HISTORY 1: The History of 2025
How can we understand the events, ideas, and conflicts that have featured in the news cycle during the past year? "The History of 2025" 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 2025, and who are curious to consider how studying history can offer a deeper and richer understanding of tumultuous times.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 4 units total)
Instructors:
Twitty, A. (PI)
HISTORY 1A: Global History: The World's Foundations (CLASSICS 76)
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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Scheidel, W. (PI)
;
Terrasi, J. (TA)
HISTORY 1B: Global History: The Early Modern World, 1300 to 1800
(Course is offered for 3 OR 5 units.) Topics include early globalization and cross-cultural exchanges; varying and diverse cultural formations in different parts of the world; the growth and interaction of empires and states; the rise of capitalism and the economic divergence of "the west"; changes in the nature of technology, including military and information technologies; migration of ideas and people (including the slave-trade); disease, climate, and environmental change over time. Designed to accommodate beginning students, non-majors, and more advanced history students
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Acosta, E. (PI)
HISTORY 1C: Global History : The Modern Age
(Course is offered for 3 OR 5 units.)
History 1C explores the making of our modern world. It investigates the interconnected histories of revolution, war, imperialism, migration, race, slavery, democracy, rebellion, nationalism, feminism, socialism, fascism, genocide, anti-colonialism, neoliberalism, and populist authoritarianism. Analyzing memoirs, novels, films, and other sources, we investigate how key political ideas have transformed societies, cultures, and economies across the globe from the late eighteenth century through to the present.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 2B: Current Issues in Baltic Affairs (REES 100B, REES 200B)
The Baltic States, comprising a geopolitical region of the world encompassing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, is vitally important politically, strategically, historically and culturally. This seminar series brings leading experts, from around the world - scholars and practitioners - representing a broad range of fields, to share their cutting-edge research and insights into the challenges and issues that have confronted this region in a global context. Class meets Wednesdays 12:00-1:00pm in CISAC - Encina Hall, Reuben Hills Conference room (E207).
Last offered: Spring 2024
| Units: 1-2
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 6 units total)
HISTORY 3C: Democracy and Disagreement (COMM 3, CSRE 31, PHIL 30, POLISCI 31, PSYCH 31A, PUBLPOL 3, RELIGST 23X, SOC 13)
Deep disagreement pervades our democracy, from arguments over issues ranging from foreign policy, free speech, and reparations to college admissions policy and the professionalization of college athletics. Loud voices drown out discussion. Open-mindedness, humility, and critical thinking seem in short supply among politicians, citizens, and other residents alike. Yet constructive disagreement is an essential feature of a democratic society. This class explores and models respectful, civil disagreement. Each week features scholars who disagree - sometimes quite strongly - about major policy issues. Students will have the opportunity to probe those disagreements, understand why they persist, and improve their own understanding of the facts and values that underlie them. The course may be taken for one or two units. The basic, one-unit class is open to all Stanford students, with other members of the Stanford community welcome to audit individual classes. The requirements are to do readin
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Deep disagreement pervades our democracy, from arguments over issues ranging from foreign policy, free speech, and reparations to college admissions policy and the professionalization of college athletics. Loud voices drown out discussion. Open-mindedness, humility, and critical thinking seem in short supply among politicians, citizens, and other residents alike. Yet constructive disagreement is an essential feature of a democratic society. This class explores and models respectful, civil disagreement. Each week features scholars who disagree - sometimes quite strongly - about major policy issues. Students will have the opportunity to probe those disagreements, understand why they persist, and improve their own understanding of the facts and values that underlie them. The course may be taken for one or two units. The basic, one-unit class is open to all Stanford students, with other members of the Stanford community welcome to audit individual classes. The requirements are to do readings in advance of each class, attend, and listen attentively and critically. Because the topics are different, students who took the course in 2023-24 may enroll this year as well. A limited number of undergraduates may take a second unit of credit. Students enrolled in the two unit course will participate in weekly small group discussion seminars about the topics discussed by guest presenters in the course that week. The discussion seminars will be led by peer facilitators, with the goals of developing critical thinking skills and discourse skills, such as active listening and curiosity. The peer facilitators are undergraduate students who have completed training in dialogue facilitation. Each discussion seminar will have a maximum of 10 students. If interest in discussion seminars exceeds the number offered, students will be chosen by lottery.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1-2
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 8 units total)
HISTORY 3F: Introduction to Modern Military History (HISTORY 103F)
(
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. May not take for credit if you have already taken
INTNLREL 103F.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
HISTORY 3J: Human Trafficking: Historical, Legal, and Medical Perspectives
Interdisciplinary approach to understanding the extent and complexity of the global phenomenon of human trafficking, especially for forced prostitution, labor exploitation, and organ trade, focusing on human rights violations and remedies. Provides a historical context for the development and spread of human trafficking. Analyzes the current international and domestic legal and policy frameworks to combat trafficking and evaluates their practical implementation.
Last offered: Winter 2025
| Units: 1
HISTORY 3S: Growing Up in the World: A Global History of Childhood
Has the concept of "child" and "childhood" remained the same across time and place? How did race, gender, and class affect children's experiences? Drawing on scholarship from around the world, this course will examine how historians recount the stories of children from the ancient past to the present day. Children tend to be neglected in historical narratives, overshadowed by the adults who run their lives. As kids generally do not leave behind written documents, their voices are difficult to find in a traditional archive. Therefore, our course goes beyond reading old pieces of paper. We will learn from skeletons, artwork, films, memoirs, toys, TV shows, newspapers, and other sources from the past. Each student will research and write about a childhood history that interests them the most. Using personal interviews with family members, visual artifacts, institutional records, or a variety of other sources, students are encouraged to get creative when researching and writing history. Students will leave this course with a strong grasp of what it means to be a historian and how to research the diverse lives of youth around the world.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Stark, L. (PI)
HISTORY 4A: The Global Drug Wars (HISTORY 104A)
This lecture and discussion course explores the global history of political struggles over the production, circulation, and consumption of illicit drugs from the early modern period to the present. It surveys medical and social controversies over intoxicants; the political economy of drug trafficking; the ethnic and racial politics of policing and interdiction; cultures of drug use, addiction, and treatment; the interplay of 'narcostates,' cartels, and international organizations; the emergence of globalized networks of exchange, regulation, prohibition, and incarceration; and the racialization of legislation on drugs. Students who have previously enrolled in
HISTORY 201A/301A, The Global Drug Wars, should not enroll in this course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Crews, R. (PI)
;
Altaras, N. (TA)
;
Booska, K. (TA)
;
Goodman Rabner, D. (TA)
...
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Instructors:
Crews, R. (PI)
;
Altaras, N. (TA)
;
Booska, K. (TA)
;
Goodman Rabner, D. (TA)
;
Song, H. (TA)