Designed to introduce history majors to historical methods and provide preparation for exit seminars. Students develop critical reading, historical analysis, research, and disciplinary writing skills.
Instructor
M. O'Hara, A. Heckman, B. Breen
General Education Code
TA
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Oceans, human communities, and the variety of relations between societies have been linked closely in world history. This course focuses on the three most well-researched and, historically, most important oceanic worlds--those that developed to link the regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic Ocean.
General Education Code
CC
Detailed consideration of some specific topic or period in the history of science and technology with significant global implication. Topic varies from year to year. Examples include: Copernicanism, Darwinism, climate change, and military technology.
General Education Code
SI
Explores the turbulent 1930s from a global perspective. Students consider the great events of the decade--the Great Depression, the consolidation of communism, and the rise of fascism--within the context of global connections and forces, including those fostered by imperialism and various forms of internationalism. (Formerly course 196A.)
Examines how American Indian history and culture has been portrayed in Hollywood films, with an emphasis on films that represent Native Americans over the broad spectrum of Native American/white relations.
General Education Code
IM
Provides an historical overview of the relationship between American Indians and museums. Current issues and practices in museums are explored, primarily those associated with ethics, collecting practices, exhibitions, education/interpretation, and administration/governance.
General Education Code
ER
Provides an historical, comparative, and theoretical exploration of the development of nations and nationalism. Emphases include the historical formation of nation-states, modernization, colonialism, decolonization, nations and globalization, and the intersections between ethnicity, race, religions, and nationalism.
General Education Code
CC
Compares memories and interpretations of war in Southeast Asia by diverse groups in France, America, and Vietnam. Topics include war origins, military strategies, propaganda, combat, civilians, media, activism, MIAs, refugees, mixed race children, memorials, textbooks, films, music, literature, and art.
General Education Code
CC
Analyzes immigration, race relations, war, gender ideology, family life, acculturation, political activism, interracial marriage, multiracial identity, and cultural representations between 1941 and the present. Emphasis on discussion, writing, research, and group presentations.
General Education Code
ER
Examines how ideologies of race and gender shaped the development of slavery and empire in the American South from European colonization to the eve of the American Civil War.
General Education Code
ER
Explores the social, economic, cultural, and political development of British North America from the first European/Amerindian contacts in the late 16th century through the establishment of a provincial British colonial society. Course 110A is not a prerequisite to course 110B.
General Education Code
ER
Quarter offered
Fall, Summer
Explores the political, social, economic, and cultural development of British North America from the first stirrings of resistance to the establishment of the U.S. Course 110A is not a prerequisite to course 110B.
Instructor
Gregory O'Malley
Social, political, and economic history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, focusing on the war's changing nature and significance, emancipation, and the postwar struggle over the future of the South and the nation.
Instructor
Catherine Jones
History of the U.S. during what was perhaps its most socially turbulent era, the period following Reconstruction through the First World War. What did it mean to be a nation in the post-Reconstruction era? How did a country that had only recently unified itself under one system of labor now resolve the question of national identity? Was America truly a nation by 1914?
General Education Code
PE-T
Between the First and Second World Wars, American society accepted the need for a regulatory state to save capitalism from itself. Takes an in-depth look at many aspects of U.S. politics and culture during these years. (Formerly Crossroads for American Capitalism: The U.S., 1914 to 1945.)
From the Good War to the Cold War, the Sixties to the rise of the New Right, the post-1945 American experience has been one of extremes. This survey course looks for evidence of commonality during those times. (Formerly Age of Extremes: The United States During the Cold War, 1945 to 1991)
Examines how the consolidation of United States sovereignty in North America and the establishment of an overseas empire during the period between the conclusion of the Civil War and the Phillippine-American War reshaped conceptions of race and citizenship.
Instructor
Catherine Jones
General Education Code
ER
Explores how race has been constructed and perceived, examining Americans' use of race to describe themselves and to label others. Particularly concerned with ordinary people and how and why their ideas of race have changed over time.
Instructor
Gregory O'Malley
General Education Code
ER
Traces history of feminist thought in the United States from the 18th century Enlightenment to the mid-20th century. Focusing on questions of social identity, gender difference, and legal/political status, examines writings of philosophers, activists, novelists, and ordinary women that challenged religious, political, and scientific beliefs underlying gender inequality.
Instructor
Marilyn Westerkamp
Historical introduction to religious culture of U.S. as experienced and created by women. Explores religious ideas about women, the treatment of women by mainstream institutions and religio-social communities, and female religious leaders and followers. Takes an explicitly feminist analytical approach and uses a variety of texts, including historical and literary scholarship, sacred texts, fiction, autobiography, material artifacts, visual art, and music.
Instructor
Marilyn Westerkamp
Examines the cultural, political, and environmental upheaval associated with antebellum market revolution. Topics include: markets and U.S. territorial expansion; reform movements that coalesced around disputes over what should, and should not be sold (e.g., antislavery activism; anti-prostitution reform movements).
Instructor
Catherine Jones
Examines the exploitation of African people as slaves throughout European colonies in the Americas. How did slavery affect slaves, enslavers, and their societies? Emphasizes the diversity of slave regimes and their importance for shaping American life for all.
Instructor
Gregory O'Malley
General Education Code
ER
Investigates the representation of slavery with scholarly and vernacual histories, focusing on the United States. Students examine representations of slavery in scholarly works, public-history venues like museums and historic sites, popular culture, and artistic productions. Students develop their own scholarly research into the history of slavery grounded in primary and secondary sources.
Instructor
Catherine Jones
General Education Code
TA
Explores the history of telecommunications systems in the US starting with the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraph, radio, television and the Internet. Students learn about the development of these systems and the cultures that they foster.
Explores the history, culture, and politics of the distribution of recorded and live sound from the 1870s through the present.
Explores the history of the Cold War from a global, multinational perspective. Begins with the opening salvos between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945, and concludes with the collapse of the latter empire in 1991.
Explores the history of a principal obsession of our age: the conspiracy. Focuses on the people who love them most: conspiracy theorists. Millions of people around the world believe in conspiracy theories. Why?
General Education Code
PE-H
Examines the thought and activities of W.E.B. Du Bois across changing historical circumstances. Considers the ways Du Bois's work has been used in the present to address issues such as racism and imperialism.
General Education Code
ER
A survey of pre-contact Africa, indigenous social structures, class relations, the encounter with Europe, forced migration, seasoning, resistance, Africa's gift to America, slavery and its opponents, industrialization, emigration vs. assimilation, stratification, Convention Movement, Black feminism, Civil War, and Reconstruction.
General Education Code
ER
A survey of the period from 1877 to present, highlighting Jim Crow, Militarism, Black feminism, WWI, New Negro, Garveyism, Harlem Renaissance, Black Radicalism, Pan Africanism, Depression, WWII, Desegregation Movement, Black Power, 1960s, Reaganism. Cultural and economic emphases.
General Education Code
ER
Explores the meaning of jazz in United States society and as a U.S.-based art form in other societies. Examines the social and cultural forces that have produced different jazz styles and the various ways that social conflicts and ideals have been displaced onto the music.
General Education Code
IM
Explores the meaning of jazz in United States society and as a U.S.-based art form in other societies since 1945. Examines the social and cultural forces producing jazz movements and the social transformations, conflicts, and ideals read into the music.
General Education Code
IM
Introduces U.S. immigration history from the colonial era to the present, with emphasis on the recent past. Particular attention given to changing immigration patterns; the character of the immigrant experience; and the range of responses to immigration, including nativism.
Instructor
David Brundage
General Education Code
ER
Examines U.S. expansion and subsequent ascent to global power. In tracing the presence of the U.S. in different areas of the world during the 20th century, course considers the ideas, politics, gender, and social relations that have influenced imperial aspirations.
California had a multi-ethnic indigenous society for centuries. Course traces the persistent multi-ethnic quality of the region as it became part of the Spanish empire, Mexico, and the United States. Considers the many diasporas that have shaped California's steady connection to the world, especially to Mexico and other nations that border the Pacific.
General Education Code
ER
Examines the tribal histories and epistemologies of California's recognized and unrecognized tribes. Beginning with ancient pasts of linguistically distinct indigenous peoples, the class focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, and considers the role of colonialism, genocide, and historical recovery.
Examines the interactions and integration of indigenous people and settlers in the Southwest U.S. and Northern Mexico from a region defined by its indigenous colonial borderlands to national borders. Explores the connections between the U.S. and Mexico. Within the deeply cross-cultural region studied, also examines the particular histories of states, indigenous peoples, and Mexican-origin groups and regions.
General Education Code
ER
A survey course on the social history of the Mexican (Chicana/o) community and people in the U.S. through the 20th century. Themes include resistance, migration, labor, urbanization, culture and politics.
General Education Code
ER
Covers from the Cuban sugar revolution (late 18th century) to the socialist revolution and its aftermath (1959–present). It is intended to be not only a modern history of Cuba but also a broader history of Latin America through the case of Cuba.
Introduction to the social history of Latin America through a focus on the inflections of class and ethnicity on gender in this region. First six weeks focuses on the colonial period. The last three weeks covers the 19th and 20th centuries.
Covers the social, cultural, economic, and political history of colonial Mexico (New Spain). Special attention paid to colonial identity formation, religion, and labor systems. Begins by examining indigenous societies prior to the arrival of Europeans and concludes with Mexico's independence movement in the early 19th century.
Instructor
Matthew O'Hara
General Education Code
ER
Social, cultural, economic, and political history from the triumph of Liberalism to the present day, focusing on four key periods: the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1900–1910), the armed phase of the Revolution (1910–1920), the consolidation of revolutionary programs and a single-party democracy (1920–1940), and the developmentalist counter-revolution since 1940. Provides background for understanding the Mexican diaspora to the U.S.
Instructor
Matthew O'Hara
General Education Code
CC
Introduction to history of Africa. Topics include states and stateless societies, culture, society and economy in the pre-modern era, stratification, oral traditions, long distance trade, the coming of Islam, and the evolution of the South Atlantic system and its social, political, and other consequences. Some background knowledge of Africa helpful.
General Education Code
CC
How Africa lost its continental, regional, and local autonomy in the era of European imperialism. The components of European hegemony, Christian proselytization, comparative colonial strategies and structures, nationalism, decolonization and independence and the disengagement from neo-colonial patterns and the colonial legacy. Case studies from northern and subsaharan Africa. Some background knowledge of Africa helpful.
General Education Code
CC
Historical study of modern African cinematography from the emergence of film as a tool of social control in the imperial and colonial periods to its theoretical and practical transformation by African cineastes in the post-independence era. Films and videos from northern, eastern, western, central/equatorial, and southern Africa viewed.
General Education Code
CC
Critically explores how to preserve, represent, and study the history of queer and gender non-conforming people. Focuses on non-traditional and digital archives, oral history, and original research.
Instructor
Bristol Cave-LaCoste
General Education Code
TA
Santa Cruz County was historically home to many Awaswas Ohlone-speaking tribes. Course traces the persistent multiethnic quality of the region as it became part of the Spanish empire, Mexico, and the United States.
General Education Code
TA
Introduces students to how Qing China arose, expanded, and struggled to enter the modern world. Focuses on what the Qing empire had in common with other agrarian empires across Eurasia, commercialization and communication networks, elite mobility and peasant revolts, political legitimacy of the alien rule, maintaining social order (such as merchants' control and gender segregation), massive population growth and internal migration, as well as its conflicts with the industrial West.
General Education Code
CC
Explores history of China from the late 19th century to the early years of the People's Republic, focusing on the end of imperial rule, the sources and development of revolution, and early attempts at at socialist transformation.
General Education Code
CC
Explores history of China from establishment of the People's Republic of China to the present, focusing on competing strategies of socialist transformation, urban/rural relations, and the effects of the post-Mao economic reforms.
Instructor
Gail Hershatter
General Education Code
CC
Introduces changes in Chinese women's lives--and changes in shared social ideas about what women should do and be--from the mid-19th century to the present. When we foreground gender as a category of analysis, how does history look different?
Instructor
Gail Hershatter
General Education Code
CC
Introduces the history of feminism in the third world, focusing on the ways in which colonialism (and post-colonialism) has shaped gender relations and on the feminist movements that have emerged in response to the impact of colonialism.
Introduces key transformations--political, economic, social, and cultural--in colonial Indian history. The focus is on the processes, institutions, and ideas that shaped colonial power and resisted it.
A study of religions (Vaisnavism, Tantrism, Islam, Sikhism), art, literature, and social movements in their historical contexts from 1000 A.D. to 1800.
General Education Code
CC
Social, political, and religious movements in the colonial and postcolonial contexts of the 19th and 20th centuries in modern and contemporary South Asia.
General Education Code
CC
Introduces historical change in 20th-century South Asia. Topics include: modernity, gender, state formation, nationalism, democracy, and development. Course material includes interdisciplinary secondary works, primary reading by important political actors, and films. Prior knowledge of South Asia is useful, but not necessary.
General Education Code
CC
Highlights the power of ideas in making South Asia modern. Focuses on the 19th and 20th Centuries. Ideas assessed include liberalism, Marxism, Hindu revivalism, Islamic jihad,democracy, nationalism, secularism, and development.
General Education Code
TA
Surveys the history of the peoples of the Japanese islands from prehistorical migrations through the 15th century. Emphases include examination of social structures, political formations, cultural production, and religion. (Formerly Ancient Japan.)
General Education Code
CC
Surveys the history of the peoples of the Japanese islands from the middle of the 15th century to the middle of the 19th century. Focus is on the era of civil war, the formation of the early modern federated state, social structure, and cultural production.
Surveys the history of the peoples of the modern Japanese nation from the Meiji Restoration to the present. Focuses on the formation of the modern state, empire, social movements, and cultural production. (Formerly Modern Japan.)
General Education Code
CC
Examines the history of the Japanese colonial empire from 1868 to 1945, including the colonies of Taiwan, Korea, Micronesia, and Manchuria. Considers how the colonies were ruled and what the legacies of the empire have been.
Instructor
Noriko Aso, Alan Christy
Known historically as the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa has long been an important transmitter of people, ideas, and goods in East Asia. Course explores this history by focusing not only on the royalty of these islands, but also on the lives of everyday people.
Explores how women's experiences in Japan and Korea were intertwined and differentiated before and during World War II under Japanese empire, and from the postwar to the present under American hegemony.
General Education Code
CC
Questions explored include the debate over when/where modern science began; the role of craft-based and artisanal skills in the production of knowledge; and the technological and social impacts of intellectual change, from the Bronze Age to the birth of computing.
Instructor
Benjamin Breen
General Education Code
SI
Explores the histories of bodies and medicine in the colonial world. Charts the relationships among ideas about the body, medical practice, race, and labor in the colonial world between the 16th and the mid-20th centuries
General Education Code
PE-T
What were drugs in the early modern world? Who grew and consumed them? How were they used, and why? Students study how humanity's ancient fascination with altered states shaped globalization, the Scientific Revolution, the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and modernity itself. (Formerly 196J, History of Drugs in the Early Modern World.)
Instructor
Benjamin Breen
Introduction to two millennia of history along the ancient trade routes popularly known as the Silk Road. These routes carried precious goods between Asia and Europe, while also serving as important conduits for the flow of people and ideas.
General Education Code
CC
Introduces the history of modern North Africa from WWI to the so-called Arab Spring. Topics include the dynamics of colonial rule and reform, anti-colonial nationalism, decolonization, the rise of Islamism, and popular protest.
General Education Code
TA
The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the most intractable disputes in our troubled world. Course begins with a glimpse of Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, surveys the rise and fall of utopian Zionism, pays especially close attention to the events of 1948 and 1967, and concludes by analyzing the collapse of hopes for peace after Oslo and Camp David meetings.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
General Education Code
CC
Explores the political trajectory of the post-colonial Middle East. Topics include: the Cold War and rise of Third Worldism; women's movements; political Islam; Arab-Israeli conflict; Lebanese Civil War; impact of oil production; Iranian Revolution; rise of the Arabian Gulf.
General Education Code
CC
Chronicles the cultural history of the Arabic-speaking regions of the Middle East through art, literature, cinema, and mass media during the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Studies the intellectual history of the Arab world from the nineteenth century to the Arab Spring. Beginning with Arab responses to colonialism, it covers the evolution of various schools of thought including liberalism, Islamism, Marxism, nationalism, and feminism.
General Education Code
CC
Explores the history of the Ottoman Empire with emphasis on its Arabic-speaking provinces. In addition to critically considering the political trajectory of the empire, we interrogate a wide range of topics relating to community organization, economic networks, international affairs, and the significance of religion within the Ottoman realm.
General Education Code
CC
Invites student collaboration on a biography of David George, born enslaved in colonial Virginia. His attempts to escape slavery led to a remarkable odyssey throughout the Atlantic World, revealing the constraints of slavery and limits of American freedom. (Formerly Cowell 161C.)
Instructor
Gregory O'Malley
General Education Code
TA
Explores the African diaspora resulting from the transatlantic slave trade, drawing on methodologies from two academic disciplines--history and archaeology. Examines key questions about the slave system, using an array of source materials, both written documents and artifacts.
Cross Listed Courses
ANTH 179
Instructor
Gregory O'Malley
General Education Code
PR-E
Examines the political, social, religious, and material culture of ancient Egypt during these periods of intense interaction with the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, from the period of Alexander (332 BCE) through the beginning of Coptic Christianity (3rd century CE). (Formerly Greco-Roman Egypt.)
Instructor
Elaine Sullivan
General Education Code
CC
Explores sex and gender in ancient Egypt with a specific focus on women. Artistic representations, texts, objects of daily life, and burials are used to examine the practices that encoded gender in this ancient culture.
Instructor
Elaine Sullivan
General Education Code
IM
Introduces the political and religious history of the Egyptian New Kingdom (1546-1086 BCE), using the city of Thebes as a focal point The political, religious, and architectural history of the city is covered.
Instructor
Elaine Sullivan
General Education Code
IM
Investigates the rise and development of urbanism in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world, including Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire. Close studies of individual ancient cities, as well as broader issues in ancient urbanism are covered.
Instructor
Elaine Sullivan
General Education Code
CC
Athenian democracy from foundation to the fourth century B.C., with emphasis on its practices and ideologies. Readings from ancient sources and modern theory. Topics to include foundations and development; Athenian concepts of freedom, equality, law, citizenship. Lectures and discussion.
Instructor
Charles Hedrick
General Education Code
CC
Detailed consideration of some specific topic or period in Greek history, varying from year to year. Examples include Greek religion, Alexander, the Hellenistic world, the ancient Greek economy, and Greece and India; Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War; Greek art and archaeology.
Instructor
Charles Hedrick
General Education Code
CC
Detailed consideration of some specific topic or period in Roman history, varying from year to year. Examples include Roman religion, Augustus and the Roman Empire, Julio-Claudian emperors and the principate, Roman slavery, and Christianity and Rome.
Instructor
Charles Hedrick
Surveys Rome's transition from Republic to Empire, and the politics, people, and literary and material culture of the principate.
Introduction to historical, textual, source, and redaction criticism of the book of Genesis and to exegesis as science and ideology. Texts, history, and iconography of neighboring traditions (Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, Egyptian, Greek) are also studied when appropriate.
General Education Code
CC
Introduction to historical, textual, source, and redaction criticism of the book of Genesis and to exegesis as science and ideology. Texts, history, and iconography of neighboring traditions (Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, Egyptian, Greek) are also studied when appropriate. Course 44, Literature 80A, or some basis in Hebrew or Greek is strongly suggested.
General Education Code
CC
Italy from the birth of the commune to the early Renaissance in Florence. Topics include urban life and social conflict, gender roles, St. Francis, the Black Death, female mystics, Dante, Boccaccio, humanism, artistic developments from Giotto through Donatello. Requires viewing several films outside of class.
Instructor
Cynthia Polecritti
Italy from the Florentine Renaissance through the Reformation. Topics include social change and political consolidation, the rise of the papacy, court life, witch hunting, Machiavelli, artistic developments from Donatello through late Venetian Renaissance. Requires viewing several films outside of class. Course 164A recommended as preparation.
Instructor
Cynthia Polecritti
Introduction to the so-called troubles in Northern Ireland, from the 1960s to the present. Examination of the historical background to the conflict, the patterns of conflict in the 1970s and 1980s, and the emergence of a peace process in the 1990s.
Instructor
David Brundage
General Education Code
CC
An intensive analysis of the First World War from multiple perspectives: military, diplomatic, political, economic, technological, global, and cultural. The emphasis is on the transformative impact of the war on European societies, international relations, and modern culture.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
General Education Code
TA
Making use of multiple perspectives, this course explores the origins of the Second World War, its course and outcome, and its transformative effects on European society, culture, polities, and demographics. Closely examines the war's impact on diverse civilian populations.
General Education Code
CC
The political, social, economic, and cultural history of the modern Netherlands and Belgium from 1500 to the present day.
French history from the Middle Ages through the Revolution. Focus on the rise and fall of absolute monarchy, the nature of Old Regime society, the causes and significance of the French Revolution. Attention to those who endured as well as to those who made events.
Social, political, and cultural history of France from the Revolution to WWI. Focus on the Revolutionary tradition, the Napoleonic myth, the transformation of Paris, and the integration of the peasantry into the national community. Readings may include novels by Stendhal and Balzac.
Surveys major events in 20th-century French history, such as the two World Wars, the Thirty Glorious Years, European integration, decolonization, the Cold War, and the events of May 1968.
General Education Code
TA
Examines the political/social upheaval in 1789, 1830, and 1848 in light of the sweeping changes brought to 19th-century France by those other great revolutions of the age, the democratic and the industrial. Students' written work focuses on the comparative analysis of revolution.
The development of German civilization, including philosophy and literature as well as politics and diplomacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Introduction to German films from 1919 to 1945. Through combination of movies and documentaries, gain insight into political, economic, social, and cultural conditions of Weimar and Nazi Germany.
General Education Code
IM
Uses films and documentaries to provide insight into the political, social, economic, and cultural conditions of postwar East and West Germany, with a strong focus on remembrance of the country's Nazi past.
General Education Code
IM
Focuses on Hitler's political career and analyzes how he harnessed Germany and much of Europe to his vision of a New Order organized along a social-Darwinist notion of the racial community.
Topics include Russia's relations with Scandinavia, Byzantium, and the Mongols; Orthodoxy; and the roles of women. Materials include chronicles, letters, law codes, household manuals, travelogues, epics, art, architecture, and maps. Also explores the continuing relevance of Russia's medieval past through operas and film.
General Education Code
CC
Russian history from Peter the Great through the collapse of the Russian Empire. Explores the relationship between state and subjects (both Russian and non-Russian), alongside the role that geography played in an expanding empire in an increasingly globalizing world.
General Education Code
CC
Covers Soviet history from the late imperial period through the Soviet collapse. Explores the nature of the Soviet state, relationships between state and society, the role of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and experiences of everyday life.
General Education Code
CC
Analyzes the roles of espionage and intelligence in modern European history with emphasis on major conflicts from the Franco-Prussian War through the Cold War and beyond. Also examines images of spies in popular culture from the early 20th century to the present.
General Education Code
CC
Does not stress questions of aesthetics or technical aspects of film making, but the changing ideology inherent in Soviet films. The goal of examining cinema is to enrich our understanding of Soviet history. Readings include works of famous directors and theorists—Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov—in addition to secondary works by Denise Youngblood, Richard Taylor, Josephine Woll, and Anna Lawton.
Examines the political and social history of modern Eastern Europe, excluding the Balkans and Baltic States, from 1848 to the present. Focuses on the development of nationalism, war, occupation, ethnic strife, communism, and democratic reform in this region.
General Education Code
CC
Examines ways in which Europeans and others thought about the environment and nature in the 19th century and how their concerns about issues such as climate change, pollution, and conservation were both similar to and different from environmentalist thinking today.
General Education Code
PE-E
Surveys the role of the tropics and tropical peoples in history, covering the post-Columbian encounters between indigenous Americans, Europeans, and Africans, colonialism, and the origins of fields, such as anthropology and tropical medicine. (Formerly Tropics of Empire.)
Instructor
Benjamin Breen
Study of European thought and literature from Hobbes and Swift to Rousseau and Goethe. Focuses on relation of ideas to their social and cultural context. Special attention to traditions of religious conflict and criticism rising from the Protestant Reformation; to the discovery of the world beyond Europe; and to the intellectual and cultural roots of the French Revolution.
Instructor
Nathaniel Deutsch
Study of European thought and literature from Blake to Nietzsche. Focuses on relation of ideas to their social and cultural context. Special attention to the rise and fall of the Romantic movement, to changing conceptions of history, and to the development of socialist and aesthetic critiques of industrial civilization.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
Drawing on experiments in autobiography, the arts, and social theory, this course focuses on ideas and images of modernity in European culture. It also highlights the role of the intellectual as politically engaged or disillusioned witness in a violent century.
General Education Code
CC
Surveys European Jewish intellectual history from the Enlightenment to the present. Major themes include emancipation and assimilation, the flowering of Yiddish literature, the rise of Zionism, new variations on the messianic idea, and Jewish contributions to the culture of urban modernism.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
General Education Code
ER
Emphasis on the interaction between social, economic, religious, and political developments. An attempt to place these phenomena in the context of the wider European and world scene. The period from 1485 to 1689.
Examines the history of the British Isles and the British Empire from the late 17th century to the present. Traces the expansion, transformation, and dissolution of the British Empire as well as the changing meanings of Englishness and Britishness over this period.
General Education Code
CC
Covers the long history of interaction between Britain and Africa, from the Atlantic slave trade and British colonialism in Africa up to the post-colonial present, from British settlers in Africa to the African presence in the British Isles.
General Education Code
ER
Italian politics, culture, and society from the Napoleonic era through early leftist movements. Central emphasis on the Risorgimento and Unification. Other topics include: north-south conflict; banditry; urban change; growth of tourism; popular religion; family structures and gender; visual arts and opera.
Instructor
Cynthia Polecritti
Examines Italian politics, society, and culture (c. 1900-1950), emphasizing the Fascist regime; interdisciplinary focus emphasizing history, literature, and film. Course 183A recommended as preparation.
Instructor
Cynthia Polecritti
Explores the histories of racism and anti-Semitism alongside efforts to combat racism in Europe from 1870 to the present. Offers a conceptual basis for thinking about the definition of race and its historical evolution.
General Education Code
TA
Comparative in approach, course examines Jewish radical politics across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas in the late 19th and 20th centuries. How did radical politics afford Jews greater agency in contexts that otherwise excluded them? What tensions arose with religious, nationalist, and internationalist obligations? What drew so many Jews across so many diverse contexts to focus on radical leftist politics? What, if anything, links Jews and radical politics across such diverse contexts? Through primary sources, memoirs, scholarly works, films and more, students compare Jewish engagement in radical leftist movements in several nodes, including Russia (and the former USSR), Poland, France, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Israel, Argentina, Mexico, and the USA among others.
General Education Code
ER
Explores Jewish immigration settlement and identity negotiation in Latin America from the mid-19th Century to the present.
Historical comparative overview of the political, socio-cultural, and intellectual transformation of Jewish societies in Europe and the Middle East from the late 18th Century to the present.
Overview of the Jewish experience in important cities in the age of empire. Istanbul, Beirut, Alexandria, and Salonica were home to thriving, culturally diverse Jewish populations. Course explores these urban Jewish cultures, the institutions, and intellectual production.
Surveys Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula from Roman times to the present, and explores offshoot Hispanic Jewish societies in the aftermath of the 1492 expulsion.
Instructor
Nathaniel Deutsch
Zionism is one of the most complex--and contested--political and ideological movements of the modern period. This course explores the intellectual history of Zionism and its critics, from the late 19th century to the establishment of the State of Israel.
Instructor
Nathaniel Deutsch
General Education Code
ER
Examines World War II in North Africa and the Middle East. Through primary and secondary sources, films, and novels, students consider WWII and the Holocaust as they intersect with colonial and Jewish histories in the Arab world.
Investigates questions relating to how new technologies are changing the way historians do research and interact with the public. This course has both a critical classroom component and a hands-on computer laboratory component. (Formerly 100A.)
Instructor
Elaine Sullivan
General Education Code
PR-E
Covers comparative history of slavery in Latin America with questions of race in the colonial and national periods and key moments and debates in the historiography of slavery and its relation to ideologies of the past and the nations.
Focuses on the ways in which nation and race have been thought about in Latin America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. These concepts were closely intertwined, albeit in differing and changing ways, since the wars of independence from Spain and Portugal (1810-1825). Compares the ways in which black, Indian, and racially mixed (mulatto or mestizo) have been socially constructed, ideologized, and contended in different countries, including Brazil, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina.
Examines Asian and Latino immigration into the United States since 1875. Students explore the relationship between U.S. foreign policies and immigration policies, transnational ties and homeland connections, and the cultural and political influences they have on American society.
A seminar on the history of Chicanos/Mexicans in the United States, 1848 to the present. Topics include Chicana/o labor, family, social, urban, cultural, and political history.
Students learn how to conduct research and write history. Primary and secondary sources are extensively read. Research sources include a rich array of government documents, newspapers, memories and diaries, visual material and film.
Instructor
A. Lonetree, E. Smyth
Quarter offered
Fall, Spring
Each year students study one or more theorists or schools of philosophy and history. Themes vary by year and include: Walter Benjamin, Hayden White, Agnes Heller, the Frankfurt School, and the Subaltern School.
Writing-intensive seminar on the experience, manipulation, and representation of time in history. Students pursue advanced research using primary and secondary sources.
Instructor
Matthew O'Hara
Complete original research in California and borderlands history in this senior research seminar. Focus on selected problems and themes. Assignments and discussions help students frame their research and edit their writing.
Diaspora studies recently have included a range of movements and people in colonial, post-colonial, and national dilemmas. Diaspora studies share historical themes with migration studies, and include the study of forced exile and situations of genocide and femicide experienced by indigenous and national minorities.
Locates common themes in the history of broadcasting and telecommunications throughout the world. Why do certain strategies for developing broadcasting and telecommunications systems succeed or fail? Why do some nations outstrip other nations of comparable development in the growth of their communications systems? Why do national or regional communication systems suddenly become more or less open—or more or less centralized?
Examines the tensions between movements for political reform and reaction in the southern United States between Reconstruction and the second world war. Students develop a research paper grounded in primary research that addresses these questions.
Instructor
Catherine Jones
Explores the lives of children and the functions of the literary figure of the child in the cultural politics of the 19th century in the United States. Examines the historically contingent nature of childhood through historical, literary, and visual sources.
Instructor
Catherine Jones
Examines contemporary crises in Africa: the new South Africa, refugees, HIV/AIDS, children of war, blood or conflict diamonds, civil war, and genocide in Rwanda. Seminar format where students will be prepared to undertake studies on specific subjects and two rounds of 15–20 page papers.
Major themes in contemporary African American historiography on a topical basis.
Explores subjects and themes in the political, social, and cultural history of early U.S. history from the colonial period through 1850. Includes critical reading of current scholarship and research in primary texts. The focus of this course is the production of a 25-page research paper. Recommended for senior history majors.
Instructor
Marilyn Westerkamp
Explores novels and novelists in relation to the writing of historical scholarship. Breaking down the simplistic genre division between fiction and nonfiction, provides opportunities for students to read novels as historical evidence, novels as editorial commentary, and novels as analytical narrative. Students produce a series of papers that culminate in a 25-page research project.
Instructor
Marilyn Westerkamp
Readings and research in the history of religions in the United States. Readings focus on topics including the rise of evangelicalism; gender and religion; class, race, and religious diversity; and modernity. Students produce papers that culminate in a 25-page research project.
Instructor
Marilyn Westerkamp
Writing-intensive seminar on Latin America during the Cold War. Particular attention given to U.S.-Latin American relations, including moments of covert or direct interventions. Students pursue advanced research using primary and secondary sources.
Instructor
Matthew O'Hara
In this research seminar, students explore F.B.I. files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act on a prominent citizen of the United States of America.
Students read historiographically significant works in the history of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction. Students develop research projects grounded in primary source material on a related topic of their choosing. (Formerly Topics in U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction.)
Instructor
Catherine Jones
Explores the transatlantic societies created by Europeans' colonization of the Americas, and their exploitation of African slaves. Questions whether the cultural, economic, and political links across the ocean integrated the adjacent lands into a fundamentally Atlantic World.
Instructor
Gregory O'Malley
Before 1800, far more Africans than Europeans colonized the Americas, arriving unwillingly in the slave trade. Course examines the captives' experiences; the trade's organization and significance in the Atlantic economy; and the eventual movement to abolish the traffic.
Instructor
Gregory O'Malley
Explores the concept of the long civil rights movement as a framework for understanding a wide range of social, economic, and political developments in the African American freedom struggle, in both North and South, from the 1930s through the 1980s.
Instructor
David Brundage
Teaching of a lower-division seminar under faculty supervision. (See course 42.) Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
To allow promising, well-qualified undergraduates to pursue directed programs of archival or archaeological study in the field under supervision of the UCSC history faculty, concentrating their work within a single given quarter. Students may take two or three courses concurrently. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Focusing on Shanghai, course examines issues of gender, class, and sex in modern urban Chinese history. Given Shanghai's history as a treaty port, particular attention paid to ways in which its semi-colonial status inflected the articulation of gender identities, class formations and issues of sexuality (particularly sexual labor). Also looks at Shanghai during the Maoist period and in the context of more contemporary economic reforms.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 194N
Examines the history of Okinawa with particular attention paid to the modern era. The goal is to give students a solid foundation in the historiography of major themes in the study of Okinawan society.
Examines through both primary and secondary sources such issues as work, sexuality, education, class, and ethnicity in relation to constructions of female gender in Japanese society over the past several centuries, particularly focusing on the modern era.
Explores the migration of the more than 10,000 Jewish refugees who fled Europe during World War II and settled in Shanghai. Examines the different Jewish populations that fled to Shanghai, the Shanghai ghetto, and the recovery of this piece of history from the 1980s through the present.
Explores the rapid and often destabilizing shifts that have taken place in China since the late 1970s (the reform era), tracing the effects of China's earlier experiment with revolutionary socialism on the market-driven present. Examines how various meanings of reform are negotiated; changes in rural and urban environments; and class, gender, and ethnic differences.
Instructor
Gail Hershatter
Explores gender, family, and state power in China from 1600 to present, examining gendered norms, education, political movements, revolutionary practice, sexuality and sex work, and state interventions in contemporary families. Responses to reading and a research paper required.
Instructor
Gail Hershatter
Focuses on the complicated and often tumultuous relationships between the United States military and Pacific communities. Investigates the histories of the people who protested against military bases in Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, South Korea, Guam, etc.
Focuses on non-elite people in modern Chinese history. Drawing on historical studies and contemporary accounts, this course looks at how colonialism, war, and revolutionary movements shaped everyday lives.
From Medieval Spain, Ottoman Salonica, 20th-century Baghdad, present day Casablanca, and beyond, this course examines Jewish experiences of exile, diaspora, and displacement, as well as how to read memoir and biography as sources in their broader historical context.
Critically examines the formation of political elites in East Asia. Compares literati in Ming and Qing, China; samurai in Tokugawa, Japan; and yangban in Joeson, Korea. Each group occupied specific roles and functions in their state and society but differed in scale and character. Students cannot receive credit for this course and course 294M.
Urbanization is an important aspect of the making of the Global South. This course introduces the histories of urbanization from the 18th Century to the present. Students read the works of historians, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists.
Introduces students to key ideas and ideologues of the Indian nation and the practices of the late-colonial and post-colonial Indian State. In the process, students become familiar with themes like modernity, gender, state formation, space, nationalism, democracy, and development.
Introduces important themes in urban studies in South Asia in the pre-modern and modern periods. These include political economic change; competing imaginations of city life; urban politics; land use; urban planning; and cultural life among others. This course begins with a brief survey of urbanism in pre-modern South Asia but focuses mostly on urbanities in the early modern and modern periods.
Explores the production and experience of new forms of space in the colonial and post-colonial world through historical, political, and anthropological case studies with an emphasis on the Middle East and Africa.
The modernization of a world city from 1750 to the present. Cairo's social and cultural history (literature, film, music) against the background of its changing political and economic contexts. Topics include: orientalism, nationalism, imperialism, minorities, women, migration, urbanism, popular culture, tourism.
Focuses on different topics in ancient Egyptian history. In addition to assigned readings, each student does additional research that culminates in a 20-page paper on a topic of the student's choice. General topics for the course vary from year to year.
Instructor
Elaine Sullivan
Introduces students to important debates in labor studies in Asia. Studies the relationship between labor, capitalism, and imperialism. Also interrogates the relevance or irrelevance of Asia as a concept from the standpoint of labor. Students cannot receive credit for this course and course 229.
Considers through primary and secondary sources the events and aftermath of the Cold War in East Asia in terms of state formation, domestic and foreign policy, and protest movements in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan with reference to Vietnam.
Widely considered the antechamber of WWII, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was the first large-scale international clash of Fascists and anti-Fascists. It was simultaneously a national conflict and a global proxy war, colonial and anti-colonial; and yet, it is often overlooked.
This writing-intensive seminar explores the social movements sweeping the contemporary Middle East. Students pursue advanced research using primary and secondary sources.
Research seminar comparing U.S. and Japanese memories of World War II. Topics include war origins, total war, the atomic bomb, war responsibility, reparations, memorials, museums, and monuments. Primary work devoted to research in original texts and documents.
Examines major events in modern Chinese history, from the Manchu conquest (1644) through the Tian'anmen Square demonstrations (1989), exploring why and how collective memories and new narratives about such events have been transmitted and have shaped politics in the present.
Instructor
Gail Hershatter
Prerequisite(s): petition on file with sponsoring agency (students should have completed two upper-division courses, preferably in their area of concentration).
Prerequisite(s): satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements; petition on file with sponsoring agency (students should have completed two upper-division courses, preferably in their area of concentration).
Developments in Italian culture and society from the postwar to the present. Topics include north-south divisions, family and gender, cinema and modernity, urbanization, mafia, and terrorism.
Instructor
Cynthia Polecritti
Explores the long-term urban history or Rome from its founding through the modern tourist city. Emphasizes the cityscape and geographical centers of political power, culture, and religion, as well as the everyday life of neighborhoods.
Instructor
Cynthia Polecritti
Aims to illuminate major themes and turning points of modern Irish history: the causes and consequences of the famine; the development of Irish nationalism; revolution, civil war, and partition; and the recent economic boom.
Instructor
Bruce Thompson
Examines the history of Europe and its empires within the context of human interactions with and attitudes toward a changing natural world. Topics include: European imperialism in ecological perspective; the effects of new developments in science and technology on urban and rural environments; the rise of public health, sanitation, and colonial medicine; environmental justice; and the historical context of contemporary environmental problems. (Formerly European Environmental History.)
A senior reading and research seminar that explores the selected historiographic debates in German history during the 19th and 20th centuries. (Formerly Modern Germany and Europe.)
Focuses on the history of sexuality in major urban areas globally. Topics include: sexual identities and race, class, and gender; sex work, policing, and urban spaces; gay, lesbian, and transgender communities; race, gender, and sexuality within the context of colonialism.
Students conduct original research on the French Revolution of 1789 based on mix of primary and secondary courses. Classroom discussions focuson interpreting contemporary documents and addressing historiographical issues. Seminar format with significant written requirements. Presumes familiarity with the period.
Topics in European intellectual history from the French Revolution to World War I. Readings exemplifying approaches from history of ideas and intellectual biography to recent studies of rhetoric and political culture. Preparation and presentation of research paper.
Studies the emergence of the secular intellectual as a force in French political and cultural life. Topics considered include Voltaire and the Republic of Letters, Robespierre and the self-fashioning of the revolutionary intellectual, the Dreyfus Affair, the enigma of French fascism, the meaning of May '68, and decolonization and the Algerian War.
Instructor
Jonathan Beecher
For several centuries, the shtetl functioned as the center of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Alternately mythologized and pathologized, the shtetl continues to exist as an imaginary space that defines and distorts the historical image of Eastern European Jewish life. Students cannot receive credit for this course and course 257.
Instructor
Nathaniel Deutsch
Study of 19th- and 20th-century Eastern European and Russian Jewish social history.
Study of the major political, social, and intellectual conflicts and transformations of the period. Topics include February and October revolutions, Civil War, NEP, rise of Stalinism, and collectivization.
A discussion of 20th-century totalitarianism.
Explores European history from the end of World War II through the fall of the Soviet Union. Examines how Europe evolved from a fragmented, polarized array of colonial rivals to a more economically and culturally integrated place.
Inquiry into the structures of Roman Palestine on the basis of parables from the synoptic Gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, inscriptions, and archaeological discoveries. Physical, social, economic, and ideological conditions are researched in an ethnographic fashion.
Seminar focuses on different topics in ancient history. In addition to assigned readings, the student is expected to do additional research that culminates in a 20-page paper on a topic of the student's choice. General topics for the course will vary from year to year.
Instructor
Charles Hedrick
The Paris Peace Conference remade Europe and the globe after World War I. By establishing the League of Nations and signing the Versailles Treaty, the Paris diplomats shaped the postwar era and created the conditions for World War II.
Addresses contemporary and modern interpretations of the events relation to medieval history. Through critical discussion and debate, assesses the value and limitations of various historical sources, as well as developing skills in research, presentation-making, and writing.
Uses memoirs, diaries, novels, films, oral interviews and histories, and scholarly works to explore everyday life in the Soviet Union, and the extent to which the Soviet Union represented a totalitarian society.
Focuses on the role of scientific and technological developments in creating the kinds of social, economic, and ecological change that inspired utopian thinking--as well as utopia's counterpart, dystopia--in Russia in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Examines popular religious belief and practice, including conversion, the cult of the saints, relics, pilgrimage, miracles and visions. Emphasis on Medieval Europe, but some attention also paid to modern patterns of devotion.
Instructor
Cynthia Polecritti
Europe's engagement with the outside world, which ranged from cultural and intellectual borrowings to relations of domination and colonialism, shaped its modern history and culture. This course examines the cultural and intellectual history of modern Europe by focusing on the ways in which European thinkers and cultural producers drew upon or were influenced by non-European sources.
Student's supervision is conducted by a regularly appointed officer of instruction by means other than the usual supervision in person (e.g., by correspondence) or student is doing all or most of the course work off campus.
Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.