Fall 2025
HIS 400 S01: How to Do History Like a Marxist
What difference does it make what theoretical perspective a historian is coming from? While many of the techniques for producing a piece of historical research, such as finding primary documents and creating bibliographies, are the same across different approaches to history, Marxists use a broader definition of what a source is, paying particular attention to material objects, production processes, and landscapes. They also have distinct ways of interrogating and interpreting these sources, placing class agency and interests front and center in their pursuit of causal explanations for historical, social or political phenomena. At their best, the results of this approach provide powerful answers to questions such as why workers and capitalists developed irreconcilable interests; how gender, racial and other forms of oppression assisted the rise and endurance of capitalism; why cities look the way they do in different geographies and periods; where different forms of authoritarianism and ethnonationalism came from in the twentieth century; what role class plays in artistic production, and much more. In this seminar, students will learn how to question, research, interpret, and explain like Marxists.
Instructor: Vera Candiani
Wednesday, 1:30 to 4:20pm
HIS 400 S02: Law and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States
This course has two goals: to provide you with a broader view of this country’s legal past and to help you develop the skills necessary to produce an original piece of scholarship that will be your junior paper. When we think of law in U.S. history, we usually think of particular kinds of published sources—namely statutes, appellate decisions, and treatises—and the legislatures, courts, and legal professionals who issued those texts. That view reflects current, decidedly ahistorical conceptions of the law that project the present onto the past: we assume that those are the places to understand the law’s history because they are the places where we look to find the law today. But law in the United States did not always work the way it does now. In this course, we will consider changes in the legal system and legal principles; where and how law was made and applied; the law’s role in people’s daily lives; and people’s expectations of what law could and should do. In addition to secondary readings, we will do hands-on work with primary sources of all kinds. While exploring this country’s legal past and the sources necessary to understand it, you will also be developing your own research topics.
Instructor: Laura Edwards
Monday, 1:20 to 4:10pm
HIS 400 S03: Dismantling Slavery: Black Activism in the Americas
TBlack political activism has deep historical roots in the experiences of Africans and their descendants who resisted, reshaped, and ultimately helped overthrow slavery in the Americas. This course explores their history of resistance in places such as Brazil, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina all the while reflecting on the afterlives of slavery in the present. We will examine a broad range of black experiences from a transnational perspective, including the United States. Focusing on the black experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this junior seminar considers how enslaved peoples navigated and contested a political landscape marked by the rise of global capitalism, abolitionist discourses, and disputes over citizenship rights. We will begin with the world created by the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, explore the multidirectional flows of black activism across the Atlantic, and conclude in the early twentieth century with a discussion of the meanings of freedom in post-emancipation societies. Topics covered in this course include: everyday slave resistance, marronage and quilombos, rebellions, war and emancipation, public health, African ethnicity, and religion.
Instructor: Isadora Mota
Tuesday, 1:30 to 4:20pm
HIS 400 S04: Truth, Lies, and Secrets
Truth has a history, and this seminar will explore how regimes of revealing and telling the truth have transformed over time. We will talk about fakes, forgeries, and their significance; we will read and analyze the stories of conmen and imposters. We’ll also talk about how governments collect and store information, explore the evolution of archives, and the shifting boundaries of secrecy.
Instructor: Katya Pravilova
Thursday, 1:20 to 4:10pm
HIS 400 S05: Reconstructing LIves: Microhistory and Biography in American History
Microhistory—the detailed study of a particular person in a specific moment in time—has emerged as one of the most promising methods of historical research. Historians have shown how much can be written and discovered about the lives of everyday people and how these stories can be used to illustrate large-scale trends: how one midwife in frontier Maine can help us understand gender in the 18th Century, one private in an army can explain the experience of a war, how reconstructing one enslaved person’s life can tell us something about the institution of slavery. This class will ask students to write a history of an everyday person in American history—to use all the tools of historical research to reconstruct as much as possible of the life, thought, choices, and importance of a relatively unknown person.
Instructor: Peter Wirzbicki
Tuesday, 1:20 to 4:10pm
HIS 400 S06: Capitalism
he Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, “the first crisis of the global age”, led to a resurgence of scholarly and public interest in the workings and history of capitalism. This seminar will introduce students to the various debates and methods that are shaping this renewed interest in economic matters within the discipline of history. Through in-depth engagement with recent scholarship and a range of primary sources, we will explore key issues such as the historical emergence of capitalism as a global economic, social, and cultural system; the links between slavery, capitalism, and the industrial revolution; the rise of the modern corporation; industrial capitalism; the Great Depression; state and business relations; modern finance; and neoliberalism. Some key questions will include: What might be the relationship between capitalism and colonialism? What are the institutions of capitalism? How has wealth and capital been distributed historically? What can the history of how commodities are produced, transported, and consumed tell us about capitalism? What makes a “capitalist”? Students will have a unique opportunity to study and write about “capitalism in action” using material available on the Princeton campus.
Instructor: Madeline Woker
Wednesday, 1:30 to 4:20pm