This exciting course is of great value – especially to majors in international relations history, and political science – because it examines the rise and fall of a genuine world order: the Congress of Vienna system established by the governments of Europe’s Great Powers following the Napoleonic Wars. The "long 19th century"(1789-1914) was simply the most dynamic in history. Europe was transformed by technological, political, and ideological revolutions, and the rest of the world was transformed by Europe’s imperialism and trade. Yet, no general wars erupted over that century thanks to the sturdy pillars of peace raised by the statesmen at the Congress of Vienna. Over time, however, the pillars crumbled and human folly, combined with the impersonal forces of modernity, pushed Europe into the world wars and holocausts of the hideous 20th century. This is a history that compels us to ask: why did the world order break down and what are the implications for the disordered world of today?

This course illuminates how debates over immigration have transformed the legal contours of the United States. We examine the evolution of federal immigration policy and the legal battles immigrants waged against exclusionary practices in the U.S. from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. The key federal and state cases explored in this course center on national citizenship, housing segregation, and school segregation. In addition to considering the key legal issues at stake in these cases, this course also encourages an analysis of the roles race, disability, gender, and labor play in shaping U.S. law within the context of immigration history.

From wax cylinders to reel-to-reel to digital video, recording technologies expanded the historical profession dramatically during the twentieth century. We will read some classics, such as Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days and Alessandro Portelli’s Death of Luigi Trastulli, as well as scholarly pieces aimed at working historians and very new work, such as Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. We will also explore the interface between documentary filmmaking, pod-casts, and more traditional Oral History forms. However, this course centers on methodology—students will learn about ‘best practices’ in the field and will work toward creating an interview record that can be housed in an archive and accessed by other researchers even as interviewees and their families retain intellectual property rights.

This course is designed to introduce students to the religious experiences of Africans and to the politics of culture. We will examine how traditional African religious ideas and practices interacted with Christianity and Islam. We will look specifically at religious expressions among the Yoruba, Southern African independent churches and millenarist movements, and the variety of Muslim organizations that developed during the colonial era. The purpose of this course is threefold. First, to develop in students an awareness of the wide range of meanings of conversion and people's motives in creating and adhering to religious institutions; Second, to examine the political, cultural, and psychological dimensions in the expansion of religious social movements; And third, to investigate the role of religion as counterculture and instrument of resistance to European hegemony. Topics include: Mau Mau and Maji Maji movements in Kenya and Tanzania, Chimurenga in Mozambique, Watchtower churches in Southern Africa, anti-colonial Jihads in Sudan and Somalia and mystical Muslim orders in Senegal.

Changes of faith are complex shifts that involve social, spiritual, intellectual, and even physical alterations. In the premodern West, when legal status was often determined by religious affiliation and the state of one’s soul was a deathly serious matter, such changes were even more fraught. What led a person to undertake an essential transformation of identity that could affect everything from food to family to spiritual fulfillment? Whether we are speaking of individual conversions of conscience or the coerced conversions of whole peoples en masse, religious change has been central to the global development and spread of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and reveals much about the people and contexts in which it took place.
This seminar will explore the dynamics of conversion across a range of medieval and early modern contexts. We will investigate the motivations for conversions, the obstacles faced by converts, and the issues raised by conversion from the perspective of those who remained within a single tradition. How did conversion efforts serve globalization and empire, and what other power relations were involved? How did peoplehood, nationality, or race play out in conversion and its aftermath? How did premodern people understand conversion differently from each other, and differently than their coreligionists or scholars do today? The course will treat a number of specific examples, including autobiographical conversion narratives and conversion manuals, the role ascribed to conversion in visions of messianic redemption, forced conversions under Spanish and Ottoman rule, missionizing in the age of European expansion, and more.
The course aims to hone students’ skills in thinking about—and with—premodern religiosity, opening up new perspectives on the past and present by reading primary texts and analytical research.

This seminar invites students to do original research into the stories of Black refugees – including escaped, kidnapped, sojourning, and other temporary or permanent residents of Pennsylvania. Their stories unfolded through contentious freedom suits, daring escapes on the Underground Railroad, newspaper wars, gun fights and thuggery, treason cases, and more. We have assembled an archive of statutes, legal cases, testimony, judicial and administrative decisions, newspaper stories, images, memoirs, maps, and more to help students get started with their research. In addition, students will have opportunities to pursue additional research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a co-sponsor of this course. Many of these materials have never been the subject of sustained study or placed in their historical context. Students will choose their topics in consultation with the professors and will produce research reports in written or digital or cinematic formats.
Students are expected to contribute to the course website, a platform that will be available to the public as well as to the Penn community, and we aim to provide new information and venues for research. The course therefore will involve considerations of how best to convey what we learn, as well as explorations of historical methods and collaborating archives.

Students in this research seminar will design original research projects related to life in the United States during World War II. Perhaps the most consequential war in global history, World War II profoundly altered the trajectory of human history, reshaping global boundaries, introducing terrifying new killing technologies, and paving the way for a world shaped by democracy. In the United States, the domestic changes wrought by World War II were nearly as dramatic, highlighted by booming manufacturing, mass migrations, and major changes to the nature of race and gender. While World War II is often depicted as a unifying moment, American life at home was rife with controversy and conflict. Students in this class will learn more about the immense societal changes in America during World War II and work with the instructor to design research projects that meet their interests. Projects might focus on topics as diverse as Rosie the Riveter, weapons manufacturing, or one of several race riots covered in class.

This intensive research seminar invites students to explore the history of farmworkers in the United States during the twentieth century. Research will primarily but not necessarily exclusively focus on the west coast, a region in which many archival sources have been digitized. Students may explore a wide variety of topics, including but not limited to: farmworker unions; the relationship between farmworker mobilizations and other movements in the US and abroad; the experiences of workers from the Philippines and Latin America and the role of US imperial and immigration policies in the lives of farmworkers; farmworkers' confrontations with and participation in systems of racism; the Great Depression in rural communities; the history of gender and family in farmworker communities; the history of environment and health; struggles over citizenship and social rights; counter-mobilizations of growers and the right; religion in farmworker communities; 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 produced their food.

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.

This course will focus on the boom in travel writing from 1400 to 1800, a period marked by sustained contact between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. However, rather than pursuing a traditional focus on authors as ‘explorers’ and ‘discoverers’, we will examine the ways in which such accounts can be used to tell a variety of histories, including those of Indigenous and local peoples around the Atlantic. What can travel narratives written primarily by European elites really tell us about the men, women and children they encountered along the west African coast? What do they have to teach us about the diverse groups inhabiting the Americas at this time: indigenous, enslaved, and formerly enslaved people as well as colonists? Incorporating book history and the study of material texts, the class will meet regularly in Kislak Special Collections to examine original travel accounts from the period and will also make use of the Common Press letterpress studio. It will ask students to think about the nature of travel writing, the concept of the ‘Other’, ideas of belonging, scientific discourses, the materiality of texts, and the ways in which the available archive shapes the histories we write.