Ruled from Constantinople (ancient Byzantium and present-day Istanbul), the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire by over a millennium. This state on the crossroads of Europe and Asia was Roman in law, civil administration, and military tradition, but predominantly Greek in language, and Eastern Christian in religion. The course explores one of the greatest civilisations the world has known, tracing the experiences of its majority and minority groups through the dramatic centuries of the Islamic conquests, Iconoclasm, and the Crusades, until its final fall to the Ottoman Turks.

This course will focus on the history of the later Roman Empire, a period which historians often refer to as "Late Antiquity." We will begin our class in pagan Rome at the start of the third century and end it in Baghdad in the ninth century: in between these two points, the Mediterranean world experienced a series of cultural and political revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. We will witness civil wars, barbarian invasions, the triumph of Christianity over paganism, the fall of the Western Empire, the rise of Islam, the Greco-Arabic translation movement and much more.

Until 1918, empire was the most common form of rule and political organization. This lecture course focuses on England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the Empire these peoples generated after c.1600, and uses this as a lens through which to examine the phenomenon of empire more broadly. How and how far did this small set of islands establish global predominance and when did this fail? What roles did war, race, religion, economics, culture and migration play in these processes? And how far do the great powers of today retain characteristics of empire?

The Roman Empire was expansive, stretching from the straits of Gibraltar to the Persian Gulf. Its capital was the largest, most densely populated city in the Mediterranean, if not the world, and not surpassed in population until the 19th century. This course offers an overview of the Roman imperial period from the assassination of Julius Caesar to the death of the emperor Constantine, who legalized Christianity - a period of about 400 years. We will learn about various aspects of this multicultural empire, from political intrigues and conquests to city-living, dining, technology and engineering, sex, entertainment, economy, and religions.

What does it mean to trace a 3000-year history of Hellenism? This course takes a critical approach by examining the construction of narratives of identity, belonging, and continuity from antiquity through Byzantine and Ottoman periods to today. We explore the grounds on which claims to Greekness have been based-from language and culture to religion, race, and territory-while considering how these claims play into distinctions like east-west and civilization-barbarism. Our critical inquiry into the 3000-year history of Hellenism allows us to contend with the political and intellectual stakes of the very premise that such a history could exist.

This course challenges the racial parameters of disability studies and disability history by asking how persistent conditions of antiblack violence, including mass incarceration, state divestment, medical neglect, and environmental racism, destabilize assumptions about what constitutes an "able body." Surveying scholarship in Black studies, disability studies, African American history, and the history of science and medicine, we will study the construction of disability as a racialized category. Students will also recover disability theories that are already intrinsic to the Black radical tradition, postcolonial studies, and Black feminisms.

This course offers a history of Eastern Europe in the modern era, from the age of Enlightenment and the French revolution in the late 18th century through the present. It covers the territory between today's Italy and Russia, including Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Topics include: Enlightenment, Romanticism, nationalism, socialism, Zionism, fascism, Nazism, communism, the Holocaust, genocides, Cold War, and post-1991 Europe. The course will incorporate a variety of primary sources, including novels, memoirs, diaries, and the arts as well as several films.

The Cairo Geniza is a cache of texts from an Egyptian synagogue including letters, lists and legal deeds from before 1500, when most Jews lived in the Islamic world. These are some of the best-documented people in pre-modern history and among the most mobile, crossing the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean to trade, study, apprentice and marry. Data science, neural network-based handwritten text recognition and other computational methods are now helping make sense of the texts on a large scale. Students will contribute to an evolving state of knowledge and gain an insider's view of what we can and can't know in premodern history.

This lecture offers an introduction to the major themes, critical questions, and pivotal moments in post-emancipation African American history. It traces the social, political, cultural, intellectual, and legal contours of the Black experience in the United States from Reconstruction to the rise of Jim Crow, through the World Wars, Depression, and the Great Migrations, to the long civil rights era and the contemporary period of racial politics. Using a wide variety of texts, images, and creative works, the course situates African American history within broader national and international contexts.

How and why did science - natural history, astronomy, alchemy, medicine and mathematics - shift so radically from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment? Subjects to include: intellectual and social explanations; the clash of natural philosophical and mathematical claims to higher knowledge; relationships with religion; different sites for natural knowledge; new 'scientific' accounts of gender and difference; new institutional, representational and rhetorical forms; artisans, demonstrators and their relationship to 'philosophers'; how 'western' science came to be understood to be something distinct from what came before.

Through the lens of Latin America, this course explains how colonization worked in Early Modernity and what were its consequences. We study how the Aztec and Inca empires subdued other peoples before Columbus, and how Muslim Iberia fell to the Christians. Then, we learn about European conquests and the economic, political, social and cultural trajectory of the continent over more than 300 years, shaped by a deepening connection to an evolving Atlantic capitalist system, by Indigenous and slave resistance, adaptation, and racial mixing, and by insurrectionary movements. This is a comprehensive view of how Latin America became what it is now.

History 306 studies all Latinos in the US, from those who have (im)migrated from across Latin America and the Caribbean to those who lived in what became US lands. The course covers the historical origins of debates over land ownership, the border, assimilation expectations, discrimination, immigration regulation, intergroup differences, civil rights activism, and labor disputes. History 306 looks transnationally at Latin America's history by exploring shifts in US public opinion and domestic policies. By the end of the course, students will have a greater understanding and appreciation of how Latinos became an identifiable group in the US.

This course is an examination of the major political and economic trends in twentieth-century African history. It offers an interpretation of modern African history and the sources of its present predicament. In particular, we study the foundations of the colonial state, the legacy of the late colonial state (the period before independence), the rise and problems of resistance and nationalism, the immediate challenges of the independent states (such as bureaucracy and democracy), the more recent crises (such as debt and civil wars) on the continent, and the latest attempts to address these challenges from within the continent.

This course is an introduction to the history of modern China, from imperial dynasty to Republic, from Red Guards to red capitalists. Through primary sources in translation, we will explore the transition from empire to nation-state, political and social revolutions, transformations in gender relations and intellectual life, and competing explanations for events such as the rise of the Communist Party and the 1989 democracy movement. Major themes include: the impact of imperialism, the rise of nationalism, the political stakes of historical interpretation, and the significance of China's history for its present and future.

This course will examine the origins, evolution and organization of the democratic system in Athens, and address some of the most controversial questions about the topic: To what extent was Athens democratic? What were the links between Athenian democracy and its aggressive imperialism? What are the similarities and differences between ancient and modern ideas of democracy?

This course aims to explore the relationship between republican political culture in ancient Rome and the traditional religious system, up to the death of Julius Caesar (44 BC). Traditional Roman religion is often said to be "embedded" in ancient culture in general and in the political system in a more specific way. We will examine to what extent this is the case and what it might mean for us in our interpretations. The seminar will explore religion and politics, both as separate phenomena (at least in our own terms), and as closely interconnected spheres in the network of cultural practices that shaped the Roman community.

This course examines the architectural history and ethics of confinement spaces - mental asylums and prisons - which share common features and goals: security, isolation, and behavioral reformation through architectural control. Engaging with justice-impacted individuals, the course applies ethical discussions to real-world case studies, prompting critical reflection on the moral implications of designing spaces explicitly meant to restrict human freedom and agency. Through community dialogue, students confront the responsibility architects bear in institutional power dynamics.

This course examines the history of modern Brazil from the late colonial period to the present. Lectures, readings, and discussions challenge prevailing narratives about modernity to highlight instead the role played by indigenous and African descendants in shaping Brazilian society. Topics include the meanings of political citizenship; slavery and abolition; race relations; indigenous rights; uneven economic development and Brazil's experiences with authoritarianism and globalization.

This class analyzes how different cultures imagine monsters and how these representations changed over time to perform different social functions. As negative objectifications of fundamental social structures and conceptions, monsters help us understand the culture that engendered them and the ways in which a society constructs the Other, the deviant, the enemy, the minorities, and the repressed. This course has three goals: it familiarizes students with the semiotics of monsters worldwide; it teaches analytical techniques exportable to other topics and fields; it proposes interpretive strategies of reading culture comparatively.

"An examination of the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union and that Union's eventual collapse. Topics include: the invention and unfolding of single-party revolutionary politics, the expansion of the machinery of state, the onset and development of Stalin's personal despotism, the violent attempt to create a noncapitalist society, the experiences and consequences of the monumental war with Nazi Germany, and the various postwar reforms. Special attention paid to the dynamics of the new socialist society, the connection between the power of the state and everyday life, global communism, and the 1991 collapse."

Are the Jews a separate nation? Should they have their own country? Where should it be located? This course investigates why Jews and non-Jews alike began asking these questions in the late eighteenth century and explores the varieties of answers they offered. The course's focus is on those who insisted that the Jews were a nation that required a state in the Jews' historic homeland. We will try to understand why these people - known collectively as Zionists - came to these conclusions, and why many others disagreed. The final part of the course will address debates within the State of Israel about what it means to be a "Jewish state."

This undergraduate lecture course examines the effects, response to, and legacies of pandemics in the past -- their short term and lasting impacts on government, civil liberties, trust in experts, ethnic and racial tensions, social inequalities, and global and local economies. The course uses insights from these past cases of world-changing pandemics (from the plague through influenza, polio, AIDS, and COVID) to inform our understanding of current social, political, and economic challenges. Analysis of the past is also used to inform policy discussions about planning for the future.

In the twentieth century, Europe underwent a range of wrenching social and political upheavals that brought into question received truths about ethics, politics, the role of religion, the relationship between the sexes, and the place of Europe in the wider world. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of different thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida, examining how they responded to these upheavals and offered new ways to thinking about the world and how we should live in it.

How did the United States emerge as a revolutionary republic built on the principle of human equality at the same time that it produced the wealthiest and mightiest slave society on earth? This course approaches that question in an interpretive history emphasizing the contradictory expansion of racial slavery and political democracy. Topics include the place of slavery in the Federal Constitution and the founding the nation, the spread of the cotton kingdom, Jacksonian democracy and the growth of political parties, the rise of antislavery and proslavery politics, and the growing social and political divisions between North and South.

This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the American Revolution and progressing through to the contemporary intellectual scene, it hopes to introduce students to major debates, themes, and intellectual movements in the history of American ideas. We will read a number of famous thinkers and actors in their own words and study the development of important schools of thought, such as Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Left.

The history of modern America, with particular focus on domestic political and social changes. Topics include the Roaring 20s; the Great Depression and the New Deal; the homefront of World War II and the Cold War; the civil rights movement and the Great Society; the Vietnam War; the sexual revolution; the Silent Majority, the Nixon administration, and Watergate.

This course surveys the rise of mass popular culture in America (1800-2000), exploring how race, labor, gender, sexuality, technology, and urbanization shaped its evolution. It examines how cultural expressions in music, art and entertainment reflect and influence societal values and the ongoing battle over "American" identity. Two lectures and one precept a week.

In our contemporary world, science, technology, and medicine enjoy tremendous cultural and intellectual authority. This class introduces a set of analytical tools historians use to understand the origins and consequences of these ways of knowing, across space and time. We will discuss a variety of ideas and methods that describe the social, cultural, and intellectual conditions of possibility for creating knowledge about the natural world. In addition, the class materials invite students to reflect on the cultural and intellectual constraints that shape how societies determine which knowledge is worth pursuing and why.

The Junior Seminar serves to introduce departmental majors to the tools, methods, and interpretations employed in historical research and writing. This course is compulsory for departmental majors and is taken in the fall of the junior year. Students may choose from a range of topics. Seminar topics will tend to be cross-national and comparative.

Memory plays an essential role in recovering the Asian American past. Since traditional US archives offer scant traces of Asian immigrants, historians have turned to personal recollections to fill in the gaps. In this course, we consider these alternative sources of history, including memoirs, oral histories, personal essays, (graphic) novels, and documentaries. How can these sources help us to reconstruct the lives of Asians in the Americas? What limitations do they hold? And how do they challenge the notion of historical knowledge?

This course will explore the history of political propaganda in the context of mass politics, international rivalries, colonialism, the rise of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. We will discuss the use (and abuse) of visual images and verbal messages, channels of delivering them to audiences, and their reactions. The topics for comparative and cross-cultural study of mass persuasion will include avant-garde art and propaganda, the cult of political leaders in totalitarian regimes, propaganda of hate and genocide, new media and terrorism, "weaponization" of information in international politics, and more.

This course will examine the U.S. West's place, process, idea, cultural memory, conquest, and legacies throughout American history. The American West has been a shifting region, where diverse individuals, languages, cultures, environments, and competing nations came together. We will examine the West's contested rule, economic production, and mythmaking under Native American Empires, Spain, France, England, individual filibusters, Mexico, Canada, and United States.

Studies of war and society rarely address environmental factors and agency. The relationship between war and environment is often either reduced to a simple environmental determinism or it is depicted as a war against nature and ecosystems, playing down societal dynamics. The seminar explores the different approaches to the war-environment-society nexus and highlights how and why the three spheres should be studied in conjunction. The objective is to assess how and why environmental and societal factors and forces caused and shaped the conflicts and how in turn mass violence shaped societies and how they used and perceived their environments.

This course asks you to examine the history of those aspects of United States government that have been called the national security state. This is a history course; it is also intended as something of an old-fashioned civics course, asking you to take part in an exercise of citizenship: to consider fundamental questions about the form of government under which you live and under which you wish to live.

This course explores the continuities and ruptures, the striking similarities and the radical differences between Black freedom struggles from the 1960s to the present. Putting #BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives in historical context, the course considers the history and legacy of the civil rights, Black Power, and anti-apartheid movements. In thinking about freedom movements past and present, we will pay particular attention to questions of philosophy, strategy, leadership, organization, and coalition building.

The ups and downs of the so-called "special relationship" between the United Kingdom and the United States is one of the major themes of the history of the twentieth century, and the one figure who embodies that association in all its many contradictory guises is Winston Churchill, who actually coined the phrase. For Churchill's relationship with the United States was much more nuanced and complex (and, occasionally, hostile) than is often supposed, and it will be the aim of this course to tease out and explore those nuances and complexities (and hostilities), in the broader context of Anglo-American relations.

This course will examine the history of anti-Judaism from antiquity to the present as an enduring and protean prejudice. It will examine how a series of thinkers - some famous, some less so, some recent, some ancient, some Jews and some not - have used Judaism as a category against which to construct their own ideas. The course will begin in antiquity, in the worlds of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, continue through early and later Christianity, and conclude in the modern period. It will examine both the fundamental distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism as well as the considerable overlaps.

The Enlightenment was one of the most intensely creative and significant episodes in the history of Western thought. This course will provide an introduction to its major works, and will consider its implications for modern politics, culture, and social life. Each class meeting will consist of a two-hour discussion, followed by a 45-minute background lecture on the subsequent week's readings.

Although the queer and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is well-known in popular media for her middle name, "pay it no mind," among her contemporaries she is better remembered for lingering on street corners and asking passersby "spare change for a starving queen?" Using a racial capitalist framework, this course examines the history of gender and sexual diversity in the United States from the pre-colonial period to the present. We will read work by historians of sexuality and gender alongside scholars of Black and Brown labor as we ask how U.S. history looks different when we center sexual and gender nonconforming working-class populations.

This class will cover the broad sweep of California History. How did the "Golden State" come to loom so large in the global consciousness? How did it come to wield such economic and political power? Who built the state, and at what cost? As we look for historical answers to those questions, we will discuss topics such as: Indigenous sovereignty, Spanish colonization, the Gold Rush, Pacific immigration, urbanization, Prop 13, agriculture, Silicon Valley, surfing and more.

The course examines the history of financial innovation and its consequences. It examines the evolution of trading practices, bills of exchange, government bonds, equities, banking activity, derivatives markets, and securitization. How do these evolve in particular state or national settings, how are the practices regulated, how do they relate to broader development? What happens as financial instruments are traded across state boundaries, and how does an international financial order evolve? What are the effects of international capital mobility? How is resulting conflict and instability managed, on both a national and international level?

Adolf Hitler did not only seek to remake German society: he sought to remake world order. This course analyzes Nazi Germany as an international problem and challenge. Topics include Nazism's origins in World War One and the peace of 1919, its critique of liberal internationalism, its rival vision of international order based on race, Lebensraum, and imperial "great blocs," fascist internationalism, the Nazi occupation of Europe, the waging of global war, the Holocaust, and the international repercussions of Nazi defeat including the Nuremberg Trials, crimes like genocide, and memory politics.

This seminar provides a unique angle of studying Chinese history from antiquity to our present moment through the lens of medicine. Using China as method, it also aims at cultivating a pluralistic and historically informed understanding of medicine as evolving science, cultural system, socio-economic enterprises, and increasingly in the modern world a vital component of domestic and global governance. This year, the thematic focus will be doctor-patient relationship and medical ethics.

How do women in Asia become "gendered" in times of war-as caregivers, as refugees, as sex workers, as war brides? This course offers an introductory survey of American wars in Asia from 1899 to the present, taking the perspectives not of Americans but of the historically marginalized. Students will be challenged to rethink and reimagine war histories through voices on the ground across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii, and Guam. foregrounding written testimonies and oral histories of women against the backdrop of war, militarism, and empire, the course will also make broader connections across the Asia pacific.

Throughout their histories, science and film have been woven together. Film is a medium of communication enabled by scientific research; science is a way of knowing depicted in cinema; and scientific communities use film as a tool of knowledge production. This class explores these entangled histories from film's 19th-c experimental origins through to 21st-c cinematic depictions of scientific ideas. Along the way, we discuss the development of new forms of visualization, the politics of representation, and the power of science and film as means of communications. Weekly assignments include engaging with both textual and filmic sources.

In this upper-level undergraduate seminar, we will explore the making of the medicine of mind and brain, paying particular attention to the complex relationship between biological investigations of the brain and subjective experience of mental and neurological illness. We will look at patient memoirs; therapeutic regimes (including drugs and somatic treatments); psychiatric classification; trauma; mind-body medicine; the neuroscientific identification of brainhood with personhood; and anti-psychiatry, amongst others.

The senior thesis (HIS 498 - HIS 499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the guidance of a faculty member. While the thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained time and attention throughout the academic year. Students are expected to consult regularly with their faculty adviser. Assessments for the semester are outlined below.

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