HISTORY 200L: Doing Public History (CSRE 201L)
Examines history outside the classroom; its role in political/cultural debates in U.S. and abroad. Considers functions, practices, creators, and reception of history in public arena, including museums, memorials, naming of buildings, courtrooms, websites, Wikipedia, podcasts. Analyzes controversies arising when historians' work outside the academy challenges the status quo; role funders, interest groups, and the public play in promoting, shaping, or suppressing historical interpretation. Who gets to tell a group's story? What changes can public history enable? Students will engage in public history projects.
Last offered: Spring 2025
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 200LB: Doing Labor History (FEMGEN 200LB)
How do historians access lives of the laboring poor in the past? What is the archive of the working-class life? Toiling in farms, plantations, workshops, mines, factories, brothels and households, workers seldom leave behind an account of their lives in their own words. How have labor historians devised methods and techniques of reading traces from the past of those who were on the margins of society and struggling for their survival, and dignity? In this undergraduate colloquium, we will engage with these questions, particularly through the historical scholarship on workers in the Global South. This course will provide an introduction to the history of the field of labor history across different parts of the world; discuss the tremendous influence of the historian E.P. Thompson in the shaping of the field; explore how studies of gender, race, caste, cultural identities, and of a global perspective, have transformed the field in profound ways; and how the modern world was built on the foundation of oppressive regimes of labor extraction such as slavery, indenture, and wage labor.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 200M: Doing Digital History
This course is designed to introduce students to the theories and methods of digital history. In keeping with the digital humanities- commitment to experimentation, public discourse, and praxis, we will compile a web presence for our seminar that includes blog posts from students that engage with the discussions and readings. A series of tutorials will provide hands-on experience with a range of common digital history tools. The course will culminate in a final project in which students apply DH methodologies to their own research interests.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
HISTORY 200MM: Doing Historical Memory
How do societies remember? What events and experiences become part of our shared patrimony and what stories are lost to time? Who decides? What are the dynamics -- and the politics -- of collective memory? In this course, we will examine these questions in the context of several different societies and historical problems. Topics examined include slavery and the transatlantic slave trade; the Holocaust; South African apartheid; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the Civil Rights movement; and the current battles over historical memorials and monuments.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Campbell, J. (PI)
HISTORY 200P: Doing Religious History (AFRICAAM 200P, RELIGST 210X)
What is religion, and how do we write its history? This undergraduate colloquium uses case studies from a variety of regions and periods - but with a specific focus on the African continent - to consider how historians have dealt with the challenge of writing accounts of the realm of religious and spiritual experience. We will explore the utility of oral history alongside written documentary sources as well as explore issues of objectivity and affiliation in writing religious histories. (This course has been submitted for WAY-SI and WAY-ED certification.)
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 200R: Doing Community History: Asian Americans and the Pandemic (AMSTUD 200R, ASNAMST 201)
Students utilize a community-engaged oral history methodology to produce short video documentaries focused on Asian Americans in the Covid-19 pandemic. In producing these collaborative digital history projects, students learn to evaluate the ways social power influences historical documentation at various levels including the making of sources, the construction of archives, and the telling of historical narratives. We ask: how have race and racism, ethnicity and community, gender and class, shaped the ways that the pandemic has influenced the lives of Asian Americans? To what extent have Asian American experiences with the pandemic been shaped by the recent global protests for racial justice and Black liberation? In studying the pandemic and its relationship to histories of race and racism, how should we understand the place of Asian Americans?
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 200U: Doing History: Beyond the Book
This class will teach you how to look for clues in the historical record beyond the usual written texts. The past took place in three dimensions, involved five senses, and included actors that were not human beings. This course takes seriously the challenges of recovering a larger source base than books (although we will also consider books in their materiality as books). What are some of these non-text sources? How should we approach them? What are their prospects and limitations? What do we do when there aren't many sources for our subject? "How do we know what to look for?" is one of the most profound and important questions for historians - and scholars more generally - to ask themselves.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
HISTORY 200UR: Doing (Sub)Urban History (AMSTUD 200UR, URBANST 100UR)
This course explores the attempts by scholars to understand the political, economic, and social development of cities, suburbs, and metropolitan regions from the nineteenth century onward. How have historians examined the evolution of metropolitan spatial forms over time? How have they approached the analytical challenge of handling the diversity in popular experiences and aspirations of urbanites? What of the relationship between industrialization and class formation, state building and culture, surveillance and resistance, banking and racism? Readings consist of some primary sources, classic works, and recent interpretations in the field of (sub)urban history. Although we will largely focus on urban processes within the United States, we will also draw on select examples from urban centers from around the globe. 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.
Last offered: Winter 2025
| Units: 5
HISTORY 200Y: Doing Colonial History
This course will explore major themes and debates in the history of modern colonialism in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Using case studies from Asia and Africa, "Doing Colonial History" will address the following issues of global importance: colonial conquest and governance, development vs. exploitation, education for assimilation, wartime and sexual violence, decolonization, and the politics of memory. This course is part of the "Doing History" series through which students learn how historians frame problems, collect and analyze evidence, and contribute to on-going debates.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Uchida, J. (PI)
HISTORY 201A: The Global Drug Wars (HISTORY 301A)
Explores the global story of the struggle over drugs from the nineteenth century to the present. Topics include the history of the opium wars in China, controversies over wine and tobacco in Iran, narco-trafficking and civil war in Lebanon, the Afghan 'narco-state,' Andean cocaine as a global commodity, the politics of U.S.- Mexico drug trafficking, incarceration, drugs, and race in the U.S., and the globalization of the American 'war on drugs.'
Last offered: Spring 2024
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
