Schedule of Classes

This course examines some of the most significant conflicts and turning points in the history of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth in Europe and its Caribbean slave colonies from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. We approach women’s reproductive bodies as contested sites of political struggle over issues as diverse as slavery, colonialism, population growth and birth control, religious reform, midwifery, the medicalization of childbirth, and nation-building. Centering women’s voices and experiences of the birth process where the sources allow us, we study the cultures and communities that women of diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds constructed around biological reproduction.

This course is an introduction to the study of the Black Atlantic. Built on a chronological and thematic basis, the course will focus on the history and culture of populations of African descent, particularly in Europe and the Americas. This course is divided into three parts. The first part will conceptualize the notion of Black diaspora and the Black Atlantic. The second part will explore the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, in particular, how this forced migration impacted societies in the Americas and Europe. The third section of this course will explore the postemancipation period and the modern construction of race in western societies. Students will review both primary and secondary readings throughout the semester.

A general survey of the political, constitutional, economic, and social history of the United States.

A survey of European history from 1400 to 1750. Topics include rural and urban communities, the Renaissance, humanism, education and literacy, women and gender, the Protestant and Counter Reformations, confessional violence, absolutism, witch-hunts, poverty and deviance, colonialism, science and empire, nationalism, religious pluralism and Enlightenment.

This class surveys the political, social, and cultural foundations of East Asian civilization from earliest times to around 1600. From the rise of states and empires to the Ways of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, we will explore the flowering of Chinese cultural norms across Asia as well as consider the unique expressions of these norms throughout China, Korea, and Japan.

A survey of the history of Japan from earliest times to the present. Topics include early Chinese influence, Buddhism, the rise of feudalism, unification in the 15th Century, the era of isolation, the intrusion of the west, the Meiji Restoration, the rise of Japan as a military power and World War II, and postwar recovery.

A study of nation building and strongman government in the nineteenth century, the Mexican Revolution 1910-20, Argentina under Peron, and twentieth-century Brazil. Special emphasis on the roles of women and blacks.

A survey of the history of African-Americans from their arrival in the English colonies to the end of the Civil War. African-Americans' struggle with slavery and oppression provide the central theme, but the course will address the various political, economic, social, and cultural conditions which contributed to the development of a unique African-American community. Particular attention will be given to the development of such institutions within this community as family, religion, and education.

An introduction to the field of environmental history, which asks how the natural world has shaped the course of human civilization, and how humans, in turn, have shaped the natural world, over time.

This first offering in a two-course sequence introduces students to the history of the Middle East. Surveying the region's history prior to the eighteenth century, it considers the emergence of the world's earliest civilizations; the rise of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the spread of Arab, Turkish, and Persian Empires. Emphasis is placed on the Middles East's place in global trade networks and imperial conflicts.

This seminar uses the Sewanee area as a case study to introduce students to the conceptual processes of history. Students employ historical methods within a variety of interdisciplinary contexts, drawing on insights from archeology, biology, and geology, as well as various approaches to history, to comprehend both what has happened here and how it is variously understood. Classroom sessions are complemented by regular field work and archival research.

This seminar compares the warfare that accompanied colonial encounters in North America and southern Africa, from the first European contact through the early twentieth century. It focuses on wars fought in response to resistance by native peoples and on the use of native allies in warfare between imperial foes as windows into the processes of acculturation, resistance, dispossession, and representation that characterized the colonial encounter as a whole. Texts range from traditional military history to religious, cultural, environmental, and comparative approaches to the topic.

This course explores New York City by studying the migrants and immigrants who have settled there since its founding. It explores how migrants and immigrants change New York, how the city changes them, and the significance of ethnic diversity in the city’s politics and culture. We will read scholarly writings, examine films and music as primary sources, take field trips to immigrant neighborhoods, and visit museums devoted to migration and immigration. At every opportunity, we will venture outside our classroom to learn about the city through direct observation.

A seminar dealing with important political, social, and intellectual movements in American history.

This course examines the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940), describing the ideologies and political programs of its rival leaders and forces. Emphasis is placed on analysis of the revolutionary movement as a mosaic of local uprisings, each with its own roots and objectives. The social origins of the participants, both followers and leaders, the causes of the insurrection, the objectives proclaimed by each faction, and the changes actually accomplished, will be the main topics of discussion. The heterogeneity and ambiguity of the Mexican Revolution will be explored by examining different approaches to the insurrection through biographies, novels, political theory and historical account.

An investigation of the ways historians read past crimes and scandals for evidence of broader social, political, and cultural anxieties and desires. Focusing less on details of incidents themselves than on the debates and public interpretation surrounding them, this seminar deals with crimes such as those committed by Jack the Ripper or French murderesses at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to analyzing secondary sources dealing with crime and scandal, students scrutinize a variety of primary documents such as trial records, medical and judicial debates, scientific analysis of criminality, memoirs of notorious criminals and detective novels.

An examination of the historical origins and development of the discourses of sustainability, sustainable development, and the green economy, which have been ubiquitous, influential, and critically and historiographically under-examined in contemporary U.S. and global society. The course draws on contemporary global environmental historiography, while analyzing key primary sources such as Malthus' An Essay on the Principles of Population, Marsh's Man and Nature, Ehrlich's Population Bomb, Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, the United Nations' Brundtland Commission's "Our Common Future," the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, and the University of the South's Sustainability Master Plan.

History majors engage in primary and secondary research on a topic of interest, culminating in a significant analytical paper. The semester concludes with an oral presentation of each student's research.

This course examines the great age of European expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries in Asia and explores the underpinnings of an imperial state. From the age of exploration, to the age of trade, to the age of European decolonization, the relations between the European and the local peoples underwent a significant change in terms of cultural contact, economic exploitation, and political domination. The course analyzes the results of these relations for the Europeans and for the Asians they ruled. It also considers why and how imperial dominations lost their force and new national identities emerged in Asia.