381 - 390 of 788 results for: HISTORY

This course approaches the study of the Black diaspora through a global and interdisciplinary lens. Throughout the quarter, the scope of our focus will span several centuries and a number of different regions, including but not limited to the Americas, Caribbean, Western Europe, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. As such, we will learn about the long history of the Black diaspora's movements and how those movements shaped the places from which they departed, through which they traversed, and to which they arrived.

Historical research in Africa is liable to issues of authenticity and relevance to local communities, as well as power disparities between researcher and subject. Can we turn this weakness into a strength by developing theory and practice of participatory action research in which communities and scholars work together to make meaningful interpretations of the past? We will explore this issue, study previous attempts, and design a participatory action research project to be carried out in Ghana.

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality in twentieth and twenty-first century Africa. It explores how concepts, identities, and practices of gender and sexuality have changed in shifting social, cultural, political, and economic contexts across the continent and in connection with global currents. This historical journey encompasses European colonialism, independence, postcolonial nation-building, and current times. Course materials include African novels, films, material culture and multinational scholarly research and primary sources. We will also engage multidisciplinary perspectives, methodologies, and theories as tools for critical thinking, writing and varied modes of producing knowledge. Gender and sexuality(ies) as examined in this course act as gateways to explore transformations in : selfhood, peoplehood, and life stage; health, medicine, reproduction, and the body; law and criminality; marriage, kinship, family, and community; politics, power and protest; feminism(s); popular culture; religion and belief; LGBTQI+ themes; and the history of emotions, including love, joy, desire, pain, and trauma.

This course examines histories of healing and harming in Africa through the lens of the individual body and the body politic. The course begins with core concepts in the history of the body and African health histories. We then explore entanglements of health, politics, and the body in precolonial Africa. Historical case studies ask how colonialism reshaped ecological health, social and biological reproduction, therapeutics, the laboring body. Contemporary case studies examine the legacies of this history, focusing on queer bodies and HIV, toxicity and pollution, and decolonizing global health. Theoretical anchors include Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Saidiya Hartman. Readings will draw from foundational scholarship on health and healing in Africa, recent pathbreaking work by African scholars, and fiction by Jennifer Makumbi, Octavia Butler, Chinua Achebe, and Ayobami Adebayo. No prior knowledge of African history is expected.

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.

This course will explore the histories of race and slavery in the African continent. We will consider how these histories developed alongside and independent of global developments, including but not limited to imperialism, capitalism, and slavery in the Arab world, as well as the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Students will engage with an array of primary and secondary sources that centralize the voices, experiences, and perspectives of Africans from different time periods. We will grapple with the complex histories of slavery within the continent and how the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion evolved over time.

Known as ghulam or mamluk in Arabic, the slave-soldier was a ubiquitous phenomenon in the world of medieval Islam. Usually pagan steppe nomads, mamluks were purchased in adolescence, converted to Islam, taught Arabic, and trained to lead armies. Sometimes manumitted and sometimes not, in either case mamluks rose to positions of privilege and prominence in numerous regimes in the medieval Middle East. Nowhere was the mamluk institution so fundamental as it was in Egypt between 1250 and 1517 CE, when Cairo was ruled by these slave-soldiers, their ranks constantly renewed by imports of new mamluks from the Black Sea and Caucuses. Born in the age of the crusades and ultimately conquered by the Ottoman Empire, the Mamluk Sultanate can be understood as a bridge between the worlds of medieval and early modern Islam, as well as between East and West, sitting astride the major Nile-Red Sea route that linked the Mediterranean world to that of the Indian Ocean and beyond. This class will investigate the rise and fall of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and its key roles in the commercial, diplomatic, and political history both of the medieval Middle East and the wider world.

This summer marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This course brings together over two dozen faculty from across the university to explore how the concerns and values expressed in that document have played out across U.S. history, tying the nation's origins to its present. Class sessions will involve a combination of lectures, panel discussions, and opportunities for questions. Open to undergrads and graduate students from all schools and fields.

This course examines the political histories and cultural themes of Native Americans in California, 1700s1950s. Throughout the semester we will focus on: demographics, diversity of tribal cultures; regional environmental backgrounds; the Spanish Era and missionization; the Mexican Era and secularization; relations with the United States Government and the State of California, including the gold rush period, statehood, unratified treaties, origin of reservations/rancherias, and other federal policies, e.g., Allotment Act, Indian Reorganization Act and termination.