History

This course surveys the history of the Roman Empire from Augustus to Theodoric. The course begins by exploring the expansion of Rome in Italy and the Mediterranean, then considers Augustus's rise to power and the principate. It then shifts perspective and asks what being Roman looked like from the periphery by using evidence from the province of Britannia. After studying the world of the 2nd century, the course then looks at the instability of the 3rd and Constantine's transformation of the Roman world into a Christian one divided between East and West. Finally, the course examines the breakup of the Roman world and the rise of the successor kingdoms. Students are introduced to the study of primary historical sources, with a focus on biography, and learn how these can be used to construct historical arguments.

This course traces history's history in Britain and Ireland through a variety of avenues. The careers and works of the great representatives of both countries - Macaulay, Carlyle and Froude Stubbs, Acton, Maitland, and Gardiner in England, and Taaffe, Ferguson, Pendergast, Lecky, Gilbert, Bagwell, Orpen, and McNeill in Ireland are examined. The structures and contexts of research, teaching, and publication is explored. And a critical analysis of the great themes of the leading historical works - the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, Cromwell, Empire, and the running sore of Ireland - reveal the degree to which contemporary ideological preoccupations influenced supposedly detached historical interpretations.

Few events in the modern history of Asia and the Pacific have been as important or as transformative as the Second World War. This course explores the far-reaching effects that this conflict had on the state, society, and individuals in, and between Japan, China, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British and French Empires. Importantly, this course examines how this conflict helped change war—conceptually and in real terms—from a narrowly defined engagement between military forces to one that encompassed a ‘total experience' involving the mobilization of virtually all segments of society. This course also traces the interconnectedness between the transformation of war and the development of new technology, changed concepts of morality, ‘just war,' and altered perceptions concerning the relationship between the state and society, the soldier and the civilian. Finally, this course helps students understand more fully how and why this war, and the numerous acts of barbarism that defined it, still influence relations today on personal, national, and international levels in Asia and the Pacific.

This course provides a study of the medieval extra-European world, paying close attention to the historical processes in the Eastern Mediterranean (Europe and Africa) and western and central Asia, and the historical development of societies and peoples located in those regions. It examines the different civilizations that developed in the Eastern Mediterranean between the 4th to the 15th centuries as well as key social, political, economic and cultural aspects.

This course introduces students to the field of global history - one of the fastest growing and most dynamic areas of historiography today. Just as we live in an ever more "globalized" world, so have historians become increasingly interested in the ways that past societies interacted with each other on a global basis. There are a number of key themes in global history: the limitations of the nation-state, going beyond Eurocentric perspectives, the spread of capitalism, empire as an enduring form of political organization, and the relationship between the universal and the particular. Nevertheless, Global history is a wide and evolving field that contains differing and contrasting approaches. To what extent is globalization a product of western domination in the post-industrial age? Can we narrate global history through a single person (for example an artist), village, or object, or must we construct grand narratives that encompass the entire world? Is it acceptable for global historians to synthesize the more localized primary research of other historians, or should they consult their own primary sources?

This course examines some of the fundamental processes of the historical evolution of Chile in the 19th century, such as the transition from Colony to Republic, the republican organization, the integration into the world market, the exercise of sovereignty, and the formation of the nation. It also identifies and explains the social and cultural characteristics of society, relating the political and economic processes with the living conditions of the population.

This course explores the sound track to life in modern Britain. From the concert culture and street ballads of the late eighteenth century to the brass bands and music halls of the Victorians, and from the dawn of the ‘Jazz Age’ to rock ‘n’ roll, punk and beyond, this course focuses on the ways in which music has shaped, and been shaped by, British society. Transformative processes – the Industrial Revolution, democratization, imperial expansion and decline, campaigns for gender, racial and sexual equality, to name a few – have all made their mark on British music, just as British music has played its part in bringing these changes into being. The course revolves around a series of repeating thematic motifs whose development we will track from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. In these years, music became a way of defining class hierarchies, enforcing women’s social marginalization, and projecting British imperial power. And yet it was also a weapon of resistance that offered a sense of solidarity, of identity, of dignity, to those marginalized in British life; the musical lives and struggles of the working classes, of women, and of Black and Asian British communities are central to this history. This is also a course designed by a historian, for historians. While music is our central focus, an ability to read music is not required. Our emphasis will be on the social and cultural meanings of music-making and listening, meanings that are accessible through a wide range of sources, from diaries, memoirs, letters, magazines, newspapers, and official archives to visual images and material culture. That said, we will do plenty of listening to music as we seek to understand how the form that music took – the nature of the sounds being created – reflected and challenged social values and norms. While this course finishes with the sounds of Britpop in the 1990s, poised on the verge of our current internet age which has opened a new chapter in musical life, the implications of our study of music and social change in modern Britain carry important legacies that continue to define the music and society of today.