The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to think deliberately about the kinds of work that are truly essential and the lives of people who do that work. This research seminar invites students to explore the history of farmworkers who produce our food, and the twentieth-century origins of today’s mobilizations for health and safety protections; labor, civil, and political rights; and cultural recognition. Students can explore a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: the history of farmworker unions; their relationship to other movements in the US and abroad, from the civil rights movement to the Chicano movement to the Cuban Revolution; the experiences of immigrant workers from the Philippines, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and the role of US immigration policy in their lives; the experience of US citizens from Puerto Rico in mainland agriculture and the role of imperial governance in shaping labor migration; the experience of African Americans and their place in a history that often focuses on Mexican Americans; environmental and health organizing; legislative and legal strategies to obtain rights denied agricultural workers in federal law; artistic, musical, and cultural production; or the relationship between consumers and the workers who produce their food.

Life histories provide engaging and challenging ways to encounter the past. This course explores the advantages and limitations of biography and microhistory as genres of historical writing by focusing on individuals and communities whose stories illuminate and reconfigure broader themes in early Atlantic and African diasporic history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Students will consider case studies of figures such as Oluadah Equiano, Queen Nanny of the Maroons, and Nat Turner alongside methodological writings by historians such as Jill Lepore, Wendy Anne Warren, and Marisa Fuentes in order to understand how scholars make use of individual and collective life histories to construct arguments and narratives about the past. Major themes include slavery and emancipation, migration, empire, gender, sexuality, and religion. Students will work collaboratively to produce a wiki composed of short biographical entries.

Korean history in the latter half of the twentieth century was anything but ordinary. The 1945 liberation quickly turned into national division, the Korean War, and escalating Cold War tensions that continue till today. We will examine both North and South Koreas at the intersection of three intersecting contexts - postwar, Cold War, and division - which are fundamental to understanding inter-Korean and the two Koreas' relations with the world today. This course explores key issues, including living memories and experiences of the Korean War, freedom, national family planning, economic development, revolutions, anti-communism, and personality cults. We will conclude by thinking through possible prospects for peace and reunification in Korea and the region.

Underneath the grandeur of empires, war, revolutions, history eventually is about people’s life. This seminar explores how the boundaries of private life in China intersect with the public arena and how such an intersection has significantly re-shaped Chinese private life between the 16th century and the present. The first half of the seminar will explore how the private realm in late imperial China was defined and construed by Confucian discourses, architectural design, moral regulation, cultural consumption, and social network. Moving into the twentieth century, the remaining part of the seminar will examine how the advent of novel concepts such as modernity and revolution restructured the private realm, particularly in regard to the subtopics outlined above. Organizing questions include: How did female chastity become the center of a public cult which then changed the life paths of countless families? How did the practice of female foot-binding intersect with marriage choices, household economy, and social status? How did print culture create a new space for gentry women to negotiate the boundaries between their inner quarters and the outside world? What was the ideal and reality of married life in late imperial China? How did people’s life change when the collective pursuit for Chinese modernity placed romantic love, freedom to marry and divorce at the center of public debates? How was “Shanghai modern” related to the emerging middle class life style as evidenced in advertisement posters? How has the ideal of gender equality been re-interpreted and realized under the Communist regime? How have the current market reforms reformulated the contours of private life in China?

In 1918 the Middle East experienced a refugee crisis of unknown dimensions. Famine, poverty, and a devastating influenza epidemic devastated urban and rural communities alike. At the same time, the imperial powers who had won the Great War began shaping the new contours of the Middle East. The lines drawn and disputed have since become the sources of destructive conflicts, impassioned debates, and endless suffering.

Our course explores the myriad markers of national identity and belonging in an era that often imposed unnatural barriers between people of different faiths and ethnicities. In particular, it focuses on the experiences of those who did not share the dominant ethno-linguistic and religious identity of states in which they lived – in other words, minorities. How did people whose leaders did not control the institutions of power protect their rights and interests? In what ways did they try to negotiate their legal participation in the creation of modern nation-states in the Middle East? What were the obstacles strewn on their paths that impeded political inclusion and equality?

These questions remain central to understanding the turmoil and deep wounds that Middle Eastern peoples still carry within them. Our course strives to understand the forces of communal cohesion as well as the causes of national disintegration. Nationalists of whatever breed have often based their romantic notions of community on land, language, religion, or ethnicity and have collided over ownership of territory and the right to sovereignty. Nationalist ideologies did not want to accommodate every competing faith, ethnicity, and culture, but rather to contain and circumvent them. By articulating their beliefs, many nationalists adopted at once a statement of inclusion and a policy of exclusion that frequently led to internal strife and external conflict in their communities - conflicts that are played out in the Middle East today.

We will look at how institutions of nation-building enabled the social construction of faux and forced homogenous identities that defied reality and reinforced dominant prejudices and minority disempowerment. In other words, we will try to understand what it meant to be a minority in the Middle East during two turbulent centuries.

This course traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement from its earliest stirrings in the 1st half of the twentieth-century to the boycotts, sit-ins, school desegregation struggles, freedom rides and marches of the 1950s and 1960s, and beyond. Among the question we will consider are: What inspired the Civil Rights movement, when does it begin and end, and how did it change American life? Readings will include both historical works and first-hand accounts of the movement by participants.

This course explores how the American Civil War and Reconstruction have been remembered and memorialized. Students will learn about the divergent narratives of the history of that era, trace why and how they spread, and examine how the conflicting memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction shape American politics and culture today. Through analysis of books, articles, films, social media, monuments, and protests we will seek to understand why Americans continue to struggle over the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Students will participate in discussions, conduct historical research, and write a 15-page research paper examining the history and collective memory of an extant or recently removed Civil War or Reconstruction monument.

This course explores the history of baseball in the United States. It covers, among other topics, the first amateur clubs in the urban North, the professionalization and nationalization of the sport during and after the Civil War era, the rise of fandom, baseball’s relationship to anxieties about manhood and democracy, tensions between labor and management, the Negro Leagues, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Nisei baseball during World War Two, Jackie Robinson and desegregation, and the Latinization of baseball. The history of baseball is, in many respects, the history of the United States writ large as well as the history of the myths that Americans tell about themselves.

The great city of Rome outlived its empire and its emperors. What happened to the Eternal City after “the fall of the Roman Empire in the West?” In this course, we will follow the story of this great city, its people, its buildings old and new, and its legacy across Italy, Europe, and beyond. Rome rebuilt and reshaped itself through the Middle Ages: home for popes, destination for pilgrims, power broker for Italy. It became a great Renaissance and early modern city, a center of art and architecture, of religion, and of politics. We will be reading a mix of primary sources and modern scholarship. All required texts are in English, though students who take this course for Italian Studies credit may choose to read some works in Italian.

This class looks at the history of the idea of property from antiquity to contemporary society though various specific themes and problems. We will begin with early development of the idea of property in Roman law. How was the idea of property explained, and what were the basic legal concepts associated with taking, using and owning? How did people lay claim to things wild or unowned? We will then move through medieval, early modern and modern periods to examine specific questions. How were people made into things? How do we create rights in intangibles? What are the limits of rights in property? Property is in many ways a central concept in relations between people in their everyday life. It is also a cornerstone of political ideology. This class will explore the history behind how we make and distinguish between ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’