Fall 2022
World History III: The Age of Empires, 1500-1800
Donald Ostrowski PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course examines major aspects of world history from 1500 to 1800. Topics include the Reformation, European expansion, the Aztec and Inca Empires, formation of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British overseas empires, the city civilizations of Africa, the Russian conquest of Siberia, the four Islamic Empires (Morocco, Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal), Ming and Manchu China, the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. Although empires existed earlier and later, this period displayed a remarkable penchant for empire building.
Spring 2023
World History IV: Globalization, 1800-Present
Donald Ostrowski PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course focuses on crucial developments in, and controversies about, the study of world history from 1800 to the present. Topics include the Industrial Revolution, Latin American independence, European colonization of Africa, independence movements in Africa and India, the end of Imperial China and the rise of the communist regime, the Meiji restoration and the Japanese recovery, the origins of World Wars I and II, the Russian revolutions, fascism, the cold war, and the computer revolution. This course attempts to place these events in their global economic and cultural contexts.
Fall 2022
Precapstone: Historical Biography
Ariane Liazos PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course teaches students the research and writing skills they need to write biography. It is interdisciplinary, as writing biography requires the research skills of the historian, the close textual analysis skills of the literary scholar, and the writing skills of the journalist. We read and discuss excerpts from biographies. We also develop research and writing skills through short assignments. Students submit an annotated bibliography as their final assignment for the course.
Prerequisites: Registration is limited to officially admitted candidates in Master of Liberal Arts, government or history, capstone track, who are in their penultimate semester. Prospective candidates and students with pending admission applications are not eligible. Candidates must be in good academic standing and in the process of successfully completing all degree requirements except the capstone, HIST E-599b, which they must enroll in the upcoming spring term as their final course. Candidates who do not meet these degree requirements are dropped from the course.
Fall 2022
Social Reform Movements in America Precapstone
Stephen Shoemaker PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course inherently espouses an interdisciplinary approach. We consider the multi-century narrative of social reform movements in the United States by emphasizing the materials and methods used in government, history, and religion. Topics include abolition, suffrage, temperance, the New Deal, civil rights, and Great Society initiatives of the 1960s. While together studying the primary sources relevant to the weekly topics, students assemble their own topics and produce an analysis of the literature relevant to their research topic.
Prerequisites: Registration is limited to officially admitted candidates in Master of Liberal Arts, history, government, or religion, capstone track, who are in their penultimate semester. Prospective candidates and students with pending admission applications are not eligible. Candidates must be in good academic standing and in the process of successfully completing all degree requirements except the capstone, HIST E-599, which they must enroll in the upcoming spring term as their final course. Candidates who do not meet these degree requirements are dropped from the course.
Spring 2023
Capstone: Historical Biography
Ariane Liazos PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course builds on the work done in HIST E-597b. Students use the research and writing skills they have developed to produce a sample chapter of a biography, one that could be submitted as part of a book proposal. Students include a bibliography and endnotes with their final submission. This semester predominantly consists of workshops of student writing-in-progress; students are evaluated on the feedback they provide for each other.
Prerequisites: Registration is limited to officially admitted capstone track candidates in the Master of Liberal Arts, government or history, capstone track. Candidates must be in good academic standing, ready to graduate in May with only the capstone left to complete (no other course registration is allowed simultaneously with the capstone), and have successfully completed the precapstone course, HIST E-597b, in the previous fall term. Candidates who do not meet these degree requirements are dropped from the course.
Spring 2023
Social Reform Movements in America Capstone
Stephen Shoemaker PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course continues the work done in HIST E-597. The course shifts to a workshop model, where presentations are given each week by students as they work toward the production of a substantive scholarly article. The article must incorporate all the elements required by academic peer-reviewed journals. Students make presentations on argument, their theory component, scholarly context, and genres of evidence. In this workshop context, students also engage in review of each other's writing. At the end of course, each student delivers a professional quality article suitable for submission to a scholarly journal in their respective field.
Prerequisites: Registration is limited to officially admitted capstone track candidates in the Master of Liberal Arts, history, government, or religion, capstone track. Candidates must be in good academic standing, ready to graduate in May with only the capstone left to complete (no other course registration is allowed simultaneously with the capstone), and have successfully completed the precapstone course, HIST E-597, in the previous fall term. Candidates who do not meet these degree requirements are dropped from the course.
Fall 2022
The Rise of the Far Right in Europe
John R. Boonstra PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
Far-right movements have, in recent years, gained striking momentum across Europe. From France's anti-immigrant National Front and neo-Nazis in Germany to efforts to rehabilitate Franco and Mussolini in Spain and Italy, forces of extreme nationalism, xenophobia, and imperial nostalgia have increased in prominence as well as popularity. The current moment is not, of course, the first time that the continent has experienced a rise in right-wing extremism. Fascism, from the 1920s onward, likewise offered violent, totalitarian solutions to the tensions of mass politics and populist resentment in polarized societies. How, precisely, do today's reactionary political formations relate to their fascistic forebears? What social and cultural dynamics is each responding to and, perhaps just as significantly, what historical legacies are they drawing on? In this course, we ask how has the present wave of far-right parties in western and central Europe tapped into notions of national decline, instability, and changing demographics? What can we learn about these movements by studying histories of European fascism in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy? And finally, how have these histories been obscured and rehabilitated in different ways in each of these countries? By moving from contemporary cases of resurgent nationalist sentiment to their interwar predecessors and back again, and through a consideration of novels, films, historical documents, speeches, and monuments, among other sources, the course seeks to uncover how anxieties of migration, race, and empire as well as changing roles of religion, gender, and nationhood shaped political animosities and allegiances within the European far right both a century ago and today.
Fall 2022
Early Modern Britain, 1485-1714
Flynn Cratty PhD, Lecturer on History, Harvard University
The history of Tudor and Stuart Britain is filled with dramatic personalities and frequent catastrophes. It is no wonder that the period has inspired so many novels, films, and television shows. In addition to bodice rippings and beheadings, however, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also witnessed the formation of British political, religious, intellectual, and economic institutions that would eventually be exported across the world. This course surveys these developments with special attention to the ways men and women sought to imagine new worlds in times of instability. Topics include the English and Scottish reformations, magical and scientific cultures, Puritanism and Arminianism, the civil wars, the growth of the public sphere, and the evolving British political constitution.
Fall 2022
Jane Austen's World in History, Literature, and Film
Maura A. Henry PhD, Professor of History, Holyoke Community College and Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course examines the cultural attitudes, institutions, and social practices of England during the period 1750 1850 through the lens of Jane Austen. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we address topics such as social rank, gender, landed society, and culture, as well as the ways in which the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries view the past.
Spring 2023
Charles Dickens's London through History, Literature, and Film
Maura A. Henry PhD, Professor of History, Holyoke Community College and Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
A vibrant multi-class, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic jigsaw puzzle, nineteenth-century London was a capital city, the center of a vast empire, the largest city on the planet, and a place of both danger and opportunity. Charles Dickens called London his "magic lantern:" he used a series of lenses to project the lives of the metropolis and its inhabitants onto the page. Using an interdisciplinary approach, students examine London through the writings of Dickens (novels, short stories, journalism, and letters focused on London), recent historical scholarship, and modern film and television adaptations of Dickens's novels. Students analyze Dickens's London through a series of analytical lenses such as class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, urbanization, industrialization, theatre and leisure, and crime and punishment.
Fall 2022
The United States and World Order since 1900
Erez Manela PhD, Professor of History, Harvard University
Since the turn of the twentieth century, as the United States became a major economic and military power, Americans have tried to mold and manage international order. In this course, we explore and assess these efforts through the rise of US overseas expansion, two world wars, the Cold War, and into the twenty-first century.
Spring 2023
Global Empires and Migration
John R. Boonstra PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University - Rebecca H. Hogue PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
From Mexico to the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia to the South Pacific, migration has been labeled a crisis for the countries to which migrants arrive. It is no coincidence, this course posits, that migratory trajectories toward these nations tend to reflect, reproduce, or reverse those of their imperial pasts and indeed presents. How, we ask, did these historically imbalanced relationships for France and Algeria, for the American Southwest and US overseas territories, for the British legacy in India and Pakistan, or for Jews in Nazi Europe affect the routes, as well as the reasons, along and for which peoples have moved, whether by boat, by train, or on foot, across oceans, deserts, mountains, or seas, and in the past or in the present? What colonial power dynamics informed the push as well as the pull of those who departed, and of those who arrived? How, in other words, is the history of empire intertwined with the history of migration? We propose to disentangle these histories through close analysis of a range of sources, texts, media, and methods, drawing on literary as well as historical approaches to understand how migrants and societies alike were shaped and reshaped by the making and unmaking of global empires.
January 2023
Mapping the Russian Empire
Kelly O'Neill PhD, Lecturer on History, Harvard University
Maps and empires have entangled histories. In this intensive January session course, we study the Russian Empire through deep dives into some of the most important maps produced in the nineteenth century. Politics, ethnic tension, environmental change, the history of data we dig into all of this and more. In the final unit we analyze (and map) the cholera epidemic of 1892 a public health crisis that swept across Europe and Asia.
Prerequisites: Knowledge of Russian language helpful but not required.
Spring 2023
Boston in the American Revolution
Robert J. Allison PhD, Professor and Chair of History, Language, and Global Culture, Suffolk University
Why did the American Revolution begin in Boston? This intensive January session course takes an in-depth look at the political and social climate in Boston in the 1760s and 1770s, and the events that transformed resistance into revolution: the Stamp Act riots, the Boston Massacre, and the destruction of the tea. The course meets in the classroom for the first session; subsequently, it meets at historical sites including some of Boston's revolutionary sites, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Spring 2023
Boston Under Siege
Robert J. Allison PhD, Professor and Chair of History, Language, and Global Culture, Suffolk University
We explore the siege of Boston from the arrival of British troops in June 1774 to their evacuation on March 17, 1776. How did Boston and the surrounding communities respond to British occupation? How did this military action turn colonial resistance into revolution? In addition to time in the classroom, we visit crucial sites for Boston in the revolution in Cambridge, Boston, Charlestown, South Boston, Dorchester, and Roxbury to get a better understanding of the social, political, and military aspects of the American Revolution.
Fall 2022
The Age of Benjamin Franklin
Robert J. Allison PhD, Professor and Chair of History, Language, and Global Culture, Suffolk University
Benjamin Franklin was the prototypical American. The son of a Boston soap-maker, he became one of the most noted men of his age, a pioneer in science, politics, and diplomacy, and in many ways the first self-made man. With just over a year of formal education, he received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews, and knew personally and well Cotton Mather, Voltaire, George Whitefield, and David Hume. Both Beethoven and Mozart composed pieces for a musical instrument Franklin invented. He wrote a treatise on chess published in the first Russian book on the game and his autobiography influenced generations of successors, though Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and D.H. Lawrence were just a few of his detractors. Franklin was engaged with every facet of his age, and it seems, our own. What made him such a pivotal figure, and what can we still learn from his remarkable life?
Spring 2023
The History of Boston
Robert J. Allison PhD, Professor and Chair of History, Language, and Global Culture, Suffolk University
This course examines the history of Boston from the 1620s to the Big Dig. We discover the people who built, rebuilt, and transformed the city, from the days of the Puritans through the era of the American Revolution, nineteenth-century immigration and industrialization, and twentieth-century decline and revival.
Fall 2022
Introduction to Harvard History
Zachary Bostwick Nowak PhD
Who made Harvard University what it is today? Harvard's history is a story of professors, students, courses, and research that has led to world-changing innovations. But it is also a story of student unrest, gender unease, and exclusion. Hundreds of thousands of people made Harvard and left traces in its archives, libraries, and museums; its buildings; and even in its soil. Some Harvard stories have been told; others have been forgotten. In this course, we uncover those lost legacies, histories, and stories. This is a historical methods course disguised as a class about Harvard's history. It aims to give students excellent research, reading, and writing skills to use for all their other courses. That said, it is a good introduction to the history of the institution to whose history you now belong.
Fall 2022
Riots, Strikes, and Conspiracies in American History
Andrew Joseph Pope PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
The course examines the history of riots, strikes, and conspiracies in America from the 1600s to the present. This course uses readings and discussions to focus on a series of short-term events that shed light on American politics, culture, and social organization. It emphasizes finding ways to make sense of these complicated, highly traumatic events, and on using them to understand larger processes of change in American history. While race has been an important element to every riot, strike, and conspiracy in American history, most of these events represented overlapping interests of race, gender, class, and even sexuality. As such, we consider events that occurred in a variety of circumstances. The present conditions of poverty, policing, and protest always inform our starting point when we engage the readings. A central thesis of this course is that the present is best understood through a deliberate examination of the past.
Spring 2023
White Rage: Progress and Backlash in American History
Andrew Joseph Pope PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course examines how people struggled to achieve the full-promise of freedom throughout American history. The organizing theme of this course is the cycle of progress and retrenchment, of revolutions and counter-revolutions, that has come to define American life. The course begins with enslaved people's struggles for freedom, and the white planters who created a form of representative government to maintain the institution. From there, we proceed chronologically through American history to the present, exploring changing notions of community, strategies used to gain freedom, and the range of violent responses that groups seeking liberation encountered. Our readings include a play by Suzan Lori-Parks, manifestos by white power advocates, George Schuyler's novel Black No More, essays by Toni Morrison, political speeches, and oral history interviews with formerly enslaved people and migrant workers, among many other historical and literary sources. While race has been an important element to every debate about political representation in American history, most debates represented overlapping interests of race, gender, class, and even sexuality. As such, we take up each issue throughout the semester.
Spring 2023
More Than Just a Meal: American Food, a Global History
Zachary Bostwick Nowak PhD
How can food let us taste the past? This course uses food history to reveal the stories of Native Americans, women, enslaved people, factory workers, and other everyday people in the American past. By looking at what people in the United States ate from the twelfth century onward, we uncover how historical actors other than just elite white men made America. The course is about contributions to American food culture, but also about resistance and liberation. We make extensive use of primary sources of all kinds about food, including cookbooks, menus, recipes, wills, tax lists, and even objects. The goals of this course are not just to teach content but also to teach students how to analyze historical data, as well as convey skills that are useful for other courses students may take. It is designed to help students become much better researchers.
Spring 2023
New Worlds and American Borderlands: Histories, Cultures, Identities
Davíd Carrasco PhD, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor for the Study of Latin America, Harvard University - Octavio Carrasco PhD, Visiting Instructor, Religious Studies, Georgia State University
This course establishes a broad understanding of American history as a dynamic, contested, and creative cultural encounter of Indigenous-Afro-Eurasian cultures and people. The borderlands and new worlds framework reflects a historical process, a geographic reality, and a focusing lens through which to think about the present with special attention to the role of political-religio-cultural dynamics. We take seriously the different narratives and perspectives involved in the colonization of parts of the Caribbean, Mexico, Guatemala, and a significant segment of what is now US territory so we can begin to grapple with the contested present. Many cities, states, and counties are still marked by Indigenous and Spanish names, while the old world continues to be manifested in architecture and culture. The history of the US is an ever-evolving struggle and blend of the ideology and religious sensibilities of the peoples dwelling in and shaping this contested space. Drawing from the history of religions, anthropology, American, and ethnic studies scholarship, we draw on historical accounts, autobiographies, art, and music to illuminate the human identities, symbols, and the social complexity of rural spaces and urban sites in the various borderlands including Mexico City, El Paso, New York, New Orleans, and Santa Fe, and their implications for today. We view the films Chulas Fronteras, Alambrista and the soon to be released Song for Cesar about the music, teatro campesino, and labor struggles of the United Farm Workers. We come to better understand the many meanings of living in the contemporary world through the influences of these borderlands' histories and peoples.
Spring 2023
The United States and China: Opium War to the Present
Erez Manela PhD, Professor of History, Harvard University
This seminar focuses on the history of Sino-American relations and interactions since the Opium War (1840s). It examines these relations through the lens of major events such as the Boxer intervention, the first and second world wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Mao-Nixon rapprochement, and the post-Mao transformations. Central themes include trade, diplomacy, conflict, mutual perceptions, cultural influences, and migration.
Fall 2022
Japan in Asia and the World
Andrew Gordon PhD, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University - David Howell PhD, Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History and Professor of History, Harvard University
From the emergence of a court-centered state 1,500 years ago to a warrior-dominated society centuries later, Japan's premodern past fascinates people around the world. The people, institutions, and ideas behind these traditions and the close connection of developments in Japan to those in Asia are the focus of the first half of the course. The second half of the course turns to Japan's modern era and one of the more striking transformations in world history. We examine the tumultuous changes that occurred in a constant global dialogue from the mid-1880s through the present and explore how people in Japan have dealt with the dilemmas of modernity that challenge us all.
Spring 2023
The History of the Cold War
Nikolas Gvosdev DPhil, Professor of National Security Affairs, Naval War College
The cold war was the crucible by which the United States was transformed into a global superpower and laid the basis for the national security state. The ideological and geopolitical competition between the US and the Soviet Union shaped the global and regional makeup of the modern world and its legacies continue to influence global politics in the twenty-first century. This course charts the origins of the cold war, provides an overview of the ideological and geopolitical drivers of the conflict, examines how the cold war was played out in Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and the third world, assesses its impact as a driver for the development of both conventional and nuclear forces, and charts the mechanisms that developed in Washington and Moscow for managing the cold war. The course concludes with charting how the cold war wound down and the legacies it has left for the twenty-first century.
Spring 2023
Europe after the Cold War
Briana J. Smith PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
In the summer of 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama infamously declared the "end of history," marking the "unabashed victory" of liberal market capitalism and defeat of communism. A few months later, East Germans poured through the Berlin Wall. The cold war was over. But what came after? This course examines the history of Europe since 1989 and questions how the aftermath of the cold war in Germany, France, and the former Eastern Bloc has shaped politics and culture in contemporary Europe and beyond. Course topics include post-socialism and Ostalgie, Holocaust memory, neoliberalism, Islam, the 2010s migrant crisis, the Orange and Maidan Revolutions in Ukraine, and right-wing populist and authoritarian movements from Hungary's Viktor Orb n to Germany's Alternative f r Deutschland party. Course materials include texts by May Ayim, Ingo Schulze, J rgen Habermas, Svetlana Boym, Vaclav Havel, Ian Buruma, Joan Scott, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Fatima El-Tayeb; art by Christoph Schlingensief, Maziar Moradi, Seraphina Lenz, and the Center for Political Beauty, as well as films like the 1993 French drama La Haine, 2004 documentary Czech Dream, and the 2016 German comedy Toni Erdmann.