printer friendly pageHISTORY 235G: Famous French Figures: Celebrity and the Making of French Identity (FRENCH 209, HISTORY 335G)
How do we think historically about something as fleeting as fame? In this seminar we¿ll engage with the biographies of eight famous French figures, exploring how each of these celebrated lives influenced popular perceptions of what it has meant to be French over the past two centuries. Questions we will ask include: How and why are public figures remembered and memorialized differently at different times and in different places? Who does and does not qualify for the role of French celebrity, and why? What work must biographers do to frame something as complex as a human life into a coherent narrative? What is gained and lost in approaching a given era through a close examination of one individual? Most central to this course: How do people create and contest their cultural and national identities through the collective celebration of particular individuals? We will study the lives and times of three men and five women: Marie Antoinette, Napoleon Bonaparte, Edouard Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Albert Camus, and Francoise Sagan.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Braude, M. (PI)
HISTORY 236: The Ethics of Imperialism
Can a commitment to liberty, progress, and universal rights be reconciled with imperialism? The ethical underpinnings of empire; how modern Europeans provided ethical and political justifications for colonial expansion. How European ideals were used to defend and justify inequality, violence, and genocide. The ethics of American-driven globalization and humanitarianism. Texts include primary sources, philosophical treatises, and historical studies.
Last offered: Autumn 2007
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
HISTORY 236B: Hobbes to Habermas: The Idea of Society in Modern Thought (HISTORY 336B)
Classic texts in social theory from the seventeenth century to the present. Readings include Locke, Smith, Hegel, Comte, and Durkheim, and Weber.
Last offered: Spring 2015
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
HISTORY 236F: The End of the World As They Knew It: Culture, Cafés, and Crisis in Europe, 1880-1918 (HISTORY 336F)
The years stretching from roughly 1880 to end of the First World War were marked by profound social upheaval and an intense burst of creativity. This seminar will focus on the major cultural movements and big ideas of the period. Topics covered include the rise of mass culture and cinema, the origins of psychoanalysis, anti-Semitism and Zionism, new anxieties about sexuality and the 'New Woman,' anarchism, decadence, degeneration, and Dada - with cameos from Bernhardt, Freud, Klimt, Nietzsche, Toulouse-Lautrec, Wilde, Zola, and other luminaries of the age.
Last offered: Winter 2015
HISTORY 237F: 20th Century British History through the Hoover Archives (HISTORY 337F)
From the rich resources of the Hoover Institution, the students in this course will select a particular archive (war posters, politician, spy, literary figure, diplomat, etc. etc.) to investigate, to write about,discuss in class, and, it is hoped, present in an exhibition at the Hoover, learning museum skills along the way as well as the history of Britain in the 20th century.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors:
Stansky, P. (PI)
HISTORY 237K: Speed and Power in the Twentieth Century (FRENCH 237K, HISTORY 337K)
Europeans living in the 20th century witnessed an unprecedented (and, to many observers, frightening) acceleration in the pace of everyday life, wrought by the introduction of a host of new travel technologies. Focusing on the metropolises of Europe, this seminar will explore the various ways that trains, planes, and automobiles have shaped modern urban life. We'll also look at how 20th-century artists and writers have treated the interrelated themes of speed and power in their work.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
Instructors:
Braude, M. (PI)
HISTORY 238G: Ethnography of the Late Middle Ages: Social history and popular culture in the age of the plague (HISTORY 338G)
During the late Middle Ages, as Europe was recovering from the devastation of the Black Death, political reorganization contributed to a burst of archival documentation that allows historians richly detailed glimpses of societies in transition. We will be reading selected scholarly articles and monographs covering such topics as persecution, prechristian cultural remnants, folk theologies, festival cultures, peasant revolts, heresy, and the advent of the diabolic witch.
Last offered: Winter 2015
HISTORY 239E: Paris: The Making of a Modern Icon (FRENCH 227, URBANST 142)
Few places have been as heavily romanticized and mythologized as Paris. To many observers, Paris and its attractions serve as icons of modernity itself. By engaging with fiction, film, journalism, painting, photography, poetry, song, and other media, we¿ll trace how different people at different times have used Paris as both backdrop and main protagonist, and we'll consider how the city itself has incorporated and rebelled against such representations. The scope of our inquiry will stretch from the late 18th century to the present, covering a host of topics, figures, and sites: from the French Revolution to the protests of May '68, from Baudelaire to Hemingway, from the Impressionists to the Situationists. Taught in English
Last offered: Winter 2015
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
HISTORY 239F: Empire and Information (HISTORY 339F)
How do states see? How do they know what they know about their subjects, citizens, economies, and geographies? How does that knowledge shape society, politics, identity, freedom, and modernity? Focus is on the British imperial state activities in S. Asia and Britain: surveillance technologies and information-gathering systems, including mapping, statistics, cultural schemata, and intelligence systems, to render geographies and social bodies legible, visible, and governable.
Last offered: Autumn 2005
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom
| Repeatable
for credit
HISTORY 239H: Colonialism and Empire in Modern Europe
To better understand the history of modern Europe within a global context, explores the following questions: What impact did more than a century of colonialism have on the social lives, cultural attitudes, political loyalties, and intellectual world views of European women and men during the nineteenth century? What accounts for the resiliency of empire during a period of rapid global change that witnessed the rise of modern democracy, economic liberalism, ethnic nationalism, and international socialism?
Last offered: Winter 2010
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci
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