Results for HISTORY

How can we understand the events, ideas, and conflicts that have featured in the news cycle during the past year? "The History of 2023" offers historically informed reflections on this year's momentous events, providing an opportunity to understand our world in its historic context. Each week will feature a different History faculty member speaking on a major news topic of the year, showing what we can learn by approaching it from a historical perspective. The course is open to all students (newcomers and history veterans alike) who want to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of 2023, and who are curious to consider how studying history can offer a deeper and richer understanding of tumultuous times.

World history from the origins of humanity to the Black Death. Focuses on the evolution of complex societies, wealth, violence, hierarchy, and large-scale belief systems.

(HISTORY 3F is 3 units; 103F is 5 units.) This course will introduce students to the basic concepts of modern warfare, its evolution, and some of the immeasurable ways by which it shaped our history as well as our world today. How have strategy, operations and tactics been transformed by the modern state; the industrial revolution; and the accelerated pace of technological change? What is the meaning of total war, conventional war, and asymmetric war, and how were these different types of war fought in the 20th and 21st centuries? From the Napoleonic wars to the war in Ukraine, how do wars reflect, and shape, our politics, economics, culture, and technology? No prior knowledge of military history (or technology) is required. Students satisfying the WiM requirement for the major in International Relations must enroll in INTNLREL 103F course listing. Please note that the version of this course offered in 2023-24 and later does not fulfill a "pre-1700" requirement for the history major.

Nature is everywhere. It pops up in advertisements, in news stories, and popular culture. We talk about nature all the time, sometimes without even realizing it: conserving nature, loving nature, and being in nature. But what actually is nature? Are oak trees nature? What about gardens, sunsets, or garbage? Are human beings nature, or is nature a state one can enter into? Do you have to go outdoors to be in nature? In this course we'll get out of the classroom and use the Stanford campus to explore how people in the past have thought about nature and why it has been and continues to be such a potent idea that is so hard to define. Together in this seminar we'll examine the history and design of Stanford University. We'll explore a range of narrative approaches to nature stories. And we'll consider current problems and debates about nature from pollution, to drought, to wildfire, and climate change. The course will culminate in a fun, hands-on project.

Worldwide there are more refugees and displaced people today than in any other period of human history. More than 90 million people across the planet have been forcibly displaced from their homes in recent years. How do we account for this crisis? And how might we imagine altering its trajectory? This course explores the varied forces, from war to climate change to narcotrafficking, that have uprooted these populations. It also seeks to understand the politics of migration by focusing on the experiences of refugees narrated by themselves. We analyze films, memoirs, novels and scholarly literature. Students will have the option of producing papers and/or audio and visual projects.Readings include:Viet Than Hguyen, ed., The DisplacedReyna Grande, The Distance Between Us Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the MountainsEmmanuel Mbolela, RefugeeLeila Abdelrazaq, Badddawiand others

The history of the twentieth-century Pacific World is the history of imperialism on a global scale. And cities were both the stages and actors of this global dynamic of domination and resistance. We will examine ten cities around the Pacific Rim (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seoul, Panama, Auckland, Shanghai, Lima, Singapore, Kyoto, and Ho Chi Minh City) and explore how we can use local historical sources to study the transnational processes of empire-building and capitalism. In this class, we learn to read city plans, maps, business documents, policy documents, newspapers, photos, diaries, interviews, and landscapes to do environmental, colonial, international, social, gender, and cultural history.

What does it mean to start a country, or to acquire and possess sovereignty over a territory? This course will examine the historical evolution of fundamental concepts in our international system: state formation, statehood, and sovereignty. Each week will spotlight a case-study in which sovereignty and statehood have appeared greatly confused and hotly contested. These include: the UK-China lease for control of Hong Kong; the US Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay; the corporate state of the legendary British East India Company; and Disney World.

(AFRICAAM/HISTORY 45B is 3 units; AFRICAAM/HISTORY 145B is 5 units.) CREATIVITY. AGENCY. RESILIENCE. This is the African history with which this course will engage. African scholars and knowledge production of Africa that explicitly engages with theories of race and global Blackness will take center stage. TRADE. RELIGION. CONQUEST. MIGRATION. These are the transformations of the 20th century which we shall interrogate and reposition. Yet these groundbreaking events did not happen in a vacuum. As historians, we also think about the continent's rich traditions and histories prior to the 20th century. FICTION. NONFICTION. FILM. MUSIC. Far from being peripheral to political transformation, African creative arts advanced discourse on gender, technology, and environmental history within the continent and without. We will listen to African creative artists not only as creators, but as agents for change.

How and why is land use a contested issue? How can we understand land injustice in light of the Anthropocene, that is, human-induced climate change? How do African knowledges, practices, and experiences inform global debates about environmental, political, and socio-economic well-being? This course considers how racial and colonial thinking and processes compounded discourses about land and examines examples of resistance, legacies of struggle, and possible futures. Centering African perspectives in a global context, we will examine how individual, institutional, and societal conceptions of land are revealed in narratives, practices, and policies created and circulated by Africans as well as outsiders in the continent. We will also analyze how these dynamics have had and continue to have repercussions across the globe. We will engage with diverse written, oral, audio-visual, and digital sources and associated methodologies to explore perceptions of land and land ownership, and discuss various forms of land use including agriculture, pastoralism, conservation, mining, and urbanization, and potential futures.

(Same as HISTORY 150A. 50A is 3 units; 150A is 5 units.) Survey of the origins of American society and polity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Topics: the migration of Europeans and Africans and the impact on native populations; the emergence of racial slavery and of regional, provincial, Protestant cultures; and the political origins and constitutional consequences of the American Revolution.

(History 55F is 3 units; History 155F is 5 units.)This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. The Civil War profoundly impacted American life at national, sectional, and constitutional levels, and radically challenged categories of race and citizenship. Topics covered include: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problems and personal experiences; the horrors of total war for individuals and society; and the challenges--social and political--of Reconstruction.

(Same as HISTORY 181B. 81B is 3 units; 181B is 5 units) This course aims to introduce students to major themes in the modern history of the region linking the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. No prerequisites or prior knowledge of the Middle East is required. We will begin with the Eurasian context that produced the Safavid and Ottoman empires and quickly move to the rapid transformations of the nineteenth century and imperial dissolution of the early twentieth. Twentieth-century themes will include mass migrations and colonial occupation; nationalism, mass politics and revolution; socialist and Islamist movements; and the growing role of American policy in the region. The course will conclude with a close examination of the profound transformations of the past decade, from the multiform uprisings of the 2010s to the equally multiform attempts to repress them.

(95C is 3 units; 195C is 5 units.) Japan's modern transformation from the late 19th century to the present. Topics include: the Meiji revolution; industrialization and social dislocation; the rise of democracy and empire; total war and US occupation; economic miracle and malaise; Japan as soft power; and politics of memory. Readings and films focus on the lived experience of ordinary men and women across social classes and regions.

Preference to freshmen. Through critical essays, maps, and atlases focusing on California, this seminar explores four principal themes: the roots of modern mapping in the rise of the state; maps as commodities; cartographies of race; and counter-mapping (where the marginalized take map-making into their own hands). Students learn to use resources in the Branner Map Library, Stanford digital collections, and the David Rumsey Map Center. The culminating project involves making and annotating your own map of the campus.

Interdisciplinary approaches to understanding human-environment interactions with a focus on economics, policy, culture, history, and the role of the state. Prerequisite: ECON 1.

(HISTORY 3F is 3 units; 103F is 5 units.) This course will introduce students to the basic concepts of modern warfare, its evolution, and some of the immeasurable ways by which it shaped our history as well as our world today. How have strategy, operations and tactics been transformed by the modern state; the industrial revolution; and the accelerated pace of technological change? What is the meaning of total war, conventional war, and asymmetric war, and how were these different types of war fought in the 20th and 21st centuries? From the Napoleonic wars to the war in Ukraine, how do wars reflect, and shape, our politics, economics, culture, and technology? No prior knowledge of military history (or technology) is required. Students satisfying the WiM requirement for the major in International Relations must enroll in INTNLREL 103F course listing. Please note that the version of this course offered in 2023-24 and later does not fulfill a "pre-1700" requirement for the history major.

Over two billion people alive today consider the Bible to be sacred scripture. But how did the books that made it into the bible get there in the first place? Who decided what was to be part of the bible and what wasn't? How would history look differently if a given book didn't make the final cut and another one did? Hundreds of ancient Jewish and Christian texts are not included in the Bible. "What Didn't Make It in the Bible" focuses on these excluded writings. We will explore the Dead Sea Scrolls, Gnostic gospels, hear of a five-year-old Jesus throwing temper tantrums while killing (and later resurrecting) his classmates, peruse ancient romance novels, explore the adventures of fallen angels who sired giants (and taught humans about cosmetics), tour heaven and hell, encounter the garden of Eden story told from the perspective of the snake, and learn how the world will end. The course assumes no prior knowledge of Judaism, Christianity, the bible, or ancient history. It is designed for students who are part of faith traditions that consider the bible to be sacred, as well as those who are not. The only prerequisite is an interest in exploring books, groups, and ideas that eventually lost the battles of history and to keep asking the question "why." In critically examining these ancient narratives and the communities that wrote them, you will investigate how religions canonize a scriptural tradition, better appreciate the diversity of early Judaism and Christianity, understand the historical context of these religions, and explore the politics behind what did and did not make it into the bible.

Why do imperialists conquer people? Why do some people resist while others collaborate? This course tries to answer these questions by looking at some of the world's earliest empires. The main focus is on the expansion of the Assyrian and Persian Empires between 900 and 300 BC and the consequences for the ancient Jews, Egyptians, and Greeks. The main readings come from the Bible, Herodotus, and Assyrian and Persian royal inscriptions, and the course combines historical and archaeological data with social scientific approaches. Weekly participation in a discussion section is required.

(AFRICAAM/HISTORY 45B is 3 units; AFRICAAM/HISTORY 145B is 5 units.) CREATIVITY. AGENCY. RESILIENCE. This is the African history with which this course will engage. African scholars and knowledge production of Africa that explicitly engages with theories of race and global Blackness will take center stage. TRADE. RELIGION. CONQUEST. MIGRATION. These are the transformations of the 20th century which we shall interrogate and reposition. Yet these groundbreaking events did not happen in a vacuum. As historians, we also think about the continent's rich traditions and histories prior to the 20th century. FICTION. NONFICTION. FILM. MUSIC. Far from being peripheral to political transformation, African creative arts advanced discourse on gender, technology, and environmental history within the continent and without. We will listen to African creative artists not only as creators, but as agents for change.

(HISTORY 50A is 3 units. HISTORY 150A is 5 units) This course surveys early American history from the onset of English colonization of North America in the late sixteenth century through the American Revolution and the creation of the United States in the late eighteenth. It situates the origins and the development of colonial American society as its peoples themselves experienced it, within the wider histories of the North American continent and the Atlantic basin. It considers the diversity of peoples and empires that made up these worlds as well as the complex movement of goods, peoples, and ideas that defined them. The British North American colonies were just one interrelated part of this wider complex. Yet out of that interconnected Atlantic world, those particular colonies produced a revolution for national independence that had a far-reaching impact on the world. The course, accordingly, explores the origins of this revolutionary movement and the nation state that it wrought, one that would rapidly ascend to hemispheric and then global prominence.

(History 55F is 3 units; History 155F is 5 units.)This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. The Civil War profoundly impacted American life at national, sectional, and constitutional levels, and radically challenged categories of race and citizenship. Topics covered include: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problems and personal experiences; the horrors of total war for individuals and society; and the challenges--social and political--of Reconstruction.

(Same as 81B. 181B is 5 units; 81B is 3 units.) This course aims to introduce students to major themes in the modern history of the region linking the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. No prerequisites or prior knowledge of the Middle East is required. We will begin with the Eurasian context that produced the Safavid and Ottoman empires and quickly move to the rapid transformations of the nineteenth century and imperial dissolution of the early twentieth. Twentieth-century themes will include mass migrations and colonial occupation; nationalism, mass politics and revolution; socialist and Islamist movements; and the growing role of American policy in the region. The course will conclude with a close examination of the profound transformations of the past decade, from the multiform uprisings of the 2010s to the equally multiform attempts to repress them.

(95C is 3 units; 195C is 5 units.) Japan's modern transformation from the late 19th century to the present. Topics include: the Meiji revolution; industrialization and social dislocation; the rise of democracy and empire; total war and US occupation; economic miracle and malaise; Japan as soft power; and politics of memory. Readings and films focus on the lived experience of ordinary men and women across social classes and regions.

An active, activist-oriented exploration of history of science methods, using exploration of the tobacco industry's secret documents as basic research materials. This is a fun class looking at how history of science methods were used to document the diseases caused by cigarettes, and how cigarette makers used (and abused) science to create doubt about their products. We also look at the rise of climate change denialism, which was largely based on "doubt is out product" techniques developed by cigarette makers. Students will produce an paper based on original research into the cigarette industry's formerly secret archives!

The genre of microhistory was expressly invented in the 1970s to recover the voices of people usually neglected in the past, often based on scanty sources. It's an exciting and risky endeavor, as the historian often has to fill in details lacking in the sources, a historical tightrope act. Class includes three sessions with authors of microhistory who share how they met these challenges:Profs. Zipperstein and Stokes (Stanford) and Getz (San Francisco State).

The involvement of U.S. and the UN in major wars and international interventions since the 1991 Gulf War. The UN Charter's provisions on the use of force, the origins and evolution of peacekeeping, the reasons for the breakthrough to peacemaking and peace enforcement in the 90s, and the ongoing debates over the legality and wisdom of humanitarian intervention. Case studies include Croatia and Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor, and Afghanistan. *International Relations majors taking this course to fulfill the WiM requirement should enroll in INTNLREL 140C for 5 units.

Many of the basic commodities that we consider staples of everyday life became part of an increasingly interconnected world of trade, goods, and consumption between 1200 and 1800. This seminar offers an introduction to the material culture of the late medieval and early modern world, with an emphasis on the role of European trade and empires in these developments. We will examine recent work on the circulation, use, and consumption of things, starting with the age of the medieval merchant, and followed by the era of the Columbian exchange in the Americas that was also the world of the Renaissance collector, the Ottoman patron, and the Ming connoisseur. This seminar will explore the material horizons of an increasingly interconnected world, with the rise of the Dutch East India Company and other trading societies, and the emergence of the Atlantic economy. It concludes by exploring classic debates about the "birth" of consumer society in the eighteenth century. How did the meaning of things and people's relationships to them change over these centuries? What can we learn about the past by studying things? Graduate students who wish to take a two-quarter graduate research seminar need to enroll in 402B in fall and 430 in winter.

Before the modern era, how did curious people in China, Korea, and Japan learn about the world? How did geographical information reach them, and how did they interpret it? This class will probe the history of cartographic exchange from the Mongols to Meiji from an East Asian perspective. Every Tuesday, we will examine East Asian maps; Thursday readings will introduce broader comparative perspectives. This course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative humanities seminar cluster. On Tuesdays we meet in our own course, while on Thursdays we will gather with two other HumCore classes for joint Plenary Sessions.

Scholars pay a lot of attention to knowledge but tend to ignore ignorance, even though ignorance defines many parts of our world. Think climate denial, anti-vaxxers, filter bubble myopia, etc. Here we explore the history of ignorance through case studies, focusing on how cigarette makers created the template for climate change denial and how can science can be used to produce ignorance. We¿ll look at rhetorical strategies to produce dis- and misinformation, and how these can be overcome. Students will produce a research paper tracing the origins and impact of a particular form of ignorance.

"When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious." The writer Edna O'Brien's portrait of Irish life encapsulates a history shaped by colonialism, famine, forced migration, and enduring political struggle. This course explores the global story of Ireland, a small land of 4.8 million that since 1800 has produced a diaspora of some 10 million people worldwide. Colonized and colonizers, freedom fighters and slave-owners, the starving and the wealthy, pious and irreverent-- the Irish reveal their past through memoirs, poetry, novels, music, film, and television.

This course examines the evolving nature of warfare and its impact on society across the Eurasian continent up to the Gunpowder Revolution and rise of the nation-state. Beginning with an attempt to define war, it will trace the evolution of military technology from the Stone Age through the rise of the chariot, the sword, and the mounted rider, and examine how changing methods of conducting warfare were inextricably linked to changes in the social order and political structures.

In the wake of the Great War (which we now know as WW1), the notion of self-determination, championed by the US president Woodrow Wilson, became an ideal of governance, spreading like wildfire across continents. It was received enthusiastically and reinterpreted creatively by former subjects of the defeated empires and those under the rule of the winners: middle class French suffragists, Black American activists, elite Egyptian women, Indians and the Irish under the British rule, warring Poles and Ukrainians, Korean students, Arab royalty, industrial laborers, and Zionists on both sides of the Atlantic. The shape of the new postwar world was to be decided at the peace conference in Paris and these groups (and more) demanded to be heard and listened to. Self-determination transformed how the contemporaries thought about empire, revolution, nation, minority, race, and gender. Paris in 1919 was the epicenter of the transformation. The objective of the course is the development of historical imagination (the ability to consider people and ideas in historical contexts and from the vantage point of their era) and critical empathy (the ability to analyze and understand the personal 'logic' of historical actors) as well as the crucial skills of public speaking and argumentative writing.

Required of History majors. How to conduct original, historical research and analysis, including methods such as using the libraries and archives at Stanford and elsewhere, and working collaboratively to frame topics, identify sources, and develop analyses. Autumn quarter: Professor Allyson Hobbs' section will focus on American Identities; Professor Ana Minian's section will focus on the Twentieth Century; and Professor Thomas Mullaney's section will focus on Honors Topics. Winter quarter: Professor Nancy Kollmann's section will focus on Early Modern History; and Professor Destin Jenkins' section will focus on the History of Capitalism. Spring quarter: Professor Robert Crews' section will focus on Modern Times. This course requires a permission number to enroll. Please email Kai Dowding at kdowding@stanford.edu for the permission number.

The First World War provided a prototype and a reference for a new, horrific kind of war. It catalyzed the emergence of modern means of warfare and the social mechanisms necessary to sustain the industrialized war machine. Killing millions, it became the blueprint for the total war that succeeded it. It also brought about new social and political orders, transforming the societies which it mobilized at unprecedented levels. This course will examine the military, political, economic, social and cultural aspects of the conflict. We will discuss the origins and outbreak of the war, the land, sea and air campaigns, the war's economic and social consequences, the home fronts, the war's final stages in eastern and western Europe as well as non-European fronts, and finally, the war's impact on the international system and on its belligerents' and participants' perceptions of the new reality it had created.

Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.

(History 224A is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 424A is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) Socialist visions and practices of the organization of society and messianic politics; Soviet mass state violence; culture, living and work spaces. Primary and secondary sources. Research paper or historiographical essay.

The course will present a survey of Eastern Europe's modern history in a global context. The themes of the course will include emergence of nationalisms and nation states, race and ethnicity, the discourse of rights, globalization, totalitarianism, as well as the role of the region in the planet's environmental history of the last three hundred years. From the Vikings to Snake Island, from the Rhine to the Caucasus, the course will examine the spatial and temporal limits of what we call Eastern Europe.

The history of the French novel is also the history of love. How did individuals experience love throughout history? How do novels reflect this evolution of love through the ages? And, most significantly, how have French novels shaped our own understanding of and expectations for romantic love today? The course will explore many forms of love from the Ancien R¿gime to the 20th century. Sentiment and seduction, passion and desire, the conflict between love and society: students will examine these themes from a historical perspective, in tandem with the evolution of the genre of the novel (the novella, the sentimental novel, the epistolary novel, the 19th-century novel, and the autobiographical novel). Some texts will be paired with contemporary films to probe the enduring relevance of love "¿ la fran¿aise" in the media today. Readings include texts by Lafayette, Pr¿vost, Laclos, Dumas fils, Flaubert, Colette, Yourcenar, and Duras. This is an introductory course to French Studies, with a focus on cultural history, literary history, interpretation of narrative, thematic analysis, and close reading. Undergraduate students should enroll for FRENCH159, while graduate students may enroll for FRENCH256. Readings and discussion in English.

What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccol¿ Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy. Taught in English. In 2023-24, this course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative set of global humanities seminars that brings all of its students and faculty into conversation. On Tuesdays you meet in your own course, and on Thursday all the HumCore seminars in session that quarter meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.

This course will be built around a photography exhibition at the Cantor Art Center, featuring the images of South African photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni. The class will invite students to consider both the history and the present-day state of photography on the African continent, exploring themes such as social-realist documentary photography and an African tradition of studio photography. The class will also reflect upon curatorial questions, including how, where, and why certain photographic work is displayed, and the aesthetics as well as politics of museum display.

Comparative focus on the demographic, political, social and economic histories of American Indians & Alaska Natives, African Americans, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans during late 18th and early 20th century California. Topics: relationships with Spanish, Mexican, U.S. Federal, State and local governments; intragroup and intergroup relationships; and differences such as religion, class and gender.

Except for the Bible no text has been the subject of as much modern interpretive scrutiny as the United States Constitution. This course explores both the historical dimensions of its creation as well as the meaning such knowledge should bring to bear on its subsequent interpretation. In light of the modern obsession with the document's "original meaning," this course will explore the intersections of history, law, and textual meaning to probe what an "original" interpretation of the Constitution looks like.

The model minority myth has been used to create a wedge between Asian and Black people in the United States, and masks the histories and lives of itinerant South Asian traders, laborers, and farmers. Beginning in the 1860s, South Asians (mostly male, and often undocumented) traveled to major ports in the US, such as New York City, New Orleans, and the California coast, where they found working-class jobs and married Puerto Rican, African American, Creole, and Mexican women. Some South Asians were double migrants, first brought to British colonies in the Caribbean and South America through indentured servitude, and later migrated to the United States. Their life stories expand to the racial history of the United States by looking beyond a Black/white binary. By juxtaposing immigrant stories with exclusionary US immigration laws, the course touches upon major themes of migration, capitalism, surveillance, race and racism, multiracial couples and communities, resistance, intersectional activism, borderlands and cities in the US, and the formation of national identity. During the quarter, we will seek to connect experiences in the past with contemporary issues of political culture in the United States to engage with the continuing challenge of locating and attaining self-definition, justice, and social progress in a fraught and divided world.

In the decades leading up to the American Civil War, the United States underwent profound transformations. Diverse developments - including the expansion of slavery and the increasing power of the cotton kingdom, the rise of the Second Great Awakening and mass politics, the growth of capitalism and its attendant panics, the construction of a series of reform movements, and deep uncertainties and anxieties about the proper role of women and people of color in the still new nation - made the lived experience of the period incredibly tumultuous. In this advanced undergraduate/graduate colloquium, students will explore the social, cultural, religious, political, economic, labor, and gender history and historiography of antebellum America, with a particular focus on how these developments were experienced by ordinary people.

This class seeks to examine the modern American experience with limited wars, beginning with distant and yet pertinent cases, and culminating in the war in Iraq. Although this class will examine war as a consequence of foreign policy, it will not focus primarily on presidential decision making. Rather, it will place wartime policy in a broader frame, considering it alongside popular and media perceptions of the war, the efforts of antiwar movements, civil-military relations, civil reconstruction efforts, and conditions on the battlefield. We will also examine, when possible, the postwar experience. Non-matriculating students are asked to consult the instructor before enrolling in the course.

What is capitalism? An economic and social system that maximizes both individual freedom and social good? An exploitative arrangement dependent on the subordination of labor to capital? A natural arrangement guided by a munificent invisible hand? Or a finely tuned mechanism requiring state support? This class offers undergraduate and graduate students a forum to consider these questions by reading selected works by historians, sociologists, economists, and other thinkers. Together we will work our way through primary sources from the twentieth century, using them to examine how capitalism has been understood, conceptualized, defended, and attacked. We will study the history of debates about markets, the state, and social organization, taking capitalism as both an economic system and a culture. Permission number required to enroll. Please contact Professor Burns at jenniferburns@stanford.edu to request permission to enroll in the course.

This course will explore the history of Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans from 1848 to the present.

Students will work with the Stanford Immigration and Asylum Lab to conduct research on conditions in Mexico and Central America to support people seeking U.S. asylum. With the guidance of historians and attorneys, students will analyze publicly available information on violence, corruption, discrimination, and other relevant country conditions to corroborate the lived experiences of asylum-seeking clients. Through collaborations with local nonprofit legal services providers, students will contribute country conditions research for expert testimony to support the asylum cases of people who have fled persecution. Guest lecturers will include legal practitioners, a former immigration judge, and other experts on U.S. asylum and Latin America. Through this work, students will gain critical research skills and an understanding of the U.S. asylum system, its implications in the Americas, and contemporary human security issues in the region, while meaningfully impacting people in need of protection.

This course studies one of the most pressing issues of our day--massive population displacements--from a historical perspective. Our focus will be the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, including Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. Questions include the following: When and why did certain ethno-religious groups begin to relocate en masse? To what extent were these departures caused by state policy? In what cases can we apply the term "ethnic cleansing"? How did the movement of people and the idea of the nation influence each other in the modern age?

Instructor: Jonathan Ming-En Tang Warfare and organized state violence has been a critical part of modern China's construction over the past 150 years. What is the consequence of such violence for our understanding of PRC strategic behavior in the present day? How can these wars be placed in a larger regional context? Over the course of this time period, and across multiple governmental regimes, can a culturally 'Chinese' form of war be identified? Conflicts will be analyzed in chronological fashion, beginning with the Taiping Civil War, The First Sino-Japanese War, the early republican "Warlord Period" in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, China's participation in World War II, the Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists, the Cold War, and the People's Republic of China's military involvement in East and Southeast Asia. This course covers selected major English-language secondary scholarship on the topic of war in China or conducted by China. No knowledge of Chinese language is required, but some background in Chinese history would be extremely helpful.

Following internship work, students complete a research report outlining work activity, problems investigated, key results and follow-up projects. Meets the requirements for curricular practical training for students on F-1 visas. Student is responsible for arranging own internship and faculty sponsorship.

May be repeated for credit.

May be repeated for credit.

Many of the basic commodities that we consider staples of everyday life became part of an increasingly interconnected world of trade, goods, and consumption between 1200 and 1800. This seminar offers an introduction to the material culture of the late medieval and early modern world, with an emphasis on the role of European trade and empires in these developments. We will examine recent work on the circulation, use, and consumption of things, starting with the age of the medieval merchant, and followed by the era of the Columbian exchange in the Americas that was also the world of the Renaissance collector, the Ottoman patron, and the Ming connoisseur. This seminar will explore the material horizons of an increasingly interconnected world, with the rise of the Dutch East India Company and other trading societies, and the emergence of the Atlantic economy. It concludes by exploring classic debates about the "birth" of consumer society in the eighteenth century. How did the meaning of things and people's relationships to them change over these centuries? What can we learn about the past by studying things? Graduate students who wish to take a two-quarter graduate research seminar need to enroll in 402B in fall and 430 in winter.

For first-year History and Classics Ph.D. students. This course explores ideas and debates that have animated historical discourse and shaped historiographical practice over the past half-century or so. The works we will be discussing raise fundamental questions about how historians imagine the past as they try to write about it, how they constitute it as a domain of study, how they can claim to know it, and how (and why) they argue about it.

This core colloquium for the Transnational, International, and Global (TIG) field will introduce students to the major historiographical trends, methodological challenges, and theoretical approaches to studying and writing transnational histories.

"When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious." The writer Edna O'Brien's portrait of Irish life encapsulates a history shaped by colonialism, famine, forced migration, and enduring political struggle. This course explores the global story of Ireland, a small land of 4.8 million that since 1800 has produced a diaspora of some 10 million people worldwide. Colonized and colonizers, freedom fighters and slave-owners, the starving and the wealthy, pious and irreverent-- the Irish reveal their past through memoirs, poetry, novels, music, film, and television.

This course examines the evolving nature of warfare and its impact on society across the Eurasian continent up to the Gunpowder Revolution and rise of the nation-state. Beginning with an attempt to define war, it will trace the evolution of military technology from the Stone Age through the rise of the chariot, the sword, and the mounted rider, and examine how changing methods of conducting warfare were inextricably linked to changes in the social order and political structures.

Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.

This course will be built around a photography exhibition at the Cantor Art Center, featuring the images of South African photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni. The class will invite students to consider both the history and the present-day state of photography on the African continent, exploring themes such as social-realist documentary photography and an African tradition of studio photography. The class will also reflect upon curatorial questions, including how, where, and why certain photographic work is displayed, and the aesthetics as well as politics of museum display.

May be repeated for credit.

Except for the Bible no text has been the subject of as much modern interpretive scrutiny as the United States Constitution. This course explores both the historical dimensions of its creation as well as the meaning such knowledge should bring to bear on its subsequent interpretation. In light of the modern obsession with the document's "original meaning," this course will explore the intersections of history, law, and textual meaning to probe what an "original" interpretation of the Constitution looks like.

In the decades leading up to the American Civil War, the United States underwent profound transformations. Diverse developments - including the expansion of slavery and the increasing power of the cotton kingdom, the rise of the Second Great Awakening and mass politics, the growth of capitalism and its attendant panics, the construction of a series of reform movements, and deep uncertainties and anxieties about the proper role of women and people of color in the still new nation - made the lived experience of the period incredibly tumultuous. In this advanced undergraduate/graduate colloquium, students will explore the social, cultural, religious, political, economic, labor, and gender history and historiography of antebellum America, with a particular focus on how these developments were experienced by ordinary people.

This class seeks to examine the modern American experience with limited wars, beginning with distant and yet pertinent cases, and culminating in the war in Iraq. Although this class will examine war as a consequence of foreign policy, it will not focus primarily on presidential decision making. Rather, it will place wartime policy in a broader frame, considering it alongside popular and media perceptions of the war, the efforts of antiwar movements, civil-military relations, civil reconstruction efforts, and conditions on the battlefield. We will also examine, when possible, the postwar experience. Non-matriculating students are asked to consult the instructor before enrolling in the course.

What is capitalism? An economic and social system that maximizes both individual freedom and social good? An exploitative arrangement dependent on the subordination of labor to capital? A natural arrangement guided by a munificent invisible hand? Or a finely tuned mechanism requiring state support? This class offers undergraduate and graduate students a forum to consider these questions by reading selected works by historians, sociologists, economists, and other thinkers. Together we will work our way through primary sources from the twentieth century, using them to examine how capitalism has been understood, conceptualized, defended, and attacked. We will study the history of debates about markets, the state, and social organization, taking capitalism as both an economic system and a culture. Permission number required to enroll. Please contact Professor Burns at jenniferburns@stanford.edu to request permission to enroll in the course.

Introduction to modern Latin American history and historiography, including how to read and use primary sources for independent research.

This course will explore the history of Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans from 1848 to the present.

Students will work with the Stanford Immigration and Asylum Lab to conduct research on conditions in Mexico and Central America to support people seeking U.S. asylum. With the guidance of historians and attorneys, students will analyze publicly available information on violence, corruption, discrimination, and other relevant country conditions to corroborate the lived experiences of asylum-seeking clients. Through collaborations with local nonprofit legal services providers, students will contribute country conditions research for expert testimony to support the asylum cases of people who have fled persecution. Guest lecturers will include legal practitioners, a former immigration judge, and other experts on U.S. asylum and Latin America. Through this work, students will gain critical research skills and an understanding of the U.S. asylum system, its implications in the Americas, and contemporary human security issues in the region, while meaningfully impacting people in need of protection.

This course studies one of the most pressing issues of our day--massive population displacements--from a historical perspective. Our focus will be the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, including Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. Questions include the following: When and why did certain ethno-religious groups begin to relocate en masse? To what extent were these departures caused by state policy? In what cases can we apply the term "ethnic cleansing"? How did the movement of people and the idea of the nation influence each other in the modern age?

Core colloquium in Jewish History, 17th to 19th centuries.

Instructor: Jonathan Ming-En Tang Warfare and organized state violence has been a critical part of modern China's construction over the past 150 years. What is the consequence of such violence for our understanding of PRC strategic behavior in the present day? How can these wars be placed in a larger regional context? Over the course of this time period, and across multiple governmental regimes, can a culturally 'Chinese' form of war be identified? Conflicts will be analyzed in chronological fashion, beginning with the Taiping Civil War, The First Sino-Japanese War, the early republican "Warlord Period" in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, China's participation in World War II, the Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists, the Cold War, and the People's Republic of China's military involvement in East and Southeast Asia. This course covers selected major English-language secondary scholarship on the topic of war in China or conducted by China. No knowledge of Chinese language is required, but some background in Chinese history would be extremely helpful.

Instructor: Tracy Stilerman This course explores the rich interactions between Tibetan Buddhists and the rulers of the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912). Inspired by Mongol Yuan precedent, the Qing rulers employed Tibetan Buddhism in their efforts to rule over a vast, multi-ethnic state that included Manchus, Chinese, Mongols, and Tibetans. We will consider the complex network of individuals and groups involved in this interaction, from the Mongols, to Gelugpa lamas from Tibet, to the ethnically Manchu rulers of the Qing. We will explore courtly ritual implements, maps, architecture, and monuments, as well as textual sources to analyze the multi-ethnic nature of late imperial China. The course will draw on tools from history, art history, and religious studies. There are no prerequisites or linguistic requirements to take this course.

This graduate colloquium is a foundational and intensive course in the field of modern South Asian history. It is a course in historiography and weekly discussions will be structured around a key monograph in a specific thematic sub-field. The colloquium will begin with discussions on the impact of the Subaltern Studies collective in shaping the field; and through the quarter we will engage with monographs from various sub-fields such as studies of the transition to colonial rule; the relationship between labor and capital; agrarian history; caste society under colonial rule and Dalit resistance; studies of bureaucratic objects such as the official document; new research in feminist history and the emerging field of trans history.

(History 224A is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 424A is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) Socialist visions and practices of the organization of society and messianic politics; Soviet mass state violence; culture, living and work spaces. Primary and secondary sources. Research paper or historiographical essay.

This graduate seminar prepares students to undertake research using Korean-language sources on a variety of themes in modern Korea. Students will identify characteristics of major online and offline archives in Korean studies, learn essential skills in investigating primary sources, and analyze selected sample documents in class.

Units by arrangement. May be repeated for credit.

Units by arrangement.