printer friendly pageHISTORY 261G: Presidents and Foreign Policy in Modern History (INTNLREL 173)
Nothing better illustrates the evolution of the modern presidency than the arena of foreign policy. This class will examine the changing role and choices of successive presidential administrations over the past century, examining such factors as geopolitics, domestic politics, the bureaucracy, ideology, psychology, and culture. Students will be encouraged to think historically about the institution of the presidency, while examining specific case studies, from the First World War to the conflicts of the 21st century. Non-matriculating students are asked to consult the instructor before enrolling in the course.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors:
Rakove, R. (PI)
HISTORY 262A: Taylor Swift and Millennial America
Whether you identify as a Swiftie or "grumble on about how she can't sing," it is impossible to deny that Taylor Swift has become a cultural, economic, and political powerhouse. This course will place Swift in historical context within the modern United States, exploring the forces that enabled her rise to superstardom as well as those that shape her loyal millennial and Gen-Z fanbase. Topics include the politics of country music; the roles of globalization and technology in the rapidly changing music industry; feminist readings, and feminist critiques, of Swift's career; and the attempts of various communities to claim Swift as their own, including Gaylors and the alt-right. Fans and non-fans alike are welcome, as our historical objective is to explore Swift, the world that made her, and the world that she is creating at a critical distance.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors:
Iker, T. (PI)
HISTORY 262B: The Roots of Gendered Labor: Women and Work in American History (AMSTUD 262B, FEMGEN 262B)
This class will explore the long, tangled history of women's labor in North America. Beginning with gendered labor practices among Native Americans, West Africans, and Europeans in the seventeenth century, this class will proceed thematically and chronologically through the early twentieth century. We will consider the deep roots of gendered labor in American history, asking how categories of race and class, freedom and enslavement, and immigration status have structured female labor. We will also examine the ways in which social transformations such as industrialization and urbanization, as well as changes in the economic, political, and sexual order shaped the experiences of laboring women. Reading secondary sources alongside a rich array of primary sources, including images and songs, we will consider the deep continuities and wrenching changes in the meanings of women's work over time.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 262E: Extremism in America, from the Ku Klux Klan to January 6
(262E is 5 units; 62E is 3 units.)This course is a historical analysis of extremism in the United States from Reconstruction through the present day, looking at such figures and movements and the KKK, the First Red Scare, Father Coughlin and the Christian Front, McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, the Aryan Nations, and the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers of the present. Students will explore the following questions: what do we mean by extremism? What are the material, cultural, political, and intellectual conditions that lay the groundwork for extremism? What is the relationship between political and religious extremism? Is there a connecting thread spanning extremist movements across the nation's history--a paranoid style or authoritarian personality, perhaps? With these guiding questions, students will be introduced to primary sources along with scholarly literature--classic texts and new, groundbreaking research--to equip them with a foundational knowledge of the long history of extremism in the United States.
Last offered: Summer 2022
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 263D: Junipero Serra
Why is Junipero Serra considered a representative figure of California? How have assessments of Serra evolved over the last 200 years? Why does his name appear so often on our campus? In this course we will consider these and other questions in terms of Spanish empire, Native American history, California politics of memory and commemoration, among other approachs. Requirements include weekly reading, class discussion, a field trip to Carmel Mission, short writing assignments, and a formal debate on the ethics naming university or public buildings after historical figures with contested pasts. Taught in English.
Last offered: Autumn 2016
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 269: Thinking About Capitalism (HISTORY 369)
What is capitalism? An economic and social system that maximizes both individual freedom and social good? An exploitative arrangement dependent on the subordination of labor to capital? A natural arrangement guided by a munificent invisible hand? Or a finely tuned mechanism requiring state support? This class offers undergraduate and graduate students a forum to consider these questions by reading selected works by historians, sociologists, economists, and other thinkers. Together we will work our way through primary sources from the twentieth century, using them to examine how capitalism has been understood, conceptualized, defended, and attacked. We will study the history of debates about markets, the state, and social organization, taking capitalism as both an economic system and a culture. Permission number required to enroll. Please contact Professor Burns at jenniferburns@stanford.edu to request permission to enroll in the course.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-ER, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Burns, J. (PI)
HISTORY 271B: US Latinx History (CHILATST 271B, HISTORY 371B)
This course introduces scholarship on Latinx history, a field of critical importance to U.S. History, American studies, Latinx studies, ethnic studies, Latin American studies, and African American history. In order to cover a plethora of Latinx experiences, it will focus on Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Central American, and other Latinx communities from the 1840s into present, though it does not adhere to a strict chronological time frame. This course attempts to show the hemispheric nature of Latinx history. It also emphasizes a notion of Latinidad as a contingent historical process. Key themes which survey its complexity include the nature and legacies of imperialism; the politics of peoplehood and citizenship; trans-border connections; the importance of race, class, and gender in defining politics and culture; the emergence of ethnic nationalisms; and the development of urban enclaves. In particular, our class will focus on linking these dynamics to present-day issues and debates.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Regalado, P. (PI)
HISTORY 273D: Caudillos and Dictators from Bolívar to Bolsonaro: Modern South America
Latin American history provides key insight into the origins and resurgence of authoritarianism as well as various forms of political and social resistance. Consequently, this course surveys the major social, economic, political, and cultural trends that shaped modern South American history. We will examine the nation-states forged in the aftermath of early-nineteenth-century independence movements, their diverse peoples, and how their development was shaped by US imperialism and intervention. We will analyze the following themes: liberalism vs. conservatism; modernization and neocolonialism ('order and progress'); the rise of nationalism and populism; industrialization and the environment; (im)migration and urbanization; and neoliberal reform. Special emphasis is placed on racial and gender inequality and the struggle for both national and individual self-determination.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 274A: The Historical Archaeology of Latin America (ARCHLGY 160, CSRE 160A)
How has the study of past material cultures contributed to our comprehension of the Iberian colonial experience in the New World? How has an archaeology of the recent past been presented to the public and made socially relevant in contemporary Latin American nations? This course invites students to address these questions in the light of current Latin American thought, and to gain innovative perspectives on the different processes through which archaeological knowledge participates in the formation and transformation of cultural, social, and racial identities in present-day Latin America. Exploring a wide array of scholarly literature--principally produced in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico--this course will offer detailed insight into the achievements, limitations, possibilities, and future challenges of Latin American historical archaeology. Through this course, students will be familiarized with some of the main topics that have been approached in Latin America, which range from the study of cultural contact in early colonial settlements to the development of forensic archaeology as a therapeutic instrument facilitating the remembrance of a traumatic past. Class discussions will also delve into rich archaeological evidence testifying to the development of specific social spaces and categories, such as maroons, colonial borderlands, or gentrified households in republican urban centers. The careful analysis of each one of these highly varied topics, as described in local archaeological literature, will contribute to a better understanding of how the politics of cultural heritage plays out across Latin America.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
HISTORY 278B: The Historical Ecology of Latin America (HISTORY 378)
This seminar explores the ways in which access to natural resources has translated into political and economic power in Latin America and the Caribbean, from the colonial period to the present. We will examine how state-building projects (colonialism, capitalism, socialism) have used natural resources as a tool to assert power and legitimacy in the region and on the world stage. We will also explore how Latin American and Caribbean thinkers and activists have offered some of the earliest critiques of capitalism based on the region's environmental exploitation. How has the long history of resource extraction and resistance played out in Latin America and the Caribbean? In what ways have indigenous and local knowledge been overlooked, even as that knowledge informed scientific innovation or management techniques over time? How can environmental history reveal new perspectives on the history of colonialism, inequality, and resistance in the region? Case studies range from hurricanes in the Caribbean to the fight of the Indigenous Cofán against oil spills in Ecuador. Students will learn how to think and write like historians through participation in class discussions, regular short response papers, and creative research toward a final project.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
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