History

This course examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this course examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels, and video games. It also engages students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals. This is the Fall only version of the course.

This course examines commercial linkages and transformations across the Indian Ocean region over the last 500 years. It covers spices that brought European traders and conquerors to Asian shores; commodities like tea, opium and cotton that have shaped the modern world; and fossil fuels, among the most valuable and contentious commodities of the present age.

This course examines the definition of propaganda and the persuasion of the masses in the contemporary world. It relies on several disciplines (history, communication, sociology, political sciences, social psychology, art history, and neuroscience) and puts into perspective the evolution of propaganda and persuasion from the "age of paper" through the "digital age." Students analyze a multitude of platforms (text, fixed images, animated images, sound, objects, and monuments) by using both a theoretical and empirical approach. Along with a methodology of writing and presentation, this course explores critical analysis in a global perspective and techniques of forming public opinion.

The opening of secret-police archives in Eastern Europe over the past three decades has constituted an archival revolution for historians. The newly-available materials have provided additional insight not only into the social and political history of communism, but also into the tools, methods, and tactics of repression employed by modern dictatorships. This course examines the English-language historical scholarship about the Soviet and Soviet-bloc state security services, including works about their role and place in East European politics and society. The opening of the records after 1989, their availability to researchers, their relative usefulness as sources, and the impact of their opening on politics and society is also discussed, along with the legacies of the communist secret police themselves. Can one speak of an emerging international or transnational historiography on the communist-era secret police, or does the scholarship about them remain largely national (or even nationalistic)?

This course provides a study of the historical evolution of Spain and Latin America from the reign of the Catholic Monarchs to the present. It covers different aspects of political, economic and social organization that occurred during significant historical changes and events.

In this course, students examine the development of Jewish life across Europe. Topics include emancipation and integration; Jewish life in the Russian empire and in Eastern Europe; the emergence of different forms of Judaism; antisemitism; mass migration; and radical politics, gender issues, and varieties of Jewish national politics.