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HIS100-01 Warfare in Ancient Rome and Greece

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.

HIS100-02 Greek and Roman Society

“What have [the Romans] ever given us in return?” is the question posed by the People’s Front of Judaea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. As enumerated by the responses given in the scene, we see that the Romans have influenced many aspects of culture around the Mediterranean in the ancient world as well as in our society today. This course will explore the Romans in their own words and those of their contemporaries around the Mediterranean. Through their writings we will trace the growth of Rome from village to empire (c. 800 BCE to 300 CE) and examine their ideas on the military, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, government, religion, entertainment, and life in a bustling metropolis.

HIS165-01: US Slavery in TV and Film

Within the past ten years, there has been a renewed interest in showing the experiences of enslaved Black people to both national and international audiences. In this course, students will view films and TV mini-series to learn about eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. Students will also read primary sources and scholarly book chapters to better understand the historical context of the films and miniseries that they watch. Among the questions we will consider in this course are: how do people use TV and film to remember slavery and how do these works reimagine the experiences of slavery?

HIS165-02 and -03 Disease and Health in US History

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 21^st 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.

HIS220: Themes in Ancient History: Africa and the World

This course examines the history of Africa‘s connections with the outside world, from the period of earliest human societies to 1800. Using primary sources, it investigates how visitors to the continent understood African societies, as well as how Africans made sense of themselves and places beyond the continent. The course emphasizes the use of primary sources in studying history. Students will work not only with documents, but also with ritual objects, oral narratives, and archeological sources. This course also develops research, writing, and historiographic skills central to the field of history.

HIS230: Themes in Modern History: The City

 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.

HIS390: Holocaust Testimonies

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.

HIS460-01: Urban America