local and global challenges and develop interventions. To do so, the course focuses on a series of fundamental questions that underpin the study of science and society from a variety of perspectives.

During the 2020 US presidential election and the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, science and “scientific truths” were fiercely contested. This course provides a historical perspective on the issues at stake. The course begins with an historical account of how areas of natural knowledge, such as astrology, alchemy, and “natural magic,” which were central components of an educated person’s view of the world in early modern Europe, became marginalized, while a new philosophy of nature (what we would now call empirical science) came to dominate the discourse of rationality. Historical developments examined in this course out of which this new understanding of nature emerged include the rise of the centralized state, religious reform, and European expansion. The course uses this historical account to show how science and pseudoscience developed in tandem in the period from 1400 to 1800. This historical account equips students to examine contemporary issues of expertise, the social construction of science, pluralism in science, certainty and uncertainty in science, as well as critical engagement with contemporary technologies.

Required discussion section for HIST UN2978 lecture.

This course considers how identity increased, limited, controlled, or otherwise shaped the mobility of individuals and groups in the Roman world, including women, slaves, freedpeople, and diaspora communities. We will identify the structures that produced differences in mobility and consider how such groups understood and represented themselves in a variety of media as possessing a specific, shared identity and community. The course will draw on a range of primary sources, including inscriptions and literary texts (both poetry and prose), and cover the period from the second century BCE to the third century CE.

This course explores the meaning of American citizenship in connection with the country’s immigration history. Topics include historic pathways to citizenship for migrants; barriers to citizenship including wealth, race, gender, beliefs and documentation; and critical issues such as colonialism, statelessness, dual nationality, and birthright citizenship. We will ask how have people become citizens and under what authority has that citizenship been granted? What are the historic barriers to citizenship and how have they shifted over time? What major questions remain unanswered by Congress and the Supreme Court regarding the rights of migrants to attain and retain American citizenship?

This seminar challenges students to consider “queer” and “trans” as categories of both experience and analysis in the historical record. We will first take on the theoretical framing of terms such as “queer” and “trans” and question their meaning and usefulness in a historical context. We will consider how we, as historians, can access the past so often rendered invisible in the archives. The course will also seek to understand dominant narratives of gender and sexuality in various periods and contexts in Europe, and then explore what it looked like when individuals and communities acted in ways that did not align with contemporary expectations.

The development of the modern culture of consumption, with particular attention to the formation of the woman consumer. Topics include commerce and the urban landscape, changing attitudes toward shopping and spending, feminine fashion and conspicuous consumption, and the birth of advertising. Examination of novels, fashion magazines, and advertising images.

This class explores the relationship between water and society in history. How did water shape human and environmental histories around the globe? On one hand, oceans and rivers affected the characteristics and resources of different civilizations. Throughout history, every community depended on access to water resources, developed local practices of water management, and produced cultural and scientific understandings of “water.” On the other hand, human attempts at regulating water flows aimed at controlling life itself, as water is essential for life. Hydro-power, before being a renewable source energy, required exerting political power over humans and nature alike.

Grounded in the interdisciplinary approach of the environmental humanities, this class will explore the politics of water management thanks to a wide range of case studies. Starting with the first environmental history of the Mediterranean in the early modern period, we will focus on the last two centuries to examine the roots of the current environmental crisis. By following the politics of water flows, the class will introduce students to key themes in global environmental history, such as the role of geography, climate, race, energy, labor, technology, cities, animals, diseases, and empires in the transformation of human societies. Finally, the class provides foundational historical knowledge to understand the importance of water in contemporary debates about environmental justice and climate change.

Examination of the development of U.S. carceral systems and logics from the late 18th century through the present.  Through course readings and class discussion, students will explore the changes and continuities in technologies of punishment and captivity over time, interrogating how the purpose and political economy of captivity and policing shifted over time, and analyzing the relationship between carceral institutions and constructions of race, gender, and sexuality.

This course examines 20th-century American political movements of the Left and Right. We will cover Socialism and the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century; the Communist Party and right-wing populists of the 1930s; the civil rights movement, black power, and white resistance, 1950s-1960s; the rise of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s; the Women's liberation movement and the Christian right of the 1970s; and finally, free-market conservatism, neoliberalism, white nationalism and the Trump era. We will explore the organizational, ideological and social history of these political mobilizations. The class explores grass-roots social movements and their relationship to “mainstream” and electoral politics. We will pay special attention to the ways that ideas and mobilizations that are sometimes deemed extreme have in fact helped to shape the broader political spectrum. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the present political dilemmas of our country in light of the history that we study.

This course examines the struggle against South African apartheid with a particular focus on the global solidarity movement in the 20th century. The class will examine key turning points in the movement, its connection with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, gendered constructs of apartheid and feminist leadership in the movement, and the circulation of theories of racial capitalism. Students will understand how and why apartheid became a global concern. Students will work on a project using the primary source material available on the African Activist Archive Digital Project at Michigan State University.

This course examines how Africa’s climate has changed in the past and with what consequences for the people living on the continent. It looks at the scope, duration and intensity of past climate events and their impacts, while using these historical climate events to teach fundamental climate concepts.  Central to the course is the human experience of these events and the diversity of their responses. The major question underpinning this course is, therefore, how have people responded to past climate events, whether short-term, decadal or longer in scope? This question is predicated on the complexity of human society and moves away from the binary of collapse vs. resilience that dominates much thinking about the impact of climate changes on past societies. This framing recognizes the significance of climate for food production and collection, as well as trade and cosmologies. It does not take climate to be the determining factor in history. Rather it foregrounds the myriad ways people acted in the face of, for example, multi-decadal below average rainfall or long periods of more reliable precipitation.

This course deals with the scholarship on gender and sexuality in African history. The central themes of the course will be changes and continuities in gender performance and the politics of gender and sexual difference within African societies, the social, political, and economic processes that have influenced gender and sexual identities, and the connections between gender, sexuality, inequality, and activism at local, national, continental, and global scales.

The early sixteenth century rise of the Mughal authority in North India coincided with the arrival of the Portuguese in South India, the emergence of Safavid empire, and the dominance of the Ottoman empire. Within the first hundred years, even more claimants to imperial power in India – the British, the French, the Rajput, the Maratha – were engaged in political negotiations, resistance and accommodation with the Mughal. We will follow the course of the development of Mughal political thought, economic and environmental impact and courtly culture through to their official demise in 1857.

The first four emperors of Mughal India left various accounts for us. Babur (r. 1525–1530), the founder of the dynasty, wrote an autobiography. Memoirs of the second, Humayun (r. 1530–1556), were written by his sister, and others in his army. The third, Akbar (r. 1556–1605) was the subject of the most amazing regnal history-- written by his minister and aide Abu'l Fazl. His son Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), recorded his daily activities and thoughts in his own journal that was published by him. 

To best engage with this complex universe, we will use the semantic vocabulary of ‘seeing’. This course will delve into how Mughal emperors saw their world and how they narrated it. This course is almost exclusively focused on primary readings. We will read large portions of the texts written by the Mughal elite. We will read them to examine their treatment of sacral landscape, nature and environment, gender, social networks, power and violence, agency and interiority, performativity, usage of history and memory.

This focus on memoir and autobiographical writing would allow us to delve far deeply into the socio-cultural worlds of the Mughal then is possible via a perfunctory reading of secondary sources.

This course will analyze the wars for Vietnam in the Cold War era from a multitude of perspectives, vantage points, and mediums. Using the award-winning documentary, The Vietnam War, as the basis of the seminar, students will explore this violent period in Indochinese history that witnessed decolonization movements, revolutionary struggles, state and nation-building, superpower interventions, and devastating warfare. At the same time, the battles that unfolded in mainland Southeast Asia posed geostrategic challenges to former imperial powers and the superpowers of the Cold War era. The class will not only familiarize students with Vietnam's tumultuous history, it introduces the latest debates, newest research, and most recent documentary films on this oft-studied topic.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required. Examines the theory and practice of transnational feminist activism. We will explore the ways in which race, class, culture and nationality facilitate alliances among women, reproduce hierarchical power relations, and help reconstruct gender. The course covers a number of topics: the African Diaspora, suffrage, labor, development policy, colonialism, trafficking, consumerism, Islam, and the criminal justice system.

This seminar will focus particularly on Pascal’s humanistic case for religious faith as a response to Montaigne’s skeptical portrayal of the self.  The aim is to understand all the implications of this encounter for the history of Western thought about human psychology, religion, and politics.

The quarter century during which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union witnessed some of the twentieth century's most dramatic events: history's fastest plunge into modernity, an apocalyptic world war, and the emergence of a socialist state as a competitive world power. This tutorial will offer students a deep dive not only into the historical depths of the Stalin era but into the gloriously complex historiographical debates that surround it. Some of the questions that will animate the readings, writings, and discussions that students will engage in are as follows: Did Stalin depart from or represent a continuation of the policies introduced by his predecessor Vladimir Lenin? Did he rule in a totalitarian fashion or in ways comparable to other twentieth century regimes? Were his policies destructive or possibly productive? And perhaps most boggling of all: why did no one resist Stalinist rule?

Science and technology have become increasingly central to the basic functioning of democratic societies The administrative state, both on the local and national level, is dependent on technological systems to ensure democratic rule and deliver services: from voting machines and welfare databases to passport scanners and the laboratory equipment necessary to set environmental standards. Just as necessary are the numerous experts – engineers, statisticians, epidemiologists, and environmental scientists – who either work for or advise the state in its dealings. How should we think about the technocratic nature of modern democracy? Is it an inevitable and necessary pre-condition for governing modern mass society? Or is it an alarming aspect, an undemocratic impulse, that undermines the promise of democratic rule?The course will examine the coproduction of science and politics. In the first part of the semester, students will gain conceptual tools with which to rethink the connection between science, technology, power, politics, policy, and democracy. They will consider the role of expertise in modern politics, as well as the construction of the public. In the second part of the semester we will consider in greater detail the way technocratic governance developed in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment.

This seminar aims to give a basic knowledge of the history, society, and culture of the Nahuas, one of the main Indigenous groups of Mexico, during the early period, 16th-18th centuries. The Nahuas left a vast and varied corpus of documents written in Nahuatl, a language still in use today. In each class, we will be reading a different set of documents available both in Nahuatl and in English translation and analyze them together to get an understanding of the Nahua world from within. To help us in this analysis, we will be reading also academic works by experts in the field of Indigenous history of early Latin America.

Thanks to a collaboration with Eduardo de la Cruz, director of IDIEZ (Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas) and a native-speaker instructor of Nahuatl, we will have the possibility to learn how Nahuatl is spoken today and how Indigenous people read their own primary sources from the past. The course will have at least one activity with professor de la Cruz built in the class time and accessible via Zoom.

“Archaeology and Heritage in the Ottoman Lands” is an undergraduate/graduate seminar focusing on archaeology, museology, and the notion of heritage throughout the lands under Ottoman rule during the ‘long’ nineteenth century. The objective is to critically reassess the nature of Western antiquarian and archaeological endeavors, and to focus on the local dimension of the question to fill numerous gaps and inconsistencies in the ‘grand narrative’ of Near Eastern archaeology and heritage.

“Ottoman Westernization and Orientalism in the Long 19th Century” is an undergraduate/graduate seminar focusing on the intricate relationship between Westernization and Orientalism in the context of the Ottoman Empire. Based on the assumption that these two concepts cannot be dissociated from one another, it sets out to explore Western/Orientalist perceptions of the empire, Ottoman efforts to Westernize, the emergence of Ottoman Orientalism, and other local reactions such as Occidentalism and anti-Westernism.

This course is designed to provide the foundations for exploring the rich and fascinating history of Islamic manuscripts from the 9th through the 19th century. Its structure is shaped mainly by thematic considerations in a notable chronological fashion. The meetings amount to a series of “cuts” through the topic and cover themes such as the paper revolution, authorship, scribal culture, technologies of book production, readers and their notes, libraries and book collections, or textual as well as extra-textual components of manuscripts. Over the semester, we will study key material, textual, and visual elements of Islamic book culture spanning many centuries and continents, and visit major historiographical questions on the millennium-long history of Islamic manuscript tradition before the widespread adoption of print technology.

This course introduces undergraduate and graduate students to the materials, techniques, contexts, and meanings of skilled craft and artistic practices in early modern Europe (1350-1750), in order to reflect upon a series of topics, including craft knowledge and artisanal epistemology; the intersections between craft and science; and questions of historical methodology in reconstructing the material world of the past.

The course will be run as a “Laboratory Seminar,” with discussions of primary and secondary materials, as well as hands-on work in a laboratory. The first semester long course to use the published Edition of Fr. 640 as its focus, it will test the use of the Edition in a higher education classroom to inform the development of the Companion. This course is associated with the Making and Knowing Project of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University.The first semester-long course to use the published Edition of Fr. 640 as its focus, it will test the use of the Edition in a higher education classroom to inform the development of Phase II of the Making and Knowing Project - a Research and Teaching Companion. Students’ final projects (exploratory and experimental work in the form of digital/textual analysis of Ms. Fr. 640, reconstruction insight reports, videos for the Companion, or a combination) will be published as part of the Companion or the Sandbox depending on content and long-term maintenance considerations.

This is a hands-on, project-driven, Laboratory Seminar that explores the frontiers of historical analysis in the information age. It harnesses the exponential growth in information resulting from the digitization of older materials and the explosion of “born digital” electronic records. Machine learning and natural language processing make it possible to answer traditional research questions with greater rigor, and tackle new kinds of projects that would once have been deemed impracticable. At the same time, scholars now have many more ways to communicate with one another and the broader public, and it is becoming both easier – and more necessary – to collaborate across disciplines. 

This course will create a laboratory organized around a common group of databases in 20th century international history. Students will begin by learning about earlier methodological transformations in literary, cultural, and historical analysis, and consider whether and how the “digital turn” might turn out differently. They will then explore new tools and techniques, including named-entity recognition, text classification, topic modeling, geographic information systems, social and citation network analysis, and data visualization. 

As we turn to specific projects, you will be able to either write a traditional history paper or try an alternative project, either working alone or as part of a team. Papers will entail applying one or more of the digital tools to a specific historical literature/debate or a novel historical topic. Projects might include assembling and “cleaning” a large dataset of documents, prototyping a new tool, launching a web-based exhibit, or drafting a grant application. You will be encouraged to seek out additional training as necessary, conduct experiments, and design ambitious projects that might extend beyond the life of the course. 

The seminar will meet every week, and start with a discussion of the readings. The second hour will be devoted to training in new tools for historical research, as well as individual and small group work. Students will also be encouraged to attend weekly lab meetings, and that will be a requirement of those undertaking alternative projects.

The course is open to students with no training in statistics or computer programming, and no knowledge of international history. But all participants should be open to learning both historical and computational research skills, such as the critical reading of primary source documents and oral history interviewing on the one hand, and scraping websites, querying databases, and using data visualization tools on the other. 

HIST 6998 GR is a twin listings of an undergraduate History lecture provided to graduate students for graduate credit. If a graduate student enrolls, she/he/they attends the same class as the undergraduate students (unless otherwise directed by the instructor). Each instructor determines additional work for graduate students to complete in order to receive graduate credit for the course. Please refer to the notes section in SSOL for the corresponding (twin) undergraduate 1000 or 2000 level course and follow that course's meeting day & time and assigned classroom. Instructor permission is required to join.

This course will situate the Jewish book within the context of the theoretical and historical literature on the history of the book: notions of orality and literacy, text and material platform, authors and readers, print and manuscript, language and gender, the book trade and its role in the circulation of people and ideas in the early age of print.

Since the eighteenth century, defenders of the Enlightenment have heralded their project as a world-historical event. This colloquium aims to introduce graduate students to the emerging scholarly literature on the global Enlightenment. The field now casts far beyond the cohort of free-thinking European philosophers around which it was initially conceived to encompass the broader cultural, economic, and religious preoccupations of the long eighteenth century—from Paris to Port-au-Prince, from Manchester to Madras, from Nantes to Nanjing. Given these tendencies, how has the significance of the Enlightenment expanded both as a historical period and interpretive framework? In what ways do scholars explicate its origins and outcomes in light of renewed attention to its global reach? In response to such questions, the readings will trace the development of Enlightenment thought and practices in dialogue with interlocutors from around the early modern world: Jesuit missionaries, European colonial trading company officials, French philosophes, African voodoo healers, Scottish political economists, Native American fur traders, Confucian scholars, Brahmin cultural elites, and reform-minded Muslim sultans. Topics to be addressed include the relationship between traditional political and religious authorities to the global public sphere, the search for historical, philosophical, and linguistic origins, entrepreneurial and epistemological innovations made possible by transatlantic and Eurasian encounters, debates surrounding effects of luxury in early capitalist society, and the multiple sites of knowledge production that defined the Enlightenment in word and in deed.

This course offers a sample of historical research on debates around African-American intelligence, mental health, family organization, and other social scientific controversies from the era of slavery to the late 20th century. The principal assignment is a lesson plan, instructions for which will be supplied on the CourseWorks site.

Please note that you may not take this course as an auditor or pass/fail without the permission of the instructor.

Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences guidelines may be found at http://gsas.columbia.edu/. Those for the history department may be found at http://history.columbia.edu/graduate/index.html.

This course introduces graduate students to advanced scholarship in early American history, focusing on the historical development of North America c. 1607-1850 CE. While the course will take recent monographs as its starting point, students will also put these new books in conversation with older works of historical scholarship, developing their understanding of important issues and ongoing debates in the field. Graduate students working in related fields (e.g., Atlantic history, early American literature, early modern history) are welcome to join.

This course is designed to introduce all first-year graduate students in History to major books and problems of the discipline. It aims to familiarize them with historical writings on periods and places outside their own prospective specialties. This course is open to Ph.D. students in the department of History ONLY.

The workshop provides a forum for advanced PhD students (usually in the 3rd or 4th year) to draft and refine the dissertation prospectus in preparation for the defense, as well as to discuss grant proposals. Emphasis on clear formulation of a research project, sources and historiography, the mechanics of research, and strategies of grant-writing. The class meets weekly and is usually offered in both fall and spring semesters.

Consistent attendance and participation are mandatory.