Brand New History Subjects Offered in Spring 2021!

21H.186 – Nature and Environment in China

Focuses on the late imperial period with forays into the modern area. Explores how Chinese states and people related to and shaped their environments, which, in turn, shaped China. Considers the degree to which China’s long environmental history has integrated with global trends and ponders the historical experiences and precedents we bring to today’s environmental challenges. Explores the diverse ways in which scholars study China’s environmental history and conceptions of nature, including the use of digital humanities tools for visualizing data and analyzing geography.

Offered: T EVE 7-10; Virtual
For more information contact Prof. Tristan Brown.

21H.187 – US Environmental Governance: from National Parks to the Green New Deal

Explores the interwoven threads of politics, economics, and the environment in the 20th century.  Examines topics such as preservation, conservation, national park creation, federal projects, infrastructure, economic growth, hydrocarbon society, international development, nuclear power, consumer rights, public health crises, environmentalism, Earth Day, globalization, sustainability, and climate change.  Studies how politics, economics, and environment converged in modern U.S. history, the “Green New Deal” and how its role promoting economic growth conflicts with its commitments to environmental management, and the emergence of the environmental movement.

Offered: TR 11-12:30; Virtual
For more information contact Prof. Megan Black.

21H.330 – Ancient Empires: Persians and Greeks in Antiquity 

Explores interactions between Greeks and Persians in the Mediterranean and Near East from the Archaic Period to the Hellenistic Age, and works to illuminate the interface between these two distinct yet complementary cultures. Examines the general narrative of Greco-Persian history, from the foundation of the Achaemenid Empire in the middle of the sixth century BCE to the Macedonian conquest of Persia some 250 years later. Discusses how contact between Persia and the Greeks in antiquity has influenced discourse about the opposition between East and West in the modern world. Students examine archaeological, epigraphical, numismatic, and literary materials from a variety of sources including Greek historiography, tragedy, and oratory; Persian royal inscriptions and administrative documents; and the Hebrew Bible.

Offered TR 11-12:30; Virtual
For more information contact Dr. Alex Forte.

21H.388/988 – Global Commodities, American Dreams

Explores how American actors and institutions got the raw materials that built the nation. Approaches commodities as a lens through which to understand a more specific relationship between the United States and the wider world in political, economic, and environmental terms, and examines a global cartography of commodities, resources, and other “stuff” that became enmeshed in American life. Examines materials like sugar, cotton, wheat, bananas, rubber, aluminum, petroleum, uranium, drugs, and others, to trace a pattern of global resource exploitation back to sites of policymaking and consumption in the United States. Explores interconnections between human society and the non-human environment, troubling the boundary often understood to divide them. Includes themes of US empire, environment, labor, consumption, modernity, race, gender, class, and transnationalism. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

Offered: W EVE 7-10; Virtual
For more information contact Prof. Megan Black.