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Program Planners and Sample Sequences
| Course Number | PAWS Class Number | Course Name | Professor | Days | Times | Pre-Modern | Region | Liberal Learning (All HIS courses count for Social Change in Historical Perspective) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HIS100-01 | 41971 | Warfare in Ancient Greece and Rome | Dr. Emyr Dakin | Tuesday/Friday | 9:30am-10:50am | Yes | N/A | Global |
| HIS109-01 | 42106 | Ancient Egypt and Neighbors | Dr. Arthur Jones | Monday/Thursday | 9:30am-10:50am | Yes | N/A | None |
| HIS120-01 | 41898 | Modern European History | Dr. Joseph Campo | Monday/Thursday | 11:00am-12:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS120-02 | 41899 | Rescue and Resistance | Dr. Barbara Krasner | Monday/Thursday | 9:30am-10:50am | No | N/A | None |
| HIS130-01 | 41901 | Vikings in Film and Fact | Dr. Roman Kovalev | Tuesday/Friday | 2:00pm-3:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS130-02 | 41902 | Vikings in Film and Fact | Dr. Roman Kovalev | Tuesday/Friday | 3:30pm-4:50pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS136-01 | 41900 | Modern South Asia | Dr. Satya Shikha Chakraborty | Monday/Thursday | 2:00pm-3:20pm | No | N/A | Global |
| HIS165-01 | 41903 | The Vietnam War | Dr. Michael Zvalaren | Tuesday/ Thursday | 5:30pm-6:50pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS165-02 | 41904 | Disease and Health in US History | Dr. Simon Finger | Tuesday/Friday | 11:00am-12:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS165-03 | 41905 | Gender and the Body in US History | Professor Elizabeth Del Tufo | Monday | 5:30pm-8:20pm | No | N/A | TBD |
| HIS165-05 | 42422 | American Constitutional Landmarks | Professor Marc Lifland | Monday | 5:30pm-8:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS173-01 | 41907 | 19th Century United States History | Professor Joseph Coleman | Tuesday/Friday | 11:00am-12:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS177-01 | 41908 | 20th Century US History | Dr. Michael Zvalaren | Tuesday/Thursday | 7:00pm-8:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS190-01 | 41909 | US Race Relations | Dr. Christopher Fisher | Tuesday/Friday | 9:30am-10:50am | No | N/A | Race and Ethnicity |
| HIS190-02 | 41910 | US Race Relations | Dr. Christopher Fisher | Tuesday/Friday | 11:00am-12:20pm | No | N/A | Race and Ethnicity |
| HIS198-01 | 41911 | Teaching American History | Professor Marc Lifland | Wednesday | 5:30pm-8:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS210-01 | 41917 | The Craft of History | Dr. Jodi Weinstein | Monday/ Thursday | 12:30pm-1:50pm | No | N/A | Global |
| HIS220-01 | 41918 | Herodotus: The Father of History | Dr. Dobrinka Chiekova | Monday/ Thursday | 12:30pm-1:50pm | Yes | N/A | Global |
| HIS230-01 | 41920 | The City in Modern World History | Dr. Cynthia Paces | Monday/ Thursday | 11:00am-12:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS230-02 | 41921 | The City in Modern World History | Dr. Cynthia Paces | Monday/ Thursday | 2:00pm-3:20pm | No | N/A | None |
| HIS300-01 | 41923 | The Hellenistic World | Dr. Arthur Jones | Monday/ Thursday | 11:00am-12:20pm | Yes | Europe | None |
| HIS305-01 | 41924 | Ancient Christianity | Dr. Dina Boero | Tuesday/Friday | 2:00pm-3:20pm | Yes | Mid East, Eurasia, Africa, Europe, | World Views and Ways of Knowing |
| HIS305-02 | 41925 | Ancient Christianity | Dr. Dina Boero | Tuesday/Friday | 3:30pm-4:50pm | Yes | Mid East, Eurasia, Africa, Europe, | World Views and Ways of Knowing |
| HIS339-01 | 41926 | Modern South Asia | Dr. Satya Shikha Chakraborty | Monday/ Thursday | 3:30pm-4:50pm | No | South Asia | Global, Race and Ethnicity |
| HIS365-01 | 41952 | American Revolutions 1763-1815 | Dr. Simon Finger | Tuesday/Friday | 9:30am-10:50am | No | North America | None |
| HIS366-01 | 41953 | Origins of the US Constitution | Professor Jeffrey Brindle | Tuesday | 5:30pm-8:20pm | No | North America | None |
| HIS368-01 | 41954 | Queer History in the United States | Dr. Lindsay Warren | Tuesday | 4:00pm-6:50pm | No | North America | Gender |
| HIS376-01 | 41955 | African American Women's History | Dr. Leigh-Anne Francis | Monday/ Thursday | 12:30pm-1:50pm | No | North America | Gender, Race and Ethnicity |
| HIS376-02 | 41956 | African American Women's History | Dr. Leigh-Anne Francis | Thursday | 3:30pm-6:20pm | No | North America | Gender, Race and Ethnicity |
| HIS389-01 | 41957 | War in Western Society | Dr. Joseph Campo | Monday/ Thursday | 9:30am-10:50am | No | Europe, | None |
| HIS390-01 | 41958 | Holocaust Testimonies | Dr. Cynthia Paces | Thursday | 3:30pm-6:20pm | No | Europe | None |
| HIS456-01 | 41959 | Genocide in Rwanda | Dr. Matthew Bender | Monday | 2:00pm-4:50pm | No | Africa | None |
| HIS461-01 | 41960 | The First World War | Dr. Michael Marino | Tuesday | 5:30pm-8:20pm | No | Europe | None |
| HIS462-01 | 41961 | Staging Politics | Dr. Dobrinka Chiekova | Monday/ Thursday | 9:30am-10:50am | Yes | Europe | None |
| HIS499-01 | 41962 | Senior Capstone Seminar | Dr. Satya Shikha Chakraborty | Wednesday | 5:30pm-8:20pm | No | None | None |
| HIS499-02 | 41963 | Senior Capstone Seminar | Dr. Jodi Weinstein | Monday/ Thursday | 2:00pm-3:20pn | No | None | None |
| HIS499-03 | 41964 | Senior Capstone Seminar | Dr. Roman Kovalev | Wednesday | 5:00pm-7:50pm | No | None | None |
History Course Descriptions
HIS100-01 Warfare in Ancient Greece and Rome- Dr. Emyr Dakin
This course is designed to explore goals, motives, and methods of warfare in the ancient world as well as people’s thinking about war. By reading primary texts and secondary texts, and looking at images of ancient weaponry, you should be able to develop a complex understanding of the multifaceted phenomenon of ancient warfare, its causes and consequences, and its interaction with social, political, intellectual, and economic phenomena.
HIS120-01 Modern European History- Dr. Joseph Campo
This course is designed to give students an appreciation for how the history of Europe unfolded from the Enlightenment to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. More so than traditional “western civ” surveys, my course seeks to explore the contact, interactions, connections, and influence Europe had with the rest of the globe. I pay particular attention to three themes: the role of chance and contingency is history, the power of social forces, ideologies, and economic developments have in changing our world, and the profound ways in warfare have acted as dynamic of change.
HIS120-02 Rescue and Resistance- Dr. Barbara Krasner
This course analyzes various types of resistance and rescue during the Holocaust. Resistance ranges from cultural, religious, social, and educational activities to armed resistance in the ghettos, concentration camps, and forests. Rescue is a form of resistance, too. Throughout Europe, many non-Jews risked their lives to save and/or hide friends and strangers. In certain instances, Jews, too, managed to save their own. We’ll examine individuals and organizations that made a difference in saving Jewish lives.
HIS130-01 and -02 Vikings and Mongols in Film and Fact- Dr. Roman Kovalev
Based on the study of primary sources and secondary literature, students shall explore and evaluate a number of films about the Vikings and Mongols for their historical accuracy and context of political, social, economic, material, spiritual, and martial culture of the period.
HIS165-01 The Vietnam War- Dr. Michael Zvalaren
This course will cover the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1975, beginning with the French occupation following World War Two and concluding with the final phase in 1975 and the war’s aftermath in the American consciousness. The reading material will cover a broad spectrum, from autobiography to journalism to fiction. Particular attention will be paid to the socioeconomic status of the soldiers, the political climate in the United States during the era, and the cultural texts produced about the war. This course will seek to enhance the understanding and appreciation of students for one of the more contentious moments in American history.
HIS165-02 Disease and Health in US History- Dr. Simon Finger
This course will explore changing American understandings of what it means to be healthy or sick, and how the quest to promote healthiness and avoid disease shaped American history and culture from the colonial era
to the 21st century. Using a variety of sources and an interdisciplinary approach, we will examine the relationship of health and environment, disease outbreaks and the responses to them, and battles over health policy. Topics will include the role of disease in American aboriginal depopulation, the catastrophic outbreaks of Yellow Fever and Cholera in the Early Republic, the doctor-patient relationship, the role of medicine in sustaining slavery, movements for dietary and health reform, the effects of urbanization on American health, debates over quarantine and immigration policy, and the role of the media in spreading information and misinformation about preserving health.
HIS165-05 American Constitutional Landmarks- Professor Marc Lifland
The American Constitution both reflects and is shaped by American society. It serves as an integral organic founding document in the American political system even while the interpretation and application of the Constitution remains contested. This class will trace the historical evolution of the document through a thorough examination of critical moments in American constitutionalism from the origins of the Constitution to the critical debates surrounding it, privacy rights, Civil Rights, the power of the federal government, freedom of speech, religion .
HIS220-01 Herodotus: The Father of History- Dobrinka Chiekova
This course will explore the ancient world through the eyes of Herodotus, traveller, explorer, and collector of stories. He is known as “Father of History” and the word historia appears in the first sentence of his work. But Herodotus is also dismissed sometimes as “Father of Lies” who mixes up reality and fiction. We will ponder which of these titles describes him better. We will learn about the ancient Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Scythians and other ancient peoples, about their environment and customs, the ways they interacted with each other, went to war with each other, and, as Herodotus himself says, “accomplished great and marvelous deeds.”
HIS230-01 and -02 The City in Modern World History- Dr. Cynthia Paces
Since the earliest civilizations, humans have created built environments as centers of housing, commerce, government, and culture. A hallmark of the modern historical era (1500-present) has been the increasing urbanization of the globe. This course will study global history through a series of case studies of major urban centers in North and South America, Asia, Europe and Africa, such as New York, London, Potosi, Johannesburg, and Prague. We will explore various ways urban historians have sought to understand the dynamics of cities from class, race, and gender relations to architecture and city planning models.
HIS300-01 The Hellenistic World- Dr. Arthur Jones
This course will trace the history of the Mediterranean in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquest down to the Roman conquest of Egypt. We will explore the rise of Rome amidst the wars between the kingdoms arising out of Alexander’s brief empire. This course will also briefly examine artistic, philosophical, and other cultural developments that occurred during this time period.
HIS365-01- American Revolutions 1763-1815 – Dr. Simon Finger
This course explores the tumultuous decades that transformed North America forever, from the periphery of a global empire into the seat of a new and distinct people who would create their own empire. But the story of the American Revolution is more than just the story of independence from England. The war of 1775-1783 was the intersection of several conflicts, of which the struggle between colonies and mother country was only one. In a sense, there were as many revolutions as there were participants in the revolution. It was also the story of Native Americans fighting to maintain their own independence, of backcountry settlers quarreling with the local colonial elites, and of African-Americans fighting for liberty in starker terms than most colonists could imagine.
The era wrought changes in commerce, politics, culture, religion, and even fashion. And those changes reached more than just the English residents of thirteen colonies on the Atlantic Seaboard. The effects of the revolution would touch the hundreds of thousands of free and enslaved African-Americans, Indian villages from Florida to Detroit, and even beyond the sea to the Caribbean and to Europe. Because the revolutionary era encompasses so many transformative events, and so many perspectives, we will be adopting a multifocal approach, examining the revolution as experienced by men and women all over the continent.
At the most basic level, we will be asking how colonists formed the bonds that enabled them to successfully claim their independence and break their ties to the British empire, and how those independent Americans then built their own republic, and how they determined who would be included or excluded from its benefits. In order to understand the era on its own terms, this course emphasizes primary source readings, including personal letters, political pamphlets, diaries, and newspapers. Only by direct engagement with the words and personalities of the revolutionary age can we begin to appreciate why it was indeed a revolution, and what it meant to the countless lives it touched.
HIS390-01 Holocaust Testimonies- Dr. Cynthia Paces
Through a special partnership with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, students in this course will learn about and practice methods of documenting and preserving Holocaust memory. As a class, we will study the history of the Holocaust, the concept of the archive, and the relationship between trauma and memory. Each student will design a research project that involves editing a transcript of at least one survivor interview and placing it in context of the larger history of the Second World War. Students can shape their projects around particular interests such as gender, sexuality, religion, and country of origin. The work produced this semester will make a lasting contribution to genocide studies and documentation. Students must have instructor approval to enroll. Please contact Dr. Paces if you are interested in the course. This class can be used to fulfill a Readings Seminar requirement or a 300-level requirement. Geographic region: Europe.
HIS456-01 Genocide in Rwanda- Matthew Bender
On April 6, 1994, genocide broke out in the African nation of Rwanda. Over the next 100 days, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandan were killed, most of whom belonged to an ethnicity known as the Tutsi. The genocide, planned by members of the Hutu political elite but largely perpetrated by everyday Hutus, had drastic, devastating, and long-term impacts not only on Rwanda, but also the region as a whole. This course, marking the 25th anniversary of this tragedy, will examine the origins, events, and implications of Rwanda’s genocide. Some of the specific issues to be examined include the development of ‘Hutu’, ‘Tutsi’ and ‘Twa’ as ethnic categories, the racialization of these categories, the implications of colonial rule, the Rwandan Civil War, the rise of refugee populations in neighboring countries, the onset of genocide, the memories of both victims and perpetrators, the redevelopment of Rwanda post-genocide, the response of the United States and the United Nations, and the impact of the genocide on neighboring countries.
HIS461-01 The First World War- Michael Marino
This reading seminar will address the origins, events, and legacies of the First World War. Perhaps no event in history has been as much written about as the First World War, and to this day significant controversies and disagreements are found within the literature. Furthermore, even though the Great War is fading to distant memory, much about the war and its origins helps us inform and understand life in the present day. For example, just as we struggle with concepts such as racial and ethnic conflict, nationality, terrorism, and imperialism in 2017, so too did the people of 1914. At the same time, to study the First World War is to learn something about a time and place that is quite different from our own, and in this sense the war marks a true turning point in history, as the values and attitudes of one era were replaced with those of another. This is why, for example, writers often argue that the First World War began the 20 th Century. With these facts in mind, the goals of this course are as follows. First, we will use the readings to identify important historiographic controversies related to the First World War and discuss different conclusions and interpretations about these controversies. Second, we will work to identify how the history of the First World War helps us understand life in the present day. Third, we will use the war and its history as a way to understand the lives of the people that experienced it and how the war helps us learn about social history and the history of everyday life. Finally, we will discuss the war’s legacy and how the conflict inaugurated a new era of history, one with different beliefs and values from the one that it replaced.
HIS462-01 Staging Politics: Theatre and Democracy in Ancient Athens- Dobrinka Chiekova
Democracy (the rule of the demos) and theater (performance of tragedies and comedies at the annual festival in honor of Dionysus) are among the most famous achievements of ancient Greek culture. In ancient Athens democracy and theatre went hand in hand. We will read ancient plays, both tragedies and comedies, including Aeschylus’s Persians and The Eumenides, Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Medea, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, as well as modern scholarship. Our discussions will focus on the cultural and political context of the plays and their reception by ancient and modern artists and audiences.