What makes an economy grow? This question has been asked – and answered – many times over in the modern era. From Adam Smith’s classic Wealth of Nations (1776) to today’s political leaders, many have debated the ingredients necessary for a nation to prosper, or policies to promote growth. Some point to the need for fiscal responsibility, others an educated labor force, or to tariffs, natural resources, and the right laws. This seminar explores the deep history of this problem of economic growth. Students will read works by economists, social scientists, and historians that present different theories for why some nations develop faster than others. With case studies from across the globe, we will tackle topics like why Europe industrialized first, or the paradox of why the abundance of natural resources does not necessarily contribute to long-lasting economic development. This course also asks students to think critically about the metrics used to measure “success” and “failure” across nations, as well as how such comparisons between societies have been mobilized to legitimize imperial expansion, human exploitation, environmental destruction, or political repression. By discussing how governments, corporate interests, and individual actors have implemented strategies to increase national wealth, students will also be asked to grapple with some of the consequences of economic growth for the environment, human welfare, and social inequality. *Students may fulfill one geographic requirement for the History major or minor with this course. The specific requirement fulfilled will be determined by the topic of the research paper.

This course will explore Egypt’s impact on the world in several historical eras – the ancient past and its unparalleled legacy; the nineteenth century and nationalism; the twentieth century’s wars, peace and music and the twenty-first centuries lessons in revolution. We will examine European Egyptomania and Orientalism in the 19th century, Afrocentrism’s ambitions for Egypt, and Egypt’s centrality to pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. And we will explore the history as Egypt’s writers, filmmakers, musicians and poets have imagined it from the nineteenth century to the present.

What exactly is justice? What is its relationship to law? To what extent is it culturally contingent? How do ideas about justice change over time? This course will examine different theories and representation of justice in European Middle Ages (ca. 500-1500).
We will begin by looking at aspects of dispute resolution in the early middle ages, when there was little centralized government. This was the heyday of feud, ordeal, and the law of talion, when law was largely unwritten and disputes were resolved informally by the community. We will then look at how law professionalized and how ideas of justice changed as formal legal institutions and centralized governments developed. Readings will be drawn from a variety of sources, including the so-called barbarian codes, stories of feud, accounts of crime, charters of rights, lawbooks, and trial records.

This course examines the socio-legal history of family separation in the United States. From the period of slavery to the present-day, the United States has a long history of separating and remaking families. Black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, and immigrant communities have navigated the precarious nature of family separation and the legal regime of local, state, and federal law that substantiated it. In this course, we will trace how families have navigated domains of family separation and the reasoning that compelled such separation in the first place. Through an intersectional focus that embraces race, class, disability, and gender, we will underline who has endured family separation and how such separation has remade the very definition of family in the United States.

This course investigates book histories and the worlds of readers, printers, publishers, and libraries in the Americas, from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Queerness has held a variety of meanings and queer life has looked different over the past several centuries of United States history, but it certainly isn’t new. This course traces queer existence—in terms of both gender and sexuality—from the seventeenth century through the present, and foregrounds lived experience, identity formation, community development, and political consciousness. We will attend closely to how race, class, immigration status, and ability shape and are shaped by queer life, and engage with current topics of concern in the field of queer history, like the rural/urban divide, capitalism and neoliberalism, and queer memory.

In this course, students will examine the origins of the March on Washington movement in the 1940s, biographies of the March organizers, and the ways the March has been memorialized over the past six decades. By exploring the dynamics that contributed to the demonstrations, students will delve into primary source documents, read secondary literature, and write their own article-length research papers based on the course material. The course will also examine the ways documentary film footage, photography, music, and media coverage of the March has contributed to understandings and misreadings of this moment in Civil Rights history.

This course discusses the political and social implications of sex, race and personal relationships in U.S. political and social history. In this class, we examine how so-called ‘emotional,’ human experiences such as falling in love, engaging in a sexual relationship, marriage, coming out of the closet, and other deeply personal events over the course of a lifetime are shaped by political, legal and historical forces. This course will examine the history of marriage rights, claims to ethnic and racial identity, activism among multiracial people in the United States, sex education in public schools, and debates about marriage and family rights in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This course examines the legal history of the United States to illuminate one of the most urgent issues of our time: immigration. From the late nineteenth century, immigration to the United States changed the legal landscape of the country by challenging the bounds of national citizenship, “separate but equal,” Congressional powers, home ownership, and an array of other topics. In this course, we will trace how immigrants challenged existing orders of their time through major state and federal supreme court cases, and the subsequent aftermaths of their trials. In addition to considering the key legal issues at stake in these cases, this course compels us to consider the dynamics of race, disability, gender, and labor that define the construction of US law in the context of immigration.

The meaning of culture can sometimes best be understood through a look at its popular traditions and the routines of everyday life. This course will grapple with issues of ethnicity, political conflict, and identity in the Middle East by analyzing the culture produced for and consumed by a wide spectrum of the general public in different countries. Political cartoons, photography, novels, film, music, dance, and other modes of cultural expression will be used to explore the historical roots of the political anxieties and social conventions common to many modern Middle Eastern communities. In this way, we will recast studies of politics through an understanding of identity and culture.