This class examines the emergence of the U.S. as a world power since 1898, and considers both the international and domestic consequences of U.S. foreign relations. In one respect, the twentieth century was a strange time to become a global empire: it was the period when colonial systems centered in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Turkey collapsed, and new nations emerged throughout Africa and Asia. This class explores the changing strategies of military, economic, and political intervention that the U.S. pursued as colonization lost legitimacy. Within that framework, the class invites students to think about several questions: How did the idea and practice of empire change over the twentieth century? How did the United States relate to new visions of independence emerging in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? How did global interactions both inform and reflect racial ideology in the United States? Finally, how did international affairs transform U.S. politics and social movements?

This class examines the emergence of the U.S. as a world power since 1898, and considers both the international and domestic consequences of U.S. foreign relations. In one respect, the twentieth century was a strange time to become a global empire: it was the period when colonial systems centered in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Turkey collapsed, and new nations emerged throughout Africa and Asia. This class explores the changing strategies of military, economic, and political intervention that the U.S. pursued as colonization lost legitimacy. Within that framework, the class invites students to think about several questions: How did the idea and practice of empire change over the twentieth century? How did the United States relate to new visions of independence emerging in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? How did global interactions both inform and reflect racial ideology in the United States? Finally, how did international affairs transform U.S. politics and social movements?

This class examines the emergence of the U.S. as a world power since 1898, and considers both the international and domestic consequences of U.S. foreign relations. In one respect, the twentieth century was a strange time to become a global empire: it was the period when colonial systems centered in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Turkey collapsed, and new nations emerged throughout Africa and Asia. This class explores the changing strategies of military, economic, and political intervention that the U.S. pursued as colonization lost legitimacy. Within that framework, the class invites students to think about several questions: How did the idea and practice of empire change over the twentieth century? How did the United States relate to new visions of independence emerging in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? How did global interactions both inform and reflect racial ideology in the United States? Finally, how did international affairs transform U.S. politics and social movements?

This course provides a perspective on the role of information as a historical actor. Moving beyond common narratives of the progress of the information economy driven by technological factors, the course underscores the significance of what may be called the political economies of information. We will approach major works, dealing with the historical importance of information (Foucault, Cohn, Habermas) and simultaneously engages with the history of institutions to store and circulate information. We will emphasize the importance of value (social, political, economic) which is at the heart of information gathering and producing. In particular, we will discuss the rise and fall of institutions to store and circulate information. We will study the importance of information in historical processes such as imperialism and colonization, state building, propaganda, the Enlightenment, as well as the informational aspects of the rise of global NGOs and international organization, police and spying. Information may be accumulated or lost; it can be safeguarded or debased; it can confer power or undermine it. In the age of fake news, these are issues worthy of a closer interest.

This course looks at Europe's interactions with other world regions throughout the twentieth century. Over the course of roughly a hundred years, Europeans have shaped the fates of peoples living beyond the western world, for instance through the impact of two world wars, European colonialism, and the global Cold War. At the same time, European societies 'at home' were not left unaffected by these interactions. Even today, Europeans are facing the legacies of some of these histories in immigration and the politics of religion and secularism for example. The past century also saw a dramatic shift in Europe's position in the world - from dominance to a loss of influence in the shadow of the United States and more recently, China. The course spends significant time covering the histories of world regions other than Europe. It furthermore considers some interactions and exchanges between world regions from a social and cultural point of view. Because the class spans roughtly a century, the content has to remain introductory and general, although a very basic familiarity with 20th-century international history is helpful.

War, it is often forgotten, is powerfully reflected in the arts. This highly flexible student-driven seminar will examine the phenomenon. Each student will choose a topic and materials for us all to examine and then discuss after an interval of 1-2 weeks. With benefit of discussion they will write a paper 10pp maximum, summing up topic and reactions, as we seek broader understanding.

The material is very rich. Goya (1746-1829) Picasso ( 1881-1973) both dealt with war in ways that scholars have examined, as did John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) whose immense canvas “gassed” (1919) not yet received monographic treatment. Of musicians, Shostakovich (1906-1975) is very promising; sculptor and artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) is of an inexpressible profundity that takes us to issues of mourning. Novels of Zola (1840-1902) and Proust (1871-1922) are great literature that deals in places with military issues. Students are of course strongly encouraged to choose their own topics.

We will begin with several weeks on Vietnam, our understanding of which has been completely transformed by the pivotally important work of Lien-Hang Thuy Nguyen, Penn Grad and Professor at Columbia, who may join us. For the first two classes we should read a short play, “The Columnist” by David Auburn, about Joseph Alsop (1910-1989) a highly influential writer of the Vietnam era, and relative of the professor. That should get things started. Then dig into “The Centurions” (1960) by Jean Laterguy (1920-2011) an absorbing novel
During this time we will prepare our topic choices and roster.

All the arts fall in the ambit of this course. We will supply what you need about war. Our focus is what artists have made of it. Arts-focused students are encouraged to join.

This course explores the history of popular culture across a long durée of four centuries. We will chart key transformations in cultural forms, popular practices, and the meanings given to them. Throughout the semester we use a comparative method in examining popular culture in Europe, especially the early modern period, and in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will study many forms of print culture, drawing upon the remarkable primary materials in Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts. We will also explore visual culture (paintings, engravings, photographs, movies, television) and musical /sound cultures. Topics include: the concept and uses of ‘popular culture’; folklore and vernacular culture; popular print culture and readings habits; popular knowledge and practices of working-class people and people of color; leisure and sports; gender, sexuality, style, and fashion; cultural destruction and preservation; the emergence of mass media and mass culture. In addition, we will introduce students to some of the classic theoretical works on popular culture.

Global Blackface, Minstrelsy and Passing is an undergraduate seminar that will explore the performance of blackface across the world. We will look at the practice of "blacking up" in theater, opera, vaudeville and film through the Middle East, Africa, Europe, India, the Caribbean and put these historical practices in dialogue with British and American blackface performance. We will also look at how performers enlisted themselves or were hired for minstrelsy shows and how these translated around the world. The seminar will also explore the concept of passing, and whether it is just a matter of skin color, but also of language. This is a cultural history course that will also investigate constructions of blackness and whiteness around the world.

Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom, self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.

Open to junior honors candidates in history. Introduction to the study and analysis of historical phenomena. Emphasis on theoretical approaches to historical knowledge, problems of methodology, and introduction to research design and strategy. Objective of this seminar is the development of honors thesis proposal.