The Renaissance was a defining era in European history, the age of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, crucial in the formation of Europe’s culture and identity. In this course we will examine the philosophers, writers, artists, and scientists of this era, as well as the political and social climate in which they lived and worked. We will give particular attention to the humanist movement, university culture, revolutionary changes in the visual arts, science, and religion. Readings will include key primary sources from the Renaissance era as well as the writings of modern historians.

This course is designed for junior and senior history majors in any regional or thematic concentrations. Using case studies from around the world, it will explore the roles of history and historians in shaping national and ‘ethnic’ outlooks and identities; in offering ‘lessons’ to guide policy makers in a variety of diplomatic, political, and social contexts; and in contributing to the numerous controversies surrounding the most appropriate ways to remember and represent painful events in a society’s past.
Because nations, regimes, and interest groups invariably want to believe that ‘history is on their side,’ they typically produce partisan narratives which use historical evidence selectively and subjectively. How effective have historians been—or can they be—in countering egregious ‘myths’ about the past, in uncovering ‘silences’ in the historical record, and in acknowledging that the same ‘objective’ events can leave different memories and carry different meanings for the various parties involved. Does fuller knowledge of the past constrain or empower our capacities to deal with challenges in the present and future?
In examining these and other ‘meta-questions’ through a series of specific case studies, you will almost certainly learn something about contested histories in parts of the world you may not be familiar with, but which should help you situate your own regional interests in a wider comparative framework. During the last five weeks of the course, students will have an opportunity to research a topic of their choice and to present their findings to the class.

Business, Economic and Financial History plays a crucial role today in informing the views of business leaders, policy makers, reformers and public intellectuals. This seminar provides students with the opportunity to acquire a command of the key elements of this important intellectual field. The seminar format enables us to do this engagingly through reading and discussion. Students acquire a knowledge of the fundamental texts and controversies. Each meeting focuses on one foundational debate and provides a means to be up to date with the insights gleaned from rigorous economic history. We will examine twelve important debates and students will be asked to write a paper. The debates will include such questions as: What is growth and how can it be measured? What caused the "great divergence" in long run development among countries? How can we "understand" the rise and fall of slavery and its long shadow today? What is globalization and when did it begin? Did the Gold Standard and interwar fiscal and monetary policy orthodoxy cause the great depression? How can we explain the evolution of inequality in the very long run?

This class develops a transnational and global approach to the rise of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. In a comparative framework, the class traces the rise of abolitionism in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, examining the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the rise of colonialism in Africa, and the growth of forced labor in the wake of transatlantic slave trade. We will deal with key debates in the literature of African, Atlantic and Global histories, including the causes and motivations of abolitionism, the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of forced labor in Africa, the historical ties between abolitionism and the early stages of colonialism in Africa, the flow of indentured laborers from Asia to the Americas in the wake of the slave trade. This class is primarily geared towards the production of a research paper. *Depending on the research paper topic, History Majors and Minors can use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, Latin America or Africa requirement.*

This research seminar provides students with instruction in basic historical methods and an opportunity to conduct collaborative primary source research into the University of Pennsylvania's historic connections to slavery. After an initial orientation to archival research, students will plunge in to doing actual research at the Kislak Center, the University Archives, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and various online sources. During the final month of the semester, students will begin drafting research reports and preparing for a public presentation of the work. During the semester, there will be opportunities to collaborate with a certified genealogist, a data management and website expert, a consultant on public programming, and a Penn graduate whose research has been integral to the Penn Slavery Project.

This intensive research seminar explores the US war in Vietnam, its contestation, and its afterlives. Students will conduct independent archival research to produce an original essay on a topic of their choice. Papers might explore the political origins and consequences of the war; the catastrophic destruction that the war wrought in Vietnam; the relationship of the war to race, class, and gender inequalities in the trans-Pacific and the United States; the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s; the war’s devastating health and environmental consequences in the US and Vietnam; the experiences of Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, and US soldiers who fought in Vietnam; US-sponsored programs for capitalist development that formed part of the war; the role of Vietnamese and US religious communities in the war; the GI movement that resisted both the war and racism in the military; the role of US scientists, social scientists and corporations in facilitating the war effort, and the reckoning they faced; the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees across the Pacific and the United States after 1975; postwar initiatives for restitution, justice, and reconciliation; and disability politics that emerged from the war.
History majors may use this course to fulfill requirements for the Diplomatic, Intellectual, or Political History concentration, depending on the topic of the research paper.

As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches in 2026, the question of how we commemorate it seems a whole lot more complex than it did in 1976, when the nation celebrated its 200th birthday. Partly, this complexity lies in the very different views of the American Revolution held by academic historians and the wider public. While most scholars have spent the last forty years researching the Revolution through the eyes of ordinary people, the public’s appetite is often for stories about America’s great heroes and Founding Fathers. This research seminar will introduce you to these competing viewpoints, giving you the opportunity to conduct original research into Revolutionary-era Philadelphians, whose lives are documented in the rich collections of manuscripts held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. At the end of semester you will have written an original research paper, grounded in primary sources you have unearthed at the Historical Society. In doing so you will confront some of the most important questions preoccupying Revolutionary historians today: What can these individual stories tell us about the American Revolution? How can we reconcile their very different narratives? And how can we interpret them for those Americans who haven’t had the opportunity to read them first-hand?

As recent public debates have indicated, the historical interpretation of archives, objects, monuments, and sites is not fixed or static but the result of social, political, and cultural contexts and decisions about what to communicate to a variety of audiences. Throughout this course we will be thinking about history as a collection of stories about the past. These stories require narrative choices by their tellers, and they are connected to a range of sites, practices, and scholars beyond the confines of university history departments. Our big questions will include: Who is history for/who is excluded? Which stories are being told? Why is the past of interest to the ‘public’? While many class sessions will focus on discussion of these concepts, the course will also involve learning about methods and practices in different fields of public history and will include visits to museums, libraries, and other historical sites. These visits will take place at Penn, wider Philadelphia, and (virtually) across the Atlantic (e.g. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Independence National Historical Park, Ghana Museums and Monuments Board). All will involve interactions with public history professionals whose insights into the field will contribute to students’ understanding of the many ways in which people can ‘do history’.

Western thinkers from the ancient Greeks to the present have speculated about what the ideal human society would look like. We can study the resultant utopias as works of literature, philosophy, religion, psychology or political science; we must understand them in their historical contexts. This seminar will take a multidisciplinary approach to utopian thought from Plato's Republic to the ecological utopias of the 1980s. Works to be examined include More's Utopia; seventeenth century scientific utopias like Bacon's New Atlantis; the political theory of Rousseau (Social Contract); essays of the French utopian socialists and Hawthorne's version of the Brook Farm experiment; Morris' News from Nowhere; its American counterpart, Bellamy's Looking Backward; Gilman's feminist blueprint, Herland; BF Skinner's psychological utopia, Walden Two; and the utopian science fiction of LeGuin. Huxley's dystopia, Brave New World, will be set against his later utopia, Island.

Using as our guides the works of Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Baldassare Castiglione, Antonio de Sosa, Elias al-Musili, and many others, this seminar will analyze the social mutations, religious confrontations, political conflicts, cultural productions and circulation of books, ideas and goods that characterized the Mediterranean world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Based on close readings of primary and secondary sources, this seminar will focus on the study of the main transformations—political, economic, religious, cultural, and literary—in the early modern Mediterranean world. Students will also be introduced to and learn to analyze original materials from the Library’s Kislak Center, where the class will meet, including early modern editions of books we will discuss, maps, ephemera, and manuscript documents. *History Majors will have the opportunity to write a 15-page paper to fulfill the Major research requirement*