Fall 2024
Oral Histories
Lilly Havstad PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
Oral histories are sources that offer perspectives, life experiences, and ways of knowing that official written records can overlook or actively seek to erase from the historical record. This course explores the methods, theories, practices, and controversies that have shaped oral history as an academic field while paying close attention to the contributions and critiques from activist oral history practitioners. In weekly readings and discussions, students gain an appreciation for this at times fraught history, while also gaining a foundation in current best practices for doing oral history. Students also have multiple opportunities for putting their oral history training into practice. The first half of the course is focused on student engagement with oral history theory and scholarship alongside existing oral history collections (as primary sources) toward developing an understanding of the field and studying various models for doing oral history. In the second half of the course, students develop and execute an oral history project that involves background research, research design, interviewing (with digital recording), transcription, and presentation of research findings in both oral and written formats. Over the semester, students learn how to incorporate oral histories into their research, with attention to research ethics and an understanding that oral history research cannot be conducted independently of other methods of historical research. Students practice oral history methods, engaging with oral sources to learn ways of interpreting and analyzing oral histories.
Fall 2024
Key Issues and Events in American Social Change 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, government, history, or religion, who are in their penultimate semester. Prospective candidates and students with pending admission applications are not eligible. Candidates must be in good academic standing, have completed the engaging in scholarly conversation series (if required), and be in the process of successfully completing all other degree requirements. Candidates must enroll in the capstone, HIST E-599, in the upcoming spring term as their one and only final course (no other course registration is allowed simultaneously with the capstone). Candidates who do not meet these degree requirements are dropped from the course.
Fall 2024
Precapstone: Historical Biography
Ariane Liazos PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course teaches students the research and writing skills they need to write historical biography. It is interdisciplinary, drawing on the research skills of history and political science as well as narrative writing skills. We read and discuss excerpts from biographies as well as articles on the craft of biography. Students develop research and writing skills through short assignments and oral presentations. Students submit an annotated bibliography and proposal for their spring capstone as their final assignment for the course.
Prerequisites: Registration is limited to officially admitted candidates in Master of Liberal Arts, government or history, who are in their penultimate semester. Prospective candidates and students with pending admission applications are not eligible. Candidates must be in good academic standing, have completed the engaging in scholarly conversation series (if required), and be in the process of successfully completing all other degree requirements. Candidates must enroll in the capstone, HIST E-599b, in the upcoming spring term as their one and only final course (no other course registration is allowed simultaneously with the capstone). Candidates who do not meet these degree requirements are dropped from the course.
Spring 2025
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 or a biographical article for an academic journal. 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 2025
Key Issues and Events in American Social Change 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, government, history, 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 2024
The Rise and Fall of Postwar Japan
Andrew Gordon PhD, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University
In this course we examine the history of Japan from the end of World War II to the present. It is tempting to frame this history as one of rise and fall. From the literally devastated landscape of August 1945 cities destroyed by firebombs and atomic bombs, a countryside deforested by wartime demand for resources the nation has been likened to the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes. Japan became a global economic power by the 1970s, for several decades boasting the world's second largest economy. It came to boast a large and optimistic middle class, and a self-understanding as an unusually successful society. Then, from the 1990s, the stock market crashed, the economy stagnated, the population began to decline, social inequality increased, and a self-understanding of loss set in, encapsulated by the catchphrase lost decades. The natural catastrophe of one of history's largest earthquakes then brought on social and environmental disaster whose consequences are still unfolding. The years of economic growth and growing national power came at high cost for many people and the natural environment. The years of apparent stagnation possibly offer global lessons for realizing a sustainable future. Across the entire postwar era, explaining and taking responsibility for the previous embrace of empire and war proved divisive in Japan, and increasingly set the Japanese government against other nations. In this course we seek to understand the value and the limits of the narratives of rise and fall. We focus on two sorts of diversity: the wide range of experience and understandings held by historical actors themselves and the varied opinions of historians seeking to make sense of the past. We give attention to differences of city and country, and of gender and social class within Japan, and to divergent understandings of Japan's modern past both inside Japan, and between people in Japan and in other nations.
Fall 2024
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Authoritarianism in the US and the World
Donald Ostrowski PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
By 1992, both right- and left-wing authoritarianism had fallen into such disrepute that the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama posited the arrival of "the end of history" and "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Since then, authoritarianism has rebounded in ways that are very similar to, yet in other ways different from, its rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This course examines the origins of the rise of radical right and radical left political movements and ideologies before World War II and the cold war, the reasons for their demise in the mid- and late-twentieth centuries, and the resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide in the twenty-first century.
Fall 2024
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 2025
Exploring Gender and Power in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre via History, Literature, and Film
Maura A. Henry PhD, Professor of History, Holyoke Community College and Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
Charlotte Bronte's fictional heroine Jane Eyre famously declared: "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will." To what extent, though, was this more a fantasy rather than a lived reality for women in nineteenth-century England? We explore gender and power through an interdisciplinary approach to the novel, pertinent historical sources, and a few modern film adaptations.
Spring 2025
Britain and the Beatles: 1960s British Culture and Society through History, Music, and Film
Maura A. Henry PhD, Professor of History, Holyoke Community College and Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
The course examines clashes over change versus the status quo in 1960s Britain through the lens of the Beatles. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, students analyze historical primary sources including music by the Beatles and other significant musicians, iconic films and television shows from the period, and other cultural products (including fashion, art, and architecture and urban planning). Through this array of contemporary evidence as well as relevant scholarship, students consider debates centered on youth culture; gender and sexuality; social class, race, and ethnicity; peace and anti-war activism; and maintenance or reform of key social institutions.
Fall 2024
Whodunnit? Gender and Class in Agatha Christie's England through History, Literature, and Film
Maura A. Henry PhD, Professor of History, Holyoke Community College and Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
Agatha Christie's novels are not only terrific murder mysteries (and the best selling and most translated works of all time), they are also windows into early twentieth-century English society, notably the interplay of gender, social class, and nostalgic English village life. Students read The Body in the Library, first published in 1942 during World War II, yet set in an imaginary time of non-combat. Students analyze curated primary sources and screen selected film and television adaptations not only to solve the mystery alongside famed elder detective Miss Marple, but also to develop insights into the ways individuals and English social institutions experienced, maintained, and/or challenged prevailing norms of gender, age, class, and Englishness during the 1930s and 1940s.
Spring 2025
The United States and World Order since 1900
Erez Manela PhD, Francis Lee Higginson 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.
Fall 2024
History of Judaism and Jewish Cultures
Susan Martha Kahn PhD, Associate Director, Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, Harvard Law School
This course provides a survey of the main features of the Jewish historical and cultural landscape from ancient times to the present. Students examine the origins, development, and cultural significance of Judaism, as well as the experiences of Jewish communities worldwide. Sources are drawn from the rich scholarly literature on Jewish history, theology, philosophy, mysticism, and social thought. Through the study of key historical events, religious texts, cultural practices, and socio-political movements, students gain a deeper understanding of the diverse and rich tapestry of Jewish history.
Fall 2024
Colonial America
Robert J. Allison PhD, Professor of History, Suffolk University
This course examines the colonization of North America, focusing on the relationships between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in the creation of North American colonial society. We explore trade relations, religious and economic motives for colonial development, imperial conflicts among European powers, and the development of the African slave trade.
Spring 2025
Boston in the American Revolution
Robert J. Allison PhD, Professor of History, Suffolk University
Why did the American Revolution begin in Boston? This 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 2025
Revolutionary America
Robert J. Allison PhD, Professor of History, Suffolk University
What caused the American Revolution? What were the Revolution's consequences? Who was responsible? We examine the tumultuous events in British North America from 1760 to 1775, the years of war, and the aftermath of the war in the creation of the United States. We focus on the tremendous political, social, cultural, and economic changes the Revolution sparked, the impact of warfare, and the international repercussions in the birth of the United States.
Fall 2024
Introduction to Harvard History
Zachary Nowak PhD, Director, The Umbra Institute
Harvard University'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 the exclusion of women and minorities, enslaved people, Native Americans, and working-class people. All of them helped to make 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 Harvard's past via exercises including creating an oral history and submitting it to the Harvard University Archives, in order to both learn about Harvard's history and add to it. This course changes the way students see Harvard and also gives them research and writing skills to aid them in their other courses.
Spring 2025
Is the US Civil War Still Being Fought?
John Stauffer PhD, Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University - Cleo Marie Harrington - Robert Gordon Mann MBA
Most of us were taught that the Civil War between the Confederacy and the Union was fought on battlefields chiefly in the American South between the years of 1861-1865. In this narrative, the North won and the South lost. But what if the issues that resulted in such devastating bloodshed were never resolved? What if the war never ended? This course demonstrates the ways in which the United States is still fighting the Civil War, a defining event in US history. In each class, we connect current events to readings and themes in the course, highlighting how and why the war is still being fought. From Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831 to the recent riot (or battle) in Charlottesville and the seditious conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results, we trace how and why the South was in certain respects the victor, even though the Confederacy was destroyed and the Constitution amended. We explore the different kinds of war ideological, political, cultural, military, and para-military that placed the unfreedom of blacks as slaves, serfs, and prisoners at the center of larger conflicts over federal versus state and local rule, welfare, globalization, and free trade. We analyze the Civil War in literature, art, politics, photography, prints, film, music, poetry, speeches, and history, while also discovering how these cultural forms worked to shape our memory of the event itself. By the end of the course, students are able to show how and why contemporary US debates are rooted in this defining narrative, and better understand the dilemmas the nation faces today. Students may not take both HIST E-1638 and ENGL E-189 (offered previously) for degree or certificate credit.
Fall 2024
Race and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century American Thought
Nicholas F. Bloom PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." This course is a survey of the work of intellectuals, artists, and activists in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries who took this problem seriously and sought to understand its origins, its functions, and how it ought to be addressed. It exposes students to certain foundational ideas, problems, and debates in the study of race and ethnicity in twentieth century America. Readings may include works by C.L.R. James, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Hannah Arendt, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldua, James Baldwin, Cedric Robinson, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison. Most importantly, the course aims to provide students the opportunity to develop their own critical and historical acumen to study those aspects of race and ethnicity that they find most urgent or fascinating.
Fall 2024
Encounters: Travel Narratives and the Origins of Race
John Harpham PhD, Lecturer on Social Studies, Harvard University
This course examines the deep roots of race and racism with reference to the travel narratives that shaped them. The course proceeds in chronological order, with each week devoted to one of the classics of the genre. Our focus in time is the period that came to be known as the Age of Discovery, which lasted from around the middle of the fifteenth century to around the end of the seventeenth century. Our focus in space is the Atlantic world. Particular attention is paid to narratives that describe (or claim to describe) Africa and America and to accounts that were the work of Indigenous American and African authors. Texts include the Travels of Marco Polo, Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano. The interests and the contexts that informed the construction and dissemination of these accounts is central objects of inquiry. We examine the extent to which these texts were embedded in histories of enslavement, resistance, and empire, but we also read these texts on their own terms. We work to understand the ideas about the common structure of human life that seem to be embedded in them. We reconstruct their particular conceptions of political life and of the state. And we also consider the complex manner in which travel narratives at once resisted and disrupted and also contributed to the invention of the modern concept of race.
Fall 2024
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 2025
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 2025
Slavery and Historical Memory
Nicholas F. Bloom PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
This course considers some of the ways that scholars, artists, and activists have attempted to address key problems in the study of Black life and slavery in the early Americas, especially the early United States. Namely, how can one begin to tell the story and the legacy of a people whose lives have been so severely distorted and erased by primary historical records records which were primarily composed by people invested in maintaining and reproducing Black enslavement? And to what extent should one trust those primary documents in telling the story of even the most powerful people and institutions in these societies? The course is organized around key phenomena and themes in the history of slavery and early Black Atlantic history, including: the transatlantic slave trade; Black self-determination and revolt; slavery and the formations of race, gender, and sexuality in the West; slavery, capitalism, and liberalism; and abolitionism and emancipation. We pay particular attention to how artists, activists, and scholars have informed one another in their approaches to studying these phenomena and how they have challenged, drawn from, and changed traditional scholarly historical methodology. In addition to the political and cultural documents produced out of and contemporaneous to slavery's historical milieu, sources may include writings from Martin Delaney, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and James McBride, and scholarship from C.L.R. James, Stephanie Smallwood, Vincent Brown, Walter Johnson, and Saidiya Hartman.
Fall 2024
Power and Civilization: China
Peter K. Bol PhD, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University - William C. Kirby PhD, T.M. Chang Professor of China Studies, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
Modern China presents a dual image: a society transforming itself through economic development and infrastructure investment that aspires to global leadership; and the world's largest and oldest bureaucratic state, with multiple traditions in its cultural, economic, and political life. The modern society and state that is emerging in China bears the indelible imprint of China's historical experience, of its patterns of philosophy and religion, and of its social and political thought. These themes are discussed in order to understand China in the twenty-first century and as a great world civilization that developed along lines different from those of the Mediterranean. The course introduces online features to make the riches of Harvard's visual collections and the expertise of its faculty more accessible to Extension School students.
Spring 2025
The United States and China: Opium War to the Present
Erez Manela PhD, Francis Lee Higginson 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.
Spring 2025
World War II through Film and Literature
Donald Ostrowski PhD, Lecturer in Extension, Harvard University
This course is an introduction to the study of World War II through the literature and films it inspired. Among the topics discussed are the home fronts of the belligerent powers, the air and naval wars, women in the war zone, war in the Pacific, and persecution in Europe. Among the literary works we read and the films made from them that we view are Phyllis Bottome's The Mortal Storm, Antti Tuuri's The Winter War, Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, Agnes Newton Keith's Three Came Home, W adys aw Szpilman's The Pianist, and Lothar-G nther Buchheim's Das Boot. We also analyze some films not based directly on a book, such as Casablanca and Mrs. Miniver, as well as some books that have not yet been made into films such as A Woman of Berlin and Madame Fourcade's Secret War.
Spring 2025
Africa in the Western Imagination
Lilly Havstad PhD, Lecturer on History and Literature, Harvard University
Africa is a vast continent of peoples, cultures, and histories that are central to a shared global past, present, and future. The continent's relationships with the United States and Europe (or, the West) are complex and full of stories that inform who we are and where we came from. As the cradle of humankind and deeply connected through the history of the transatlantic slave trade, twentieth-century colonialisms, and twenty-first century nation-states, stories of Africa and Africans matter greatly to our understanding of global exchanges of peoples, cultures, technologies, politics, and economies. But Westerners more often think about Africa as an exotic and undeveloped place of negatives that stands on the periphery of the modern world, badly in need of western help. Why? In the first part of this course, we introduce ourselves to some of the origins of negative western images of the continent of Africa. We also interrogate how popular culture and media coverage in the West perpetuates negative and often harmful stereotypes of Africa and Africans. In the second part of this course, students learn methods of writing and speaking about Africa that consider the diversity of Africa's histories, peoples, and cultures, while reflecting on our shared humanity, aspirations, and experiences. Much of this work in the second half of the course is generated by students' original research projects that explore Africa's dynamism through topics of their choosing.
Spring 2025
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 United States 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. It provides students with an overview and general survey of the key developments of the period from 1945 to 1990. This course is designed especially for national security professionals, although it is open to anyone. This is primarily a political-security history of the cold war with a focus on how this shapes and defines the national security enterprise.