Spring 2025
This course is an introduction to the history of modern East Asia. We will examine the inter-related histories of China, Japan, and Korea since 1800 and their relationships with the wider world. Major topics include: trade and cultural exchanges, reform and revolutions, war, colonialism, imperialism, and Cold War geopolitics.
An overview of European history since the French Revolution, taking as its major theme the changing role of Europe in the world. It looks at the global legacies of the French and Russian revolutions, and how the Industrial Revolution augmented the power of European states, sometimes through formal and sometimes informal imperialism. How did ideologies like nationalism, liberalism, communism and fascism emerge from European origins and how were they transformed? How differently did Europeans experience the two phases of globalization in the 19th and 20th centuries? Biographies are used as a way of approaching the problem of structural change.
This course will explore the major issues that have shaped the Caribbean since 1791, including: colonialism and revolution, slavery and abolition, migration and diaspora, economic inequality, and racial hierarchy. We will examine the Caribbean through a comparative approach--thinking across national and linguistic boundaries--with a focus on Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. While our readings and discussions will foreground the islands of the Greater Antilles, we will also consider relevant examples from the circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora as points of comparison.
This course examines the nature of state and society in an age of turmoil, with a focus on patterns of allegiances, ways of waging war, codes of conduct, norms of etiquette, social and political structure based on primary and secondary sources. Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Kagemusha shall provide the thematic foundation for this course.
The Greek experience from Alexander the Great through Cleopatra. An exploration of the dramatic expansion of the Greek world into Egypt and the Near East brought about by the conquests and achievements of Alexander. Study of the profound political, social, and intellectual changes that stemmed from the interaction of new cultures, and the entrance of Rome into the Greek world. Readings include history, biography, and inscriptions.
The course begins with the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 and ends with the collapse of the Eastern (or Byzantine) Empire in 1453. Among the topics addressed are the following: the western successor states, the birth and expansion of Islam, the Carolingian Empire, the Vikings, and the political entities of the High and Late Middle Ages. Due attention will also be paid to religious beliefs and devotional practices, economic change, cultural development, gender relations and other aspects of social history.
This course looks at the formation of a techne ("art" or "science") of medicine in fifth-century BCE Greece and debates about the theory and practice of healthcare in Greco-Roman antiquity. We look at early Greek medicine in relationship to established medical traditions in Egypt and Mesopotamia; medical discourses of human nature, gender, race, and the body; debates about the ethics of medical research; the relationship of the body to the mind; and the nature of "Greek" medicine as it travels to Alexandria, Rome and Baghdad. Readings drawn from primary sources as well as contemporary texts in medical humanities and bioethics.
HUM 248 will introduce students to the multi-faceted literary and cultural production of a region that at one point stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indus Valley. Starting at the tail end of the Abbasid Empire up to the rise of nation-states in the 20th century, students will learn of the different power dynamics that shaped the region's diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and ultimately national communities, and their worldviews. Readings will include literary works written originally in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew.
Cuba was one of the first New World colonies of Europe yet among the last to sever the colonial bond. The island was among the last places in the hemisphere to abolish slavery, yet home to the first black political party in the Americas. After the revolution of 1959, among the most radical of the modern world, it became an important international symbol of third world socialism and anti-imperialism, and an unexpected focus of global Cold War struggles. This course serves as an introduction to that fascinating history and to the major themes that have shaped it: race and slavery; nationalism and empire; revolution and socialism.
This course merges research in American religious history with creating an archive using digital and deep mapping practices. It explores the politics of mapping, geography and race before delving into a place-based exploration of American religious communities during the late 19th century. The course asks, how do religious communities develop and construct space, foster and develop from movement? How are these processes influenced by the constructions of power reflected in defining religion, race and geography?
An introduction to the history of the Middle East from the late eighteenth century through the turn of the twenty-first, with an emphasis on the Arab East, Iran, Israel, and Turkey.
This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese incarceration, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.
The Oral History Lab is a hands-on course that will teach students how to conduct, catalogue, and archive oral histories. The course will be analyzing oral histories completed in SPA 364: Doing Oral History in Spanish and using them as a jumping off point to conduct more oral histories in the Princeton Latino/a/e community. The goal is to collect oral histories and write articles intended for a website on the Latine community in Princeton. Spanish-language skills are not required for this course.
Technology and society are unthinkable without each other, each provides the means and framework in which the other develops. To explore this dynamic, this course investigates a wide array of questions on the interaction between technology, society, politics, and economics, emphasizing the themes such as innovation and regulation, risk and failure, ethics and expertise. Specific topics covered include nuclear power and disasters, green energy, the development and regulation of the Internet, medical expertise and controversy, intellectual property, the financial crisis, and the electric power grid.
The course focuses on digital history as a way to integrate different unconventional and conventional sources and approaches especially oral, spatial (maps), images (photos) and netbased data. Digital history allows for the combination of, for example, spatial history (through the use of Geographic Information Systems or GIS) with oral history in a single multi-dimensional, multimedia, and interactive platform (a blog or webpage). Oral history can be used to recapture the history of individuals, groups, and phenomena that conventional written sources (written by the elite) have erased.
An introduction to the craft of academic history, particularly useful for potential history majors and those interested in the practice of writing history. Students will immerse themselves in primary documents from three critical historical events: the Salem Witch Trials, the New York City Draft Riots, and the Little Rock school integration crisis. Using those primary documents as raw material, students will practice writing their own histories. We will stress interpretation of documents, the framing of historical questions, and construction of historical explanations.
This gateway course to the study of history will be an immersive exploration of sources written in and about Asia between 1500 and 1900 CE. Students will study major scholarly debates in Asian history on the nature of early modernity, the agency of marginal actors, and the interpretive work of modern researchers. We will focus on India and China by dwelling on the themes of kingship and court culture, Jesuit writings, women and gender, and the tea and opium trades. Students will write three short papers: one on methods and two based on close and critical reading of these clusters of primary sources in translation.
The last two decades have seen the rise of an extraordinary new attention economy-- a pervasive, technologically-mediated "fracking" of human beings for the money-value of their eyeballs. This dramatic commodification of human attention is transforming social relations, political life, and the experience of personhood. This course (anchored in the history of science, but reaching into theology, media theory, psychology, and philosophy) stretches back from our current predicament, to uncover the deep genealogy of this most intimate feature of human being. What is attention? And how can richer understanding of this question change the world?
This course explores Latin America's history from independence to the present. We examine the contentious process of building national polities and economies in a world of expansionist foreign powers. The region's move towards greater legal equality in the 19th century coexisted with social hierarchies related to class, race, gender, and place of origin. We explore how this tension generated stronger, even revolutionary demands for change in the 20th century, while considering how growing U.S. power shaped possibilities for regional transformation. Primary sources foreground the perspectives of elites, subalterns, artists and intellectuals.
This course surveys histories of Black health activism and their legacies in the US. It addresses the pursuit of Black health and healing from the Atlantic slave trade through twenty-first century Black feminist manifestos on radical self-care. We will center the political labor and social movements of Black patients, doctors, scientists, and organizers - and their efforts to secure health equity for Black Americans - as fundamental to the arc of the long Civil Rights movement. Topics include: the Black Panthers' free clinics, Black eugenics, reproductive justice, "citizen" science, the anti-psychiatry movement, and HIV/AIDS activism.
History 306 studies all Latinos in the US, from those who have (im)migrated from across Latin America 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.
From a relatively poor, multi-religious, and politically-fragmented land during the Middle Ages, Spain became in the early modern period one of the biggest empires in world history. This introductory course offers a historical overview of the Spanish empire, from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its eventual dissolution in the nineteenth century. We will examine the nature of Spanish imperial rule, the societies and cultures that were forged in the process, and the asymmetric connections that it facilitated between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
How did the introduction of new text technologies impact premodern culture? What motivated or delayed the adoption of the codex or the various types of print? Did these technologies encourage new practices or suppress old ones? And how does the story change when we turn from European to Near Eastern contexts? By learning about past text technologies, we'll gain a fuller understanding of how today's digital text technologies leave their mark on how we interact with texts and with the world. This course teaches relevant digital humanities methods for texts and reflects critically on both our current moment and premodern pasts.
The modern histories of Japan and Korea cannot be understood without close attention to the other. This seminar explores major events, starting with the fall of the Choson Dynasty, the Japanese colonial period, the creation of two Koreas, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and decolonization and social revolutions. Students will read primary texts, including memoirs, autobiographies, and novels, and engage with major works and debates on modern Japan and Korea. By adopting a comparative and transnational perspective, the course aims to reveal new ways and approaches to understanding the fraught histories of Japan in Korea, and Korea in Japan.
This discussion-based seminar will examine political, social, economic, and cultural factors that led to the collapse of a republican political system in Rome in the middle of the first century BCE. We will study the period from 146 BCE (the destruction of Carthage) to the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BCE), which is the best documented time in all of antiquity, in light of primary sources of various kinds. This course will also consider why this historical era remained so fascinating for later generations, notably the American Founders. Students will be able to choose a topic to research for their oral report and final paper.
This course introduces students to the ways that policy, design, and citizen activism shaped affordable housing in the United States from the early 20th century to the present. We explore privately-developed tenements and row houses, government-built housing, publicly-subsidized suburban homes and cooperatives, as well as housing developed through incentives and subsidies. Students will analyze the balance between public and private, free market and subsidy, and preservation and renewal. Close attention will be paid to the role of race in structuring the relationship between policymakers, property owners, renters, and homeowners.
This course charts the history of international order over the last two centuries, from the Haitian Revolution to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. It explores how grand schemes for world parliaments, universal peace, and human rights as well imperial domination and dismal violence shaped today's world system. Can great power politics be squared with global ethics, with self-determination, with environmental protection? Is there such a thing as just war? We will investigate shifting answers to these questions in conversation with figures like Kant, L'Ouverture, Marx, Wilson, Du Bois, Lenin, Hitler, Ho Chi Min, Arendt, Hayek, and Nkrumah.
This is a survey of the history of Russian multinational empire from the late 1600s to the Revolution of 1917. Students will learn how the Russian Empire expanded, and why it collapsed in 1917. Special attention will be paid to the history of Russian colonialism, the policies of Russification, religious conversion and imperial assimilation in Ukraine, Alaska, Caucasus, Central Asia, Poland, and other national borderlands.
The history of contemporary America, with particular attention to political, social and technological changes. Topics will include the rise of a new conservative movement and the reconstitution of liberalism, the end of the divisive Cold War era and the rise of an interconnected global economy, revolutionary technological innovation coupled with growing economic inequality, a massive influx of immigrants coupled with a revival of isolationism and nativism, a revolution in homosexual rights and gender equality coupled with the rise of a new ethos of "family values."
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.
Why did the flourishing United States, by some measures the richest and most democratic nation of its era, fight the bloodiest civil war in the 19th century Western world? How did that war escalate into a revolutionary political struggle that transformed the nation--and then, almost as rapidly, give way to a reactionary backlash? This course will explore the causes, course, and consequences of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, keeping in mind the ways that America's greatest conflict also represented a major event in the history of the global 19th century, and a landmark moment in the making of the modern world.
This course explains a turbulent and transformative era in United States history, from the dismantling of Reconstruction to the aftermath of World War One (c. 1877-1920). Lectures and readings examine the nature of Reconstruction and its destruction; economic inequality in the Gilded Age and the political movements that challenged it; the relationship of financial and industrial capitalism; the making of the American middle class and the contradictions of Progressivism; the politics of white supremacy and the construction of Jim Crow regimes; mobilization for World War 1 and wartime contests over civil liberties; postwar social upheaval.
Data and data-empowered algorithms shape our professional, personal, and political realities. They also increasingly shape how we are able to access and tell stories about the past. This course introduces students to the history of data practices so as to better understand the future we are building together as scholars, scientists, and citizens. In covering the history of the human use of data, we will learn how data are used to reveal insight and support decisions, how data-driven practices make historical and literary arguments, and how data and culture are fundamentally intertwined.
Rise of popular entertainment, values, ideas, cultural expression, and the culture industries in modern American history. Two lectures, one precept.
The word 'ecology' evokes the scientific discipline that studies the interactions between and among organisms and their environments, and also resonates with the environmental movement of the sixties, green politics, and conservation. This course explores the historical development of ecology as a professional science, before turning to the political and social ramifications of ecological ideas. Throughout the course, we will situate the history of ecological ideas in their cultural, political, and social context.
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. Seminar topics will tend to be cross-national and comparative.
This course will immerse students in archival research and explore the history and nature of archives themselves. Working with original revolutionary-era materials in Firestone, students will contribute to an upcoming exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence. Along the way, we will investigate what archives are, how they are created and evolve, and how they shape historical scholarship. Whose voices do archives preserve or exclude? How do historians navigate them and grapple with their limits? And how are they being transformed in the present? Weekly in-class workshops will focus on 18th-c. manuscripts and rare books.
This seminar explores the history of Ukraine from the early 20th century through the present day. Though it covers a rather long period, this course is geared towards the contemporary events in the 21st century. We will try to understand how despite a relatively peaceful transition from communism to independence in the 20th century Ukraine became engulfed by a new war with unprecedented destruction. We start this seminar by setting up historical background of Ukrainian territories between the empire in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. We will end the course with discussion and analysis of most recent events in Ukraine.
Socialist governments saw the urbanizing project as an arena and a showcase for the transcendence of the shortcomings of past urban life. This course will explore the great variety of socialist cities with an emphasis on thematic and comparative approaches. An introductory survey of the late nineteenth-century context and the "urban question" will be followed by a roughly chronological movement through some localities of socialist urbanisms across the twentieth century. It will conclude with reflections on post-socialist transitions. No prior knowledge is required.
This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the origins of Roman law in the ancient world, and end with the rediscovery of Roman law in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries. Over the course of the intervening millennium, we will focus on pivotal moments and key texts in the development of the legal cultures of the Roman and post-Roman worlds of Western Eurasia. Our goal will be to think about how law and law-like norms both shape and are shaped by society and social practices.
This seminar examines the history of antislavery movements and struggles from the end of the seventeenth century to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery in 1865. With intensive reading in an array of primary sources, including speeches, manifestos, private letters, poetry, and more, supplemented with pertinent secondary readings, it inquires into how antislavery fitfully moved from the margins of American politics and culture to become, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a mass political movement that won national political power and sparked the Civil War.
History of Slavery in Africa and the Middle East focuses on the experiences of enslaved individuals and the powerful social, legal, and political regimes that attempted to define their subjection. Attention will be concentrated on the themes of race, gender, class, and diaspora to examine how these histories both differ from and are informed by histories of slavery globally. This course will analyze the relationship between abolitionist discourses and imperialism, underpinning the ongoing transition from slavery to freedom. Students will engage with literature to understand how historical production has distorted and silenced enslaved lives.
This course explores the history of what has been described as an "impossible but inevitable city" over three centuries. Settled on perpetually shifting swampland at the foot of one of the world's great waterways, this port city served as an outpost of three empires and a gateway linking the N. American heartland with the Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Atlantic World. From European and African settlement through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will consider how race, culture, and the environment have defined the history of the city and its people.
This experimental course surveys many historically significant "schools" of American legal thought, along the way questioning the notion of distinctive "schools," as well as the distinctive legality and the distinctive Americanness of the thought. (We will not be challenging the notion that there is thought going on.) It offers a chance to read and to argue about much of the most important and interesting writing about law produced in the past 140 years. Throughout, the emphasis will be on core controversies.
This course will examine the causes, conduct, and outcomes of the First World War. We will delve into the complex factors that led to the outbreak of the conflict, analyzing how a war of such devastating scale and far-reaching consequences spiraled out of control. The course will go beyond traditional military history to explore the human dimension of the war, both on the battlefield and on the home front. We will investigate the experiences of soldiers in the trenches, the impact of the war on civilian populations, and how societies coped with the unprecedented demands and horrors of a total war.
This seminar will examine the origins, evolution and accomplishments of the civil rights movement, with special attention to the political context and consequences at every stage of its development.
This course is about human-animal relations in history, specifically the management of predator attacks on human beings. The course examines the idea, common among conservationists around the world, that predators that attack humans are "problem animals" by definition and must be killed. The course draws on a range of primary and secondary to challenge the claim that predators that attack humans acquire a taste for human flesh and must, therefore, be killed lest they become a danger to all humans.
In Latin America, the extraction of silver, dyes, cash crops (sugar, bananas, wheat), guano, petroleum, and more broadly water, soil, energy, and human labor embedded in goods from the 15th to the 21st centuries fed the rise of capitalism and its imperialist expansion. This impacted environments and human relationships with and within them throughout the continent. The seminar analyzes such impacts through the environmental history of subsistence agriculture, monoculture, deforestation, the control and degradation of water and soil, mining, urban pollution, conservationism, climate change, "sustainable development", and activism.