Examine contact and conflict among peoples of various religions, cultures, and societies in the medieval and early modern periods. Explore the histories of the Latin Kingdoms of Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic Caliphates, paying special attention to the crusades, the position of religious minorities, and the role of trade and intellectural exchange. Learn to analyze a variety of different kinds of primary sources related to the themes of the course.

Examines the expansion of European imperial power during the nineteenth century, focusing upon developments in Asia and Africa. Explores the reasons for the renewal of European imperialism with a focus on the role of exploration, profit, religion, technology, and violence. Focuses on Asian and African responses to European imperial expansion, and the impact that colonial rule had on structures of class, gender, and race. Restriction: Not available for credit to students who have taken HIST 3008. 

Examines challenges to European colonialism during the twentieth century. Explores structures of colonial rule and how they affected class, gender, and race relations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Analyses the rise of anti-colonial movements and their challenges to imperial rule, within the context of the global crises of the years between 1914 and 1945. Concludes with examinations of the struggles for national independence after the Second World War, and the legacies of colonialism.

Examines the political, social, and cultural history of France during a century of upheaval. Topics to be covered include the Dreyfus Affair; the First World War; culture and society between the wars; the Great Depression and the era of the Popular Front; the rise of French fascism; the Second World War and the Vichy regime; collaboration and resistance; postwar social and cultural change; intellectuals and politics; the government of General de Gaulle; and recent debates over immigration and identity. France’s role as a colonial and postcolonial power is also a central theme in the course.

Offers a comprehensive introduction to the First World War, examining its causes, course, and aftermath within a military, political and social context. It focuses on how the war was experienced on both the war and home fronts, by soldiers and civilians alike.

Beginning with the 1871 unification of Germany and ending with the Third Reich’s defeat in the Second World War, this course explores numerous themes, including: political and cultural innovation, diplomacy, violence, gender relations, everyday life under democracy and dictatorship, memory and commemoration, war and genocide, and the changing place of Germany within Europe. We discuss the fractures and divisions within Imperial German society, the home and fighting fronts of the First World War, the short-lived but influential Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich, and the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” in Occupied Europe. 

This course examines German history from the end of the Second World War to the present. Beginning with the Allied occupation of Germany in 1945, the course investigates the formation of two separate states: the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. Using the tools of social, cultural, political, and gender history, the course considers themes such as: everyday life under communism and capitalism, Cold War politics, protest and terrorism, the memory of Holocaust crimes, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the many challenges facing Germany in the post-unification era. 

Examines the evolution of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991. Topics to be examined include: the debate over the origins of the Cold War; the creation of opposing alliance systems in Europe; the Asian dimensions of the Cold War; the significance of the Cold War for Africa and Latin America; the rise and fall of détente; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Attention is paid to the social and cultural impact of the Cold War. 

Studies the impact of the Catholic Reformation on Baroque Rome, the end of Papal Rome with the unification of the Italian nation, the urban expansion of the late nineteenth century, and Rome's emergence as the capital of Mussolini's New Empire. The creation of the Vatican City State is studied, and contemporary Roman life and politics will be experienced. Normally taught on location.

As the decades of faith in Enlightenment reason gave way to the emotional backlash of the Romantics, Rome provided a context for many of the aims of the new generation: the balance between Classicism and Romanticism, between the ruins of civilization and the struggle for a new political order, between nature and the imagination, between the past and the future. Designed as an interdisciplinary exploration of these subjects as they manifested themselves in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rome, this course considers literature, music, art and philosophy as forces of innovation that helped shape the experience of social and cultural transformation. By visiting, seeing, reading and listening to the new styles of expression embodied by Romanticism, we explore the political issues central to the new aesthetic that inspired poets and patriots in Rome’s Revolution of 1848. Normally taught on location. 

Examines the politics, society and culture of Italy from 1945 to the present. Normally taught on location.

Beginning with an examination of the late medieval and Renaissance papacy, this course focuses on the role of the papacy in and its response to the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The course gives special attention to Rome as the catalyst, locus and expression of reform. Normally taught on location. 

Early modern London was an exceptional city in many ways and it played a unique and pivotal part in the history of England, Europe and increasingly during this period, in a global context. This is an advanced level course designed to explore the nature of London and Londoners from 1485-1714. Normally taught on location.

Surveys major governance, social and cultural themes of British history for the period 1485-1688. Explores religious, political, dynastic, economic, intellectual, and social transformations in England (and, to a lesser extent, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) during the Tudor and Stuart eras. Topics include: the rise of the Tudor state; the nature of English society; the English Reformation; overseas exploration, trade, and settlement; the coming of the Stuart monarchy; the Scientific Revolution; the Civil Wars and Interregnum; the Glorious Revolution. Not available for credit to students who have taken HIST 3170, HIST 3202, HIST 3204, or HIST 3242 . 

Surveys major governance, social and cultural themes of British history for the period 1688-1830. Explores religious, political, dynastic, economic, intellectual, and social transformations in England, Scotland, and Ireland during the reign of Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs. Topics include: The Glorious Revolution; the unions of England, Scotland, and Ireland; the Enlightenment; industrialization; eighteenth-century politics; the quest for empire; the American and French Revolutions; the Napoleonic Wars. Not available for credit to students who have taken HIST 3170 or HIST 3242 . 

Examines popular religion and magic in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe and official efforts to transform "popular culture". Emphasizes the medieval inquisitions against heresy (twelfth to fifteenth centuries) and especially the phenomenon of European witch-hunting (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). Explanations of the causes of the witch-hunt, its victims and eventual decline are highlighted.

Studies society and culture in Europe, especially Italy, from the mid fourteenth century to about 1530. This was one of Europe’s greatest periods of intellectual and cultural ferment and creativity, marked by great achievements in commerce, education (humanism) and the arts. It was also a period of considerable upheaval, including the plague, political intrigue, warfare, economic and social crises, witch-hunting and the devastating effects of the conquest of the Americas. The course will also examine the lives of women and men in the urban environment.

Examines the ways in which the lives of women from Europe, Africa, and the Americas were shaped by "Atlantic World" experiences from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. Considers how race and socio-economic/legal status influenced female experiences of patriarchy, sexuality, work, and agency by placing them into the broader social, cultural, political, and religious contexts of the early modern Atlantic World. 

This course explores the fresh emphasis that early modern Europeans placed on learning, the exploration of nature, and new critiques of the societies in which they lived.  The Scientific Revolution, social activism (such as the antislavery movement and early feminism), and the rise of republicanism are examined in the light of contemporary thought and social currents.

Focuses on the European home fronts of the First World War, a conflict George Kennan termed the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century. Historians increasingly refer to the First World War as the first “total war”, as entire societies were scaled toward supporting the massive armies on the fighting fronts. The course takes students deep into the everyday experiences of European men and women on the home fronts.

Provides a thematic survey of the Nazi destruction of the European Jews. Examines the ideological underpinnings of the genocide, the policies leading up to and including the so-called “Final Solution” of the “Jewish problem”, perpetrator motivations, Jewish responses to persecution and survival strategies in the camps. Also explores how the Holocaust unfolded in various European countries and the responses of nations, institutions and individuals to the mass murder of the Jews. Concludes with an examination of the post-war trials of war criminals and considers the definition of genocide after the Holocaust. Primary documents are discussed in the lectures, and several on-going historiographical are debates examined during class discussions. 

Examines the international history of the period between 1919 and 1941. Topics to be covered include the Paris Peace Settlement of 1919; the attempt to rebuild the international system in the 1920s; the impact of the Great Depression; the evolution of alliances in the 1930s; the role of ideology in international relations; military and strategic influences on foreign policy; and the significance of both intelligence-gathering and public opinion. The course will focus on the foreign policies of Great Britain, France, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States.

From the crisis of Liberal Italy in the First World War, this course studies the rise and decline of Mussolini's Fascism and the establishment of the Christian Democratic hegemony after 1945. The challenge of Italian Communism is examined as are the policies of the Vatican in the twentieth century.

Examines the changing meanings and representations of social status in Britain during the ‘long eighteenth century,’ circa 1688-1832. Considers whether (and to what degree) Georgian Britons may be regarded as “a polite and commercial people”. Topics include: rank and status; gender roles; manners, politeness, and emulation; consumerism and consumption; mercantilism, trade, and the pursuit of wealth; the ‘middling sort’ and the rise of the middle class; urbanization and non-landed elites; early industrialization.