241 - 250 of 788 results for: HISTORY

What is law, and how do we write its history? Drawing on case studies from a broad range of periods and places, this course will explore how law is made, interpreted, enforced, experienced, and resisted. It will also explore how historians use both legal and non-legal sources to study the ways in which law and society have shaped each other. This course forms part of the "Doing History" series: rigorous undergraduate colloquia that introduce the practice of history within a particular field or thematic area.

This course introduces the field of environmental history, which examines how humans have influenced and been affected by various environments over time. We will utilize different sources (written, visual, and on-site) to explore methods of studying environmental history, with a focus on water justice - that is, how access to water, its use and abuse, and the impacts of storms and droughts have historically reflected racial, gender, and class disparities from local to global levels. Case studies include the AI industry; South Asia under British colonial rule; Native Americans in the Western US, including the Muwekma Ohlone people's unceded land now part of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, which we will visit; Hurricane Katrina's devastation of predominantly Black New Orleans; and others. Assignments will include in-class work and a final research paper on Jasper Ridge's environmental history.

Although historians often focus on broad social forces, individuals can and do shape these currents in unexpected ways, as the headlines of our own time illustrate. What role do individuals play in historical change? How can we use individual life stories to illuminate broader trends? Led by two history faculty members who are also biographers, this seminar will introduce students to a diverse cast including writers, musicians, politicians, and intellectuals, with a general focus on the modern era since 1870. As a final project, students will draw on Stanford's archival holdings to write an original mini-biography.

How does ethnicity and race operate in different time periods, and across different historical, national, and cultural contexts? This course guides students through an historical and cross-cultural exploration of ethnoracial identity formation, racism, ethnopolitics, migration, belonging, and exclusion, using primary and secondary sources to examine how the lived experience of race and ethnicity shapes and is shaped by local, regional, and global dimensions. This course forms part of the "Doing History" series: rigorous undergraduate colloquia that introduce the practice of history within a particular field or thematic area.

The history of science has often been at the crux of key debates in the larger field of history, including debates over objectivity and bias, relativism and the problem of "present-ism." This course explores key questions, methods and debates in the history of science and examines how historians of science have addressed these organizing problems of the historical discipline. This course forms part of the "Doing History" series: rigorous undergraduate colloquia that introduce the practice of history within a particular field or thematic area.

Does death have a history? In dealing with the past, all historians inevitably deal with the dead. Yet few historians primarily engage with the meaning of death, disease, and sickness to individuals, communities, and societies. In this class, we will explore how historians have theorized sickness, health, and death in the United States and greater Atlantic World. Topics include: the shifting burden and social meanings of disease; how sickness has impacted individuals' sense of citizenship, religion, identity, and the law; the impact of epidemics/pandemics on the size and shape of government and empire; the economics of the medical profession, hospitals, insurance, and biotech industries; the history of race, gender, and the body; the changing doctor patient-relationship; how mass-casualty events like war create cultural shifts; the politics of immunity and vaccination; and why illness and death is so hard to write about evocatively. The 200-series "Doing History" requirement offers students an intellectual bridge between Sources & Methods courses and 209S. Treating a specific subfield within history as the focal point, these courses will explore how each subfield emerged, how it engages with allied fields outside of History, and how it has changed over time. Students will gain deep familiarity with the primary theoretical frameworks deployed by scholars working in this area as well as the intellectual impetus these scholars articulate to legitimize their inquiries. In learning more about the inner workings, or "backstage," of the discipline students will gain insight into how to ask historical questions and shape historical problems. Ultimately, the course will offer opportunities to reflect on what it means to think historically, to ask historical questions, and to produce historical knowledge.

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).

While history was once believed to be the study of "great men," war, and politics, in recent decades, histories of women, gender, and sexuality have flourished. This course explores the development and major questions in the subfield of gender history from a transnational perspective. It allows students to examine gender history at the craft level, including research methods, theoretical frameworks, and novel approaches to uncover what has been previously hidden or ignored. This course is part of the "Doing History" series, rigorous undergraduate colloquia that introduce the practice of history within a particular field or thematic area.

Students explore exemplary historical works based on oral histories and develop a range of practical skills while completing their own interviews. Topics include oral history and narrative theory, interview techniques, transcript preparation, and digital archiving. Students also learn how to analyze interviews using both qualitative and quantitative methods, practice writing history using oral evidence, and experiment with digital humanities approaches for disseminating oral history, including the Stanford Oral History Text Analysis Project. This course forms part of the "Doing History" series: rigorous undergraduate colloquia that introduce the practice of history within a particular field or thematic area.