Search Results
Your search for courses · during 24FA, 25WI, 25SP · tagged with HIST Modern · returned 23 results
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HIST 100 Exploration, Science, and Empire 6 credits
This course provides an introduction to the global history of exploration. We will examine the scientific and artistic aspects of expeditions, and consider how scientific knowledge–navigation, medicinal treatments, or the collection of scientific specimens–helped make exploration, and subsequently Western colonialism, possible. We will also explore how the visual and literary representations of exotic places shaped distant audiences’ understandings of empire and of the so-called races of the world. Art and science helped form the politics of Western nationalism and expansion; this course will explore some of the ways in which their legacy remains with us today.
Held for new first year students
- Fall 2024
- AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1 IS, International Studies
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Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.
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HIST 100.01 Fall 2024
- Faculty:Antony Adler 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLeighton 202 11:10am-12:20pm
- FLeighton 202 12:00pm-1:00pm
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HIST 100 U.S.-Latin American Relations: A Declassified View 6 credits
“Colossus of the North” or “Good Neighbor”? While many of its citizens believe the United States wields a benign influence across the globe, the intent and consequences of the U.S. government’s actions across Latin America and Latin American history offers a decidedly more mixed picture. This course explores the history of Inter-American relations with an emphasis on the twentieth century and the Cold War era. National case studies will be explored, when possible through the lens of declassified U.S. national security documents. Latin American critiques of U.S. involvement in the region will also be considered.
Held for new first year students
- Fall 2024
- AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1 IS, International Studies
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Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.
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HIST 100.02 Fall 2024
- Faculty:Andrew Fisher 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLeighton 202 9:50am-11:00am
- FLeighton 202 9:40am-10:40am
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HIST 100 Music and Politics in Europe since Wagner 6 credits
This course examines the often fraught, complicated relationship between music and politics from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Our field of inquiry will include all of Europe, but will particularly focus on Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. We will look at several composers and their legacies in considerable detail, including Beethoven, Wagner, and Shostakovich. While much
of our attention will be devoted to "high" or "serious" music, we will explore developments in popular music as well.Held for new first year students
- Fall 2024
- AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1 IS, International Studies
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Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.
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HIST 100.05 Fall 2024
- Faculty:David Tompkins 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- M, WLeighton 301 9:50am-11:00am
- FLeighton 301 9:40am-10:40am
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HIST 100 Food and Public Health: Why the Brits Embraced White Bread 6 credits
Food, health, medicine, public policy and the built environment… all were transformed as Britain industrialized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This course explores how cultural, social and economic changes shaped the culture of food consumption during this transitional period. We also explore changing ideas in medical history and public health from the early modern to modern period. We will consider how our historical understanding can inform our views of the present through an academic civic engagement project that will connect students to Northfield communities.
Held for new first year students
- Fall 2024
- AI/WR1, Argument & Inquiry/WR1 IS, International Studies
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Student is a member of the First Year First Term class level cohort. Students are only allowed to register for one A&I course at a time. If a student wishes to change the A&I course they are enrolled in they must DROP the enrolled course and then ADD the new course. Please see our Workday guides Drop or 'Late' Drop a Course and Register or Waitlist for a Course Directly from the Course Listing for more information.
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HIST 100.06 Fall 2024
- Faculty:Susannah Ottaway 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THLeighton 202 1:15pm-3:00pm
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HIST 112 Freedom of Expression: A Global History 6 credits
Celebrated as the bedrock of democracy, freedom of expression is often seen as an American or western value. Yet the concept has a rich and global history. In this course we will track the long and turbulent history of freedom of expression from ancient Athens and medieval Islamic societies to the Enlightenment and the drive for censorship in totalitarian and colonial societies. Among the questions we will consider are: How have the parameters of free expression changed and developed over time? What is the relationship between free speech and political protest? How has free speech itself been weaponized? How does an understanding of the history of free speech help us think about the challenges of combating hatred and misinformation in today’s internet age?
- Winter 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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HIST 112.00 Winter 2025
- Faculty:Amna Khalid 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 330 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLeighton 330 2:20pm-3:20pm
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HIST 116 Intro to Indigenous Histories, 1887-present 6 credits
Many Americans grow up with a fictionalized view of Indigenous people (sometimes also called Native Americans/American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians within the U.S. context). Understanding Indigenous peoples’ histories, presents, and possible futures requires moving beyond these stereotypes and listening to Indigenous perspectives. In this class, we will begin to learn about Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and the Pacific through tribal histories, legislation, Supreme Court cases, and personal narratives. The course will focus on the period from 1887 to 2018 with major themes including (among others) agency, resistance, resilience, settler colonialism, discrimination, and structural racism.
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HIST 116.00 Spring 2025
- Faculty:Meredith McCoy 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- T, THLeighton 426 1:15pm-3:00pm
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HIST 125 Roots and Resistance: Africa to the U.S. Civil War 6 credits
This course is a survey of early African American history. It will introduce students to major themes and events while also covering historical interpretations and debates in the field. Core themes of the course include migration, conflict, and culture. Beginning with autonomous African politics, the course traces the development of the United States through the experiences of enslaved and free African American women and men to the Civil War. The main aim of the course is for students to become familiar with key issues and developments in African American history and their centrality to understanding U.S. history.
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HIST 125.00 Fall 2024
- Faculty:Rebecca Brueckmann 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- T, THLeighton 236 3:10pm-4:55pm
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HIST 126 Black Freedom: Reconstruction to #BlackLivesMatter 6 credits
This course analyzes Black Freedom activism, its goals, and protagonists from Reconstruction until today. Topics include the evolution of racial segregation and its legal and de facto expressions in the South and across the nation, the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance, Black activism in the New Deal era, the effects of World War II and the Cold War, mass activism in the 1950s and 1960s, white supremacist resistance against Black rights, Black Power activism and Black Internationalism, the “War on Drugs,” racialized welfare state reforms, and police brutality, the election of Barack Obama, and the path to #BlackLivesMatter today.
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HIST 126.00 Winter 2025
- Faculty:Rebecca Brueckmann 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- T, THLeighton 202 1:15pm-3:00pm
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HIST 141 Europe in the Twentieth Century 6 credits
This course explores developments in European history in a global context from the final decade of the nineteenth century through to the present. We will focus on the impact of nationalism, war, and revolution on the everyday experiences of women and men, and also look more broadly on the chaotic economic, political, social, and cultural life of the period. Of particular interest will be the rise of fascism and communism, and the challenge to Western-style liberal democracy, followed by the Cold War and communism's collapse near the end of the century.
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HIST 141.00 Fall 2024
- Faculty:David Tompkins 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- M, WLeighton 426 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 426 1:10pm-2:10pm
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HIST 161 From Mughals to Mahatma Gandhi: An Introduction to Modern Indian History 6 credits
An introductory survey course to familiarize students with some of the key themes and debates in the historiography of modern India. Beginning with an overview of Mughal rule in India, the main focus of the course is the colonial period. The course ends with a discussion of 1947: the hour of independence as well as the creation of two new nation-states, India and Pakistan. Topics include Oriental Despotism, colonial rule, nationalism, communalism, gender, caste and race. No prior knowledge of South Asian History required.
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HIST 161.00 Winter 2025
- Faculty:Amna Khalid 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- M, WLeighton 202 11:10am-12:20pm
- FLeighton 202 12:00pm-1:00pm
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HIST 170 Modern Latin America 6 credits
This course focuses on some of the principal challenges that Latin Americans have confronted over the first two centuries of post-colonial existence (ca. 1820-2020). Case studies will highlight themes and concerns still pertinent today, such as: political instability and authoritarianism, economic underdevelopment and poverty, neo-colonial challenges to national sovereignty, deeply ingrained socioeconomic and racial inequalities, and popular struggles to attain meaningful political, economic, and cultural rights, among others.
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HIST 170.00 Winter 2025
- Faculty:Andrew Fisher 🏫 👤
- Size:30
- M, WLeighton 236 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 236 1:10pm-2:10pm
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HIST 205 American Environmental History 6 credits
Environmental concerns, conflicts, and change mark the course of American history, from the distant colonial past to our own day. This course will consider the nature of these eco-cultural developments, focusing on the complicated ways that human thought and perception, culture and society, and natural processes and biota have all combined to forge Americans’ changing relationship with the natural world. Topics will include Native American subsistence strategies, Euroamerican settlement, industrialization, urbanization, consumption, and the environmental movement. As we explore these issues, one of our overarching goals will be to develop an historical context for thinking deeply about contemporary environmental dilemmas.
- Winter 2025, Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies
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HIST 220 From Blackface to Blaxploitation: Black History and/in Film 6 credits
This course focuses on the representation of African American history in popular US-American movies. It will introduce students to the field of visual history, using cinema as a primary source. Through films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the seminar will analyze African American history, (pop-)cultural depictions, and memory culture. We will discuss subjects, narrative arcs, stylistic choices, production design, performative and film industry practices, and historical receptions of movies. The topics include slavery, racial segregation and white supremacy, the Black Freedom Movement, controversies and conflicts in Black communities, Black LGBTQIA+ history, ghettoization and police brutality, Black feminism, and Afrofuturism.
Extra time
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HIST 220.00 Spring 2025
- Faculty:Rebecca Brueckmann 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 236 10:10am-11:55am
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HIST 229 Working with Gender in U.S. History 6 credits
Historically work has been a central location for the constitution of gender identities for both men and women; at the same time, cultural notions of gender have shaped the labor market. We will investigate the roles of race, class, and ethnicity in shaping multiple sexual divisions of labor and the ways in which terms such as skill, bread-winning and work itself were gendered. Topics will include domestic labor, slavery, industrialization, labor market segmentation, protective legislation, and the labor movement.
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HIST 229.00 Spring 2025
- Faculty:Annette Igra 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 202 10:10am-11:55am
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HIST 245 Ireland: Land, Conflict and Memory 6 credits
This course explores the history of Ireland from Medieval times through the Great Famine, ending with a look at the Partition of Ireland in 1920. We examine themes of religious and cultural conflict and explore a series of English political and military interventions. Throughout the course, we will analyze views of the Irish landscape, landholding patterns, and health and welfare issues. Finally, we explore the contested nature of history and memory as the class discusses monuments and memory production in Irish public spaces.
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HIST 245.00 Winter 2025
- Faculty:Susannah Ottaway 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 426 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 426 1:10pm-2:10pm
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HIST 262 Borders Drawn in Blood: The Partition of Modern India 6 credits
India’s independence in 1947 was marred by its bloody partition into two nation states. Neighbors turned on each other, millions were rendered homeless and without kin, and gendered violence became rampant, all in the name of religion. Political accounts of Partition are plentiful, but how did ordinary people experience it? Centering the accounts of people who lived through Partition, this course explores how divisions and differences calcified, giving birth to national and religious narratives that obscure histories of intersecting identities. With right wing Hindu nationalism ascendant in India and Islamic nationalism in Pakistan on the rise, Partition alas is not over.
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HIST 262.00 Fall 2024
- Faculty:Amna Khalid 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- T, THLeighton 426 1:15pm-3:00pm
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HIST 265 Central Asia in the Modern Age 6 credits
Central Asia–the region encompassing the post-Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and the Xinjiang region of the People’s Republic of China–is often considered one of the most exotic in the world, but it has experienced all the excesses of the modern age. After a basic introduction to the long-term history of the steppe, this course will concentrate on exploring the history of the region since its conquest by the Russian and Chinese empires. We will discuss the interaction of external and local forces as we explore transformations in the realms of politics, society, culture, and religion.
Participation in 2025 Spring Russophone Studies in Central Asia
- Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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Acceptance in the Russophone Studies in Central Asia program.
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HIST 270 Nuclear Nations: India and Pakistan as Rival Siblings 6 credits
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 India and Pakistan, two new nation states emerged from the shadow of British colonialism. This course focuses on the political trajectories of these two rival siblings and looks at the ways in which both states use the other to forge antagonistic and belligerent nations. While this is a survey course it is not a comprehensive overview of the history of the two countries. Instead it covers some of the more significant moments of rupture and violence in the political history of the two states. The first two-thirds of the course offers a top-down, macro overview of these events and processes whereas the last third examines the ways in which people experienced these developments. We use the lens of gender to see how the physical body, especially the body of the woman, is central to the process of nation building. We will consider how women’s bodies become sites of contestation and how they are disciplined and policed by the postcolonial state(s).
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HIST 270.00 Spring 2025
- Faculty:Amna Khalid 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 236 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 236 1:10pm-2:10pm
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HIST 276 In Search of Moctezuma: Reimagining Mexico’s Indigenous Past 6 credits
Even while still on the campaign trail, Spain’s conquistadors endeavored to describe Mexico's native societies to other Europeans. Thus began a centuries-long fascination with all things Mesoamerican, real and imaginary. This course explores how the Mesoamerican past has been imagined by indigenous and non-indigenous people. Potential subjects include Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, early Mexican nation-builders and artists, professional and pseudo-archaeologists, apocalyptic doomsayers, promoters of the Mexican tourist industry, and the counterculture and Chicano movements of the 1960s. Importantly, we will also consider how Mexico's indigenous groups have come to understand their own past from the time of Spanish rule to the present day.
- Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IS, International Studies
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HIST 276.01 Spring 2025
- Faculty:Andrew Fisher 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 301 1:50pm-3:00pm
- FLeighton 301 2:20pm-3:20pm
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HIST 287 From Alchemy to the Atom Bomb: The Scientific Revolution and the Making of the Modern World 6 credits
This course examines the growth of modern science since the Renaissance with an emphasis on the Scientific Revolution, the development of scientific methodology, and the emergence of new scientific disciplines. How might a history of science focused on scientific networks operating within society, rather than on individual scientists, change our understanding of “genius,” “progress,” and “scientific impartiality?” We will consider a range of scientific developments, treating science both as a body of knowledge and as a set of practices, and will gauge the extent to which our knowledge of the natural world is tied to who, when, and where such knowledge has been produced and circulated.
- Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry WR2 Writing Requirement 2
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HIST 287.00 Spring 2025
- Faculty:Antony Adler 🏫 👤
- Size:25
- M, WLeighton 330 12:30pm-1:40pm
- FLeighton 330 1:10pm-2:10pm
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HIST 308 American Cities and Nature 6 credits
Since the nation’s founding, the percentage of Americans living in cities has risen nearly sixteenfold, from about five percent to the current eighty-one percent. This massive change has spawned legions of others, and all of them have bearing on the complex ways that American cities and city-dwellers have shaped and reshaped the natural world. This course will consider the nature of cities in American history, giving particular attention to the dynamic linkages binding these cultural epicenters to ecological communities, environmental forces and resource flows, to eco-politics and social values, and to those seemingly far-away places we call farms and wilderness.
HIST 205 is recommended but not required.
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HIST 308.00 Spring 2025
- Faculty:George Vrtis 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THLibrary 344 10:10am-11:55am
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HIST 320 The Progressive Era? 6 credits
Was the Progressive Era progressive? It was a period of social reform, labor activism, and woman suffrage, but also of Jim Crow, corporate capitalism, and U.S. imperialism. These are among the topics that can be explored in research papers on this contradictory era. We will begin by reading a brief text that surveys the major subject areas and relevant historiography of the period. The course will center on the writing of a 25-30 page based on primary research, which will be read and critiqued by members of the seminar.
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HIST 320.00 Winter 2025
- Faculty:Annette Igra 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THLeighton 303 10:10am-11:55am
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HIST 347 The Global Cold War 6 credits
In the aftermath of the Second World War and through the 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for world dominance. This Cold War spawned hot wars, as well as a cultural and economic struggle for influence all over the globe. This course will look at the experience of the Cold War from the perspective of its two main adversaries, the U.S. and USSR, but will also devote considerable attention to South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Students will write a 20 page paper based on original research.
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HIST 347.00 Spring 2025
- Faculty:David Tompkins 🏫 👤
- Size:15
- T, THLeighton 301 10:10am-11:55am
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