701 - 710 of 788 results for: HISTORY

This course explores the political history of modern Turkey as a lens to critically rethink democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries. Emerging from the Ottoman imperial legacy as a secular republic and assertive nation-state, Turkey has oscillated between democratic openings and authoritarian closures, shaped by social, economic, and geopolitical forces. Once hailed as a model for reconciling Islam and democracy, Turkey now exemplifies the challenges of new authoritarianism under Erdogan. Yet, its democratic trajectory - marked by military interventions, European Union debates, and persistent civic engagement - offers valuable insights into the possibilities and limits of democratic practice. Situating Turkey within a comparative framework alongside cases like Tunisia, Greece, Mexico, and South Korea, the course examines global influences from French secularism to Latin American populism. Ultimately, Turkey's contested democratic history helps illuminate the crises and prospects of democracy today, offering new ways to understand both Turkey's place in the world and the future of democracy itself.

Focuses on political regimes, transregional connections, economic interactions and sociocultural formations in the early modern Islamic Afro-Eurasia. Topics include complex political-economic systems of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires and expansion of Turco-Persianate political and literary cultures across the Post-Mongolian Eurasia; experiences of various Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Hindu, as well as urban, rural and nomadic communities and networks under Islamicate political regimes; consolidation of transregional commerce and cultural exchange with the proliferation of networks of merchants, scholars and sufis; new tendencies in knowledge, individual, gender, family, social order, and religion; incorporation of the Islamic world in the global economy; Muslims in the age of revolutions; political and social reforms and consolidation of Muslim internationalism in the age of imperialism.

This course expands conceptions of Jewish History by focusing on overlooked regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. Beginning in medieval Al-Andalus, the course follows the Jews of Spain and Portugal to other parts of the world and traces their stories into the 20th century. Topics include the expulsions from Iberia, the formation of a Sephardi identity, encounters between Sephardim and other communities (Muslim, Christian, and Jewish), life in the Ottoman Empire, networks and mobility, gender, colonialism, and the rise of the nation-state paradigm.

Core colloquium in Jewish History, 17th to 19th centuries.

Graduate colloquium in Jewish History, 19th-20th centuries.

North Korea has been dubbed secretive, its leaders unhinged, its people mindless dupes. Such descriptions are partly a result of the control that the DPRK exerts over texts and bodies that come through its borders. Filtered through foreign media, North Korea's people and places can seem to belong to another planet. However, students interested in North Korea can access the DPRK through a broad and growing range of sources including satellite imagery, archival documents, popular magazines, films, literature, art, tourism, and through interviews with former North Korean residents (defectors). When such sources are brought into conversation with scholarship about North Korea, they yield new insights into North Korea's history, politics, economy, and culture. This course will provide students with fresh perspectives on the DPRK and will give them tools to better contextualize its current position in the world. Lectures will be enriched with a roster of guest speakers.

Cinema was invented in the 1890s and simultaneously introduced to East Asia. This colloquium explores how this new medium changed the cultural and social landscape of East Asia and how the visual power of films also affected the culture politics of empires in the region. The themes include cinema and urban spaces, cultural imperialism, film images and gender discourse, colonial modernity, Americanism and Asianism, the visual and the textual, wartime propaganda, and Hollywood movies and cold war empires.

(Students enroll for 3 OR 5 units.)The nature of borders and border conflicts in N.E. Asia from the 17th to the early 20th century. Focus is on contact zones between China, Russia, Korea, and Japan. The geopolitical imperatives that drove states to map their terrain in variable ways. Cultural, diplomatic, and imperial contexts. European pressures and contributions to E. Asian cartography; the uses of maps in surveillance, diplomacy, identity, and war. Student projects focus on a contested border zone.

This course examines the evolution of warfare in China, and its impact on the evolving political and social orders, from the earliest states through the Mongol conquest. It will study how changing military technology was inextricably linked to changes in the state and society. It will also look at changing Chinese attitudes towards warfare over the same period, from the celebration of heroism, through writing about warfare as an intellectual art, to the links of militarism with steppe peoples/