* HIST 0131a, What Makes An American?: U.S. National Identity, Founding to Present  Alvita Akiboh

What makes someone an “American”? This question has plagued the United States since its inception. Most countries, in constructing their national identity, point to shared language, culture, or ethnicity. The United States, on the other hand, has been called a “nation of immigrants,” a “melting pot,” or a “mosaic.” These terms seek to describe how disparate groups of people from all over the globe have come together to form a nation. In this course, students grapple with questions of who has been considered “American” at different points in U.S. history, how the boundaries of this U.S national community have been policed, and why those boundaries have changed over time to allow some to become American while continuing to exclude others. Enrollment limited to first-year students.   WR, HU
HTBA

* HIST 172Jb / AFAM 3170b / HSHM 4630b, Care Work: Intersectional Pedagogical, Experiential, and Theoretical Approaches to Healing  Ayah Nuriddin

What does it mean to “care”? What models of care work do we need to attend to current crises? What models of care work can we learn from the past? Can we imagine a world where the concept of care, in its most inclusive, embracing, holistic, liberatory form operates as a fundamental value driving our global societies? These are some of the questions that inspired the creation of this course. In this seminar, students explore theoretical feminist, Black feminist, and Crip-of-Color perspectives of care work as well as experiential healing modalities that might interrupt cycles of harm often experienced by care workers.  HU
HTBA

HIST 236a / HIST 1236a / HSHM 2260a, The Global Scientific Revolution  Staff

The material, political, cultural, and social transformations that underpinned the rise of modern science between the 14th and 18th century, considered in global context. Topics include artisanal practices and the empirical exploration of nature; global networks of knowledge and trade, and colonial science; figurative arts and the emersion of a visual language of anatomy, astronomy, and natural history.   HU  0 Course cr
Th 2:30pm-3:20pm

HIST 304b / EAST 2321b, The History of Modern China, 1911-2025  George Remisovsky

An introduction to modern Chinese history spanning from the fall of the Qing Empire to the present. Examines the factors that led to the end of China’s dynastic system, the political and social divisions that emerged after the Qing Dynasty’s collapse, and the various alternative visions for China’s future that have arisen from the late nineteenth century onward. Focuses on aspects of political, economic, and social history.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 305a / LAST 1100a, Introduction to Latin American Studies: History, Culture and Society  Lorena Ojeda-Davila

This course provides a political and social introduction to Latin America and the Caribbean, an extraordinarily diverse group of countries in the Western Hemisphere. Latin America is often presented as a region characterized by poverty, inequality, crime, drugs, political instability, and armed conflict. However, this stereotype does not reflect the remarkable economic and political development over the last few decades. While social, legal, political, and economic factors vary within and between the countries of the region, since the 1980s, many countries that faced authoritarian regimes transitioned to democracy; Most children in the region now have access to healthcare and attend school; The subcontinent is at the center of the climate justice agenda while dealing with new forms of colonialism from the “Global North”; Latin America is pioneering women’s inclusion in politics, parity policies, and legal landmarks to combat gender-based political violence; Latin American feminism, queer activism, and movements advocating for the rights of black people, indigenous communities, and environmental protection are vibrant and have achieved pivotal accomplishments. Still, some governance challenges persist, and new ones have emerged.  HU
MW 4pm-5:15pm

* HIST 0607b and HIST 0622b, Monks, Sufis, and Asceticism in the Medieval Middle East  Staff

Ascetic practices like fasting, spiritual seclusion, intensive prayer, and abstinence were common across the medieval Middle East, and were the monopoly of no one religious group. Asceticism (Greek askēsis, Arabic zuhd) acted as a path to try to achieve a surpassing degree of holiness and was often practiced in combination with mystic practices by which ascetics sought to contemplate God to become nearer to—or perhaps even one with—the divine. This course examines the long history of asceticism in the medieval Middle East, focusing on dominant ascetic trends within Christianity and Islam, namely monasticism and Sufism, respectively. It considers the context in which both developed, the long-lasting influence of each upon the other, and the role played by ascetic practitioners in other religious groups, such as pagans, Manichaeans, and most of all, Jews. We see throughout the course that even within each religious tradition, a diverse array of linguistic, cultural, and sectarian groups devoted themselves to different ascetic and mystic practices, and we consider what meanings these individuals attached to their actions. Enrollment limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
MW 1pm-2:15pm

* HIST 0623b / HUMS 0360b / JDST 0035b / RLST 0035b, Jerusalem: Judaism, Christianity, Islam  Sarit Kattan Gribetz

The Old City of Jerusalem is just 0.35 square miles large, about half the size of Yale’s campus. Have you ever wondered what makes this tiny city so beloved to—and the object of continual strife for—Jews, Christians, and Muslims? Through engagement with a wide range of sources—including biblical lamentations, archeological excavations, qur’anic passages, exegetical materials, medieval pilgrim itineraries, legal documents, maps, poetry, art, architecture, and international political resolutions—students develop the historiographical tools and theoretical frameworks to study the history of one of the world’s most enduringly important and bitterly contested cities.  Students encounter persistent themes central to the identity of Jerusalem: geography and topography; exile, diaspora, and return; destruction and trauma; religious violence and war; practices of pilgrimage; social diversity; missionizing; the rise of nationalism; peace efforts; the ethics of storytelling; and the stakes of studying the past. Enrollment limited to first-year students.   HU  RP
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

* HIST 0722a, What History Teaches  John Gaddis

An introduction to the discipline of history. History viewed as an art, a science, and something in between; differences between fact, interpretation, and consensus; history as a predictor of future events. Focus on issues such as the interdependence of variables, causation and verification, the role of individuals, and to what extent historical inquiry can or should be a moral enterprise.  Enrollment limited to first-year students.   WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 0724a / CLCV 0531a, The Age of Cleopatra  Joseph Manning

This course introduces students to historical method using a pivotal and fascinating period in Mediterranean history. This course goes far beyond the typical framework, mainly from Roman sources, to examine Egypt in the age of Cleopatra, 50-30 BCE and the much wider world. We examine the reception of Cleopatra through the lens of women's history.  Enrollment is limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

* HIST 0737a, History of Indian Ocean Crossings  Nurfadzilah Yahaya

This seminar explores the history of the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea region to South Asia, and onward to Southeast Asia through two creative works by Amitav Ghosh. The first work is In an Antique Land, an autobiographical account of his time in Egypt as an anthropologist in the late twentieth century that he interspersed with that of the history of a Jewish merchant in Aden and Malabar in the twelfth century when Indian Ocean trade formed the backbone of international economy. The second book, Sea of Poppies is the first novel in his epic trilogy on the Indian Ocean, which traces the journey of a diverse group people from the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia and China during the nineteenth century. This seminar breaks out of conventional regional fields by closely following historical actors on the ground. Each session explores several core themes for historical research namely commerce, mobility, labor, climate, cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and modernization. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.  WR, HU
TTh 1pm-2:15pm

* HIST 0742a, Comparative Women's History  Rebecca Tannenbaum

Comparative perspective on the lives of women and their experiences, the ways in which historical forces shaped gender roles in different cultures, and the similarities and differences in gender roles across different time periods and around the world. Topics include work, family roles, political participation, health and sexuality, religious roles, and global feminisms.  Enrollment limited to first-year students.  WR, HU
HTBA

HIST 1114a / HSHM 2060a, Histories of American Reproductive Health, Rights, and Activism from 1800  Staff

Are all politics reproductive politics? This course traces the reproductive history of the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Questions about reproduction–and about not reproducing–are deeply tied to questions of gendered and racial rights; of bodily autonomy; of American expansion and empire; and of who counts as a citizen, or even as a human being. In the past few years, we’ve encountered new stories about everything from new and restrictive abortion laws, to immigrant woman who were sterilized without their consent, to new technologies in male birth control, to the inequitable childcare burden that falls to women during times of hardship, to the racist roots of foster care and residential school systems. In this course, we come to understand the historical changes in American reproduction to better understand the complicated roots of our current moment. By analyzing articles in newspapers and scientific journals, advertisements, film, patient and physician narratives, and exhibitions and material culture, students will understand reproduction as a site for empowerment and activism, as a site of medical professionalization, and as a site of health disparity. We examine reproduction capaciously, including pregnancy and childbirth, birth control and abortion, assistive reproductive technologies, and adoption and foster care. Our analysis is intersectional, and we consider what different identities meant for reproduction historically, as well as in our current moment.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1120a / AMST 1120a / EVST 1120a / HSHM 2040a, American Environmental History  Staff

Ways in which people have shaped and been shaped by the changing environments of North America from the nineteenth century to the present. Migration of species and trade in commodities; the impact of technology, agriculture, and industry; the development of resources in the American West and overseas; the conservation and environmental movements; planning and the impact of public policies; automobiles, highways, and urban growth; toxic chemicals, radiation, and environmental justice; climate change and energy transitions.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1122a / DEVN 2000a, America at 250: A History  Staff

This one-time-only course examines U.S. history from 1776 to the present, in advance of the nation's semiquincentennial (or 250th birthday) in 2026. Taught jointly by Professors Joanne Freeman, David Blight, and Beverly Gage, the course emphasizes the history of the nation-state and the contested nature of American national identity. The class explores U.S. political history broadly conceived–not just as a realm of presidents and elections and wars (though there will be plenty of those) but as a conversation across time between citizens about what the United States is, was, and was meant to be. It proceeds from the premise that the American Revolution was the first but not the last radical act of national reimagining in U.S. history.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1125a / AMST 1197a / ARCH 2600a / HSAR 3219a / URBN 1101a, American Architecture and Urbanism  Staff

Introduction to the study of buildings, architects, architectural styles, and urban landscapes, viewed in their economic, political, social, and cultural contexts, from precolonial times to the present. Topics include: public and private investment in the built environment; the history of housing in America; the organization of architectural practice; race, gender, ethnicity and the right to the city; the social and political nature of city building; and the transnational nature of American architecture.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

HIST 1129b / HSHM 2490b, The Good Death: A History  Deborah Streahle

Can a death be "good" or "bad?" How so? Who gets to decide? Students in this course trace how the idea of “the good death” changed through U.S. history. Together, we consider several questions that have been used to evaluate the “goodness” of a death, asking: Is there a right time to die? Can a good death be planned? Is there a right attitude or spiritual stance to have toward death? Where does a good death take place? What kind of care is best for dying people? What should be done with dead bodies? How does grief factor into the good death?  Over the semester, students investigate both aspirational visions of the good death as well as the realities of death in U.S. history. We analyze cultural, social, and medical factors that influenced the professionalization and medicalization of death into the 21st century. In addition, students are asked to probe their own assumptions about the good death and its corollary, the good life. The course culminates in an essay that features self-reflection as well as rigorous historical analysis.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 10:30am-11:20am

HIST 1131a / AFAM 2150a / ER&M 2534a / HSHM 2520a, History of Anti-Black Racism and Medicine  Staff

The course traces how anti-Black racism shaped the development of western medicine in the Americas. It examines how ideas of anti-Blackness shaped the work of health practitioners and the experiences of patients. It engages the emergence of racial science and scientific racism, and how they contributed to the production of medical knowledge. More importantly, it centers the voices and experiences of Black people, and the various ways challenged racism through knowledge production and activism. It also addresses the enduring legacies of anti-Black racism in medical practice, and its impact on health inequality.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1183a / AMST 2272a / ER&M 2682a / WGSS 2272a, Asian American History, 1800 to the Present  Staff

An introduction to the history of East, South, and Southeast Asian migrations and settlement to the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. Major themes include labor migration, community formation, U.S. imperialism, legal exclusion, racial segregation, gender and sexuality, cultural representations, and political resistance.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1212a / CLCV 2685a, The Ancient Economy  Staff

A survey of the economies of the ancient Mediterranean world, with emphasis on economic institutions, the development of the economies over time, ancient economic thought, and the interrelationships between institutions and economic growth. Material evidence for studying the economies of the ancient world, including coinage, documentary material, and archaeology.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1215a / RLST 2830a, Reformation Europe, 1450–1650  Staff

Examination of a series of religious revolutions in Europe between 1450 and 1650. The causes and nature of the reformations that changed the religious, political, social, and economic landscapes of early modern Europe and shaped the course of Western civilization as a whole.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1217a / CLCV 2501a / HUMS 2501a, The Roman Republic  Staff

The origins, development, and expansion of Rome from the earliest times to the deaths of Caesar and Cicero. Cultural identity and interaction; slavery, class, and the family; politics, rhetoric, and propaganda; religion; imperialism; monumentality and memory; and the perception and writing of history. Application of literary and archaeological evidence.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1218b / CLCV 2502b, The Roman Empire  Andrew Johnston

The history of the Roman Empire from its establishment by Augustus to the reign of Justinian. Attention to social, intellectual, and religious changes, as well as to the framework of historical events within which these changes took place, and to the processes by which the Roman Empire was replaced by the institutions of the Western Middle Ages and the Byzantine Empire.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1219a / ER&M 2519a / JDST 200 / JDST 2000a / MMES 1149a / RLST 1480a, Jews and the World: From the Bible through Early Modern Times  Ivan Marcus

A broad introduction to the history of the Jews from biblical beginnings until the European Reformation and the Ottoman Empire. Focus on the formative period of classical rabbinic Judaism and on the symbiotic relationships among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jewish society and culture in its biblical, rabbinic, and medieval settings. Counts toward either European or non-Western distributional credit within the History major, upon application to the director of undergraduate studies.  HU  RP  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

HIST 1229a, From Oligarchy to Democracy in Britain, 1780-1914  Staff

British politics, society, and culture in the long nineteenth century, a period of constitutional reform, industrial development, social dislocation, imperial expansion, and cultural criticism.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1231b / HUMS 277, European Intellectual History from Renaissance to Revolution  Isaac Nakhimovsky

A survey of eighteenth-century European intellectual life, considered in its social and cultural contexts and with attention to its historical legacies, focusing on responses to emerging global networks of trade, finance, and empire.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 1:30pm-2:20pm

HIST 1236a / HIST 236a / HSHM 2260a, The Global Scientific Revolution  Staff

The material, political, cultural, and social transformations that underpinned the rise of modern science between the 14th and 18th century, considered in global context. Topics include artisanal practices and the empirical exploration of nature; global networks of knowledge and trade, and colonial science; figurative arts and the emersion of a visual language of anatomy, astronomy, and natural history.   HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1254a / GMAN 2080a, Germany from Unification to Refugee Crisis  Staff

The history of Germany from its unification in 1871 through the present. Topics include German nationalism and national unification; the culture and politics of the Weimar Republic; National Socialism and the Holocaust; the division of Germany and the Cold War; the Student Movement and New Social Movements; reunification; and Germany's place in contemporary Europe.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1257a, England and Its Empire, 1485-1783  Staff

In 1485, England had just struggled through the internal Wars of the Roses, between Yorkist and Lancastrian factions. It was a medium-sized kingdom that had not even managed to control the entirety of its home island, and had a small part of Ireland as its sole overseas possession. In 1764, Great Britain had just won a decisive victory over France in the Seven Years’ War. It controlled the entirety of Britain and Ireland, possessed the second largest overseas empire in history, and was richer than any other European state. But then, in the space of the next two decades, the empire seemed to disintegrate as thirteen American colonies won their independence. This course examines how all that happened, both through the eyes of professional historians and the historical figures themselves. We are guided in this course by two critical questions: How did English monarchs, ministers, and merchants build the most effective European imperial state of its time? And what was the cost?  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1265a / RSEE 2660a, Soviet Russia 1917-1991  Staff

Overview of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Topics include political culture and ideology of the Bolshevik/Communist Party; social and economic changes; foreign policy and the role of WWII; major artistic and cultural movements. Paper assignments involve close readings of memoir and oral history accounts.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1280b / ITAL 1315b / RLST 1600b, The Catholic Intellectual Tradition  Carlos Eire

Introductory survey of the interaction between Catholicism and Western culture from the first century to the present, with a focus on pivotal moments and crucial developments that defined both traditions. Key beliefs, rites, and customs of the Roman Catholic Church, and the ways in which they have found expression; interaction between Catholics and the institution of the Church; Catholicism in its cultural and sociopolitical matrices. Close reading of primary sources.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 2:30pm-3:20pm

HIST 1290a / RSEE 2225a, Russia from the Ninth Century to 1801  Staff

The mainstream of Russian history from the Kievan state to 1801. Political, social, and economic institutions and the transition from Eastern Orthodoxy to the Enlightenment.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1340b / AFST 3340b, Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade  Robert Harms

Examination of the tumultuous changes experienced by African societies during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, approximately 1450–1850. Focus on the complex interaction between the internal dynamics of African societies and the impact of outside forces.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 9am-10:15am

* HIST 1344a / AFST 3344a, African Independence: A Cup of Plenty or a Poisoned Chalice?  Staff

In every African colony after World War Two there emerged nationalist movements which no longer called for civil rights as in the pre-war years but demanded self-determination. While many of them got it easy, some had to fight long and bloody wars for it. By the 1960s the colonial edifice had crumbled except for the few settler colonies in southern Africa. But even here the winds of change could not be stopped. But what did decolonization and independence mean to Africa? Did Africans get what they wanted? Was independence a cup of plenty or a poisoned chalice? In addressing these questions, this course charts the economic, political, and cultural transformations of postcolonial Africa from the 1960s to the present. The argument is this: there can be no understanding of Africa’s challenges today without an inquiry into the nature of what the continent got from the departing colonial powers.   HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1421a / EAST 2301a, China from Present to Past  Staff

Underlying causes of current issues facing China traced back to their origins in the premodern period. Topics include economic development, corruption, environmental crises, gender, and Pacific island disputes. Selected primary-source readings in English, images, videos, and Web resources. Preference given to first years and sophomores.   WR, HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1568b / ER&M 3568 / LAST 1368, Political Violence, Citizenship, and Democracy in Latin America  Marcela Echeverri Munoz

Exploration of how and when definitions of citizenship and democracy have been shaped by violent conflicts; how local and global contexts have influenced individual and collective political action; and the transformation of leadership, ideologies, and utopias in different Latin American contexts.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
TTh 10:30am-11:20am

HIST 1645b / JDST 3265 / MMES 1148 / RLST 2020b, Jews in Muslim Lands from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries  Ivan Marcus

Jewish culture and society in Muslim lands from the time of the Prophet Muhammad to that of Suleiman the Magnificent. Topics include Islam and Judaism; Jerusalem as a holy site; rabbinic leadership and literature in Baghdad; Jewish courtiers, poets, and philosophers in Muslim Spain; and the Jews in the Ottoman Empire.  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

HIST 1701b, History of Dutch Empire  Nurfadzilah Yahaya

This lecture course introduces the history of the Dutch Empire which consists of territories throughout North America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Indian Ocean from the seventeenth century till the present day. Compared to other European empires, the history of the Dutch Empire is lesser known although its impact was truly global. We study the history of the nascent Dutch Republic coming out from under Spanish rule and trace Dutch voyages across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean through the histories of the earliest chartered companies, the Dutch East India Company which dominated Sri Lanka and Netherlands East Indies (present-day Indonesia), and the Dutch West India Company in North America, the Caribbean and Brazil. We also look at how the Dutch became deeply involved in Atlantic slave trade and the Indian Ocean. We explore how with the demise of both companies, the Dutch government took direct control all over the world, and strove to maintain control and legacies of Dutch rule. Towards the late nineteenth century, Dutch imperialists altered their colonial strategies to grant more autonomy to subjects. We end by exploring the legacies of the Dutch Empire in the world.   HU  0 Course cr
TTh 1:30pm-2:20pm

HIST 1702a / CLCV 2691a / GLBL 1204a, Global Leadership, 600 BCE–600 CE  Staff

This course provides students with an accessible and engaging introduction to both the classical world and the problems of political organization and leadership through time and across societies. Students learn to think comparatively between individuals, societies, and systems and to analyze different ideals of leadership. This means considering not only traditional masculine and military conceptions of rule but also the leadership roles and styles of women, slaves, and rebels. We hope to bring into view, in other words, the intersectional challenges to power faced by non-traditional leaders in a world dominated by gender, class, and cultural prejudices, and to show how non-traditional leaders confronted and overcame these. Students draw upon this experience to access the premodern world as an alternative but related historical reality which can productively inform their engagement with the present.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1703b, The World Circa 1800  Stuart Semmel

Global history studies cross-cultural interactions, connections, influences, and conflicts. Our subjects include: colonial expansion; war and resistance; slavery; migration and diaspora; the diffusion of ideas and technologies; and the transplanting of crops, livestock, and bacteria. Looking at the world around 1800 lets us consider the impact of European imperial expansion, the French revolution, religious movements, industrialization, and the “international” emergence of “nationalism.” We consider and explore the very notions of “modernization” and “globalization.”  HU  0 Course cr
TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

HIST 1712b, History of Pandemics  Zeinab Azarbadegan

Diseases, especially pandemic ones, are not confined to a mere scientific medical issue. They are a social phenomenon, where even the medical discourse is shaped by the societies they emerge from. This course provides an overview of how global pandemics have been understood and dealt with since ancient times to now. We explore issues such as the evolution of medical discourses about the spread of diseases, how states and governments deal with pandemics, how a global public health regime was established, and what has been its triumphs and failures among others.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

HIST 1727a / EVST 2206a / HSHM 2010a / HUMS 1060a / PHYS 1060a, Sustainable Energy: Physics and History

Students explore the physical logic of energy and power in parallel with the histories of technology for energy exploitation and economic theories of sustainability on the path to modernity. They learn the fundamentals of quantitative analysis of contemporary and historical energy harvesting, its carbon intensity, and climate impact. They also gain an understanding of the historical underpinnings of the current global energy status quo and its relationship to economic theories of sustainability.  Mathematical proficiency with algebra is assumed. Students from all academic interests and experiences are welcome in the course.  QR, SC, SO  0 Course cr
TTh 1:30pm-2:20pm

HIST 1733a / GLBL 1433a, The Twentieth Century: A World History  Staff

For most people, almost everywhere, the twentieth century was a time of profound and accelerating change. Someone born in the 1890s could, if they lived a long life, have experienced two world wars, a global depression, collapse of empires, the enfranchisement of women and young people, and the rise of the United States to global power.  They could have witnessed the first cars, the first planes, the first radios and TVs, and the first computers. They could have been among the first to swear allegiance to one (or several) of 130 new states, almost twice the number that existed in 1900. They would have been certain to witness massive ecological destruction, as well as unparalleled advances in medicine, science, and the arts. The twentieth century was, as one historian puts it, an age of extremes, and in this class we explore some of these aspects of the age. The class is not intended to be a complete history nor is it one that provides an integrative interpretation of historical events. The aim is rather to enable students to know enough to think for themselves about the origins of today’s world and about how historical change is created.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1744b / HSHM 2321b, Cultures of Western Medicine  John Warner

A survey of Western medicine and its global encounters, encompassing medical theory, practice, institutions, and healers from antiquity to the present.  Changing concepts of health, disease, and the body in Europe and America explored in their social, cultural, economic, scientific, technological, and ethical contexts.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 10:30am-11:20am

* HIST 1759a / CPLT 3450a / EVST 2228a / HUMS 2228a, Climate Change and the Humanities  Katja Lindskog

What can the Humanities tell us about climate change? The Humanities help us to better understand the relationship between everyday individual experience, and our rapidly changing natural world. To that end, students read literary, political, historical, and religious texts to better understand how individuals both depend on, and struggle against, the natural environment in order to survive.  HU
MW 9am-10:15am

HIST 1763a / HSHM 2330a, The Politics of Global Health, 1850-Present  Staff

This course explores the emergence of global health from the 1851 International Sanitary Conference in Paris to contemporary global health and examines how health initiatives and policies have evolved over the last 150 years. We begin by examining the impact of colonialism on health systems, highlighting the introduction of Western medicine that dismantled local health systems and established healthcare infrastructures that primarily served colonial and elite interests. We then explore the rise of international health organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO), and the World Health Organization (WHO), and the role of multilateral institutions in shaping global and local health policy in the postwar period. We also evaluate health missions between the Socialist bloc and the Third World and assess the successes and limitations of these alternative visions for promoting health equity. Over the course of the semester, we examine the experiences of health interventions and eradication programs from the perspective of recipient communities and gain an understanding of resistance, contestations, and adoption of these programs. Challenging dominant narratives that portray recipients of global health projects as passive, we evaluate how marginalized communities have variously resisted, appropriated, and shaped global technologies and ideas. Importantly, rather than following a linear North (donor) -to-South (recipient) model, we examine how the contemporary global health landscape emerged as the result of the exchange of ideas, technologies, and local knowledge and expertise between the Global North and South  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 1765b / EVST 2090b / HSHM 2090b, Making Climate Knowledge  Deborah Coen

This is a course about how humans have come to know what we know about our impacts on the earth’s climate and our vulnerability to climate change. When did humans first know that their actions, in the aggregate, could transform the planet? Did scientists bear responsibility to warn of these consequences? In what ways has the modern science of climate both appropriated and undermined traditional and indigenous forms of climate knowledge? Students learn to work with the methods of history of science: we analyze science as a social and material process bound to the cultural and epistemological particularities of its historical context, and we examine the political dimensions of historical narratives about the emergence of the theory of global warming. Via hands-on experience with Yale’s historical collections, students learn to analyze maps, artifacts, and instruments as historical sources. They also gain familiarity with the methods of environmental history, learning to attend to historical evidence of shifting relationships between humans and non-humans. Finally, students become more attuned to the evidence of climate change around them and more confident in their ability to make climate knowledge for themselves.  HU
TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

HIST 1766a / ECON 2265a, History of Economic Thought  Robert Dimand

The objective of this course is to give an overview of how economic analysis has developed, and an introduction to the varied ways in which some of the great economists of the past have gone about studying how the economy functions. We discuss the relevance of their theories to public policy and the role of the state, and consider the roles of pre-analytic vision, improvements in analytical technique, and external events (such as the Great Depression or Global Financial Crisis) in the development of economic analysis. Prerequisites: ECON 115 and ECON 116.  SO
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm

HIST 2113b, The Un-American Century  Beverly Gage

This course explores the political history of the United States in the 20th century through the national contest over communism and anticommunism, a conflict that reshaped American politics and society at every level. Through this subject, the course investigates debates about democracy and extremism, policing and surveillance, civil liberties and civil rights, liberalism, radicalism, and conservatism, foreign and domestic policy. It describes the evolving histories of both the Left and the Right, along with the ways that government institutions responded to their challenges. Subjects include McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, intellectual history, labor, espionage and security, gender and sexuality, and the Cold War.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
MW 1pm-2:15pm

* HIST 2114a / AMST 4449a / FILM 4470a, The Historical Documentary  Charles Musser

This course looks at the historical documentary as a method for carrying out historical work in the public humanities. It investigates the evolving discourse sand resonances within such topics as the Vietnam War, the Holocaust and African American history. It is concerned with their relationship of documentary to traditional scholarly written histories as well as the history of the genre and what is often called the “archival turn.”
T 3:30pm-5:20pm, M 7pm-10pm

HIST 2140a / AMST 1109a / WGSS 1109a, US LGBTQ History & Queer Futures  Staff

This interdisciplinary course offers a critical overview of queer history in the United States from the colonial era to the present, exploring the lives and experiences of LGBTQ individuals and emphasizing the broader historical evolution of ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender that constitute the ever-changing landscape of queer history. Through an intersectional lens, students analyze how gender, sexuality, race, and class have shaped LGBTQ identities, cultures, and political movements. Drawing heavily from primary sources including historical texts, literature, visual culture, and popular media, we investigate how queer lives and experiences have been represented, constructed, and contested across time.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 2149a / AMST 1142a, Early American Studies for 21st-Century America  Staff

This introductory lecture offers students a scholarly initiation into the field of early American studies while also reflecting on the increasingly loud politicization of “early American history” as a scholarly and rhetorical project. From Hannah Nikole Jones’ 1619 Project to the first Trump administration’s 1776 Commission, from the “originalism” or some members of the United States judiciary to the neo-monarchism of so-called “dark enlightenment” thinkers (the Enlightenment itself also being an eighteenth-century movement, if a relatively small one), the politics of our present moment regularly invoke early American history to ground and legitimate their ethical, political, historical, and visionary claims. While this course is primarily an introduction to early American studies—an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the period that draws on scholarship in history, literature, and law, among other fields— the course is organized into three sections, organized around three themes (sovereignty, labor, and governance), and at the end of each section we engage twenty-first century political debates surrounding these themes. This course focuses on British colonial North America, and then the early national United States before 1865, but readings cluster around the long eighteenth century. Topics may include the histories, geographies and politics of Native nations prior to the incursion of Europeans into the region; the labor cultures of bondage (chattel slavery) and indenture; anti-government, anti-monarchical and revolutionary movements; the legal architecture of Native dispossession; the beginnings of nationalist imperialism; the politics of democratic governance; regional, religion-based, and culturally-specific formations of gendered and sexual comportment; visual and/or literary arts of the era; abolitionist movements (temperance, anti-slavery); the creation of citizenship infrastructures as well as those controlling immigration and naturalization; and contemporary visions of what “Americanness” meant, looked like, or represented.   HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

* HIST 2196a / AMST 2233a / ER&M 3536a / WGSS 2235a, Another “Other” – Introducing Critical Theories and Histories of Disability  Jiya Pandya

What is disability? How has its definition changed over time? How do people “become” disabled and how does one inhabit a disabled body? In what ways has the disabled body become a site for enacting imperial, national, and resistant politics? Where and how are alternate, radical visions of health being developed? This introductory course in Disability Studies poses answers to these and other related questions through an overview of key texts and debates in the growing field of disability studies. Students will learn about the transnational history of disability and disability rights, think about the intersections of disability, race, sexuality, gender, and citizenship, and engage with questions of accessibility and activism that already exist in spaces around you. This course, composed of three modules on “disability,” “disidentifications” with disability, and “disability justice” and “health liberation,” is meant to be both an academic overview of a field and a toolkit for advocacy. As we reckon with the longer impacts of COVID-19 and process what it means to live life during and after a global pandemic, it makes most sense for us to turn to those who have reckoned with what it means to live in “crisis,” to inhabit a body that is almost-always at “risk,” and to build creative forms of care and community. We will spend significant time with disabled writers, artists, and scholars who offer insight and memory about interactions with and between medicine, war, design, technology, sexuality, race, and imperialism. none
MW 11:35am-12:50pm

HIST 2211b, The Birth of Europe, 1000-1500  Hussein Fancy

Europe during the central and late Middle Ages, from the feudal revolution to the age of discoveries. Europe as it came to be defined in terms of national states and international empires. The rise and decline of papal power, church reform movements, the Crusades, contacts with Asia, the commercial revolution, and the culture of chivalry.  HU  0 Course cr
MW 11:35am-12:25pm

HIST 2214a, The Early Middle Ages  Staff

This course focuses on the “Early Middle Ages” in the Mediterranean, European, and Middle Eastern worlds. This course takes us through a number of events that have long been considered great ruptures: the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West and growth of Barbarian Europe, the collapse of the Persian Empire and Rise of Islam, and the Christianization of the Roman world and dominance of Abrahamic religions in the Mediterranean and Middle East. We consider in what way these phenomena served as historical ruptures, and in what other ways we see continuities threaded across the centuries and across diverse locales. At the same time, we learn how vibrant this world was, where political configurations changed and developed, intellectuals battled with essential questions about the nature of God, and the fundaments of the modern world were laid. We consider these subjects and many more in considering both the creative and diverse medieval world, and the ways in which scholars conceptualize its different aspects.  HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

HIST 2249a / JDST 3446a, Making European Culture Jewish: Five Media, 1780-1930  Staff

This course studies the ways in which Jewish writers and artists turned European culture into Jewish culture, that is, how a minority group fashioned its own version of the majority culture. As European Jews encountered European culture and society, they had to grapple with a host of fundamental questions. What was Judaism and who were the Jews: a religion, a history, a culture, a nation? We examine the way in which writers and artists struggled with these issues in five media: memoir, theology, history, fiction, and painting, thereby creating Jewish versions first of Enlightenment, Romanticism, and realism (1780-1870) and then of nationalism, positivism, and modernism (1870-1930).    WR, HU  0 Course cr
HTBA

* HIST 2391a / AFST 3385a / EP&E 4350a / HIST 3344a / PLSC 3439a, Pandemics in Africa: From the Spanish Influenza to Covid-19  Jonny Steinberg

The overarching aim of the course is to understand the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic in Africa in the context of a century of pandemics, their political and administrative management, the responses of ordinary people, and the lasting changes they wrought. The first eight meetings examine some of the best social science-literature on 20th-century African pandemics before Covid-19. From the Spanish Influenza to cholera to AIDS, to the misdiagnosis of yaws as syphilis, and tuberculosis as hereditary, the social-science literature can be assembled to ask a host of vital questions in political theory: on the limits of coercion, on the connection between political power and scientific expertise, between pandemic disease and political legitimacy, and pervasively, across all modern African epidemics, between infection and the politics of race. The remaining four meetings look at Covid-19. We chronicle the evolving responses of policymakers, scholars, religious leaders, opposition figures, and, to the extent that we can, ordinary people. The idea is to assemble sufficient information to facilitate a real-time study of thinking and deciding in times of radical uncertainty and to examine, too, the consequences of decisions on the course of events. There are of course so many moving parts: health systems, international political economy, finance, policing, and more. We also bring guests into the classroom, among them frontline actors in the current pandemic as well as veterans of previous pandemics well placed to share provisional comparative thinking. This last dimension is especially emphasized: the current period, studied in the light of a century of epidemic disease, affording us the opportunity to see path dependencies and novelties, the old and the new.  SO
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 2443a / EAST 4301a, Environmental History of Japan (1600 to the present)  Staff

This course explores Japanese concepts of nature and the environment from the Tokugawa period to the present. Split into three modules, we consider how the Japanese government and society have responded to environmental change, degradation, and destruction. The first module—Tokugawa Nature (1600-1868)—examines shifts in agriculture and forestry, urbanization, and the emergence of scholarly knowledge of the natural world. The second module—Modern Transformation (1868-1945)—focuses on Japan’s rapid industrialization, disaster preparedness, and imperial expansion, tracing the environmental consequences of these processes on both the archipelago and East Asia. The third module—Postwar Developmentalism (1946-present)—addresses industrial pollution diseases, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the environmental struggles related to the American military bases in Okinawa.  HU
MW 1pm-2:15pm

* HIST 2464a / EAST 4322a, Law and Society in East Asia, 1600-Present  George Remisovsky

What have been the primary concerns of lawmakers in China, Japan, and Korea throughout history? Were their ideas primarily shaped by “Confucian” ideas or by other, more material concerns? How did the public try to make the legal system work for them? This seminar explores these questions in three parts. Part I examines the structure of the Tang legal system and how it shaped the institutions of both Japan and Korea. Part II focuses on case studies from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, showing how these legal systems operated in areas ranging from land disputes to violent acts of revenge. Part III then looks at some of the dramatic changes that began in the late 19th century, as foreign imperial pressure impelled their transition to Western-style laws and court systems.  HU
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 2621a / RLST 2930a, The Sharīʿa 101: From Medieval Jurists to Modern States, Why Islamic Law Matters Today  Matthew Steele

This course aims to provide students with an alternative reading of the Islamic legal tradition. It upends the view that Islamic law was in some way allergic to change. Likewise, it problematizes the notion that the medieval legal tradition either lacked innovation or was rendered obsolete by colonial reforms and modernist critique. It approaches Islamic law through the speculative enterprise of jurisprudence (fiqh), the work of legal scholars to elaborate God’s most likely position regarding any legal dilemma. Through the literature and opinions (fatwās) of legal specialists from the ninth through the twentieth century, the class interrogates the relationship between change and continuity in Islamic law. We explore how jurisconsults balanced the doctrine of trans-regional schools of law with the local dilemmas faced by the communities in which they lived and served. Similarly, we consider not only the opportunities but also the risks that arise from adapting Islamic law to local conditions. The course challenges students to ask what is change within a tradition? In the debates and polemics of legal scholars, we contemplate the appeal and the limitations of reform within Islamic law, tracing how both have been contested and have evolved across different geographies and periods in the Muslim World. Likewise, we rethink the boundaries of continuity. We question how a legal school and a legal canon are constructed and revised, examining the ways in which both are capable of reinforcing – or imperiling – the Islamic legal tradition. Last, we explore the endurance of Islamic law in contemporary Muslim societies. The course reflects on the processes and the consequences of various projects of “modernizing” the Sharīʿa, asking how the institutions of the colonial and postcolonial state have reconfigured Islamic law in radically different ways.   HU
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

HIST 2623a / GLBL 2357a, Palestine and Israel  Laura Robson

This course traces the history of Palestine and Israel from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, focusing particularly on the genesis of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the construction of two opposing nationalist narratives attached to the same geographical space. In this class, we examine the political, social, economic, and cultural history of the region and trace the concurrent development of Palestinian and Israeli national identities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We also consider the historiography of the conflict and investigate some of the most prominent scholarly debates surrounding the history of the region.  HU
MW 11:35am-12:25pm

* HIST 2635b / HUMS 2035b, Antisemitism and its opponents in the Muslim world  Staff

Antisemitism, as well as opposition to it, has long been a part of social, political, and intellectual life in Muslim-majority societies. These societies have also long included significant Jewish minorities, especially before the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. This course takes a historical approach, carefully examining antisemitisms of various types in various periods as well as opposition to them by Jews, Muslims, and others in the Islamicate world.  HU
HTBA

* HIST 2705b / ENGL 3474b / HUMS 1740b, Writing from the Archive: Imagining the Real  Adina Hoffman

Where do the dry, who-what-which details set down on a census form meet the far messier and richer reality of the people whose names are scrawled there? And how might a writer bring that meeting about? What can a shoebox of doodle-filled letters tell us about the ways that friendship, art, war, sex, and politics struck a couple of New York novelists, c. 1941? How do we respond as writers and as a culture when faced with the lack of such inky particulars? Blending seminar and workshop, this class is meant for students who want to write literary non-fiction based on archival materials. In an intensive, hands-on fashion, we’ll dig into documents of all sorts as we read essays and excerpts from belletristic works that wrestle with the sometimes slippery fact of the archive. Throughout, we’ll ask how best to bring vital prose into being. Weekly writing experiments that draw from various Yale collections and beyond will encourage students to see and respond to archival discoveries freshly and for themselves. A semester-long writing project will take shape as an extension of that seeing and responding. While no previous archival experience is required, this class calls for a serious commitment to the written word. By permission of instructor. Limit 12.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3118b, U.S. Immigration Policy: History, Politics, and Activism, 1607-Present  Brendan Shanahan

How can we study a history so broad, complex, and evolving as the history of American immigration policy?  This course explores that question by studying U.S. immigration law, politics, and activism from the colonial era to the present day.  Chronologically, we particularly examine: (1) antebellum immigration policy in the context of forced migration, settler colonialism, and slavery, (2) the rise of a federal “gatekeeping” immigration regime in the post-Civil War era, and (3) transformations in immigration policymaking and policies during the long twentieth century. Thematically, we emphasize how U.S. immigration policies have often been framed—and challenged by immigrant rights advocates—on the grounds of racialized and gendered exclusion and/or subordination.     WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3119b / AMST 4453b, The United States Constitution of 1787  Mark Peterson

This undergraduate seminar is organized around developing a deep historical understanding of one of our most important documents, the United States Constitution, as it emerged in the late 1780s.  In addition to close reading and analysis of this fundamental text, we read a series of other primary sources relevant to the evolution of constitutional thought and practice in the Anglo-American tradition of the early modern period.  And we engage relevant secondary scholarship produced by professional historians over the past century or more, in an effort to grapple with the evolution of changing approaches to the Constitution and its meaning over time. This course carries PI credit in History.  WR, HU
W 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3126b, Witchcraft in Colonial America  Rebecca Tannenbaum

This class examines the social, religious, economic, and gender history of British North America as it manifested itself through witchcraft beliefs and trials. We also explore the portrayal of the trials in literature and the continuing resonance of witchcraft in modern American culture.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3130a / AMST 4441a / ER&M 3570a, Indians and the Spanish Borderlands  Ned Blackhawk

The experiences of Native Americans during centuries of relations with North America's first imperial power, Spain. The history and long-term legacies of Spanish colonialism from Florida to California.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3131b / ER&M 1691, Urban History in the United States, 1870 to the Present  Jennifer Klein

The history of work, leisure, consumption, and housing in American cities. Topics include immigration, formation and re-formation of ethnic communities, the segregation of cities along the lines of class and race, labor organizing, the impact of federal policy, the growth of suburbs, the War on Poverty and Reaganism, and post-Katrina New Orleans.  WR, HU
M 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3135a, The Age of Hamilton and Jefferson  Joanne Freeman

The culture and politics of the revolutionary and early national periods of American history, using the lives, ideas, and writings of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton as a starting point. Topics include partisan conflict, political culture, nation building, the American character, and domestic life.  WR, HU
W 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3139b / HSHM 4450b, Fetal Histories: Pregnancy, Life, and Personhood in the American Cultural Imagination  Megann Licskai

In our twenty-first-century historical moment, the fetus is a powerful political and cultural symbol. One’s fetal politics likely predicts a lot about how they live their life, vote, worship, and even about how they understand themselves. How, then, has the fetus come to carry the cultural significance that it does? Are there other ways one might think of the fetus? And what is happening in the background when we center the fetus up front? This course examines the many cultural meanings of the fetus in American life: from a clump of cells, to a beloved family member, to political litmus test, and considers the way that these different meanings are connected to questions of human and civil rights, gender relations, bodily autonomy, and political life. We look at the history of our very idea of the fetus and consider how we got here. Each of us may have a different idea of what the fetus is, but every one of those ideas has a particular history. We work to understand those histories, their contexts, and their possible implications for the future of American political life.  WR, HU
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3145a / AFAM 3145a, Enslavement in the Americas, 1500–1900  Edward Rugemer

This course explores the practice of enslavement in the Americas from the beginnings of colonization through the nineteenth century. The racialized slavery that emerged in the Americas was new to World History, developed by European colonists to exploit the natural resources of the Americas. Initially, European colonists enslaved indigenous peoples wherever possible, yet by the late sixteenth century the enslavement of Africans had become far more common. We focus upon North American and the Caribbean, where European colonists developed sophisticated agricultural enterprises that produced for export to the European market and were completely dependent upon the enslaved labor of Africans. An enormous ocean commerce trafficked almost twelve million enslaved captives from the Atlantic coasts of Africa to work on the plantations of the Americas. The commerce in tobacco, sugar, rum, and cotton enabled these colonies to develop. Black people resisted enslavement at multiple levels, and throughout the Americas there emerged the Black cultures, languages, musics, struggles, and histories that we know and love today.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3150a or b / HSHM 4060a or b, Healthcare for the Urban Underserved  Sakena Abedin

Exploration of the institutions, movements, and policies that have attempted to provide healthcare for the urban underserved in America from the late nineteenth century to the present, with emphasis on the ideas (about health, cities, neighborhoods, poverty, race, gender, difference, etc) that shaped them. Topics include hospitals, health centers, public health programs, the medical civil rights movement, the women’s health movement, and national healthcare policies such as Medicare and Medicaid.   WR, HU
HTBA

* HIST 3158b, When the Rust Hit the Sunbelt: Neoliberalism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands  Staff

This seminar examines how macroeconomic forces—including free-trade, deindustrialization, the deregulation of the U.S. economy—along with immigration reform have transformed the U.S-Mexico Borderlands and reshaped the daily lives of its inhabitants. With a focus on how late global capitalism has produced a precarious working class, largely composed of migrant workers, the course guides students in considering how the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, as a geopolitical, economic, and ideological space of convergence, evolved during the latter twentieth century. By challenging the conventional view of neoliberalism as a unidirectional export from the Global North, the course highlights the multifaceted ways neoliberal policies took root across governmental regimes. Students analyze how individuals in the Borderlands have adapted to and resisted these shifts, while forging communities and livelihoods in the face of growing inequality.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3159a, From the Monroe Doctrine to Revolutions: US-Latin America Relations Since 1800  Staff

Since the Spanish American War of 1898, US expansion overseas has shaped the political development of other nations. Nowhere is this more salient than in Latin America, a region with geographic proximity to the United States. This seminar explores the relations between the United States and Latin America, from the rise of nation states in the nineteenth century to present-day conflicts, providing an overview of the most relevant issues that shaped the history of both regions, emphasizing themes like capitalism, imperialism, and resistance. The course shows how key Latin American actors, institutions, and resources shaped the development of the United States as the dominant hegemonic power in the twentieth century. We begin in the nineteenth century, when both regions began to create alliances to combat the presence of European powers in the hemisphere. Then, we examine how US economic and military presence in Latin America was both welcomed and contested by different social sectors in both regions. We also emphasize how the Cold War dictated US strategy in the region, resulting in coups and revolutions, and how Latin America played a fundamental role in US foreign policy. This seminar exposes students to different historiographical debates about American imperialism, tracing how different scholars have characterized the unique relationship between the US and Latin America.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3163a, Slavery & Capitalism  Caleb Knapp

This course considers the historical relation between capitalism and slavery in the Americas. It tracks the rise of the slave trade and the plantation economy alongside emergent processes of primitive accumulation, commodification, labor exploitation, industrialization, social reproduction, and more. Of central concern to the course are historiographical debates about the role that slavery played in the development of capitalist modernity.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3164a, Foxes, Hedgehogs, and History  John Gaddis

Application of Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between foxes and hedgehogs to selected historical case studies extending from the classical age through the recent past.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3165b, Yale and America: Selected Topics in Social and Cultural History  Jay Gitlin

Relations between Yale and Yale people—from Ezra Stiles and Noah Webster to Cole Porter, Henry Roe Cloud, and Maya Lin—and American society and culture. Elihu Yale and the global eighteenth century; Benjamin Silliman and the emergence of American science; Walter Camp, Dink Stover, and the all-American boy; Henry Luce and the information age; faith and ideology in postwar Yale and America.  WR, HU
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3166b / AMST 4409b / WGSS 4409b, Asian American Women and Gender, 1830 to the Present  Mary Lui

Asian American women as key historical actors. Gender analysis is used to reexamine themes in Asian American history: immigration, labor, community, cultural representations, political organizing, sexuality, and marriage and family life.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3168b, Quebec and Canada from 1791 to the Present  Jay Gitlin

The history of Quebec and its place within Canada from the Constitutional Act of 1791 to the present. Topics include the Rebellion of 1837, confederation, the Riel Affair, industrialization and emigration to New England, French-Canadian nationalism and culture from Abbé Groulx to the Parti Québécois and Céline Dion, and the politics of language. Readings include plays by Michel Tremblay and Antonine Maillet in translation.  WR, HU
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3170a / HSHM 4090a, Community Histories: Reproductive Health in New Haven  Megann Licskai

How does a local focus help us to understand the history of reproductive health, and how does reproductive health help us to understand local history? As a project within Yale’s Community Histories Lab, students join a team of Yale researchers and community partners committed to producing new knowledge about the history of health in New Haven. Students collaboratively build an archive of reproductive health histories in New Haven. This archive will be a site of academic interest, developed in response to community needs as we consider how to leverage historical research to imagine a better future. The first unit provides students with targeted methodological training in oral historical and traditional archival methods in preparation of the collection of oral histories and compilation of paper archives. The remainder of the seminar engages these methods in project work. Students use their training to build a publicly accessible reproductive health archive housed at Yale, to develop their own research questions coming out of this nascent archive, and to support New Haven organizations that can use these histories to serve their communities.  WR, HU  0 Course cr
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3174a / HSHM 4280a, Technology and American Medicine  Deborah Streahle

This course explores the material culture of American medicine. From instruments like thermometers and scalpels to imaging tools like X-rays and MRIs to everyday aids like glasses, prosthetics and fitness tracking apps—technology suffuses medicine today. In this course, we analyze particular technologies as both physical and cultural objects in historical context. In addition to investigating the definition of medical technology, also consider a range of themes and questions, among them: why do some technologies succeed and others fail? What is the relationship between medical technology and power? How do race, class, gender, and sexuality impact the creation and use of medical technology? We pay particular attention to the themes of expertise, authority, and identity. In addition to reading primary and secondary sources, students work closely with materials from the Medical Historical Library. Students can expect to emerge from the course prepared to analyze medical technologies and place them in historical context in American medicine. The course culminates in a student-run virtual exhibition of medical technologies  WR, HU
W 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3175a / HSHM 4230a, Healing Spaces in U.S. History  Deborah Streahle

Where does healing happen? Is place an important factor in health care? How has the design of a space influenced health? What is the relationship between nature and health? Students in this course investigate healing spaces in the history of American medicine and consider how space has been understood to interact with health. We discuss health care in institutions, mobile settings, and natural spaces. From ambulances and hospitals to homes and gardens, we consider the impact of setting on patients and practitioners. The course  draws on resources local to New Haven as well as guest speakers. Students can expect to emerge from the course familiar with several healing spaces in New Haven and with the way space has impacted broader health care. While the course focus on U.S. history, I welcome student contributions addressing healing spaces beyond the U.S.   WR, HU
Th 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3177a / HSHM 4480a / WGSS 4448a, American Medicine and the Cold War  Naomi Rogers

The social, cultural, and political history of American medicine from 1945 to 1960. The defeat of national health insurance; racism in health care; patient activism; the role of gender in defining medical professionalism and family health; the rise of atomic medicine; McCarthyism in medicine; and the polio vaccine trials and the making of science journalism.  WR, HU
T 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3178b / HSHM 4240b, Health Activism in U.S. History  Deborah Streahle

How have activists changed health care? How have health concerns become political? This course explores health activism and advocacy via case studies drawn from U.S. history from 19th-century sanitary reform to 21st-century environmental justice. Throughout the course, students examine movements, figures, and tactics that have shaped health policy and practice. We analyze the role of grassroots organizations, policy advocacy, and public campaigns in shaping health policy and addressing health inequities. Themes include: the intersection of health and social justice; the role of government and policy in health care; the influence of social movements on health reform; and strategies for effective advocacy and activism. Students engage with a variety of primary sources, including historical documents, speeches, art, and personal narratives, and emerges with an ability to analyze health activism in historical context.  WR, HU
Th 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3179a or b / HSHM 4580a or b, Scientific Instruments & the History of Science  Paola Bertucci

What do scientific instruments from the past tell us about science and its history? This seminar foregrounds historical instruments and technological devices to explore how experimental cultures have changed over time. Each week students focus on a specific instrument from the History of Science and Technology Division of the Peabody Museum: magic lantern, telescope, telegraph, astrolabe, sundial, and more!  WR, HU
HTBA

* HIST 3186b, Intelligence, Security, & Society in Modern US History  Staff

This course traces the evolution of U.S. intelligence and the national security state, from its 19th-century origins to its post-WWII expansion and through the early War on Terror. Focusing on espionage, covert operations, and surveillance, students examine the rise of intelligence agencies, their internal conflicts, and their complex relationships with government institutions, the private sector, and political interests. Beyond providing a history of security institutions, the course explores how espionage and security practices have shaped American society—its politics, culture, and identity—while also considering how race, gender, sexuality, and class have influenced the practice of intelligence and state-building. At its core, the course investigates how domestic and foreign threats blur, driving a security state shaped by both internal fears and external pressures.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3187b, Histories of Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the United States  Staff

This seminar introduces students to the entangled history of sexuality, gender, and race in the United States, from slavery to present. We question how race, gender, and class have shaped the making of sexual knowledges, sexual norms, and sexual identities. Together, we track how the idea of “sexual deviance” has been constructed over time to shore up varying political, economic, scientific, and cultural projects and regulate queer and trans lives. This course presents students with the main questions and frameworks that have animated the history of sexuality. We consider the role of slavery in the colonial sexual economy, the place of family life and homoeroticism in the colonial city, the rise of sexology in the nineteenth century and the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as sexual and social identities, the significance of capitalism, urbanization, and Reconstruction-era race politics in the history of sexuality, and how racialized gender and sexual norms in the twentieth century were shaped by state-building, immigration, medical and psychiatric knowledge, and neoliberal social policy.  A previous history course is recommended.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

HIST 3188b / HSHM 2140b, Extraterrestrials in History  Ivano Dal Prete

The notion of extraterrestrials and "radical others" in history and culture from antiquity to the present. Topics include other worlds and their inhabitants in ancient Greece; medieval debates on the plurality of worlds; angels, freaks, native Americans, and other "aliens" of the Renaissance; comet dwellers in puritan New England; Mars as a socialist utopia in the early twentieth century; and visitors from space in American popular culture.  HU
MW 10:30am-11:20am

* HIST 3195b / HSHM 4150b, Historical Perspectives on Science and Religion  Ivano Dal Prete

The engagement between science and religion from a historical standpoint and a multicultural perspective. The Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Christian traditions; the roots of modern creationism; salvation expectations and the rise of modern science and technology.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3197a / HSAR 4375a / HSHM 4410a, Museums: Power and Politics  Elaine Ayers

Museums are in a state of crisis. From calls for decolonization and repatriation to protests over human remains collections and unethical donor policies, museums and related cultural institutions find themselves at a crossroads, reckoning with their violent colonial histories while handling ongoing concerns about workers’ rights, systemic inequality, and their role in shaping knowledge in the public sphere. Whether addressing climate change policy, Black Lives Matter protests, fights for unionization, or Indigenous representation, it’s clear that museums are rich sites for critique in the history of science and beyond. How did we get here, and where do we go from here? Beginning with early modern cabinets of curiosity and moving through nineteenth century encyclopedic museums, controversial anatomical collections, and more recent natural history institutions, we investigate how museum politics and power produce knowledge, from the depths of their archives to sensationalized exhibits while questioning what an ethical, holistic museum might look like in the future. Amidst ongoing debates over controversial collections like the Benin Bronzes, human remains stored in universities across the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2023 admission of looting practices, and the American Museum of Natural History’s shallow apology for its eugenic past, the role of museums has expanded beyond the bounds of the academy, stoking universal struggles around human rights, international repatriation policies, and the politics of preservation, display, and loss. We bridge the classroom and the collection, visiting institutions around New Haven, practicing skills like provenance research and ethical handling of difficult objects while working towards a practice-based final project that suggests ways forward for museums and collections.  WR, HU
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3210b / HUMS 4124, Hobbes and Galileo: Materialism and the Emergence of Modernity  William Klein

Hobbes considered himself a disciple of Galileo, but as a systematic philosopher and ideologue during a period of civil unrest in England, he no doubt produced something that Galileo, a Tuscan astrophysicist and impassioned literary critic, was not entirely responsible for: an absolutist theory of the modern state situated within an eschatological time frame. In this course we will reflect on the relation between Galileo’s anti-Aristotelian physics and Hobbes’ system by reading key texts by Galileo and Hobbes along with an array of interpretations and criticisms of Hobbes that will serve to situate Hobbes in early modern currents of thought in science, religion and politics, while at the same time situating us in contemporary ideological debates about the origins of modernity.    HU
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3214a, History of the Night  Maria Jordan

This seminar is dedicated to the reality and the perception of the night across time and in different cultures. We explore how religious and philosophical beliefs, political and economic forces, changes in technologies of lighting, human biology, and the shift from rural to urban and agrarian to industrial societies affected attitudes toward time in general and the night in particular. These changes influenced the perceptions, uses, and the ways different groups experienced nocturnal time, and how we act, sleep, work, interact, and even dream. The traditional binary view of day and night is questioned by presenting a more complex "and dynamic face" of the night. Nightfall provides multiple opportunities for dissent and rebellion and becomes an ideal space for marginal and subordinate people. Historical analysis, literary texts, medical and scientific writings, and primary sources provide the class with a cross-disciplinary approach to examine how the night became the abode of the ghost, the devil, the witch, and the dead, and how the night became criminalized, commercialized and even politicized. In our time, improvements in lighting changed the nocturnal world, but also had detrimental effects on sleep and dreams, and caused contemporary movements–aesthetic and scientific–to "rescue" the night.  WR, HU
T 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3216a, History of Food and Cuisine  Paul Freedman

Food as an expression of cultures and societies from pre-history to the present. How environment, taste, and contacts among peoples and actions influence culinary preferences. The second half of the course concentrates on US history and looks at food in relationship to immigration, gender, technology, and ethnicity.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3218a, Crossroads of Empire: Ireland, Canada, and 19th-Century Anglo-American Relations  Brendan Shanahan

This seminar examines the role of Ireland, Canada, and Irish (North) Americans in the development of U.S.-U.K. relations and the (geo)politics of Anglo-American empire in the long nineteenth century. It explores the countless examples of fracture, détente, and alternatively competing and collaborative imperial projects that defined Anglo-American relations in the long nineteenth century (prior to rise of rapprochement, alliance, and the eventual “special” U.S.-U.K. relationship of the twentieth century). The course pays special attention to the importance of international relations to the domestic politics of each respective polity and the transnational forms of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics that emerged from them. The class primarily engages the fields of (North) American political history, migration history, diplomatic history, comparative empire, and U.S. and the World scholarship. Students also workshop original research methods and makes use of Yale’s Library and Archival Collections.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3220a, Grand Strategy and the Origins of the Second World War  Paul Kennedy

A survey of the most important literature and debates concerning the coming of the Second World War in both Europe and the Pacific. Emphasis on the comparative approach to international history and on the interplay of domestic politics, economics, and strategy. Counts toward only European distributional credit within the History major.  WR, HU  RP
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3222b / RSEE 222, Russia and the Eurasian Steppe  Paul Bushkovitch

A study of Russia's interaction with the nomads of the Eurasian steppe. Topics include the Mongol invasion, the Mongol Empire in Asia and the Golden Horde, Islam, nomadic society, and the Russian state. Focus on conquest and settlement. May count toward either European or Asian distributional credit within the History major, upon application to the director of undergraduate studies.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3226b / JDST 3470 / RLST 2310b, How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe 800-1500  Ivan Marcus

Students study how Jews and Christians interacted on a daily basis as medieval Europe became more restrictive and antisemitic, a contributing factor to the Holocaust. In this writing seminar, students discuss a variety of primary sources in class–laws, stories, chronicles, images–while researching and writing their own seminar paper structured by sessions on topics, bibliographies, and outlines.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3232a / HUMS 4430a / JDST 3270a / MMES 3342a / RLST 2010a, Medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims In Conversation  Ivan Marcus

How members of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities thought of and interacted with members of the other two cultures during the Middle Ages. Cultural grids and expectations each imposed on the other; the rhetoric of otherness—humans or devils, purity or impurity, and animal imagery; and models of religious community and power in dealing with the other when confronted with cultural differences. Counts toward either European or Middle Eastern distributional credit within the History major, upon application to the director of undergraduate studies.  WR, HU  RP
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3236a / HUMS 323, Truth and Sedition  William Klein

The truth can set you free, but of course it can also get you into trouble. How do the constraints on the pursuit and expression of “truth” change with the nature of the censoring regime, from the family to the church to the modern nation-state? What causes regimes to protect perceived vulnerabilities in the systems of knowledge they privilege? What happens when conflict between regimes implicates modes of knowing? Are there types of truth that any regime would—or should—find dangerous? What are the possible motives and pathways for self-censorship?  We begin with the revolt of the Hebrews against polytheistic Egypt and the Socratic questioning of democracy, and end with various contemporary cases of censorship within and between regimes. We consider these events and texts, and their reverberations and reversals in history, in relation to select analyses of the relations between truth and power, including Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Brecht, Leo Strauss, Foucault, Chomsky, Waldron, Zizek, and Xu Zhongrun.  WR, HU
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3240a / RSEE 2410a, Government, Law, and Society in Modern Russia, 1853-1953  Sergei Antonov

Russian political culture from the Crimean War to the death of Stalin. Special attention to continuities, as well as changes, across the revolutionary divide of 1917, and to comparing official policies with daily experiences of ordinary Russians. Changing ideologies and ruling styles of tsars and early Soviet leaders (esp. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin) and relations with aristocratic and bureaucratic elites; political dissent and protest, including popular and state-imposed violence; the problem of legality and the rule of law. All discussions and readings in English.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3242a / CLCV 3691 / HELN 3000a, The Olympic Games, Ancient and Modern  George Syrimis

Introduction to the history of the Olympic Games from antiquity to the present. The mythology of athletic events in ancient Greece and the ritual, political, and social ramifications of the actual competitions. The revival of the modern Olympic movement in 1896, the political investment of the Greek state at the time, and specific games as they illustrate the convergence of athletic cultures and sociopolitical transformations in the twentieth century.  HU
W 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3260a / HSHM 4680a, Sex, Life, and Generation  Ivano Dal Prete

Theories and practices of life, sex, and generation in Western civilization. Politics and policies of conception and birth; social control of abortion and infanticide in premodern societies; theories of life and gender; the changing status of the embryo; the lure of artificial life.  WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3265a / ITAL 3387a / RLST 3145a, Francis of Assisi and His Legacy  Carlos Eire

Francis of Assisi is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in European history. As one of Catholicism’s most revered saints (often considered to be the greatest male saint ever), his radical message of voluntary poverty, humility and fraternity significantly revived the Catholic church in a moment of profound crisis, and has since been accepted as one of the foundational elements of European thought, receiving universal admiration from diverse thinkers who are often unaffiliated with the Catholic tradition. This course seeks to take both challenges head on. Its pedagogical intent is three-fold. First, by offering a comprehensive overview of the layered accumulation of narratives that has given us the Francis figure so beloved today, it encourages students to examine the ambiguous boundaries of “reliability” with regard to historical narratives, especially those with a mythopoetic flavor. Other than the well-known “Little Flowers”, students are also exposed to less-known “lives” of the saint and are expected to critically compare these sources. Second, students are invited to Socratically wrestle with Francis’ spiritual legacy in light of its obvious conflict with prevalent notions of the “good life” in contemporary America. Third, students will gain a robust understanding of the Franciscan tradition which has left its footprint in vast regions outside of Europe (Jerusalem, East Asia, the Americas), has generated an important school of theology, and continues to stoke prominent public debates through controversial modern figures such as Padre Pio. Background readings on medieval religious history will also be provided. Topics will include orthodoxy and heresy, factional conflict within religious orders, missionary activities, mysticism, female religious life, and faith and the visual arts.   L4, HU
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3269a, History and Holocaust Testimony  Carolyn Dean

This course focuses on Holocaust testimony to ground students in the history of how victims’ experiences are narrated and assessed by historians and other interpreters who shape the afterlives of historical events. Class readings underscore how Holocaust memory has changed over time, including how it belatedly became an event primarily about the genocide of European Jewry. We read histories, testimonies, and work on the relationship between the historical memories of the Holocaust and of European Imperialism.  WR, HU
T 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3292a / HUMS 2790a / PLSC 3313a, Democracy and the French Revolution  Isaac Nakhimovsky

The French Revolution of 1789 and its legacies, as viewed through the late-eighteenth-century debates about democracy, equality, representative government, and historical change that shaped an enduring agenda for historical and political thought in Europe and around the world.  WR, HU
W 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3344a / AFST 3385a / EP&E 4350a / HIST 2391a / PLSC 3439a, Pandemics in Africa: From the Spanish Influenza to Covid-19  Jonny Steinberg

The overarching aim of the course is to understand the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic in Africa in the context of a century of pandemics, their political and administrative management, the responses of ordinary people, and the lasting changes they wrought. The first eight meetings examine some of the best social science-literature on 20th-century African pandemics before Covid-19. From the Spanish Influenza to cholera to AIDS, to the misdiagnosis of yaws as syphilis, and tuberculosis as hereditary, the social-science literature can be assembled to ask a host of vital questions in political theory: on the limits of coercion, on the connection between political power and scientific expertise, between pandemic disease and political legitimacy, and pervasively, across all modern African epidemics, between infection and the politics of race. The remaining four meetings look at Covid-19. We chronicle the evolving responses of policymakers, scholars, religious leaders, opposition figures, and, to the extent that we can, ordinary people. The idea is to assemble sufficient information to facilitate a real-time study of thinking and deciding in times of radical uncertainty and to examine, too, the consequences of decisions on the course of events. There are of course so many moving parts: health systems, international political economy, finance, policing, and more. We also bring guests into the classroom, among them frontline actors in the current pandemic as well as veterans of previous pandemics well placed to share provisional comparative thinking. This last dimension is especially emphasized: the current period, studied in the light of a century of epidemic disease, affording us the opportunity to see path dependencies and novelties, the old and the new.  SO
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3364b, Riverscapes in African History  Robert Harms

This junior seminar features case studies that focus on an epoch or episode in Africa’s history that was influenced or shaped by the riverine ecosystem in which it was embedded. Chronologically, the case studies range from the Nile in early dynastic ancient Egypt to the discovery of vast peatlands in the Congo River Basin in 2017. Geographically, the course looks at histories that developed in four of Africa’s major river basins: the Nile, the Niger, the Congo, and the Zambezi.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3388a, Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa  Robert Harms

The slave trade from the African perspective. Analysis of why slavery developed in Africa and how it operated. The long-term social, political, and economic effects of the Atlantic slave trade.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3392a / AFST 392 / ER&M 3547, Pan-Africanism, Anti-Colonialism and Colonial Modernity  Daniel Magaziner

A history of Pan-Africanism and Anti-Colonial thought from the Haitian Revolution until the apex of the global struggle against apartheid and white supremacy in South Africa, focusing on intellectual and cultural history from across the African diaspora and Atlantic world.  HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3415a / HSHM 4740a / SAST 3640a, Health, Medicine and Science in Modern South Asia  Gourav Krishna Nandi

In this seminar, we explore health, medicine, and science in South Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries, and examine how networks and circulations of medical knowledge, local and transnational actors, and anticolonial physicians and scientists shaped colonial modernities and postcolonial nationalism in the region. In the first part, we examine the establishment of colonial medicine in British India, colonial interventions during plague visitations, and approaches to famine and food in the 19th century. We explore how science in colonial India was intertwined with anticolonialism, and examine anticolonial arguments against famines using modern economic sciences. In the second part, we explore pluralist practices of medicine in colonial South Asia and analyze how diverse approaches of colonial Indian medical practitioners blur the categories of “traditional” and “modern” medicine. We then focus on colonial and postcolonial public health interventions—including, regulating poisons and adulterated food, population control, and vaccination campaigns—and their contestations. In the final part, we focus on the postcolonial state and explore how scientific nationalism shaped the postcolonial state’s approaches to modernization and development. We examine how Indian physicists and surgeons created and maintained knowledge networks using alliances on both sides of Cold War rivalries."  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3419a / WGSS 3419a, Modern South Asian Histories of the Body  Jiya Pandya

Beginning from the recognition that bodies are contextually specific and historically produced, we chart South Asia's history in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries from the vantage point of the body. Unpacking the body’s role as a site of power in imperial, nationalist, and postcolonial politics, we investigate how our narratives of history deepen when we make questions of race, caste, gender, sexuality, and disability central to our narratives. To understand some of the vast array of embodied practices under empire and in new national states, we consider the perspectives of multi-disciplinary scholars across a series of themes like violence, labor, war, and health. Together, we work to foster ethical engagement with historical subjects and to understand the lasting legacies of embodied histories on the social and political worlds of South Asia today.  HU
M 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3463a / ER&M 3633a / SAST 3340a, Mobile South Asians and the Global Legal Order  Rohit De

South Asians make up the largest population of overseas migrants in the world, close to 33 million in 2017 and a diaspora that is almost double that number. This course looks at the unprecedented mobility of South Asians from the mid-19th century until now as merchants, indentured labor, students, pilgrims, professionals, domestic workers, political exiles, refugees, and economic migrants, through the lens of state attempts to control movement and individual resistance, subversion, and adaptation to such controls. Focusing on the legal consciousness of South Asian migrants and the emergence of South Asian nations as political players on the global stage, this class traces how South Asian mobility led to the forging of a new global order, over migration, multiculturalism, Islamic law, civil liberties, labor law, and international law.  WR, HU
T 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 3703b / HSHM 4730b, Vaccination in Historical Perspective  Jason Schwartz

For over two centuries, vaccination has been a prominent, effective, and at times controversial component of public health activities in the United States and around the world. Despite the novelty of many aspects of contemporary vaccines and vaccination programs, they reflect a rich and often contested history that combines questions of science, medicine, public health, global health, economics, law, and ethics, among other topics. This course examines the history of vaccines and vaccination programs, with a particular focus on the 20th and 21st centuries and on the historical roots of contemporary issues in U.S. and global vaccination policy. Students gain a thorough, historically grounded understanding of the scope and design of vaccination efforts, past and present, and the interconnected social, cultural, and political issues that vaccination has raised throughout its history and continues to raise today.  HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3706b, The Monroe Doctrine at 200 Years: History of the United States and Latin America  Greg Grandin

This seminar focuses on the history of the United States and Spanish, French, and Portuguese America, from the Age of Revolution to the present day. It covers such topics as the American, Haitian, and Spanish-American Revolutions; the Monroe Doctrine; the Confederacy’s foreign policy toward Spanish America, Brazil, and Haiti; William Walker’s invasion and occupation of Nicaragua; the end of slavery throughout the Americas, and the New World consolidation of jus soli (or birthright) notions of citizenship; the War of 1898; the building of the Panama Canal; US counterinsurgencies in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic; the Good Neighbor Policy; the politics and culture of the Cold War, including CIA interventions in Guatemala, Chile, and Nicaragua; and the Invasion of Panama. Combining social, intellectual, and diplomatic history, the course covers topics such as the region's revolutionary wars for independence; comparative republicanisms; the creation of borders; the expansion and abolition of slavery; more revolutions, and counterrevolutions; military interventions and coups; and evolving forms of political economy. The course’s main comparative framework is to examine how the United States and Latin America both advanced, and struggled to define, a set of New World ideas and political forms: Christianity, republicanism, liberalism, democracy, sovereignty, rights, and, above all, the very idea of America.   WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3718b / WGSS 2297b, Gender Expression Before Modernity  Igor De Souza

What are the historical forms of gender non-conformity? This course investigates expressions of gender that were considered non-conforming within their historical contexts. Our point of departure is the idea that gender constitutes a “useful category of historical analysis” (Joan Scott). In this course we ask how deviant gender expression can be a category of historical analysis. How do we write history from the perspective of gender fluidity, non-binarism, and gender transgression? How can this history give us the tools to critique regnant norms of gender expression, then and now? How does this historical approach relate to trans* and non-binary people & movements today? The course is historically wide-ranging, from Antiquity to the Early Modern period, and geographically diverse, including Europe, the Middle East, and the colonial Americas. The breath of contexts enable us to consider broad patterns, continuities, and discontinuities. At the same time, we discuss the specificities of particular contexts, emphasizing the connection between gender fluidity/non-conformity, on the one hand, and local cultural norms around gender and sex, on the other. We investigate intellectual and cultural trends, as well as the lives of gender fluid/non-conforming individuals. We analyze sources drawn from law, medicine, religion, philosophy, visual arts & literature, biographies, and memoirs. All readings are in English translation. No prior background is required. However, it will be helpful to have taken either WGSS 291/HIST 287J or WGSS 306 before or in concurrence with this course.  HU
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3719a / HSHM 4330a / WGSS 4419a, Gender and Science  Deborah Coen

Exploration of the dual potential of the sciences to reinforce received ideas about gender or to challenge existing sexual and racial hierarchies; the rise of the ideas and institutions of the modern sciences as they have reflected and shaped new notions of femininity and masculinity.   WR, HU
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3741a, Ordering the World: A Twentieth-Century History  Tien Thanh Nguyen

Talks of "world order" abound today. How did we come to think this way, how has it shaped how we act, and to what effects? This seminar introduces students to the field of global history through a study of ideas of world order in the twentieth century. As the Eurocentric world order of the nineteenth century was shattered by global conflicts, competing worldmaking projects arose, prompting intellectuals and social scientists to race to comprehend them. The identification or declaration of a certain emerging order was often also a political intervention. Thus, to study the trajectory of the world order in the last century, we need a combined toolkit of international history and intellectual history. After surveying the political and intellectual impacts of the world wars, we will pay special attention to the twin processes of Cold War and decolonization, their origins and their aftermath. Through topics such as war and revolution, modernization and development, nationalism and capitalist globalization, students will be equipped to think critically about contemporary questions: Are we entering a new Cold War? Is empire a thing of the past? Can history inform foreign policy? We will also pay attention to world order as intellectually experienced by historical actors, especially experiences of disorder and imaginations of a new world in an eventful century. With travelers, novelists, and social scientists as well as statesmen as our guides, we will dwell on how moments of crisis and rupture such as global wars and violence, imperial dissolution, and the rapid, uneven development of capitalism gave rise to not only new institutional experiments but also new forms of subjectivity and imagination, all of which help make any idea of order plausible.  WR, HU
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3742a / AMST 2253 / ENGL 2853 / HSHM 4180a / SOCY 3233 / WGSS 4435a, Queer Science  Juno Richards

Why are there so many studies involving trans brain scans? Can facial recognition technology really tell if you’re queer? Why is everyone so obsessed with gay penguins? For that matter, how did science come to be the right tool for defining and knowing sex, gender, and sexuality at all? How does that history influence our collective lives in the present, and what are some alternatives? This course gives students a background in the development of sex science, from evolutionary arguments that racialized sexual dimorphism to the contemporary technologies that claim to be able to get at bodily truths that are supposedly more real than identity. It introduces scholarly and political interventions that have attempted to short-circuit the idea that sex is stable and knowable by science, highlighting ways that queer and queering thinkers have challenged the stability of sexual categories. It concludes by asking how to put those interventions into practice when so much of the fight for queer rights, autonomy, and survival has been rooted in categorical recognition by the state, and by considering whether science can be made queer.  HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3744a, Early Photography: Global Tech, Local Histories 1839-1914  Zeinab Azarbadegan

Photos are windows onto known and unknows places; they are an inseparable part of how we see and understand the world. In the age of Instagram, smartphones, and #Filter-#NoFilter we are all photographers, our very own curators of visual microcosms. We produce and consume photographic images almost constantly. We are now simultaneously master, subject, and audience in a transnational consumerist visual culture. This is remarkable seeing as the technology of photography has only been around for the past 180 years. No one could have foreseen the selfie as a potential technological application. The advent of photography in 1839 as a means of visual knowledge production was entangled with the rise of modern disciplines of ordering and categorizing knowledge about both people and places. Going beyond looking at photography merely as a technology invented in and disseminated from Europe, this course attempts to analyze “other histories” of photography, by looking at how this global technology was appropriated locally in Asia, Africa and the Americas. It is thus a global social history of the technology of photography. This course endeavors to give students the tools to analyze photos contextually, materially, and in terms of their content by looking at the first sixty years of photography. Specifically, this course looks at the intertwined histories of early photography and the formulation of modern disciplines by focusing on how early non-European anthropologists, geographers, and archaeologists incorporated photography in their methods of picturing place and the populace. Through thematic analysis and examination of different types of archival photos, students learn how to analyze photos both in the larger context of other visual sources, such as paintings, as well as textual sources.
   WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3747b / HIST 447J / HSHM 4670b / WGSS 4465b, History of the Body  Ziv Eisenberg

What does it mean to have a “bad hair day?” How should you care for your skin? What happens when you eat a burger and drink wine? How are babies made? What happens when you die? The answers depend not only on who provides them, but also on where and when. This seminar examines historical production of systems of corporeal knowledge and power, as well as the norms, practices, meanings, and power structures they have created, displaced, and maintained. Structured thematically, the course familiarizes students with major topics in the history of the body, health, and medicine, with a particular focus on US history.  WR, HU
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3750b / HSHM 4440b, Health, Humanitarianism, and Refugee Politics  Gourav Krishna Nandi

How have states historically determined which bodies deserve asylum and care and which can be exposed to deportation, detention, and violence? How have colonial depictions of Asia and Africa as racialized geographies continued to shape migration policies and humanitarian practices throughout the twentieth century? In this seminar, we explore how states and humanitarian actors have utilized technologies of surveillance and control to govern the lives and movements of migrants and refugees throughout the twentieth century. We consider the multifarious reasons why communities, especially throughout Asia, have been mobile since the beginning of the nineteenth century and how this mobility has been shaped through colonial biomedical regimes. Critically interrogating Western images of Global South refugees seeking asylum in the Global North, we investigate contemporary gendered and racialized images of the “good refugee” or migrant who “deserve” consideration in the modern humanitarian system through biomedical categories. Students are expected to apply historical insights to contemporary debates surrounding surveillance, citizenship, and the global migration regime, challenging prevailing narratives and exploring alternative perspectives on refugee surveillance regimes.  WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3761a / HSHM 4380a, Unnatural History: Colonialism and Inequality in the Making of Nature  Elaine Ayers

Penetrated jungles, “mother” nature, and quests to preserve the redwoods – for hundreds of years, colonial agents have characterized environments in racialized, gendered, sexualized, classist, and ableist terms, anthropomorphizing nature along ongoing systems of inequality.  This class traces shifting conceptualizations of nature from the early modern period to the present, focusing on how naturalists and scientists have described, collected, and displayed “new” environments and peoples while building extractive and exploitative natural history collections, from cabinets of curiosity to Yale’s own Peabody Museum. By analyzing methodologies like classification, conservation, and scientific communication, we will discuss how divisions between the “natural” and “unnatural” were created in western cultures along unequal ideas about human bodies. Critical analyses of sources across multiple disciplines will inform conversations about knowledge production with the goal of interrogating how these power structures have silenced voices and enacted long-lasting violences on both environments and the peoples inhabiting them. Using both primary and secondary sources while conducting original research, students will learn how binary and reductive categories have been used and abused in colonial science and beyond. This class will include visits to museums around Yale’s campus and beyond, with two of your assignments focused on the Peabody Museum.  WR, HU
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3768a / JDST 3451a / PLSC 3464a / RLST 3240a, The Global Right: From the French Revolution to the American Insurrection  Elli Stern

This seminar explores the history of right-wing political thought from the late eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on the role played by religious and pagan traditions. This course seeks to answer the question, what constitutes the right? What are the central philosophical, religious, and pagan, principles of those groups associated with this designation? How have the core ideas of the right changed over time? We do this by examining primary tracts written by theologians, political philosophers, and social theorists as well as secondary literature written by scholars interrogating movements associated with the right in America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Though touching on specific national political parties, institutions, and think tanks, its focus is on mapping the intellectual overlap and differences between various right-wing ideologies. While the course is limited to the modern period, it adopts a global perspective to better understand the full scope of right-wing politics.  HU, SO
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3770b, The Arabic Atlantic  Alan Mikhail

This course begins with advent of colonialism in the Americas in order to rethink the ways in which race and religion comingled in histories of conquest, genocide, and slavery that bridge, but also to sort through the differences between the Atlantic, Caribbean and Mediterranean worlds. The course examines and conceptualizes how the Middle East figured in European imperial projects in the Western Hemisphere. It starts with the Papal sanction of Spanish and Portuguese colonial projects in the Americas as a continuation of their expulsion of the Moors from Iberia and proceeds to examine the histories of enslaved Black Muslims. A visit to the Beinecke Library and the Yale Archives to examine Ezra Stiles’ collection of Hebrew and Arabic texts and the ‘moorish’ identity of the boy he enslaved brings our inquiry closer to home. Additional visits to the archives of American missionary societies active in the Middle East, which are housed at the Yale Divinity School, invites students to examine primary sources linking Yale and New Haven to the Middle East. Our class ends in 1887 with Frederick Douglass’ visit to Egypt and the concurrent histories of officers in the US Confederacy who served in the Egyptian military. By examining how the Middle East came to appear in European imperial projects in the Americas, we can more critically understand how American and European colonizers, missionaries, and travelers came to appear in the Middle East. Topics include toleration and violence, women and gender, settler colonialism, slavery, ecological and climatic changes, and the birth of financial capitalism. The study of the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and the Americas.   WR, HU
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3771b, Women Who Ruled  Winston Hill

The range of the course is broad. We’re going to go all the way from ancient Egypt to the present day, and around the world once or twice. As we do that, you get familiar with queens from Wu Zetian to Njinga of Angola to Elizabeth II, and gain some understanding of just how massive the sweep of history is. In the course, we try to answer two key historical questions: What parts of these queens’ lives and experiences are made different by the particular conditions of their societies and cultures? Do gender, race, and power interact in similar ways across time and space? By the end of the course, we should have some answers. We also closely consider the question of this history’s relevance today. What roles do the stories of these politically powerful women play in our present, and in the presents of cultures across the globe? And how can we learn to be critically literate consumers of history in pop culture?  WR, HU
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

* HIST 3783a / GLBL 3344a / PLSC 3125a, Studies in Grand Strategy II  Michael Brenes

The study of grand strategy, of how individuals and groups can accomplish large ends with limited means. During the fall term, students put into action the ideas studied in the spring term by applying concepts of grand strategy to present day issues. Admission is by application only; the cycle for the current year is closed. This course does not fulfill the history seminar requirement, but may count toward geographical distributional credit within the History major for any region studied, upon application to the director of undergraduate studies. Prerequisite: PLSC 321. Previous study courses in political science, history, global affairs, or subjects with broad interdisciplinary relevance encouraged.  SO  0 Course cr
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3784b, Histories of Capitalism in Modern Asia  Sunil Amrith

The economic rise of Asia—and especially of China and India—has coincided with a resurgence in historical research on the concept of “capitalism.” Over the past twenty years, historians of capitalism have situated the origins of capitalist transformation in global forces and processes. Yet this body of scholarship has largely focused on North America, Western Europe, and the Atlantic world. This seminar aims to elucidate how an integration of modern Asian history into global histories of capitalism might challenge existing historical models of economic life. How are we to understand the relationship of Asia—and different regions within Asia—to capitalism? Is capitalism a long-term tendency in the societies of early modern Asia, or is it a set of external arrangements superimposed upon local settings? What is the relationship between capitalism and the social organization of South, Southeast, and East Asian societies? This seminar anchors these questions in two main areas of focus: the role of environmental variables in histories of capitalism in Asia; and the centrality of migration in networks of labor, commerce and specialization. We will explore these questions through a series of topics including: the pre-colonial trading world of the Indian Ocean; arguments about industrialization and the “Great Divergence” in the nineteenth century; continuities and transformations under colonialism; nationalism, decolonization, and competing visions for developmentalism; as well as neoliberalism and the energy transition.  HU
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

* HIST 3797a, Global Capitalism since 1800: Origins, Alternatives, Futures  Staff

From the ads on our computers and the oil in our cars to university endowments and the clothes that we wear, capitalism seems to touch every aspect of modern life. But what exactly is this force that seems so universal? How has it changed across time and space? This reading–and writing–intensive course surveys the global history of capitalism since the end of the eighteenth century, covering both the details of economic change and its interaction with society, culture, and politics. Students learn how capitalism has changed from the cotton mills of the nineteenth century to the cryptocurrency exchanges of the twenty-first; how its effects have been felt and interpreted in different ways around the world; and how historians employ a range of methodological approaches and sources to make sense of this history. Key themes include economic ideas; technological change; the tension between global interconnection and everyday life; and how both critics and champions have understood capitalism’s relationship to social justice and personal freedom.  No prior subject knowledge is necessary, though some experience with history courses is helpful.  WR, HU
W 9:25am-11:15am

* HIST 4994a, Individual Writing Tutorial  Daniel Magaziner

For students who wish, under the supervision of a member of the faculty, to investigate an area of history not covered by regular departmental offerings. The course may be used for research or for directed reading. It is normally taken only once. The emphasis of the tutorial is on writing a long essay or several short ones. To apply for admission, a student should present the following materials to the director of undergraduate studies on the Friday before schedules are due: a prospectus of the work proposed, a bibliography, and a letter of support from a member of the History department faculty who will direct the tutorial. A form to simplify this process is available from the office of the director of undergraduate studies.
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* HIST 4995a and HIST 4996a, The Senior Essay  Vanessa Ogle

All senior History majors should attend the mandatory senior essay meeting in early September at a time and location to be announced in the online Senior Essay Handbook. The senior essay is a required one- or two-term independent research project conducted under the guidance of a faculty adviser. As a significant work of primary-source research, it serves as the capstone project of the History major. Students writing the one-term senior essay enroll in HIST 497 (see description), not HIST 495 and 496. The two-term essay takes the form of a substantial article, not longer than 12,500 words (approximately forty to fifty double-spaced typewritten pages). This is a maximum limit; there is no minimum requirement. Length will vary according to the topic and the historical techniques employed. Students writing the two-term senior essay who expect to graduate in May enroll in HIST 495 during the fall term and complete their essays in HIST 496 in the spring term. December graduates enroll in HIST 495 in the spring term and complete their essays in HIST 496 during the following fall term; students planning to begin their essay in the spring term should notify the senior essay director by early December. Each student majoring in History must present a completed Statement of Intention, signed by a department member who has agreed to serve as adviser, to the History Department Undergraduate Registrar by the dates indicated in the Senior Essay Handbook. Blank statement forms are available from the History Undergraduate Registrar and in the Senior Essay handbook. Students enrolled in HIST 495 submit to the administrator in 237 HGS a two-to-three-page analysis of a single primary source, a draft bibliographic essay, and at least ten pages of the essay by the deadlines listed in the Senior Essay Handbook. Those who meet these requirements receive a temporary grade of SAT for the fall term, which will be changed to the grade received by the essay upon its completion. Failure to meet any requirement may result in the student’s being asked to withdraw from HIST 495. Students enrolled in HIST 496 must submit a completed essay to 211 HGS no later than 5 p.m. on the dates indicated in the Senior Essay Handbook. Essays submitted after 5 p.m. will be considered as having been turned in on the following day. If the essay is submitted late without an excuse from the student's residential college dean, the penalty is one letter grade for the first day and one-half letter grade for each of the next two days past the deadline. No essay that would otherwise pass will be failed because it is late, but late essays will not be considered for departmental or Yale College prizes. All senior departmental essays will be judged by members of the faculty other than the adviser. In order to graduate from Yale College, a student majoring in History must achieve a passing grade on the departmental essay.
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* HIST 4997a, One-Term Senior Essay  Vanessa Ogle

All senior History majors should attend the mandatory senior essay meeting in early September at a time and location to be announced in the online Senior Essay Handbook. The senior essay is a required one- or two-term independent research project conducted under the guidance of a faculty adviser. As a significant work of primary-source research, it serves as the capstone project of the History major. Seniors writing a two-term senior essay do not register for HIST 497; instead, they register for HIST 495 and HIST 496 (see description). History majors may choose to write a one-term independent senior essay in the first term of their senior year and register for HIST 497; however, students who choose the one-term senior essay option are not eligible for Distinction in the Major. The one-term essay must include a substantial research paper of no more than 6,250 words (approximately twenty-five pages) based on primary sources, along with a bibliographic essay and bibliography. Seniors enroll during the fall term of senior year; only History majors graduating in December may enroll during the spring term (or seventh term of enrollment). In rare circumstances, with the permission of the adviser and the Senior Essay Director, a student enrolled in HIST 497 during the fall term may withdraw from the course according to Yale College regulations on course withdrawal and enroll in the spring term. Each student enrolled in HIST 497 must present a completed Statement of Intention, signed by a department member who has agreed to serve as adviser, to the History Department Undergraduate Registrar by the dates indicated in the Senior Essay Handbook. Blank statement forms are available from the History Undergraduate Registrar and in the Senior Essay Handbook, available on the History department Web site. Additional details about the senior essay, including the submission deadlines are included in the Senior Essay Handbook. Essays submitted after 5 p.m. on the due date will be considered as having been turned in on the following day. If the essay is submitted late without an excuse from the student's residential college dean, the penalty is one letter grade for the first day and one-half letter grade for each of the next two days past the deadline. No essay that would otherwise pass will be failed because it is late. All senior departmental essays will be judged by members of the faculty other than the adviser. In order to graduate from Yale College, a student majoring in History must achieve a passing grade on the departmental essay. Permission of the departmental Senior Essay Director and of the student’s faculty adviser is required for enrollment.
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