| source Harvard (X) |
level |
department Historical Study (X) |
Understanding Africa as it exists today requires an understanding of the broader historical trends that have dominated the continent's past. This course will provide an historical context for understanding issues and problems as they exist in contemporary Africa. It will offer an integrated interpretation of sub-Saharan African history from the middle of the 19th century and the dawn of formal colonial rule through the period of independence until the present time. Particular emphasis will be given to the continent's major historical themes during this period. Selected case studies will be offered from throughout the continent to provide illustrative examples of the historical trends.
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Examines modern conflicts in Vietnam and their implications for the US from 1945-75, from both Vietnamese and American perspectives. Seeks to provide an understanding of the complexity of the war and the ethical dilemmas it raised by examining issues ranging from the power-politics assumptions of decision makers to the personal experiences of those caught in the war. Covers both background and consequences of the war, but the main focus is on the 30-year period during which the fortunes of America and Vietnam became intertwined.
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This course is a survey of American constitutional history from the Framing of the Constitution to the present. Our focus will be on the texts of important Supreme Court opinions as well as on other significant documents that have shaped our constitutional understanding.
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This course considers the Age of Revolution in the North Atlantic world, roughly encompassing the latter half of the 18th century, as a continuous sequence of radical challenges to established authority resulting in fundamental transformations of governance throughout the region. We will view the progression of the American and Haitian revolutions as a kind of chain reaction, as if the Atlantic world was swept by a single revolutionary movement, though one of widely ranging inspirations, goals, and outcomes.
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For 200 years, the family of Charlemagne welded together the disparate fragments of a fallen Roman Empire and free Germania. The result was a new civilization, called Europe; a new cultural movement, called Renaissance. "Charlemagne" investigates how a new civilization arose in the countryside and in the conquests of the 8th and 9th centuries AD with consequences that endure down to our own time. But "Charlemagne" is also about historical analysis: the techniques by which today's historians wrest new data and insights from manuscripts, memorandums, and mud to rediscover the lives of the men and women who created the first European civilization.
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Modern China presents a dual image: a society transforming itself through economic development and social revolution; and the world's largest and oldest bureaucratic state, coping with longstanding problems of economic and political management. Whatever form of modern society and state emerges in China will bear the indelible imprint of China's historical experience, of its patterns of philosophy and religion, and of its social and political thought. These themes are discussed in order to understand China in the modern world, and as a great world civilization that developed along lines different from those of the Mediterranean.
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This course will focus on how concepts of woman and gender have defined meanings of religious and national communities in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. It will survey changes in these concepts historically through reading a variety of sources-religious texts and commentaries, literary and political writings, books of advice, women's writings, and films-and will look at how contemporary thinkers and activists ground themselves differently in this historical heritage to constitute contesting positions regarding gender and national politics today.
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On July 8, 1853, Commodore Mathew C. Perry steamed into Japan's Edo Bay with four heavily armed US Navy warships. Two were the so-called "black ships," ominously painted steamships of the latest design. There, within view of a stunned populace, Perry issued an ultimatum: open the country to trade or face unstoppable bombardment. Thus began Japan's modern engagement with the outside world, a new chapter in the broader encounter between "East" and "West." Through primary sources, discussion and lecture, this course examines Japan's rapid development from samurai-led feudalism into the worlds first non-Western imperial power.
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From the emergence of a court-centered state 1500 years ago to a warrior-dominated society centuries later, the people, institutions, and ideas of premodern Japan will be our initial focus. We then turn to the extraordinary transformations of Japan's modern era. We examine the invention of new traditions as one crucial aspect of the tumultuous process of change from the mid-19th century through the present and explore how people in Japan have dealt with the dilemmas of modernity that challenge us all. We give particular attention to placing Japan in the context of Asian and global history.
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This course seeks to understand the transformation of the Jews from a relatively homogeneous group that was readily distinguished from its surrounding cultures, to their current state in which they are neither homogeneous nor readily distinguished from other identifiable groups. The focus will be on the political, social, and economic shifts that led to major changes in Jewish political and cultural aspirations and achievements. Specifically, the course will examine processes of change in France, Germany, Russia, and the US.
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Psychiatry is one of the most intellectually and socially complex and fraught fields of medicine today, and history offers one powerful strategy for better understanding why. Topics covered in this course include the invention of the mental asylum, early efforts to understand mental disorders as disorders of the brain or biochemistry, the rise of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and war, the rise of psychopharmacology, the making of the DSM, anti-psychiatry, and more.
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Surveys major developments in the history of American medicine since 1500. Emphasis on setting the practice of medicine and the experience of health and disease into broad social, cultural, and political contexts. Topics include the social and cultural impact of epidemic disease; the nature of demographic and epidemiological change; the development of medical therapeutics and technologies; the growth of health care institutions; the rise of the medical profession; and debates about the allocation of health care resources. Evaluates the role of medicine in addressing social needs as well as the social and economic determinants of patterns of health and disease.
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This course offers historical perspective on the social relations and relative power of the sexes, tracing sharp changes and striking continuities over the past century. We will look at sexuality, masculinity, and femininity, centering these in US social, cultural and political history. Demographic patterns, economic demands, public policy, war, and gender-based social movements will provide the context for examining expectations for manhood and womanhood as they play out in family lives, work, popular culture and politics.
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This course provides the historical depth and the comparative context in which to understand contemporary South Asia through an historical inquiry into the making and multiple meanings of modernity. It explores the history, culture, and political economy of the subcontinent which provides a fascinating laboratory to study such themes as colonialism, nationalism, partition, the modern state, economic development, refashioning of religious identities, center-region problems and relations between Asia and the West. Significant use of primary written sources (in English) and multi-media presentations.
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When Thomas Jefferson listed the "pursuit of happiness" as one of the inalienable rights of humankind, he offered future generations an evocative but elusive vision of the good society. This course explores the competing visions of "happiness" that animated political and social life in the half century surrounding the American Revolution. Was happiness best achieved through collective commitment to public good? Through submission to God? Or in the possession of property and the cultivation of private affections? And what happened when happiness became misery or its pursuit provoked political rebellion, riot, scandal, and crime?
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This course begins with the question of terminological precision and the definition of slavery and other forms of servile labor-especially in Africa. The course then examines the institution of slavery in Africa and the Americas within this wider historical context, analyzing the political economies and ideologies that underpin slavery and the crucial role of slave trade in reproducing slave communities that were barely able to reproduce themselves naturally. The course explores the impact of slavery on political, economic, social, and cultural life in Africa and the Americas and ends with a discussion of the legacy of slavery and the global nature of the African diaspora.
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This course treats the history of the 19th-century US and the Civil War in light of the history of US imperialism, especially the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s. Likewise, it relates the history of slavery in the US to the Haitian Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, Indian removal, Atlantic cotton, land and money markets, and the hemispheric history of antislavery.
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Less than a century ago the British Empire ruled a quarter of the world. This course surveys the extraordinary reign of the British Empire from the American Revolution to World War II. Course presents a narrative of key events and personalities, introduces major concepts in the study of British imperial history, and considers the empire's political and cultural legacies. Readings include works by Niall Ferguson, Linda Colley, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi.
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This course introduces the emigration of people from China to other parts of the world over the last five centuries. It considers the causes of emigration, the ties that emigrants retained to China, and the communities that Overseas Chinese created abroad. It compares the experiences of emigrants and their descendants in Southeast Asia and in North America. Last, it tries to situate the recent wave of Chinese migration to North America in global and historical context.
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Examines the crusades as formative events in the developing relations between Western Christians, Eastern Christians, and Muslims, and in the expansion of Western Europe into both the Middle East and the non-Christian areas of northeastern Europe. Christian and Muslim concepts of holy and just war are elaborated. Topics include: the interaction of political, economic, and religious factors in the elaboration of the crusading movement; the consequences of the crusades; the transformation of East-West relations; the effects on subsequent history; aspects of medieval colonization; conflict and coexistence between the various peoples involved. Readings focus on sources in translation.
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Focus on the insurrectionary war, the consolidation of power, Fidel Castro's role, the role of organized labor and the peasantry, the US-Cuban conflict, the alliance with the Soviet Union, the choice of economic strategy, the "remaking of human beings," the role of intellectuals, the support for revolutions in Africa and Latin America, and the change toward "orthodox" policies. The instructor will debate himself, presenting two or more views on each issue. Readings include original documents in translation.
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An examination of the intellectual structure and social context of evolutionary ideas as they developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on Darwinism as a major transformation in Western thought. Topics include an introduction to origin stories in different cultures; the natural history tradition in the West; evolutionary thought before Darwin; key aspects of Darwin's ideas; the comparative reception of Darwinism in Britain, US, Germany, Russia and France; social Darwinism, eugenics and racial theories; early genetics and biological determinism; the search for the gene; religious controversy.
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The cultural, social, and political life of France before 1789; the rise of a public sphere; the Revolution in its development from the decentralized "consensus" of 1789 to Jacobin terrorism in 1793-94; the structures of Jacobin thought; the ideological, social, and administrative effects of the Revolution in France. The roles of Mirabeau, the Montagnards, the Girondins, Robespierre, Babeuf, and Napoleon are considered, as well as more general themes such as the effect of public opinion and the redefinition of gender roles.
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Nine centuries of interaction between two neighboring world civilizations centered around the Mediterranean basin. Examines the transformation of the terms of coexistence and competition over time from an asymmetry in favor of the Islamic world to one favoring Europe in terms of power and prestige. Surveys major events and broad patterns of human activity (wars, migrations, conversions, trade, cultural exchange); compares institutions and worldviews; studies the ways in which the two civilizations perceived and imagined each other. Focus on common roots and mutual influences. Analysis of (mis)perceptions as historically constructed cultural categories and of their legacy in the modern world.
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The past 125 years have seen more rapid economic growth, and more global economic integration, than ever before. Yet the gap between rich and poor countries has widened, and "globalization" has alternated with attempts at national self-sufficiency under fascist, communist, and other banners. The course explores the impact of technological, economic, social, and political trends, at both global and national levels, on the development of the world economy since 1873. Topics include free trade and the gold standard in the 19th century, European colonialism, the depressions of 1873-96 and 1929-39, and the postwar economic order.
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