An analysis of the development of the international system, from 1648 to 1945, which highlights the role of war as an instrument of national policy, as a determinant of the system of states and as a threat to international society.

This course introduces the history of the African Diaspora in the Americas, from 1492-1804. Lectures and readings will draw from primary sources and historical scholarship to focus on a range of topics, including slavery and the slave trade, race relations, gender and sexuality, religious and cultural practices, and liberation struggles.

This course draws on the history of China, Korea and Japan between 1600 to 1950 to explore historical issues of gender, nationalism, war and relations with the West.

This course offers an introduction to history as a discipline - to the history of the discipline itself, to the questions, categories, and methodologies that constitute it, to the ways these interrogations and methods have evolved in varied times and places, and to the methodologies students need to acquire to engage in historical inquiry and writing. The course will be part methodological workshop, part epistemological reflection. Designed for any students interested in the study of the past or considering the History major.

The shape of traditional society; the forces at work on the social, political, economic, cultural and intellectual structures of Western Europe since the high Middle Ages: the Structure of Traditional Society; the First Period of Challenges, 1350-1650; the Second Period of Challenges, 1650-1815; Confidence, Stability and Progress, 1815-1914; the Collapse of the Old Order and the Condition of Modern Europe, 1914-1945.

This course introduces you to the connected and interdependent world people who lived between the present day cities of Dakar, in West Africa, and Jakarta, in Indonesia, from about 1000 to the present. We explore in this class the three "C"s which have linked human experience in Africa and Asia via routes which connected the Indian Ocean World: Connectedness, Contingency, and Cosmopolitanism. We study how people who lived more than a thousand years before our time transported ideas, products, and scripts by land and sea via routes that connected large parts of Africa, Central & South Asia, and East and Southeast Asia, and their histories. The land and sea routes connected these communities and the cosmopolitan outlook of the hosts provided the contingent conditions for a Buddhist monks to travel from all over China to Southern and Southeast Asia; Muslim scholars to travel from West Africa to Indonesia; and merchants and writers to move within these worlds. Human migration, economic trade, and religious conversion had linked the lands and the seas, making it possible for our imams, merchants, monks, and servants to traverse these territories, across the Africa and Asia. This vibrant and wealthy world of African and Asian thinkers, merchants, leaders, and communities became the envy of the world, and as late as the seventeenth century, these crazy rich Africans and Asians dominated the world as it was known. We'll see how history is contingent--and that human migration, economic exploitation, lack of reciprocity, and legacies of European colonial racism have disrupted the cosmopolitan worlds of the Indian Ocean. The world is different today, but more than three quarters of the human population still live in Africa and Asia--see the richness of their worlds as it was for thousands of years, and what will be left for the people of this world as climate change makes the seas rise.

What role does social media play in the spread of historical falsehoods? Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are relatively new, but the hidden power structures that shape their content are not. This course explores the relationship between social media platforms and history in two ways. First, class discussions, workshops, and guest lectures introduce students to overlooked histories behind social media itself, including the rise of the early internet and its diverse roots and applications. Second, we explore how and why social media platforms, and increasingly AI tools, have come to amplify and automate historical biases and misinformation, while censoring or burying accurate and important historical content. Our course focuses on the big histories behind algorithms to think about the AI future, while offering students hands-on experience building original, critical historical content for social media. Restricted to first-year students.

Ever wonder how and why the founding of Islam in 610, the Mongol conquests of Eurasia in the 13th century, the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), or the detonation of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the world? This course ten events changed the world and continue to have ramifications today. Experts will give guest lectures on the important “events,” while students will learn how historians work to understand the significance of these moments, human agency, and the idea of an “event,” itself.

In this introduction to the discipline of history, the instructor chooses several pressing issues facing the world today and delves into their pasts. The course helps us understand what the study of history can and cannot teach us about the present moment, and the challenges and opportunities of using history to understand our present – and potentially our future, as well. Students will assess historical “truth claims” made across multiple media, how to find and make use of credible scholarship, and how historians make use of primary sources. Assignments will focus on the development of critical reading and strong writing skills. In tutorial discussions, students will practice making effective oral arguments.

This first-year seminar explores radical traditions of education beyond and in resistance to formal schooling. Transnational in scope—and journeying from the late nineteenth century to the present day—we will study the pedagogical innovations and grassroots struggles of anarchic youth, guerrilla intellectuals, and feminist revolutionaries who used education broadly, and historical inquiry in particular, as tools for empowerment and collective liberation. Focusing on primary sources from archives of anticapitalist, antiracist and anticolonial movements, we will investigate traditions of self-teaching and co-learning, genealogies of critical and transformative pedagogies, the construction of decolonial survival and supplementary schools, student mobilizations within and against the university, as well as abolitionist education in our contemporary moment. This course invites participants to interrogate the relationship of education to freedom and justice through collective criticism, self-reflection and creative expression. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

We have all just lived through a major historical disruption caused by CoViD-19. In this course, you will be invited to use your experience of the pandemic as a tool for understanding other times, other places, and the study of history itself. We will study plagues and diseases from the ancient world to the Twentieth Century, and introduce methods from social, cultural, and economic history, as well as concepts from the histories of science and medicine. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

A first-year seminar on the history of queerness, in all its complexity and diversity, in the no less complex and diverse settings of East, South, and Southeast Asia. Our journey will encompass empires and Indigenous peoples, rulers and rebels, and range from early recorded history down to the twentieth century. Focus will be placed on primary sources and introducing students to the evolving definitions of "queerness" itself. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

The last Indian Residential School in Canada closed in 1996. For more than a century and half before that, the Canadian state supported church-run residential schools intended to take Indigenous children away from their families, cultures, languages and traditions. Over 150,000 children passed through the doors of these different schools that operated from coast to coast. Using the formal report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a central text, this course explores that history and the ongoing legacy of residential schools in Canada while introducing first year students to historical research methods and sources. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This course will look broadly at the question of power and resistance in the Americas (Canada, the United States, and Latin America) through the prism of graphic novels. Each week we will read a graphic novel related to important historical moments or events, drawing on scholarly articles to help us contextualize the novel. We will discuss the medium of graphic novels, their history and place in the broader culture, as well as how they might help or hinder our ability to study and disseminate information about the past. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of history by exploring processes of remembering and forgetting intrinsic to every society. Topics include the ideas of history and memory, memory cultures and narratives and counternarratives and the study of legal trials, museums, monuments, novels and films as popular vehicles of historical knowledge. The course analyzes in particular how the experiences of war and violence have been both remembered and forgotten. The intersection, and dislocation, between trauma and remembrance is a main theme, as is the topic of collective memories in post-conflict societies. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This seminar explores the roles of religion in extreme violence. Working backward from the 1990s (Rwanda, Yugoslavia), we will consider cases including Guatemala, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Holocaust, Armenians, German Southwest Africa, and genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America. Students will produce a final project based on original research. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This course focuses on the theories and practices of medicine in Europe, c.500-1500, by examining surviving evidence from the period, including (in translation) pharmaceutical recipes, diagnostic guides, doctor’s records, treatises on anatomy, surgery and gynecology, commentaries on Hippocrates and Galen, laws and regulations for physicians, university lectures, disputes in court records, satirical writings against physicians, and so on, as well as visual evidence of artifacts, surgical instruments, manuscript illumination/diagrams, hospital sites and design. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This course introduces students to the historiographical and theoretical debates in women's and gender history from a global perspective, with emphasis on the local histories of women in the non-western world. Students will study the themes in women's history as articulated by first and second wave feminists. The second part of the class deconstructs the basic assumptions of Western feminism through the perspective of post-colonial feminist writings and empirical studies. The readings are structured so that you consider how examples from Asia disrupt narratives of universality in Western feminist epistemologies. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

Histories of wine or beer or vodka often focus either on the production of these alcoholic beverages and their role in national or local economies, or on the ways that drinking is part of celebration. But drunkenness enters the historical record in other ways, too—not just as a social lubricant but as a social ill, one associated with intimate violence or violence to the self and with mass protest. From worries about the Gin Craze to race-based restrictions on consumption, from tax policies to policing, this class will consider the many ways that drunkenness has been accepted, denounced, and legislated in societies around the world.

This course critically examines gender in the context of politics, society, culture, and economics across a range of comparative times and spaces depending on instructor expertise. In what ways have gendered norms and transgressions been part of human societies and lived experiences? How have those norms shifted across historical and geographical contexts? How has the history of gender impacted gender as it is lived and made political today?  Throughout the course, we will be querying the theoretical assumptions underlying and framing the historical texts we are studying, as well as assessing the different kinds of primary sources used to recover women’s and gender history.

This course introduces students to the diverse experiences of women from a comparative perspective. Students will study how women’s strategies have shaped the major cultural, economic, political and social processes in the world and how these processes have affected women’s experiences in their particular societies.  By studying women’s history from both local and global perspectives, students will engage critically with claims that women’s history is universal.  The local focus of the course will rotate between Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, depending on the expertise of the instructors.

This course explores the origins of the Jewish people, beginning with the Bible and ending in the 21st Century. We will follow the development of Jewish social and cultural life across the Muslim and Christian worlds and discuss how Jews adapted to the constraints and opportunities provided by the non-Jewish majority. We will also learn about key Jewish books and concepts, including the Talmud, Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), Halakhah (Jewish law), and Jewish philosophy. Finally, we will investigate the Jewish movements that arose in response to the challenges of modernity and new ideologies.

A lecture-based course designed to introduce students to key moments and concepts in the field of environmental history since c. 1400. This course will track the reciprocal influence of humans and the non-human world since the so-called "Columbian Exchange," emphasizing the ways in which the non-human world-from plants, animals, and disease organisms to water, topography, and geography- have shaped human endeavours. At the same time, students will engage with many of the ways in which human beings have shaped the world around us, from empire and colonization, to industrial capitalism, nuclear power, and modern wildlife conservation.

A new approach to medieval history, this course focuses on the Mediterranean world as a site for the convergence of Western and Eastern Christian, Muslim, Jewish, sub-Saharan African, and East Asian peoples and cultures. It treats topics such as political and military conflict, including Muslim conquests and the Crusades; the situation of religious minorities; religious conversion; cultural exchange; commerce; slavery; aspects of material culture, such as art and architecture; and family and gender from a comparative perspective.

Immersion in medieval western Europe with extensive readings of primary sources from Roman times to 1500 and use of works of art. The goal is to understand medieval society on its own terms, as much as possible.

An introduction to the history of Africans and people of African descent in the Americas generally, and the United States in particular. Major themes include modernity and the transatlantic slave trade; capitalism and reparations; Atlantic crossings; African women, gender, and racial formations; representation, resistance, and rebellion; nation-building; abolitionism and civil war; historical method and the political uses of the past.

This course examines the history of black people in the United States after the abolition of slavery. Major themes include the promise and tragedy of Reconstruction; gender and Jim Crow; race and respectability; migration, transnationalism, and 20th century black diasporas; black radical traditions and freedom movements; intersectionality and black feminisms; the drug war and mass incarceration; sexuality and the boundaries of blackness.

This course introduces students to the study of Caribbean history from first human settlement to the late 18th century. Subject matter covered includes indigenous social structures, cosmology and politics; the process of European conquest; the economics, society and political order of colonial society; the Middle Passage; the everyday lives and struggles of enslaved peoples.

This course explores the history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century Caribbean, from the Haitian Revolution to the U.S. occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Students learn about the first struggles for political independence; the struggle to abolish the slave trade; slave emancipation; indentureship and struggles to define freedom after emancipation.

Many scholars believe that the initial 1900s had only been an extension of the 19th century and that the First World War opened the next age. Many feel that it changed Europe and the entire world and started a long period of military conflicts, genocides, nationalism, and high-speed modernization. This course will offer the most important facts related to the Great War and discuss their consequences. The course will demonstrate that it is difficult to understand our contemporary world without basic knowledge of World War I, that we are all grandchildren of that war.