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HIST 481 Seminars

SPRING 2024

 

Adrian Chavana

HIST 481-901: Indigenous Borderlands in North America

As in-between spaces on the periphery of Indigenous, colonial, and national borders, borderlands represent a geographical and sociopolitical space where distinct peoples, cultures, and ideas converge. Centering Indigenous people as important historical actors in the shaping of North American borderlands, students will explore and think through some of the most pressing questions in Indigenous borderlands history by engaging with cutting-edge scholarship in this emerging subfield. Students will develop an original research paper in this is writing-intensive (W) course.

  

Jessica Herzogenrath

HIST 481-902: America’s World’s Fairs

Over the course of the semester we will explore America’s World’s Fairs, with an emphasis on the fairs held in the United States. World’s Fairs enjoyed the height of their popularity from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, welcoming millions of visitors from around the world. We will examine how World’s Fairs reflected both the values and anxieties of their host cities and countries. Potential themes for study include performance, architecture, exhibitions, labor, fair leadership, campaigns to secure the fairs, and participation by different groups of people. Students will develop an original research paper in this is writing-intensive (W) course.

 

Stephen Riegg

HIST 481-904: Europe on the Move in the 19th century

Human history is one of mobility – from region to region, continent to continent – yet the modern technologies, political ideologies, and economic realities of the nineteenth century rendered that era the period of particularly energetic European movement. From Europe’s western, northern, eastern, and southern corners, people of diverse backgrounds left their homes in search of something – refuge, opportunity, adventure, power – or a combination of these aims. In this capstone seminar for history majors, students will read several broad-ranging histories of modern European movements as well as a few topically chosen works on European colonization, commerce, religion, and other relevant themes of nineteenth-century migration and immigration. A key accent will be placed on the complicated encounters between newcomers and locals. Students will develop an original research paper in this is writing-intensive (W) course.

 

Jason Parker

HIST 481-905: The Global Cold War

This seminar explores the rise of the superpower conflict from the ashes of World War II in Europe to its spread into the far corners of the decolonizing world.  Students will spend the first half of the course becoming familiar with the scholarship on the Cold War and the “Third World” via classroom lecture and discussion, and the second half conducting research in primary and secondary sources to produce an essay of original scholarship on the topic. Students will develop an original research paper in this is writing-intensive (W) course.

 

Jonathan Brunstedt

HIST 481-906: Remembering (and Forgetting) War

This course looks at how societies have “remembered” war—through monuments, public holidays, commemorative rituals, reenactments, popular culture, and so on. More specifically, we will focus on how collective war memories have shaped and sustained notions of group identity. In the process, students will produce an original research paper, based on primary and secondary sources, that incorporates the theoretical insights gleaned from class readings and discussions. Students will develop an original research paper in this is writing-intensive (W) course.