History

This course examines the African American experience in the United States from the colonial period to the contemporary era. It is interdisciplinary in design, using different approaches to considering the history and culture of Africans who gradually became African Americans as the British American colonies became the United States.

 

The Roman Empire, although largely a product of warfare, lasted for half a millennium. In many ways it still survives, embedded in present institutions, explicitly addressed in contemporary architecture and constantly reemerging in literature, cinema and most recently, in computer games. This course primarily focuses on how this big empire came into being and why it lasted for so long. The course reviews the City, the Italian core land, and the provinces in an attempt to answer the following questions about the nature of this empire: How far was life in the provinces aligned with the model of the City? What purpose did monumentalization fulfill? What did it mean to be Roman? What do we know about the economic and social basis of this empire? How much did this empire differ from other contemporary constructs, such as China and Parthia?

This course explores science and environments from European invasions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the 16th century to their legacy in a climate-changed world. Students learn how knowledge is produced through complex and often unequal collaborations of diverse actors. It begins with a critical introduction to key episodes and methods in the history of science, including global, Indigenous, and feminist standpoints. They then venture through thematic weeks—e.g., Islands, Mountains, Arid Lands, Underlands, and Atmospheres—to bring global histories of science and environment into a comparative framework. This course also practices history for the future, asking how historical perspectives can inform contemporary conversations about environmental justice and the value of scientific knowledge.

The first part of the course is introductory and provides the general outlines of the historical development: political, economic, and social of the European continent, as well as of the interaction and circulation of peoples and of the international relations between multinational states and nation-states, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, focusing in the final part also on the processes of European institutional and economic unification. A second part is devoted to an analysis of the early postwar period in Europe, which saw profound political and institutional crises, a new geopolitics on the continent with the emergence of new states, and a phase of revolutions and counterrevolutions in which political violence and social conflicts took on particular magnitude. Starting with Wilsonian proposals and the decisions made at Versailles and imposed by the peace treaties, attention goes to the crisis of democracies, the rise of a new internationalism and trans-nationalism, and communism, and the rise to power of fascism in Italy. On the centenary of the March on Rome, the course takes a close look at 1922 in Italy and at the long repercussions of that historical event on the continent. In addition to an examination of the most recent historiography, the course focuses on sources and especially on analyses, reconstructions and memories relating to fascism's seizure of power written by contemporaries, both opponents and protagonists of the early fascist movement, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Encounters and exchanges among world cultures have been the main driving force behind the extraordinary social, political, cultural, intellectual, scientific, and technological transformations of recent centuries. This course examines the rise of Europe (and then the United States) to global preeminence, which is the central question of world history. Europe was far behind China, India, and the Islamic world, yet dominates the modern world. The course suggests that Western Civilization was uniquely open to innovation, imitating other cultures, and fostering human self-realization. 

This course highlights 1960s, or the “Sixties,” as a puzzling concept in many respects. It uses the concept of the “Sixties” to move beyond both the chronological limits of 1960-1969 and the purely temporal framing of the term. It studies a longer timeframe spanning almost twenty years from the start of the Civil Rights movement (Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955) to the end of the Vietnam War (fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975). It addresses the historical period as defined in international and domestic terms, but also according to geopolitical, political, economic, social, and cultural change; as an era but also a zeitgeist, a time of specific social and cultural effervescence. The course develops a nuanced knowledge of this key period of United States history. Topics include the counterculture, social activism, feminism, and the rises of a New Left and a New Right.

This course explores major themes, patterns, developments, and conflicts in American history, politics, and society, from the pre-colonial era to the present day. Drawing on a range of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, both historical and contemporary, it outlines phases, continuities, and changes in the nation’s history, identifies key ideologies and institutions, introduces theories and analytical methods that shed light on the nation’s development, and highlights how understandings of the present-day United States call for an informed, critical knowledge of its past. The course includes topics such as liberty and equality, individualism and community, nationalism and regionalism, self-reliance and welfare, business and labor, slavery and race, immigration and identity, ethnicity and gender, domestic reform and overseas expansion, and hot and cold wars. It also addresses the growth of the United States from its origins as a British colonial outpost to its contemporary status as global superpower. In addition, the course enables students to produce written work on topics within its subject areas.