History Department

HIST 205 - The Twentieth-Century Middle East through Music

This course is a survey of the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa region, using the lens of music to approach that history, from the early twentieth century to the present. The course will focus on the Arabic-speaking countries of the region, particularly the Maghrib (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Egypt, and the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Jordan). Taking a critical cultural approach, we will learn how music can be a window into a broader understanding of political and social histories, and how musical traditions have shaped and been shaped by their historical contexts. Special attention will be given to race, gender, class, religion, colonialism, nationalism and state building, Orientalism, and the politics of knowledge production in the region's history.

HIST 206 - Anti-Colonial Movements in Africa and the Middle East

Th

HIST 207 - Gender in the Middle East

Th

HIST 215 - Environmental History of US Empire

Th

HIST 223 - Early Modern China and the World: 1300-1900

This course surveys the history of China from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, tracing the rise and fall of the Ming dynasty, the Manchu conquest, and the disintegration of the Qing empire. This course will not only "discover history in China," but also situate China in a global context by discussing the flow of peoples, goods, and ideas into and out of China. After the Silk Road connecting the Eurasian continent declined with the end of the Pax Mongolica, China continued to be an engine of the Afro-Eurasia network and began to interact with the Americas. However, since the Great Divergence in the 1750s, China has scrambled to join a new international order. By analyzing the exchanges between China and other regions, students will understand how the concept of China was in flux and the dynamic role of China in the early modern world.

HIST 224 - Modern China through Foreign Eyes: 1800-1980

Th

HIST 225 - The History of Slavery and Human Trade in East Asia Since 1200

This course examines the history of slavery and human trade in East Asia from 1200 up to now. We will explore questions such as: Was East Asia a slaveholding region? How did people in East Asia enter and exit from slavery? How were the human markets in East Asia operated locally and globally? How were family practices, such as adoption, marriage, and concubinage, entangled with slavery? How did Confucianism, the dominant ideology in premodern East Asia, conceptualize and legitimize the relationship between slaves and masters? What are modern forms of coerced labor in China, Japan, and Korea? How could the East Asian histories of slavery and human trade contribute to international efforts in combating unfree labor and human trafficking worldwide? At the end of our class, we will reflect on globalized concepts-such as freedom, coerced labor, and property rights-and their applications from non-Western perspectives.

HIST 231 - Crime and Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

哈

HIST 240 - World Environmental History

Th

HIST 242 - The Love and Destruction of Nature: Romanticism in the Time of Settler Colonialism

This course studies the history of the idea of nature in American thought, from the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century to the development of environmentalist thought and organizations in the twentieth century. The course will contextualize that history in two ways: in relationship to the formation of the United States through settler colonialism and the death and displacement of Indigenous peoples, land, and culture; and in relationship to the capitalist exploitation of nature that has fundamentally reshaped the ecological communities that live in and across U.S. political space. The course will ask what it means-politically, ethically, and philosophically-to love nature in the wake of environmental and cultural destruction.

HIST 253 - History of Reading from Gutenberg to Chat GPT

“H

HIST 256 - Migration Histories in the British Imperial World

The British Empire was built on migrations both forced and free, and in this course we will examine particular migration stories in wider imperial and global contexts. Some of the migrants that we will examine include settler colonists, enslaved persons, transported radicals, colonial officers, missionaries, and indentured and migrant laborers. The course will present a broad chronological survey of the British imperial world since 1700, paying attention to political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics. The final project for this course will be a digital exhibition to which students will contribute content and explanatory material.

HIST 270 - Introduction to American Environmental History

This course introduces students to the major themes, questions, and methods in American environmental history. Environmental historians see the natural world as both a material place and a historical and cultural idea. This course considers how human societies have shaped the natural world, how the natural world has shaped human societies, and how ideas about nature have been created, challenged, and changed in American history.

HIST 271 - U.S. Politics and Culture, 1964-2004

Like most of U.S. history, the 40 years between the 1964 presidential election and Illinois state senator Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention were times of change and conflict. We will explore this time period using secondary works and primary documents. The last baby boomers were born in 1964; Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z were still to come. U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was underway; after September 11, 2001, a war on terror would be waged. Women's labor force participation (including that of married women and married mothers) was on the rise. Americans grappled with grassroots protests and political partisanship, persistent economic inequality, divisive foreign policies, and the so-called culture wars. In 1964, network TV and national and local radio and newspapers provided entertainment and news; by 2004, digital technologies would democratize and fragment access to information. We will examine all these changes, and more.

HIST 272 - Gender and the American Family

Historians can chart the numbers: from the changing demographics of birth and marriage rates to the rise in divorces and the number of households headed by single parents (usually mothers), families in the United States have changed dramatically in the past century. This course will explore the changing forms and meanings of "family." We will examine changing family and household structures and look at how gender roles are built into and reproduced through social, legal, and political discourses. Topics include the shifting meanings of marriage and singlehood and the social value placed on children. Policy makers and social scientists privileged some families over others, and we will consider how constructions of race and ethnicity determined welfare benefits. We will also consider adoption practices and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

HIST 273 - U.S. Politics & Culture: The 1990s

This course will examine the recent history of partisan and popular politics, social movements, and transformation in U.S. political culture during the long 1990s. Key world events (the end of the Cold War U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, eastern Europe and Africa) shifted global alliances and inspired protests, while communication technologies (video via satellite, the Internet) made the world seem smaller. In domestic politics feminist, LGBT, civil rights, and environmental activists forged new ideologies and strategies while conservatives waged culture wars on political ground. We will pay particular attention to the two terms of Democratic President Bill Clinton and his Republican predecessors. Topics include responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis, enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), the reception of the televised Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, and the racial politics of the 1992 LA uprising.

HIST 298 - Music and the Cold War United States

See MUS 238 for description.

HIST 303 - The History of the Sahara

Th

HIST 307 - War and Peace in Europe, 1700-1914

This course examines the cultures of war in Europe in the period leading up to World War I, and explores changes in the historiography as well as the history of warfare in this critical period. We will examine theories of peace and the rise of philanthropic organizations alongside developments in military recruitment, technology, and mobilization to question the relationships between military and society, and between pacifism and militarism. Key themes will include the influence of the press and public opinion on European wars, the role of women in modern warfare, and the relationship between war, diplomacy, and the development of national and European identities.

HIST 310 - Water and the American West

Th

HIST 311 - Environmental Justice Histories of Latin America

拉

HIST 314 - Nature Knows No Borders: Environmental History of the U.S. - Mexico Borderlands

Th

HIST 315 - Defining and Defying Difference: Race, Ethnicity, and Empire

From the origins of the British Empire in the sixteenth century, the encounter between Britons and colonial subjects demanded explanations of human difference. In this course, we will consider race and ethnicity as contingent and contested categories shaped by political and economic circumstances. Topics will include the international slave trade and abolition, caste and community in South Asia, color and class in the twentieth-century Caribbean, and immigration and multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Britain. Throughout we will pay attention to gender.

HIST 317 - The American Earth: U.S. Environmental History in the Twentieth Century

This course will address the concurrent histories of American environmental politics and the changing environment itself in twentieth-century U.S. history. We will approach the American continent both as a unique constellation of material and geographical spaces and as a changing and historically contingent cultural construct dependent on ideas about power, labor, identity, and morality. Topics will include nature and American nationalism, cultural constructions of nature, the American environmental movement, science and environmental management, and climatic change and sustainability in modern environmental politics.

HIST 321 - The History of Sexuality and Society in East Asia Since 1200

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HIST 325 - History of Technologies in Imperial and Modern China: 1500-2000

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HIST 334 - Race and the Politics of Decolonization

This course examines how the struggle for decolonization in the British Empire was shaped by the politics of race. How did colonial subjects imagine freedom, and how were those visions of freedom constrained by the racial hierarchies of empire? How did they look to other movements within and without the British imperial world to theorize what political, economic, and intellectual decolonization might be? Topics will include intellectual critiques of empires, transcolonial movements, the transfer of power, the postcolonial nation-state, and the Commonwealth. We will pay attention to gender throughout and consider the legacy of the formal era of decolonization in the present day.

HIST 338 - Crisis & Catastrophe in Modern Europe

Between 1720 and 1870, a series of natural and manmade crises forced Europeans to question the purpose of violence in a supposedly "improving" society and the role of rational individuals in a world sometimes beyond their control. This course will consider the political, religious, intellectual, and cultural ramifications of disaster and crisis, including financial collapse, revolution, war, earthquakes, disease, and famine. These crises disrupted the political and intellectual worlds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, threatening and transforming their ideas about risk, progress, religion, and political authority, and restructuring the relationships between man and the natural world.

HIST 343 - The Human Condition

See POL 390 for description.

HIST 344 - Freud and the Psychoanalytic Tradition

This class explores how the psychoanalytic tradition inaugurated changes in what we mean when we call ourselves human beings. The first half of the course reviews Freud's thought as it evolved in the context of clinical practice. The aim is to consider how influential ideas about the unconscious, love and sexuality, dreams, fantasy, and the organization of the psyche developed in response to the peculiar kind of suffering Freud called neurosis. The second half of the course asks what is to be learned by situating psychoanalytic thought in its scientific, cultural, and social contexts, and by following its international dispersion in the work of those who extended (and revised) Freud's ideas in ways he did not foresee.

HIST 345 - Whole Earths, Globalizations, and World Pictures

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HIST 353 - The French Revolution, 1775 - 1800

Within a generally chronological framework, this course will focus on the social and cultural history of the French Revolution. Particular attention will be given to the ideological origins of the Revolution, the question of class, the popular movement, revolutionary culture, gender and citizenship, the role of terror, and the nature of counterrevolution. Another focus of the course will be the historiography of the French Revolution. Works from both traditional historiography and contemporary revisionist historiography will be included on the syllabus.

HIST 355 - Heretics, Witches, and Inquisitors: Deviance, Orthodoxy, and the Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

This course will examine the evolution and operation of one of medieval and early modern Europe's most infamous religious and legal institutions-the Inquisitions of Heretical Depravity. Initially established in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to affirm the Roman Church's spiritual authority and to repress religious heterodoxy, Inquisitions could be found across much of Catholic Europe by the early sixteenth century. This course will examine several of the most prominent examples: the Inquisition of medieval Languedoc, the Roman and Venetian Inquisitions, and the Spanish Inquisition, to compare how they functioned as hybrid legal and religious institutions in distinct historical contexts. We will also explore the complex interplay between inquisitors, secular authorities, and the populace by looking at their treatment of a specific heretical crime-witchcraft-during the early modern period.

HIST 362 - Revolutionary America

In the late eighteenth century, 13 North American colonies severed their colonial ties to Britain and constituted a new nation. This course will assess the causes of these changes, as well as the extent to which they altered the political, economic, social, and cultural landscape of North America. We will address major conflicts of the period from 1763 to 1815, including the tensions between libertarian ideology and institutionalized slavery, household dependence and national independence, centralized authority and local control, enlightenment rationalism and evangelical religion, private property and communal interests, and Indian sovereignty and American expansionism.

HIST 364 - Slavery, Freedom, Anarchy: The Politics of Abolition

This course studies the resistance to slavery in the nineteenth-century United States, tracing the practical and theoretical politics of abolition. How could enslaved people become free, and what would freedom entail? The course will trace various and tangled answers to these questions, from direct resistance to slavery through rebellion and flight, to attempts to win political power and reshape the national state, to nonresistance and the rejection of state power. For some abolitionists, slavery remained the central and primary problem, while for others, the problem of slavery generated criticism of other forms of social and political hierarchy. The course will examine the variety of abolitionist thought and its intersection with feminism, anarchism, and labor radicalism.

HIST 369 - Race and the Law in American History

Ranging from the colonial period to the recent past, this course examines the role of the law and the courts in the construction of racial categories and the production of racial inequality in the United States. We will read scholarship from history and other fields concerning the relationship between law and social practice and the possibilities and limitations of law as a means for resisting racism and securing equality. While we will engage a range of primary source material, we will devote particular attention to landmark Supreme Court decisions concerning civil rights, segregation, and immigration and naturalization. Other topics include regional variations in racialization in the United States, race making beyond the Black-white binary, and historical methodology applied to the realm of law.

HIST 370 - The Tragedies of American Diplomacy: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1893

Building from the framework laid out in William Appleman Williams' hallmark essay, "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy," this course will explore the history of American foreign policy since Frederick Jackson Turner declared the end of the American Frontier in 1893. Beginning with Turner's "Frontier Thesis" and John Hay's famous "Open Door Note," we will investigate how the flexible, economically oriented policies of the late nineteenth century became the sacred political ideologies at the heart of twentieth-century American imperialism. Topics will include the Spanish-American War, policies leading up to each of the two world wars, the advent of and decision to drop the atomic bomb, the Marshall Plan, and a variety of political, economic, and military issues associated with the Cold War, including its origins, its institutions, its many phases, and its ultimate end.

HIST 371 - Sports in Modern America

This course explores the history of sports in modern American culture and life, beginning in the nineteenth century but focusing predominantly on the twentieth century. From the "sport" and spectacle of waterfall jumping in nineteenth-century New England to the Cold War Olympic doping challenges of the 1950s and '60s to the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s, students will explore the structures and meaning of individual sports, as well as sports as a broader category of social engagement, as the nature of sports in America has changed over time. Beyond the history of sports themselves, students will also consider how sports have both reflected and influenced the constructed categories and lived experience of race, gender, class, ability, and identity among a variety of American publics, leveraging sports as a lens for approaching other dominant cultural, social, and political themes in American history.

HIST 374 - Gender and Sex

Examination of the changing ideas about gender and sex roles in the context of key transformations from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries in America. These include the second industrial revolution, which enabled women and men to live on their own outside of household economies; the emergence of modern consumer culture; service in same-sex militaries during two world wars; the rise of social scientific and psychological experts who named and quantified "deviant" and "normal" sexual practice; and the so-called sexual revolutions of the 1960s and beyond.

HIST 376 - The United States in the 1970s

For many years U.S. historians neglected the 1970s to focus on the political and cultural shifts in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on a wealth of new historical studies, we will look at the 1970s to assess the successes and defeats of movements that originated in earlier decades. These include civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, environmentalism, and organized labor. We will examine transformations in party politics in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, and chart the changing fortunes of liberals and conservatives. This was a time of economic turmoil and anxiety, and we will consider how inflation, deindustrialization, and the oil crises in 1973 and 1979 influenced the lives of working Americans. We will also look at the changing demographics of families, households, and suburbs in this epoch.

HIST 385 - Catholicism in the Early Modern Spanish World

This course examines the central role of the Catholic church, and of Catholic belief and practice, in the Spanish world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We start with the transformation of Iberia from a center of religious pluralism to the bastion of Catholic orthodoxy with the expulsion of Jews and Moslems and extreme hostility to Protestantism. The first half of the course looks at the role of the Church and the Inquisition in society; popular religion; and personal spirituality. We then turn to examine the role of the Church  in intellectual debates surrounding the colonization of the Americas; Indigenous religion, campaigns and infrastructure of conversion and religious syncretism; and the role of the Church in creole culture. 

HIST 386 - The Incas

This course examines the Incas of the central Andes, from their emergence in the thirteenth century as a small clan alliance through their imperial apogee, their colonial reconstitution, and their republican demise; the class concludes with a brief look at the Inca legacy in modern Peru. Topical emphases are archaic imperial organization, Andean history and cosmology, and Spanish colonialism and evangelization. Methodologically, the class focuses on the challenges of studying nonliterate civilizations and of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts as historical and ethnographic sources.

HIST 388 - Race and Ethnicity in the Andes

This course explores the ethnic and racial organization of Andean society from Inca times to the present, and Andean discourses on race. Beginning with the ethnic pluralism of the Inca Andes, we turn to the creation of the colonial categories of "Indian" and "Spanish" and the imposition of two racialized legal republics from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. We then examine the development of "creole republics" that instituted unified republics with deeply racialized hierarchies; the indigenista critiques of that ordering in the twentieth century; and the emergence of Indigenous and ethnic politics over the past few decades. While attention will be paid to Afro and Asian Andeans, the course focuses on the categories of Indigenous and European. The central focus is on Peru, although ethnicity and race in Ecuador and Bolivia will also be considered.

HIST 390 - Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865-1965

See MUS 360 for description.

HIST 391 - The Greek World from 776 to 404 BCE

See ANME 371 for description.

HIST 392 - The Hellenistic World: Egypt, the Middle East, and Central Asia after Alexander the Great

See ANME 372 for description.

HIST 397 - Women in the Ancient World

See ANME 377 for description.

HIST 411 - Junior Seminar

Post-Imperial Histories of Britain

How does the imperial past shape the present? In the twentieth century, Britain transformed from the largest empire the world had seen, to an island nation off the northwest coast of Europe. These changing borders profoundly shaped life within Britain itself. In this course, we will examine how historians have studied the afterlife of empire in Britain's twentieth century. Course readings will address formal decolonization, Britain's global role, public institutions, the welfare state, immigration, racial formation, gender, and culture. From this shared foundation, students will be able to pursue independent research projects on topics of their own choosing.

Americans and the Wider World, 1789-1861

Sc

HIST 421 - Topics in Historiography

通用电气

HIST 470 - Thesis

HIST 481 - Individual Study

Individual study in fields either more specialized than the regular courses or not covered by them. Individual reading also may be done in connection with a regular course for one or two units additional to the course.

HIST 554 - The French Revolution (c. 1770 - c. 1804)

菲