Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Reading and discussion of major texts of the European Enlightenment, from the late 17th century to the late 18th century, with particular attention to the promotion of useful knowledge and to the theory of religion. Readings in Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume and Kant.

In a society where material possessions are distributed unequally, what obligations do the well-off have towards everyone else? This undergraduate seminar examines conceptions and practices of charity in early modern Europe and the Middle East. The study of charity reveals not only the forms that giving has taken in the past, but also the complexity of motivations that surround giving, the often gendered nature of charity, and the visions of an ideal social order that are embedded within the acts and institutions of charity. Taking a comparative approach, the course emphasizes how charity and "doing good" mean different things depending on the historical setting.

This seminar will introduce students to the history of the U.S. West. The course will examine the shifting place, process, idea, cultural memory, conquest, legacies, and environments of the U.S. West throughout American history. Drawing on recent historiography and primary sources such as journals, photography, music, film, and material culture, students will explore how individual people who fell under competing empires, nations, and tribes became a part of the United States. Major themes will include the mapping and the scientific cataloging of the West, racial caricature and exclusion, gender, imperialism, and the increasing role of the federal government.

This course examines why and how Europeans claimed control of roughly 70% of the African continent in the late nineteenth century. Students will engage with historiographical debates ranging from the national (e.g. British) to the topical (e.g. the role of international law). Equally important, students will interrogate some of the primary sources on which debaters have rested their arguments. Key discussions include: the British occupation of Egypt; the autonomy of French colonial policy; the mystery of Germany's colonial entry; and, not least, the notorious Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.

Takes an in depth look at succession practices and family dynamics in medieval ruling dynasties over a period of several centuries. This course will integrate scholarship from medieval history, organization theory and family business studies.

A reading seminar focused on literature relevant for a natural history of humankind from several million years ago to the present. Topics will include population diasporas; long-distance exchange; coevolution; family, sex, and marriage; food; communication; goods and things; technology; human contact with ecosystems; status; demography and scale; and cognitive studies. The course will introduce students to the rapidly growing field of big history or deep history.

This course explores the literature in the history of children and childhood in America from the 17th century to the present. It is organized chronologically but is also topical in approach. Fundamental questions posed by historians in this burgeoning field will be examined. Students will learn how to develop a nuanced critique of works in the field and how to write a professional book review during the course of the seminar.

The twentieth-century United States is a vibrant and flourishing field of historical study. The goal of this seminar is to introduce students to the central questions, problems and debates in the history of the "American century." Students will learn how the literature of history has developed through reading both older and newer approaches. Readings focus on questions of politics, political culture, the state and social life. The course is both thematic and chronological (as well as necessarily selective). Students are expected to prepare well for seminar and to participate actively in discussion. Each class will begin with a brief introduction to the readings (no more than five minutes) by a member of the seminar. The idea here is for one student to take special responsibility for leading discussion, raising questions and problems posed by the reading.

A general introduction to theories of imperialism, nationalism, and post-colonialism. Case studies to include Asia and Africa. Will combine the study of theory with examination of particular anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements.

Introduces students to international history through the study of commodities ranging from oil, coal, and cotton to potatoes, rum, coffee, and sugar. Showcases historical writings that transcend geographic, cultural, and political boundaries between East and West, North and South, Atlantic and Pacific as well as methodological boundaries between cultural, economic, business, and environmental history, the history of food, of technology, and of ideas.

This seminar is based on the fascinating firsthand accounts of travelers who visited Constantinople and other areas of Byzantine world. The texts will generate questions for discussion and research on a wide range of issues, such as Byzantine civilization, cross-cultural contacts in the Middle Ages, the practice and experience of travel, and the interrelationship of travel, ethnography, and politics. Sources will be chosen from among the works of western, Islamic, Jewish, and Russian travelers.

Explores the history of the political, social, and cultural center of the largest continental European Empire in modern history, and one of the birthplaces of European modernism. From the 1880s through WWI and into the early years of the Republic of Austria, the course examines not only Vienna's intellectual vitality, but also the social and ideological divisions underlying the human catastrophes of World War and genocide in the twentieth century.

The history of Jacobinism during the French Revolution.

Examines the history of various kinds of economic thought, including 18th century laissez-faire political economy and late 19th century theories of economic and social reform. Will consider writings in different media from scientific theories to economic periodicals. Students will prepare individual research projects.

Working with museum collections as well as written documents, students will explore the interplay between particular objects and larger historical themes, such as colonialism, nationalism, scientific and ethnographic exploration, or expanding commerce. Employing a range of scholarly tools, emphasizing visual and material analysis and including archival research, students will help prepare materials for a future exhibit.

Will explore the links between Harvard and slavery during the first 229 years of the university's history. Students will write original research papers on various aspects of the history of Harvard University and slavery, including how resources extracted from slave labor benefited the university, the ways Harvard administrators and faculty supported or struggled against the institution of slavery, and what kinds of links the university built to slaveholders.

The birth of contemporary American politics and our current regime of primary, secondary, and university education both date from the 1890-1930 period. Focusing on psychology, philosophy, and political and educational reform, with particular emphasis on the writings of William James and John Dewey, this course examines the shaping of modern American democracy and education.

This seminar explores the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the complex relationship between Europe and the United States in the twentieth century. You will also contribute to telling the story of that relationship, by producing a long research paper based on original sources. Shared readings will provide a common fund of knowledge and a common language for discussion.

This course deals with the challenges of representing medieval history by focusing on selected films, which will be viewed at two levels at once, as films and as history. What are the uses of cinema as a vehicle for thinking about the past? What qualities, other than accuracy, make for good history in films? What are the advantages, if any, of cinematic representation of the premodern past with its different sense of intimacy with the supernatural?

Will explore Britain's deployment of various forms of violence in its 20th-century empire, and how this violence was understood, justified, and represented in the empire and at home. Imperial objectives and policies will be weighed alongside local factors such as race, settler presence, indigenous responses to colonial rule, and economic and strategic interests to assess the universality and particularity of British colonial violence.

This research seminar will focus on the history of Sino-American relations and interactions since the Opium War (1840s). It will examine major episodes such as the Boxer intervention, the first and second world wars, the Korea and Vietnam wars, the Mao-Nixon rapprochement, and the post-Mao transformations, and explore central themes such as immigration, trade, culture, diplomacy, and security.

History Lab offers History concentrators and other students a chance to spend a semester working with History faculty on faculty research projects. Outcomes will include familiarity with a range of digital tools for research and data visualization and insights on how to design and execute a major research project. Students will be assessed on the basis of blogs and presentations of research assignments.

The emergence of the science of medicine and its professionalization have been integral aspects of human history. The history of medicine allows us to trace the various traditions that have come together to create "modern medicine." In this section, students will examine the human endeavor to be healthy and to cure disease. The practice of medicine draws on changing ideas about the natural world and the body. It also demands interventions in the physical environment so as to maximize public health, and readily incorporates transformative technologies from other sectors of human society. Students will be asked to reflect on the interaction of medicine and culture through questions such as: How did western powers use biomedicine in the context of empire? How do non-western cultures appropriate and indigenize biomedicine?

Everything has a history, and the discipline of history has a particularly long and broad one. In this section we'll focus on ideas about how and why to study history and on the practices of historical research and writing as they have varied across different cultural contexts. In selected case studies we will consider who wrote and who read history, and how historians answered questions that we also ask ourselves today. E.g. What features are essential to a good historical account? Does the study of history teach moral lessons? How does history interact with memory?

Though empires have recently disappeared from the map, for historians these sprawling multi-ethnic, multi-confessional states remain crucial laboratories for the study of violence, power, ideology, aesthetics, and identity. This section will introduce students to the many ways historians define empires and interpret the experiences of those who inhabited them. How does one write the history of such diverse, expansive entities? How does imperial history incorporate the perspectives of disenfranchised, enslaved, and colonized peoples? What is its scale? How does the work of historians relate to images of empire generated through public commemoration and popular memory?

Legal history has become a popular pursuit in recent decades, but what does it mean to do legal history? Do lawyers, who routinely review precedent or study the evolution of specific pieces of legislation, do legal history? Do judges, when they reconstruct past events in order to apply the law? Do historians, who use legal documentation? And how is legal history differently done in Europe and in the USA? This section will consider these questions (and others) by analyzing the various ways by which different scholars have approached the relationship between law and history over time, in different locations, and for different ends.

Biographers write histories of lives. Their storytelling is often novelistic but their standards of evidence are those of the historian. They confront distinctive questions: What lives are worth writing? What is the relationship between the individual and society? What rules govern the relationship between biographers and their subjects? How has the art of biography changed over the centuries, and what forces have driven those changes? In this section, we'll read both notable biographies and the critical literature on biography as a genre that is often seen to be at odds with the conventions of other kinds of historical writing.

This course provides an introduction to theories of social control, prison practices, and experiences of confinement. Our historical comparison of penal regimes from different time periods and different nations will explore fundamental questions about the purpose of government authority and the role of prisons in society. In the spirit of Nelson Mandela's famous observation that "no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails," this course offers a deep and critical analysis of social exclusion, the contours of state power, and the malleability of the law and its function in various societies over time.

This course takes a cultural approach to connected histories and more contemporary developments of (post)colonial national identity formations, U.S. empire, and globalization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lenses of gender, race, and appearance. We will examine visual and performative cultural arenas such as beauty pageants, advertising, mass media, film, and video and investigate how discourses of racial and gendered aesthetics functioned in structuring and maintaining colonial forces and empire.

Think big: A historical survey of world societies since the 16th century "encounters," designed to emphasize their interactions and interdependence. Covers transnational forces such as demographic change and migration, religious revivals, industrial development, and upheavals in class, racial and gender relationships. Also follows comparative political transformation within empires and states and the international hierarchies of power, including the impact of the great revolutions, imperialism and war, trade and investment, and cultural diffusion.

Introduces students to historical study by focusing on selected topics in Twentieth-Century American history. The course teaches students how to use the systematic patterns of thought that historians use to recreate and analyze the past. These are patterns of thought common among all historians and the skills and experiences gained will provide students a way to enter historical study across time and geography. Topics include, the history of race-based disfranchisement, the Dust Bowl, the history of birth control, Thoreau's influence on twentieth-century reform movements, and others.

Will explore the great transformation in European legal habits that took place between 500 and 1600, as family-based forms of law, vengeance, and regulation gave way to royal, municipal, and ecclesiastical justice. Topics include the blood feud, the judicial ordeal, and judicial torture. The course is designed to raise ethical and substantive issues that are relevant to an understanding of the function of law and justice in the modern world.

Surveys the civilization of the high middle ages (~1100-~1500), focusing on cultural and political institutions, such as monasticism, knighthood, kingship and crusade. This class will put an emphasis on the evolution of these medieval ideas and institutions and the contributions they still make to our world and identities today.

The course provides an introduction to the history of economic thought, from Huan K'uan to Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Paul Samuelson; and to economic concepts in historical perspective, from the state and the market to natural resources and financial crises.

An untold story lies behind the news that we read, hear or see every day and the media sources that we mine constantly as historians. This lecture course introduces students to the major themes and approaches to the historical study of news from the `invention' of modern newspapers in the seventeenth century to the multiplication of media today. Topics include journalism, propaganda, public opinion, news agencies, radio, television, and Twitter.

This course will explore the causes and consequences of the political upheavals that transformed Britain during the seventeenth century. The English Revolution witnessed the first trial and execution of a lawful monarch in European history. The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 made Britain a great European power. Why was it necessary for Britons to overthrow constituted authority and how did they do it? Readings will include works from among James I, the Levellers, Milton, Hobbes, and Locke as well as writings of modern historians. No prior knowledge expected.

This survey course explores European history from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Topics include the Renaissance in Southern and Northern Europe, the Reformation and the wars of religion, the rise of Absolutism, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. The course will introduce students to key figures (such as Machiavelli, Luther, Montaigne, Bacon, and Kant) as well as to topics in cultural and everyday history.

This course examines the history of Germans in Europe and elsewhere, starting with the revolutions of 1848 and ending with the separation of Austria, West Germany, and East Germany following the Second World War. We will consider multiple different visions of what "Germany" should be, what borders it should have, and who should be considered "German."

The history of Ukrainian territory and its people within a broad context of political, social and cultural changes in Eastern Europe in the course of the half of a millennium. Special emphasis on the role of Ukraine as a cultural frontier of Europe, positioned on the border between settled areas and Eurasian steppes, Christianity and Islam, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, as well as a battleground of major imperial and national projects of modern era.

Examines how and why communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Places the events of 1989/1991, usually considered sudden and shocking, within the political, economic, social, and cultural context of the surrounding decades (1970-2000). Considers both international and domestic factors, including the Cold War and the arms race; ideology and dissent; consumption and culture; oil, economics and the environment; nationalism and civil war; gender and health. Investigates the role of structural conditions and contingency in history.

A survey of major themes in the intellectual history of the Greek and Roman World, with special attention to metaphysics, psychology, ethics and the philosophic life. Readings in the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Augustine, and Boethius.

An introduction to the cultural history of the book and its functions as both material object and text. Major themes include the techniques of book production, authorship, popular and learned readership, libraries and censorship. The course surveys developments from scroll to web with a special focus on printing and developments in early modern Europe, 16th-18th centuries.

A philosophical and historical survey of major debates in modern German social theory over the span of a century, from Nietzsche's anti-foundationalist critique of morality and truth to Habermas's attempt to rebuild a pragmatic-transcendentalist theory for ethical and discursive reason after the collapse of metaphysics. Readings by Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas.

An inquiry into American ideas since 1870, examining developments in political and social theory, philosophy, and literature in the context of socioeconomic change. Topics include the breakdown of Victorian idealism and laissez-faire; the emergence of social science and progressivism; conflicts over gender, race, and ethnicity; interwar cultural ferment and political reform; post-World War II theories of consensus and 1960s radicalism; and the consequences for democracy of our contemporary culture of hyper-partisanship.

The course is designed primarily for students interested in further study in the field, but all students are welcome. We cover topics, from the seventeenth- to the twenty-first century, in political, social, intellectual, and cultural history. Students read both primary and secondary materials, and receive intensive guidance for their writing.

Family forms in the United States have varied widely over the centuries. This course will consider the radical innovations of 17th century Puritans, eighteenth-century Moravians, and nineteenth-century Mormons; the role of the family in debates over slavery, immigration, and the status of American Indians; and the impact of legal, economic, and social changes on mainstream ideals and practices. Students will work with a wide variety of family records as well as public documents and will have the option of writing about their own family history.

This course studies the American Populist tradition that defines the common "people" as the centerpiece of American economic and political life and thrives on opposition between the people and "elite" interests. The class focuses on the formal Populist movement and the People's Party of the late nineteenth century, and places this history in broader context, from Jeffersonian tradition through the rise of anti-elitist and anti-government movements characterized by Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the rise of the Tea Party.

This lecture course explores the complex interactions of science and religion in the United States, with a particular focus on their roles in democratic politics. Beginning with the Scopes trial of 1925, it looks back to the "pan-Protestant establishment" and the Darwinian controversies of the nineteenth century and then proceeds forward to today's debates over abortion and bioengineering. Students read a wide range of primary sources and examine visual material. No previous coursework is required.

This course will examine sexual rules and behavior over four centuries in the U.S. and Europe, probing the making of sexual categories such as 'normal' and 'deviant', and asking how understandings of men and women as sexual beings have changed over time. A premise of the course is that human sexual behavior is malleable, and that understanding a society's values about what is right and wrong in sex sheds light on social relations as a whole. Likewise, modes of sexual regulation reveal a social order's priorities. We will consider how popular beliefs, dominant discourses on sexuality and modes of sexual regulation relate to assumptions about class, gender, race, and age.

Surveys the complex, mutually constitutive, and often thorny relationship - characterized by suspicion and antagonism, but also by fascination and desire - between the United States and the diverse republics south of the Rio Grande. Examines public policy, US expansionism and empire, popular culture and consumption, competing economic development models, migration, tourism, the Cold War, sovereignty, dissent, and contrasting visions of democratic citizenship.

This course is an introductory survey of colonial Latin American history, spanning the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Organized chronologically and thematically, it will examine developments in Spanish and Portuguese America by reading both secondary and primary sources (available in English translation).

This course examines China's modern history from the last decades of the 19th century to the present. It explores the great political, economic, and social transformations with a particular focus on identifying continuities and discontinuities in China's historical development across the 20th century. Lectures, readings, and discussions will also emphasize China's global interconnections and develop a framework for assessing the role of communism, capitalism, and nationalism in the making of modern China.

Survey of Vietnamese history from 1802 to the present. Covers the period of unified rule under the Nguyen dynasty, French colonial conquest, the struggle for independence, the Vietnam War, and the recent unification under Communism. Major topics include the relationship between the state, the village, and the individual; the transformation of Vietnamese society, culture, and politics under French rule; the rise of nationalism and Communism; the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War.

The course explores the internal dynamics of West African states from 1800, and West Africa's relations with the wider world. Innovations in science, technology and finance made the 19th century an era of social and economic opportunity and of political experimentation; a phase curtailed by European imperialism. The course examines African perspectives on colonialism, the two world wars, nationalism, and the transfer of political power. We will review post-colonial political economies and the search for workable political and economic models.

A survey of the history of the Near East and North Africa from the rise of Islam in the 7th century to the Turkish ascendance in the mid-11th century. Includes Muhammad and his community, Arab conquests, Umayyads and Abbasids, sectarian movements, minority communities, government and religious institutions, and relations with Byzantium and the Latin West.

Surveys the transformations of the Ottoman order in the Middle East and southeastern Europe in the early modern era and in the long nineteenth century until the demise of the state. Topics include changes in the conduct of state; social and religious movements; the impact of the new world economy and new trade routes; relations with Europe; emergence of nationalism; the `Eastern Question.' Ethnic and religious diversity, rural society, urban popular culture, guilds, gender and family life are also examined. The importance of this era for understanding today's Middle East is stressed.

Weekly seminar and studio for multimedia history. The course encourages students to design new modes of historical storytelling by embedding historians' core values and methods in the innovative products of artisanship and craft. Extensive use of primary sources, attention to processes of change over time, keen historiographical awareness, and an overarching respect for evidence will guide a range of multimedia historical projects.

Examines the eighteenth century through some of the many lives of Benjamin Franklin. Students analyze in depth one of these lives, or identify and explore yet another, to better comprehend Franklin and the worlds in which he lived: colonial America, British empire, independent US, books, science, popular culture, politics, war, social reform, personal improvement, and many others.

Using sources ranging from diaries and memoirs to biographies, autobiographies, records of interrogations, resumes and self-criticisms, we will explore the ways in which individuals, both famous and ordinary, make sense of their lives in Asia. The focus will be on the upheavals of the twentieth century were experienced and how individual biographies and national histories enrich one another.

The course explores the historical and ethnographic contexts of Japan's compound disasters of March 2011. As people sought to survive and make sense of the disasters, social media as well as photos, videos and websites played critical roles. We examine the role of these records, using a participatory digital archive developed at Harvard. Student teams will develop research questions, collect digital material, and create multimedia narratives. Students will complement their research with study of responses to similar global events as well as critical reflection on digital scholarship and the emerging practice of "crisis archiving."

This course examines how our image of Latin American past(s) changed in last decades in order to introduce students to some of the major debates and recent developments in history and the art of history making. Among other things, it examines issues of periodization, comparative and Atlantic history, the nature of the sources and their interpretation, the use of notions such as "crisis," "decline," and "corruption," the object historians reconstruct, and the contribution of subaltern studies and postcolonialism to the study of Latin America.

Examines recent and ongoing discoveries that show how the natural sciences are revolutionizing understanding of the human past across temporal and geographic boundaries. Topics include how archaeology, history and science illuminate and are illuminated by Jomon Pottery, ancient and medieval coins, silk, climate change, and genomics. Mixes classic classroom, seminar-style teaching with classes held as field-trips to New England museums, landscapes and laboratories.

How can we explain the role of the state in China's economy past and present? Why did China never experience an industrial revolution in the 19th century? What about China's encounter with capitalism? The relationship between visible and invisible hands, i.e. state and market, frames our discussion of entrepreneurs, firms, business associations, laws and practices in the evolution of China's modern economy and society, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese overseas communities across Asia. Readings address important debates in the field of Chinese business, economic, and social history from the early 19th to the 21st century but also offer a comparative perspective on China's economic and political modernization in a global setting.

This course will examine a range of epistemological and methodological questions about the nature of historical knowledge and practice that have been prompted by the rise of indigenous histories or pasts in settler societies. Focusing on Australia, topics will include history, place and time; the demand for indigenous histories; memory, myth and oral tradition; history and the construction of Aboriginality; and role of representations of the past in making and settling legal claims.

This course asks us to rethink the time and place of Asian America, especially in relation to the United States and the broader world. By beginning in the late eighteenth century and looking beyond the official national borders of the United States, we will trouble the traditional American immigrant narrative and the model minority myth. Through reading primary sources and historical scholarship we will explore how Asian America constituted, and was constituted by, histories of global capitalism and labor, imperial rivalries, U.S. foreign policy, struggles over decolonization and self-determination, transnational social movements, and cross-racial politics. Finally, this course draws from interdisciplinary approaches, especially critical ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, to seek subaltern and non-normative histories of Asian America in the world.

This course will introduce students to the use of digital tools in historical research. We will explore the emerging fields of digital history and public history and the current and potential impact of digital technologies on the theory and practice of history. The course will train students in the acquisition, management, analysis, visualization, and sharing of historical data, documents, and texts.

First published in 1932, Black Elk Speaks is a defining text through which non-Indian people have made sense of American Indians-and through which Indian people have imagined a collective self. At once epic spiritual account, editorial curiosity, political text, war story, nineteenth century memoire, and travel narrative, the book opens a range of questions and themes critical to American Indian Studies. This course will use Black Elk Speaks to consider issues of authorship, historical consciousness, religion and spirituality, colonialism, modernity, and the complexities of cultural production, while allowing students to engage in original research in the field.

Introduction to the study of medieval history and to the literature basic to the examination field. Readings include both canonical works as well as recent studies. Though designed for specialists in medieval European history, the course welcomes all non-specialists interested in exploring large issues of comparative history and chronological depth.

Explores law and violence across the global human past. Readings will range from studies of violence and vengeance in historical and anthropological settings to the methodological insights provided by sociology, cognitive neuroscience, and criminal justice.

Introduction to methods and techniques of textual scholarship with reference to Renaissance Latin texts. Topics include finding and describing manuscript and printed sources; paleography and codicology; text editing; rhetorical analysis. Course includes a six-week paleography workshop held in Houghton Library.

Students will conduct primary research on topics of significance in the history of England, ca. 1563-1714.

Examines the international history and historiography of the Cold War; investigates Cold War origins, narratives, sources, collapses, and legacies; assesses their usefulness as a means of understanding the second half of the twentieth century.

The seminar will consider how individual people and groups in the past thought about and planned for the future. Specific topics can include the history of: insurance; speculation; engineering and unintended environmental consequences; climate change; population growth (or decline) and social planning; education and "disruption." Our object will be to design an undergraduate course that encourages students to look critically at how we think we can plan for the future in the present.

Major themes include nationalism, communism, the `Polish question,' the `Jewish question,' the political and economic viability of the Habsburg Empire, cultural exchange and diplomatic relations between Austria, Germany and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union.

Year-long bi-weekly seminar on collective and personal identities in the history, culture, and politics of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Key questions: where and how are identities formed (in domestic, public, textual, and virtual spaces)? What factors constrain, promote, and shape identity formation? What theories of self-expression help us understand the region? How are identities and subjectivities similar? How are they different?

Exploration of the landscape of digital history from the perspectives of both theory and practice. Students will examine major debates in the field, assess groundbreaking projects, and apply digital history methods to their own research.

A graduate seminar on the nature of censorship and the way it actually operated in Stuart England, Bourbon France, the British Raj, Communist East Germany, and regimes vulnerable to the Internet.

Will introduce students to methods and debates in the history of the book and of reading. Students from all humanities and social science disciplines are welcome. Primarily for graduates; open to advanced undergraduates by consent of the instructors.

The political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt famously observed that "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." But what does it mean to secularize a concept? This graduate-level seminar will explore the controversy and aftermath of this political-theological dictum by considering the broader history of theoretical debate concerning the place of religion in the modern world. We will focus on works by Carl Schmitt together with his many interlocutors, including Walter Benjamin, Jacob Taubes, and Erik Peterson, with special attention to the postwar debate over secularization between Karl Lowith and Hans Blumenberg.

This course examines classic texts in American intellectual history from 1630 to the present, both primary and secondary, and surveys recent developments in the field. It is intended for first- and second-year graduate students preparing for general exams in history and for other graduate students in fields such as American Civilization, Government, Law, Literature, Religion, and Education.

This course offers students the opportunity to conduct original research in the history of education.

Research culminating in the production of a scholarly essay. Some prior knowledge of the period assumed.

This seminar will explore recent scholarship on nineteenth and early twentieth century Mormonism and guide students in developing independent research projects on selected topics of their choice

This seminar is open to graduate students who are acquainted with using gender and/or sexuality as categories of historical analysis and are ready to undertake relevant historical research. The bulk of the term will be devoted to individual (or collaborative) research projects, with the completion of a 25- to 30-page paper required. Topics for research are open. The seminar is centered around U.S. historiography, but participants working in non-U.S. and/or comparative/international history are welcome to apply.

This course examines major issues in the development of schooling from the Colonial period to the present.

In this graduate seminar we will read books and articles on topics that reflect the diverse experiences and ideologies of African Americans in the twentieth century. We will discuss and analyze differing historical interpretations and methodologies. We will also explore a variety of historical writings, e.g., biography, intellectual history, race and gender studies, labor history, transnational history, etc. Students are required to write a short report on a recommended reading each week, in addition to being prepared to discuss the required reading. A historiographic paper will be due at the end of the term.

This seminar considers issues in 20th-century movement for social reform from the perspective of legal history and the legal profession. It emphasizes matters of race, class and gender inequality and readings cover the black freedom struggle, women's rights, the labor movement and anti-poverty struggles. Students read legal cases and works of historical and legal scholarship.

This course examines the history of capitalism in America, viewed through the lens of debates over regulation of economic activity. Beginning in the early days of the republic, it will examine the role of law in capitalist development, focusing on debates over the regulation of corporations, banking and the financial system, antitrust, and administrative law, continuing through the regulatory reforms of the New Deal. It will then examine movements for deregulation, the roots of the financial crisis, and recent proposals to regulate banks and other financial institutions. The course will examine the social, institutional and intellectual history of economic regulation.

Seminar culminating in the production of an article length essay based on primary research. Students will conduct research into significant topics at the intersection of the state and civil society in the twentieth-century United States.

Students write research papers on topics of their own choosing drawing on sources in Japanese, and other languages as appropriate.

Analyzes trends and debates in historical research and writing on colonial and post-colonial South Asia.

Explores exchanges between the disciplines of History and Anthropology, emphasizing overlaps and distinctions in the treatment of mutual concerns such as the representation of time and space, the conceptualization of power, and the making of the subject.

Topic to be announced.

This course explores new approaches to the international history of the twentieth century. We probe problems of scope, theme, narrative strategy, research method, and sources, among others.

The purpose of this graduate seminar is to get Teaching Fellows and other graduates to engage with the historiographical and pedagogical challenges of the General Education course, Societies of the World 19: Western Ascendancy. Courses in Western Civilization are nowadays widely seen as outmoded and excessively Eurocentric. The aim of SW 19 is to address questions of global economic and political divergence in a fresh way, taking advantage of more recent literature on economic history, for example.

Approaches to global history, including economic and labor systems, cultural transfer, imperial frameworks, migration, and environmental challenges. Students will prepare and present a research paper as well cover common readings.

Explores the historical method by considering the wide array of "levels" of analysis or foci that historians adopt, from local and national to transnational, comparative and global; considers the relationship between scope and problematic.

Required of and limited to first-year doctoral students in History, HMES, and HEAL.