Summer 2015 History Electives

"Selma and American Sniper: Is Accuracy Important?"

 

"150 Years Later, A Formal Apology For The Sand Creek Massacre."

 

As these headlines suggest, the past is the topic of heated debate and a source of raw wounds in the present. In this hybrid course, we will explore several controversies over versions of the past in memorials and monuments, in television and film, at theme parks, and on websites. We will analyze why Americans struggle over the form and expression of memory in popular culture, why struggles over memory are such a persistent feature in our everyday life, and what, if anything, is at stake in these conflicts.

 

Students will devote the online instructional time to watching assigned films, discussing them in a Blackboard discussion forum, and collaborating on a final group wiki project commemorating either the Occupy movement or the Black Lives Matter protests through newspaper sources, photographs, film clips, and other materials.

 

MoWe 11:30AM - 2:05PM
 

For more than two centuries Manhattan has been both the object of urban thinkers¿ fantasies and a laboratory for urban movements and design strategies. Architects and urbanists in the 19th and 20th centuries imagined idealistic and dystopian plans for the great city, with roadways stacked five or ten stories high, aerial avenues of commuter airplanes, or uncontrolled speculative skyscrapers turning the city into a bleak lattice of canyons. But the island¿s realized dreams were often even more audacious;among the grandest of these was the 1811 legislation of the city's Cartesian block grid at a moment when most of the island was farmland and forest. But no more timid are a town made from towers (Rockefeller Center), a neighborhood where the Hudson recently flowed (Battery Park City), and an 800-acre populist artificial garden made from the most valuable land in the world (Central Park). This course considers the movements, ideologies, and theoretical frameworks that transformed Manhattan into the island as it continues to rise today. Field visits will supplement in-depth analysis of the city¿s architecture and urban designs.In the course¿s hybrid component, students will investigate¿collectively and individually¿the history of a particular site of their choice, engaging not only with its `original design,¿ subsequent modifications, and present state, but also with the unrealized architectural and urban fantasies to which it has played host.

 

 

MoWe 3:00-5:35pm
 

The Afghan wars—from the Soviet occupation of the 1980s to the American invasion of 2001 and beyond-- present a good example of contemporary conflicts, often described as "complex political emergencies" (CPEs). These are the offshoots of diverse factors related to ethno-national, ethno-geographic, ethno- economic, ethno-religious and ethno-sectarian phenomena. To grasp these conflicts, one needs to examine Afghanistan's history, culture, and linguistic dynamics, as well as its socio-economic structure, religio- tribal ideologies, and geo-strategic and geo-political stereotypes. A comprehensive record of the impact on the country's human capital from the 1980s to the present will be examined. The course will be conducted through reference readings (no textbook!), films, documentaries, videos, and digital and print media. And multiple on-line primary sources.

 

HIST 37900: The Collapse Of Communism &Post-Soviet Europe (HYBRID) --Undergraduate

 

Examines the history of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the late 1960s to the present. Topics include the long- and short-term causes of the collapse of Communism, the economic, political, social, and cultural legacies of Communism, and the challenges confronting the post-Communist world.

 

 

 

 

HIST 20600: Modern Europe --Undergraduate

An overview of the social, economic, political, and intellectual developments in Europe from the Enlightenment to the present, and an introduction to the study of history. Topics include the problems of revolution, industrialization and the transformation of rural societies, the emergence of liberalism and the challenges it has faced in the 20th century.

 

James Lewis

 

MoTuWeTh 6:00PM - 8:35PM

The political triumphs of the middle classes and their troubled hegemony;the factory system, free trade parliamentarians;the transformation of 1848;the Second Empire;Italian and German unifications; movements of reform;democratic currents;socialism;the new imperialism.