printer friendly pageHISTORY 42Q: Animal Archives: History Beyond the Human
There's a great big world out there. We humans are just one of a million or more animate beings on this planet. Nonhuman animals have their own histories that influence, intersect with, and stand apart from our own. This IntroSem takes animals seriously as subjects of historical study. Together we'll explore how the study of animals--from platypus to (plastic) pink flamingo--offers new ways of seeing human history. We'll examine how animals have shaped historical events and, inversely, how animals are historical artifacts. And we'll spend the majority of the course puzzling through challenges that arise when studying nonhumans. Can we understand creatures that do not communicate the way we do? Do nonhumans tell stories and chronicle their own histories? Are animals themselves archives of historical information? If so, how do we read them? This course will introduce you to diverse ways of studying historical animals and contemporary creatures too. You'll write animal biographies, practice slow witnessing of the more-than-human world, and conduct research deep dives into nonhuman narratives. You'll encounter multi-disciplinary approaches to our core questions, including historical and cultural analysis, ethnography, scientific inquiry, and technological surveillance. Ultimately, you'll gain insight into how scholars reconstruct the past and know the lives of others, whether human or nonhuman. The creative research skills and critical analysis that you exercise in Animal Archives will serve you in other history courses and beyond.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
HISTORY 45B: Introduction to African Studies I: Africa in the 20th Century
(AFRICAAM/
HISTORY 45B is 3 units; AFRICAAM/
HISTORY 145B is 5 units.) CREATIVITY. AGENCY. RESILIENCE. This is the African history with which this course will engage. African scholars and knowledge production of Africa that explicitly engages with theories of race and global Blackness will take center stage. TRADE. RELIGION. CONQUEST. MIGRATION. These are the transformations of the 20th century which we shall interrogate and reposition. Yet these groundbreaking events did not happen in a vacuum. As historians, we also think about the continent's rich traditions and histories prior to the 20th century. FICTION. NONFICTION. FILM. MUSIC. Far from being peripheral to political transformation, African creative arts advanced discourse on gender, technology, and environmental history within the continent and without. We will listen to African creative artists not only as creators, but as agents for change.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Getz, T. (PI)
;
Ayodele, M. (TA)
HISTORY 46N: Show and Tell: Creating Provenance Histories of African Art (AFRICAAM 46N, AFRICAST 46N)
Provenance refers to the chain of custody of a particular art object during its lifetime. Put another way, provenance refers to all the individuals, communities, and institutions who have owned (both legally and illegally), kept, stored, exhibited, displayed, managed, and sold an art object. Knowledge of provenance can both inflate and deflate the value of an art object and it can also shed light upon legal and ethical questions including assessing repatriation and restitution claims for African art objects. Furthermore, by telling the story of how a particular object moved through multiple pairs of hands, often over the course of centuries and across several continents, we gain nuanced appreciation of the social currency of artwork as well as of changing perceptions of aesthetic and monetary value, and insight into the extractive dynamics of colonialism and postcolonial global economies. For this class, you will have the unique opportunity to work first hand with an important African art collection in North America: the Richard H. Scheller Collection at Stanford University. You will select one object from the collection and create a detailed provenance history, documenting and detailing its origins, its movement across space and time, and its arrival to the Scheller collection in Silicon Valley. You will use archival materials from Scheller¿s collection, online databases and archives, and secondary literature. Your final project for the class will be to create a visual StoryMap that allows you to display your provenance history with narrative text and multimedia content. In this way, you will not only have completed a class assignment: you will also have constructed for posterity a remarkable hitherto unknown history of an important African art object.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
HISTORY 48: The Egyptians (AFRICAAM 30, CLASSICS 82, HISTORY 148)
This course traces the emergence and development of the distinctive cultural world of the ancient Egyptians over nearly 4,000 years. Through archaeological and textual evidence, we will investigate the social structures, religious beliefs, and expressive traditions that framed life and death in this extraordinary region. Students with or without prior background are equally encouraged.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
HISTORY 48S: African Voices: Literature and Arts in 20th Century South Africa (AFRICAAM 149)
How did South African Black intellectuals and artists utilize literature and other artistic forms to articulate their increasingly precarious position in the country's political landscape in the 20th century? What hopes and visions were captured through their works? Engaging with numerous sources ranging from speeches, newspapers, short stories, novels, music, film, paintings to photographs, we will explore what Ntongela Masilela calls "New African modernity"--a movement pioneered by different generations of Black intellectuals and artists. We will grapple with the notion of art as political, and the salience of Black women's works in contexts of double marginalization. This class lies at the intersection of intellectual, cultural, and literary histories.
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
HISTORY 50A: Colonial and Revolutionary America
(Same as
HISTORY 150A. 50A is 3 units; 150A is 5 units.) Survey of the origins of American society and polity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Topics: the migration of Europeans and Africans and the impact on native populations; the emergence of racial slavery and of regional, provincial, Protestant cultures; and the political origins and constitutional consequences of the American Revolution.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
HISTORY 54: The History of Ideas in America, Part I (to 1900) (AMSTUD 54)
(Same as
HISTORY 154. 54 is 3 units; 154 is 5 units.) How Americans considered problems such as slavery, imperialism, and sectionalism. Topics include: the political legacies of revolution; biological ideas of race; the Second Great Awakening; science before Darwin; reform movements and utopianism; the rise of abolitionism and proslavery thought; phrenology and theories of human sexuality; and varieties of feminism. Sources include texts and images.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
HISTORY 54B: The History of Ideas in America, Part II (AMSTUD 54B, AMSTUD 154B, HISTORY 154B)
This course explores intellectual life and culture in the United States during the twentieth century, examining the work and lives of social critics, essayists, artists, scientists, journalists, novelists, and sundry other thinkers. We will look at the life of the mind as a narrative of ongoing yet contested secularization and a series of debates about the meaning and nature of truth, knowing, selfhood, and the American democratic experience. Persistent themes include modernism and anti-modernism, shifts and changes in political liberalism and conservatism, disagreements about the role of the United States in the world, and the importance of distinctions based on race, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
HISTORY 54N: African American Women's Lives (AMSTUD 54N)
This course encourages students to think critically about historical sources and to use creative and rigorous historical methods to recover African American women's experiences, which often have been placed on the periphery of American history and American life.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-Gender, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Hobbs, A. (PI)
HISTORY 63N: The Feminist Critique: The History and Politics of Gender Equality (AMSTUD 63N, CSRE 63N, FEMGEN 63N)
This course explores the long history of ideas about gender and equality. Each week we read, dissect, compare, and critique a set of primary historical documents (political and literary) from around the world, moving from the 15th century to the present. We tease out changing arguments about education, the body, sexuality, violence, labor, politics, and the very meaning of gender, and we place feminist critics within national and global political contexts.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
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