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.

This seminar will introduce you to the history of international organizations. The course seeks to understand how and why international organizations have come to play such a significant role in the politics, economics, and culture of the modern world. We will consider the historical factors that have determined the structure, ethos, and efficacy of particular organizations and why international organizations arose in the first place. The course will combine that historical awareness with assessments of broader attitudes towards international organizations. That combination will help us to answer questions about the historical role of international organizations and their work. Why do we use the vocabulary of fighting wars when we discuss disease, for example? What do we actually expect of United Nations bodies and why? And why have historians only recently become interested in international organizations? More broadly, we will use the wide-ranging history of international organizations to rethink the role of the modern state as well as questions of peace, development, culture, and environment

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 treats the crowd as historical subject from prehistory to the present. We examine what it means to talk about "crowds" across various historical settings and collective behaviors. We proceed from hunting bands to social networks, analyzing gladiatorial crowds in Rome, crusader armies in the Middle Ages, revolutionary crowds in America, France, and Britain, twentieth-century mass politics (democratic, fascist, and communist), crowd theorists (Seneca, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Le Bon, Freud, Canetti), and postwar protesters, shoppers, fun-seekers, and smart mobs. Topics include community formation, ritual, entertainment, crowd psychology, the history of labor, revolution and protest, class, gender, and war.

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.

The Russian and Soviet empires acted both as direct agents of transformation and as facilitators of cross-cultural contact in Central Asia, shaping the region in both intended and unintended ways. This course will examine the patterns of cultural change in Central Asia in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries while investigating possible parallels to other contexts of colonial rule and cultural "globalization" worldwide. What role did factors like violence, the dissemination of new ideas and goods, and the creation of an indigenous elite play in bringing about cultural change? In what ways were imperial rule and cross-cultural contact disruptive to local societies, and in what ways (and for whom) were they productive? What opportunities were there for exercising individual agency and what were the constraints on it? Topics discussed in the course will include Islam, gender, national identities, and clan and tribal relationships.

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.

What does it mean to start a country, or to "acquire" and "possess" sovereignty over a state? This seminar will examine the historical evolution of fundamental concepts in our international system: state formation, statehood, and sovereignty. Simultaneously, the seminar will explore histories in which sovereignty and statehood have appeared greatly confused and hotly contested. These include: the UK-China lease for control of Hong Kong; the legal battles at the US Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay; international responses to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor; and the "corporate state" of the legendary British East India Company.

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.

Both scholars and tribal people (not mutually exclusive!) have found it useful to structure American Indian history around four broad chronological categories emerging from the formation of United States Indian policy: Treatymaking, Indian Removal, Land Allotment, and Self-Determination. This seminar will use this "four acts" structure to offer a broad overview of American Indian history, while also considering the limitations of such category-making, including the decentering of Indian people and the blunting of historical complexity. Engaged with primary sources and historiography, the course will also allow students to engage in original research in the field of American Indian history.

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.

The seminar focuses on the eastern Mediterranean in a period of economic integration and political fragmentation marked by the crusades, the expansion of the Italian maritime republics, western colonization, and the conquests of the Turks. How did the Byzantines react to the new unsettled world around them? What was the role of the newcomers? Special attention will be paid to the crusades, cross-cultural contacts, and the Mediterranean economy.

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.

This course studies the responses to the Great Depression that formed the New Deal. Particular attention will be paid to the connection of between policy development and the rise of American Liberalism. Major topics include Social Security, economic redistribution, Keynesianism, social planning, regulatory reform, conservative critiques of the New Deal and others.

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.

An exploration - beginning with a look at the alleged Mayan prediction of the world's end on December 12, 2012 - of the long history of the Maya past and present. Covers the ancient Maya, Mayan experiences of Spanish colonialism, and Mayan history and politics in modern Mexico and Central America. Critically examines representations and appropriations of indigenous peoples in scholarship, national narratives, and popular culture over time, and highlights examples of Mayan self-representation.

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.

This seminar will explore China's transition from the last decades of the Qing empire to the republic founded in 1911 to the PRC after the 1949 revolution. We will focus on important social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of "building" a nation and creating "modern" citizens, including the introduction of modern educational and economic institutions, legal reforms, public health and infrastructure, dress codes and new gender roles. The course will address the role of nationalism in the Chinese, East Asian and international context and its continuing relevance for our understanding of contemporary China.

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.

Whether regarded as a model for European empires or as a precursor of western colonialism and globalization, Roman imperial expansion has captured both popular and scholarly imaginations. We proceed thematically, analyzing a variety of textual and material evidence for the changing nature of Roman imperialism between the mid-Republican and early imperial periods, and its impact on the politics, culture, religion, and society of Roman and local communities alike.

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.

This course will fulfill the concentration requirement for a research course requiring the completion of an historical essay based on primary materials. It will explore the causes, course, and consequences of the English Revolution by focusing on selected topics covering the range of issues that dominated the period from the convening of the Lord Parliament to the execution of Charles I. Emphasis will be on research techniques and the use of seventeenth century sources.

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 Yalta Conference is analyzed in the context of the long-term geostrategic goals of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR. Special attention is paid to psychological and cultural aspects of the negotiating process.

The history of Jacobinism during the French Revolution.

This course examines relations between European and North African societies, economies, and peoples from the age of "Barbary Piracy" through colonial conquests, anti-colonial nationalism and decolonialization, to post-World War II migrations and reverberations from the "Arab Spring" of 2011. Students will consider crucial turning points in European-North African relations and will write a substantial research paper focusing in on some aspect of Mediterranean history in the modern era.

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.

The teachings of major philosophers in the Western tradition about how living a philosophical life can cure diseases of the soul and bring tranquility, harmony with nature, and a sense of moral worth.

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.

This hands-on interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar is for students who want to think about what a book is and how to read one. Readings include historical and literary narratives of reading by Cervantes, Richardson, Franklin, Sterne, Ellison, and Bradbury, together with research exercises in Harvard library and museum collections.

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.

Examines the movement for racial equality outside the South from the 1940s and into the early 1970s, and will examine integrationist efforts, as well as competing ideologies of black power through weekly urban case studies.

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.

An exploration of the trajectory of New Deal reform and the broader social, economic, political, and cultural changes in the US in this period. Topics will include the First and Second New Deal, the rise of liberalism, the Roosevelt administration, the social movements of the Left and the Right during the 1930s, the coming of war, and the waning of the reform impulse.

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.

The history of the decline and rise of a continent between 1813 and 2013 in the domains of economy, politics and culture.

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?

This course surveys the history of the encounter between settlers and indigenous people in Australia from the beginning of British colonization in the late eighteenth century to recent times. Topics include early cross-cultural relations; conflict on frontiers; treaty-making; the imposition of British law; indigenous dispossession, depopulation and removal; religious change and reserves; labor relations; the growth of racial consciousness; government policies and practices; indigenous responses to oppression and marginalization; and political movements for indigenous rights.

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.

As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger was the architect of the policy of detente with the Soviet Union, of the "opening" to China, and of the effort to salvage "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Yet Kissinger should be understood as a scholar as well as a statesman. Using selections from his writings, this seminar will assess Kissinger in his own terms and in the context of modern international history.

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.

Limited to juniors and seniors. Students wishing to enroll must petition the DUS for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the consent of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some course work as background for their project.

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.

Please select a Sophomore Tutorial from the list below: History 97a through History 97i.

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?

Intellectual historians study almost every period, place, and theme in human history: from classical times to the present, from Asia to the Americas, by examining philosophy and religion, social and political thought, literature and art, and other expressions of human agency and intention that range from ancient epics to graphic novels. This section will draw examples from a wide range of moments and regions to ask how intellectual history has developed as a field, what methods it uses, and how it can be distinguished from other forms of history even as it informs debates of interest to all historians.

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?

This section gives new History concentrators an introduction to environmental history. Most historians leave the natural world out of the story, but environmental historians regard nature as the inescapable context for human history, including the human impact on nature. We will explore how the histories of the environment and of humans can (and perhaps should) be written together. Is there a "natural archive" which historians can consult in parallel with conventional libraries and archives? Do places have "biographies," just as people do? Can natural entities (mountains, dogs, rivers, microbes, climate) have "agency" in the same way human actors can?

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?

This section offers new History concentrators an overview of the history and anthropology of material culture. Our coverage will range widely across both time and space; major themes will include things created in the deep human past as well as the habits of consumption and even addiction that define our relationship with things in the present day. Do we own things? Or do things own us? Does having more stuff necessarily lead to happiness? Readings will offer students a chance to work not just with history and historical sources, but also art history, literary studies, archaeology, environmental history, and cognitive neuroscience.

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.

This section will explore the methods historians have used to understand the political, economic, and social development of cities and urban life over the past four centuries. How have historians approached the study of metropolitan regions and their inhabitants? What methods have they used to examine the ways in which social and spatial forms differ by time and place? How does urban history provide a unique vantage to analyze issues of class, ethnicity, migration, race, and gender? Readings and discussions will give special attention to cities and transformations in the United States, but we will draw comparative examples from the histories of urban centers across the globe.

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.

Research and writing the senior thesis in History.

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.

An introduction to Roman history from the mid third century BCE to the mid third century CE, with emphasis on the multiple cultures of the Roman empire and their diverse involvement in, and perspectives on, Roman conquest and rule. Challenging traditional narratives of Roman political history, we will seek a much more dynamic view of 'Roman' culture and society, based on both literary and archaeological evidence.

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.

This course surveys the origins and impact of encounters at several sites of empire: Qing China, British India, Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. The course conducts its inquiry from several angles, focusing on the way American and European imperial systems affected politics, law, economics, and culture. Students will grapple with key concepts, including financial imperialism and neocolonialism; they will also learn about such specialized topics as the laws of imperial expansion. While the course will spend ample time covering the effects of imperialism "at home," it will equally engage with its effects abroad.

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.

An introduction to modern financial history from the first stock market bubbles to the most recent. Topics include money and banking, public debt and bond markets, corporations and stock markets, investment banking, cross-border capital flows, private insurance and welfare systems, mortgages, consumer credit, privatization, emerging markets, derivatives and hedge funds. Special attention will be paid to the role of financial institutions and financial crises in economic and political development.

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.

The Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire outlived the fall of Rome by a thousand years. In what ways did Byzantium preserve the institutions and politics of imperial Rome? In what ways was it a medieval civilization? How did Byzantium's professional armies, able diplomats, and brilliant intellectuals ensure its survival and renewed expansion? This course traces the story of the Byzantine Empire between c. 600 and 1453, setting it in the context of medieval and world history.

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 an early phase of European expansion and colonial activity in areas including the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, the eastern Mediterranean, eastern Europe, the Baltic lands, and central Asia. A major goal of the course is to explore how a European identity emerged in the process of contact and conflict in the new borderlands. Readings will include primary and secondary sources.

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.

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.

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.

Explores the history of international organizations, including activities concerned with economic crises, economic development, security, and environment. Taught in conjunction with the development of new web-based sources on United Nations history.

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.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 marked the intersection of warfare and science that was more than a century in the making. What motivated scientists to participate in the creation of the bombs? How did civilian populations become justifiable targets in modern warfare? What was it like to experience nuclear attack? Does the historical evidence confirm the popular conception that these bombings ended World War Two in the Pacific? This course examines these and related questions using a broad range of sources, including poetry and fiction, de-classified government documents, and readings in the history of science.

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.

The Renaissance has been described by historians as a revival of antiquity, as a revolt against the Middle Ages, and as the beginning of the modern world. This course examines these claims in the context of a detailed examination of the society and culture of Florence, the most important Renaissance center, from the time of Dante to the time of Machiavelli.

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 explores the history of France from the foundation of the Third Republic to the beginning of the 21st century. Topics include the advent of modern left-wing, right-wing, and anti-Semitic politics; imperial expansion and its consequences; the devastating impact of the First World War; the tumultuous interwar era; the Second World War and the politics of resistance, collaboration, and memory; decolonization; the May 1968 movement; immigration and identity politics since the 1970s.

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."

Examines the development of nationalism and socialism as ideologies intended to shape group loyalties, public and private behavior, and political activities of subjects of the continental European, empires in the long nineteenth century. Primary focus will be on the Habsburg Empire, with attention paid to other German-speaking lands and to the western territories of the Russian Empire (especially Poland).

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 the history of the Soviet Union from the Russian Revolution to Gorbachev's failed reforms. Focus on the period 1928-53 when industrialization, nationalization and political terror created a distinct Soviet society and culture. Readings include novels, short stories, memoirs, Soviet propaganda, high policy deliberations, letters, journalism, songs, jokes, etc.

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.

The history of Russia from the early days of imperial expansion in the sixteenth century to 1917. Topics include the nature of autocratic authority, Russian Orthodoxy, and the integration of non-Russian peoples and territories. We will explore a wide variety of technologies of imperial rule (mapmaking, censorship, religious policy, ethnographic description), as well as the relationship between subjects of the empire (elites, peasants, and everyone in between) and the built and natural environments they inhabited.

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.

A survey of major themes in medieval and early modern intellectual history. Readings in Anselm, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Thomas More, Martin Luther, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes.

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.

This course investigates the complex philosophical affiliation between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Will address how various themes of Heideggerian philosophy were borrowed, displaced, revised, and challenged in Arendt's political theory. The first half of the course addresses texts by Heidegger, esp. selections from Being and Time, and An Introduction to Metaphysics. The second half of the course addresses Arendt's major theoretical works, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and On Revolution.

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.

A survey of major themes and debates in modern French social theory over the span of a century, from Durkheim's neo-Kantian theory of the social symbolic to Foucault's conception of the historical a priori, concluding with the recent emergence of post-Marxist and liberal-democratic conceptions of both history and society. Major readings by Durkheim, Mauss, Sartre, Kojeve, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Lefort, Derrida, and Bourdieu.

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.

Examines the evolution of democracies in different nations over extended periods of time, and will focus on one fundamental issue: Under what circumstances or conditions have democracies (or political rights) expanded, and under what circumstances of conditions have they contracted? Readings will include historical studies as well as comparative theoretical works.

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.

This course will trace the development of the American legal and political system from 1776 to 1865. We will discuss the formation of state constitutions and the Federal Constitution, slavery and law, the development of American private law, the "Revolution of 1800" and the "Age of Jefferson", the mechanisms of westward expansion, the "Age of Jackson", and the coming of the Civil War.

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.

Africans and their descendants in the Americas have drawn upon their experiences to create enduring cultural forms that seem simultaneously to be thoroughly American and distinctly African. How can we best understand these diverse cultural practices? From where did they derive? How are they related to each other? The course explores how transnational affinities have been articulated, debated, and put to use from the Transatlantic slave trade to the present.

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.

A course covering the major public and political events in America from the administration of Teddy Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan. Focuses on both rising national unity and power, as well as persistent racial, gender, and economic division that conflicted with this unity. Topics include: the Progressive Era, New Deal, World Wars, and Civil Rights Movement, and Watergate.

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.

Examines the development of the American economy from its beginnings to the present. Focuses on the nature of economic change during the past 400 years and the reasons for and effects of capitalist growth. Topics include Native-American economies, the industrial revolution, slavery, the rise of new business structures, labor relations, and technological change.

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.

A wide-ranging overview of American interactions with the world from the Spanish-American War through 9/11 and beyond. We will consider the changing patterns of international politics, the causes and implications of imperialism and decolonization, the pivotal impact of the world wars and the Cold War, the significance of cultural interactions and social movements, the challenges of globalization, the complexities of international development, and the roots of current world (dis)orders.

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 surveys Latin America from its 19th-century independence movements through the present day. How did the powerful legacies of European colonialism, and the neocolonial economic order that emerged to replace it, shape the Americas' new nations? Themes include nationalism and identity, revolution and counterrevolution, populism, state formation, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social movements, the role of foreign powers, inequality and social class, dictatorship, democratization, and human rights.

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 is a survey course of the history of European law from the fall of the Roman Empire (5th century) to the establishment of the European Union (20th century). Organized chronologically, it engages with the sources and nature of Law, the organization of legal systems and the relationship between law and society, law and law-maker, law and the legal professions. Continental and Common Law, as well as Colonial law would be covered.

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.

Vietnamese history from antiquity to the founding of the Nguyen dynasty in 1802 with emphasis on the period following independence from China in the 10th century. Topics include the Sinicization of Vietnam and the sources of Vietnamese national identity; tensions between aristocratic and bureaucratic rule; territorial expansion and national division; first contacts with the West; the changing status of women.

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.

Survey of sub-Saharan Africa to 1860, with attention to the range of methodologies used in writing early African history, including oral history, archaeology, and anthropology. Will address themes of the impact of climate change on migration and settlement, trade and commerce, state formation, slavery, and the impact of Islam and Christianity on the continent. Will provide a methodological and historiographical framework in which more specific historical processes and events may be placed and understood.

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.

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.

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 emergence of the Ottoman state from a frontier principality into a world empire in its social, political and cultural dimensions. Topics include pre-Ottoman Anatolia; frontier society; methods of conquest; centralization and institutionalization of power; land regime and peasantry; urbanization; intercommunal relations; religion and learning; architecture and literature. Relations with Byzantium as well as Islamic and European states are examined.

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.

The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the Earth's surface and one-third of humanity lives on its shores and islands, from Russia to New Zealand and from Southeast Asia to South America. This seminar introduces students to oceanic and global history via works in Pacific history by scholars of the Pacific Islands, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and the Americas. Themes covered include cultural encounters, exploration, migration, history of science, geopolitics, and economic history.

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.

Latin America's "dirty wars" generated intense struggles over historical memory. Course focuses on Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and comparatively examines how societies reckon with bloody recent pasts that are anything but settled. Looks at both these countries' dictatorships and their fraught peace processes (including truth commissions, transitional justice, artistic representations, human rights activism, international law, foreign involvement, backlash) in order to probe the stakes and politics of historical interpretation.

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.

This course will examine the rules and standards of evidence in law, history, science, and journalism. What counts as proof in these fields varies and has changed over time, often wildly. Emphasis will be on the histories of Western Europe and the United States, from the middle ages to the present, with an eye toward understanding how ideas about evidence shape criminal law and with special attention to the rise of empiricism in the nineteenth century, the questioning of truth in the twentieth, and the consequences of the digital revolution in the twenty-first. Topics will include the histories of trial by ordeal, trial by jury, "spectral evidence," "negro evidence," case law, scientific testimony, footnotes, the polygraph, statistics, anonymous sources, fact checking, and big data.

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.

This conference course explores the thought of Jurgen Habermas, the foremost social theorist of Germany in the post-1945 era. The course combines philosophical methods of rational reconstruction with an historical sensitivity to context. While devoting primary attention to his major contributions to philosophy and social theory, we will also consider Habermas' role as a public intellectual, in, e.g., the `historians' controversy' and the debates surrounding German unification. Major readings include: Knowledge and Human Interests, The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, The Theory of Communicative Action (Volumes I and II), and Between Facts and Norms.

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 Europeans interacted with those they considered different inside and outside Europe during the Medieval and the Early Modern periods. Reading will alternate between primary and secondary sources.

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.

The Byzantine Empire is perhaps best known today as the medieval successor to imperial Rome and as a model for later empires in the Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. The course investigates imperialism both as an idea and as a practice in Byzantium. We will focus on a variety of themes, such as the role of Constantinople, the methods of governance, the role of coercive and soft power, the integration of diverse communities, the views of empire among the inhabitants of the capital, provincials, and frontiersmen. Primary sources and important secondary works will enable us to examine the specificity of Byzantine imperialism and gain deeper insight into empire as a historical phenomenon.

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.

International economic history and political economy, including strategies of economic development, international trade, migration, finance and monetary relations, based on both theoretical works and specific case studies, and focusing on the period from around 1700 to the present.

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.

Surveys history of the Near East from the coming of the steppe peoples to the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. Includes Seljuks, Crusades, Mongols, and the fall of the Abbasid caliphate, Mamluks, the development of Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade, and the Timurids and their successors.

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.

What does it mean to do work, and what is labor? This seminar considers how the answers to these questions have changed over time and varied across place. In particular, we situate the work of ordinary people in the context of the changing global institutions of empire and trade. In addition to analyzing classic texts of political economy, we examine such topics as the history of slavery, factory labor, migrant labor, call-center work, the digital distribution of work, work and debt, and labor under fossil-fuel economies.

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.

Disease and epidemics are important agents of historical change. With the formation of the modern state, the control of infectious disease became both a means and a goal in the exercise of power. Simultaneously, individual experiences of disease and the place of the body in society also were transformed. This course examines responses to infectious disease in modern China, Japan, and Korea, focusing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will explore the history of disease and public health using methodological approaches ranging from biology to anthropology and iconology, with a focus on cholera, plague, tuberculosis, and AIDS.

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.

The moment of crisis is the moment of discrimination: it forces decisions of obvious consequence, pitting rival theories and their proponents against one another. The crisis is par excellence the moment at which theory and practice meet. This course offers two analytical perspectives based on the study of twelve crises that are frequently seen as turning points in the modern era. To contextualize each crisis, be it political, economic, military, or a combination, we explore what the dominant theories were at the time and how they were deployed in practice in the heat of the crisis. (We may think of this a vertical, historically oriented axis of understanding.) Then we examine the linkages between crises. Are there modes of behavior or thought that are of general utility in such moments? Can strategic thought ever truly claim to be universally applicable. (We may think of this as a horizontal, thematic axis of understanding.) The course at its core is an argument for bringing history back into the core of strategic thought.

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.

The course will examine the troubled post-independence history of the Arab World divided into three parts: North Africa, the Arab East, and the Arab Gulf. Its main focus will be on state-formation under increasingly authoritarian regimes, the challenge to those regimes by global and regional forces and the political and social repercussions of the Arab Spring. Topics to be discussed in depth will include presidential rule, the role of the military and the establishment of crony-capitalist forms of government and political Islam.

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.

Joint philological analysis of Latin texts, archaeological and scientific evidence illuminating the fall of Rome and the origins of medieval Europe, culminating in a research paper.

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.

Readings focused alternately on the English legal tradition and on the Roman-canonical tradition. The topic for 2014-15 will be the English legal tradition. Short papers analyzing texts will be required but not a research paper.

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.

The greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Dante was also a philosopher and theologian, a theorist of language, and a political thinker. In this course we will read through the entire corpus of Dante's works, examining each in a different context. The contexts will include the literary traditions of courtly love and true nobility, scholastic philosophy and theology, contemporary history and political theory. The reception of Dante's works in the Renaissance and later times will also be considered.

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

A graduate colloquium designed for students preparing preliminary examinations in early modern history or interested in English historiography of the early modern period. Historiographical papers and reviews.

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.

Historical and theoretical analyses of crises and transformation: critiques of liberalism; fascism and communism; legacies of world war and empire; postwar institutional constructions including the EU; ideological revival from the 1960s to the collapse of communism; the rise and attrition of a European civil society.

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.

Introduces students to recent and classic literature on German-speaking Europe as well as the Habsburg Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and their successor states. Some discussion of Southeastern Europe. Reading knowledge of German or another approved Central/Eastern European language advisable, but not required. Open to graduate students and qualified undergraduates with permission of the instructor.

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.

Introduction to archival and primary sources, as well as major historiographical debates. Primary focus on major research paper.

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?

This course is an introduction to major themes and debates in the early modern and modern history of the "other Europe." Its main focus is on the histories of European Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland. Readings discuss international and political developments in the region and their impact on the formation of imperial, national, religious and cultural identities from the rise of Reformation to the collapse of Communism. The course is designed to prepare students for a general exam field in East European history. It is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students working on a senior thesis.

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.

Introduction to advanced research in intellectual history with special reference to philosophy and political thought. Readings will include primary and secondary materials drawn from East-Asian and Euro-American traditions.

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.

This graduate seminar provides a survey of major themes and controversies in modern European intellectual history from the Enlightenment to the post-war era. The seminar is intended primarily for graduate students who are preparing for the qualifying examination. The course is offered on a yearly basis, and it meets every other week throughout the academic year. Please consult with the instructor for further details.

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.

This seminar explores the work of the philosopher and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, a leading member of the Institute for Social Research. Moving chronologically and thematically through his major works, we will discover how Adorno applied his inimitable manner of critical reflection to issues such as the dialectic of enlightenment, the social implications of psychoanalysis, the cultural reification of consciousness, and the redemptive promise of autonomous art in a capitalist age. Readings include selections from: Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory. Open only to graduate students, advanced undergraduates at instructor's discretion.

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.

A graduate seminar which examines a number of 18th century writings (by Hume, Smith, Wollstonecraft, and Condorcet) and ideas (enlightenment, religion, empire), and explores different ways of writing about the history of ideas.

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 is intended for graduate students who wish to supplement the reading of primary and secondary sources in American intellectual history with the preparation of a research paper.

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

An introduction to scholarly literature on colonial and revolutionary America. Required for History Department graduate students specializing in US history. Open to those from other fields or programs.

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

Participants in the seminar will explore Harvard's vast collections of tangible things, from rocks to medical specimens to works of art, as sources for the writing and teaching of history. Although the emphasis will be on American history, students from other fields are welcome.

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 interdisciplinary graduate seminar is dedicated to developing an undergraduate course on the attic as both a place and a realm of the imagination. Students will explore the historical and aesthetic richness of archives.

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.

The second in the sequence of three proseminars required of all graduate students in American history and open to graduate students in other history fields and other departments as space permits.

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

Readings in recent monographs as well as older historiography, covering a wide range of 20th-century topics. This proseminar is required of all History graduate students focusing on the United States.

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.

Associated with the Warren Center visiting scholars' workshop on the same topic, this research seminar explores new models for the design and presentation of historical and literary scholarship.

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 workshop will examine major works in the field of legal history, important historiographical debates and critical methodologies. Students will participate in workshop presentations by leading scholars.

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.

A year-long research and reading course on the history of capitalism during the past 300 years.

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.

This seminar provides a critical examination of the documentary and archival forms that lie at the heart of historical knowledge production. Readings span disciplinary boundaries, geographic regions, and time periods.

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

A critical introduction to the historiography of modern Japan, with emphasis on English-language scholarship.

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

Seminar to equip graduate students with the necessary tools for archival research and fieldwork, as well as to introduce them to recent approaches in the historiography.

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.

Informed by theories of gender and sexuality, this seminar investigates how historically notions of desire, body, sex, masculinity, femininity, gender and sexual subjectivities have formed and reformed in Islamicate cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, and South and East Asia.

Topic to be announced.

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.

An historical introduction to theories of war and peace, sovereignty, diplomacy, colonialism, international law, and international relations since the fifteenth century. Readings include primary and secondary sources.

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.

What do empires have in common, and what makes each distinct? Course undertakes thematic approach to imperial history via culture, economics, governance, and more. Open to students across subfields; emphasis on teaching and exam preparation.

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.

A critical exploration of history's "environmental turn." This course tracks the movement of environmental themes to the center of the discipline and the emergence of environmental history as an important new subfield. Readings will range from classics to cutting-edge new work.

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.

Examines approaches to the history of economic thought and economic history by the exploration of particular topics, including the political economy of empire, energy, and information.

Instructors listed above under History 3010 supervise individual work in preparation for the General Examination for the PhD degree.

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

Required of and open only to all third-year history department graduate students.