Fall 2008 History Course Offerings for First Year Students

Please click on the course title to access a .pdf of the syllabus. If a syllabus is unavailable in .pdf format, you may request it by emailing the professor or by contacting the Academic Coordinator at jjohnso2@bowdoin.edu.

FIRST YEAR SEMINARS:

History 12c. (MW 1:00-2:25) Utopia: Intentional Communities in America, 1630–1997. SARAH MCMAHON. An examination of the evolution of utopian visions and utopian experiments that begins in 1630 with John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill,” explores the proliferation of both religious and secular communal ventures between 1780 and 1920, and concludes with an examination of twentieth-century counterculture communes, intentional communities, and dystopian separatists. Readings include primary source accounts by members (letters, diaries, essays, etc.), “community” histories and apostate exposés, utopian fiction, and scholarly historical analyses. Discussions and essays focus on teaching students how to subject primary and secondary source materials to critical analysis.

History 18c. (MW 2:30-3:55) The Racial Argument in Historical Perspective. RANDOLPH STAKEMAN. Pursues a critical analysis of historical arguments in general and racial historical arguments in particular. Examines the debates over the 3/5 rule in the Constitution, slavery, native American policy, segregation, nonwhite immigration, Japanese internment in World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, and post CRM “nonracial” racial policy including the Obama presidential campaign. Each debate will be looked at in its own context and for the structure of its argument. Includes online and classroom components. (Same as Africana Studies 18.)

History 22. (MW 11:30-12:55) Modern Nightmares: Dystopia and the 20th Century. AARON WINDEL. Examines the cultural history of modern Europe through the eyes of those who rejected the popular notion that science and technology could bring about universal improvement. The course examines skeptical visions of modernity's future that existed alongside more hopeful views of progress. We will examine imaginative works of dystopian fiction and science-fiction films and contextualize them be examining the real world events and historical transformations that inspired such nightmares. Topics include the expansion of the state; the birth of psychoanalysis, marketing, and propaganda; the development of industrial war technologies; the rise of totalitarianism; genocide; mass communication and the information revolution.

History 27c. (TTh 11:30-12:55) Political Kinetics: Social Movement vs. Social Arrest. MEHMET DOSEMECI. Why have various types of social groups historically referred to themselves as “social movements”? Is this concept still relevant today? Does its mirror concept, “social arrest,” better describe the motion and principle behind political programs such as slow-food, conservationism (whether ecological or local-cultural), anti-globalization, and environmentalism? What does it mean that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century focus on “development” or “progress” toward a democratic or socialist ideal has given way to a twenty-first century struggle to “stop” global warming and unbridled capitalism? Through discussion of various historical readings, explores the centrality of kinetic language to the conception and performance of critical political struggle.

INTRODUCTORY-LEVEL LECTURE COURSES (100s):

140c,d. (MW 11:30-12:55) War and Society. PATRICK RAEL. Explores the nature of warfare from the fifteenth century to the present. The central premise is that war is a reflection of the societies and cultures that wage it. This notion is tested by examining the development of war-making in Europe and the Americas from the period before the emergence of modern states, through the great period of state formation and nation building, to the present era, when the power of states to wage war in the traditional manner seems seriously undermined. Throughout, emphasis is placed on contact between European and non-European peoples. Students are required to view films every week outside of class.

LECTURE/SURVEY COURSES (200s)

207c - ESD. (MWF 9:30-10:25) Medieval Europe. DALLAS DENERY. Examines the social, cultural, religious, and economic development of medieval Europe from the origins of Christianity to the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. Particular attention is paid to the varying relations between church and state, the birth of urban culture and economy, institutional and popular religious movements, and the early formation of nation states.

214c - ESD, IP. (MW 2:30-3:55) City and Country in Roman Culture. ROBERT SOBAK. The American political landscape has been painted (by the pundits at least) in two contrasting colors: Blue and Red. These “states of mind” have become strongly associated with particular spatial differences as well: Urban and Rural, respectively. Examines the various ways in which Roman culture dealt with a similar divide at different times in its history. Explores the manner in which “urban” and “rural” are represented in Roman literature and visual arts, and how and why these representations changed over time. Studies depictions of the city and the country in sources as varied as Roman painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as Roman authors such as Varro, Vergil, Horace, Pliny and Juvenal. Authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Max Weber, Jane Jacobs and Wendell Berry are read as modern analogues and as points of comparison. Analyzes how attitudes towards class, status, gender and ethnicity, in both ancient Rome and modern America, have historically manifested themselves in location, movement, consumption and production. Challenges our modern urban vs. rural polarity by looking at a similar phenomenon within the context of Roman history. (Same as Classics 224.)

218c. (MWF 10:30-11:25) The History of Russia, 1825–1936. PAGE HERRLINGER. Examines major transformations in Russian society, culture, and politics from 1825 to 1936. Among topics explored through novels, autobiographies, film, and other primary documents are life in “Old Regime” Russia, attempts at reform and modernization in the late nineteenth century, the rise of the revolutionary movement and the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the building of socialism under the Bolsheviks, and the making of the modern “Soviet system” under Stalin.

223c - IP. (MW 2:30-3:55) Modern Britain, 1837 to the 1990s. AARON WINDEL. A social history of modern Britain from the rise of urban industrial society in the early nineteenth century to the present. Topics include the impact of the industrial revolution, acculturation of the working classes, the impact of liberalism, the reform movement, and Victorian society. Concludes with an analysis of the domestic impact of the world wars and of contemporary society.

233c - ESD. (TTH 11:30-12:55) American Society in the New Nation, 1763–1840. SARAH MCMAHON. A social history of the United States from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson. Topics include the various social, economic, cultural, and ideological roots of the movement for American independence; the struggle to determine the scope of the Constitution and the political shape of the new republic; the emergence of and contest over a new social and cultural order and the nature of American “identity”; and the diverging social, economic, and political histories of regions (North, South, and trans-Appalachian West) and peoples in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Topics include urbanization, industrialization, and the development of new forms of social organization in the North; religion and the Second Great Awakening; the westward expansion of the nation into areas already occupied; the southern plantation economy and slave communities; and the growth of the reform impulse in Jacksonian America.

245c - ESD. (TTh 8:30-9:55) Bearing the Untold Story: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. JENNIFER SCANLON. Women of color are often ignored or pushed to the margins. There is a cost to that absence, obviously, for women of color. As Zora Neale Hurston put it, “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” There is also a cost to those who are not women of color, as women of color are encountered as objects, rather than subjects. Addresses the gaps and explores the histories and contemporary issues affecting women of color and their ethnic/racial communities in the United States. (Same as Africana Studies 245 and Gender and Women’s Studies 245.)

252c,d - IP. (TTh 10:00-11:25) Colonial Latin America. ALLEN WELLS. Introduces students to the history of Latin America from pre-Columbian times to about 1825. Traces developments fundamental to the establishment of colonial rule, drawing out regional comparisons of indigenous resistance and accommodation. Topics include the nature of indigenous societies encountered by Europeans; exploitation of African and Indian labor; evangelization and the role of the church; the evolution of race, gender, and class hierarchies in colonial society; and the origins of independence in Spanish America and Brazil. (Same as Latin American Studies 252.)

261c,d - ESD, IP. (TTh 10:00-11:25) Modern South Asia. RACHEL STURMAN. Chronological and thematic introduction to the history of South Asia from the rise of British imperial power in the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Topics include the formation of a colonial economy and society; religious and social reform; the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism; the road to independence and partition; and issues of secularism, religious fundamentalisms, democracy, and inequality that have shaped post-colonial South Asian societies. (Same as Asian Studies 256.)

273c. (TTh 2:30-3:55) The Revolutions of Modern Europe. MEHMET DOSEMECI. From the 1789 French revolution to the “velvet revolutions” of 1989, the European continent convulsed with radical change. Focuses on the moment of revolution (broadly conceived) within European society during these two hundred years. Examines moments of success as well as failed and even “fake” revolutions. Topics include instances of popular political upheaval (1848, 1871, 1917–18, and 1968), but also sudden changes that inaugurated new ways of thinking, working, or killing, such as the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, World War I, and the Holocaust.

275c,d - ESD, IP. (MW 11:30-12:55) The Making of Modern China. KAREN TEOH. An introduction to the transformation of China’s political and social life from the advent of its last dynasty in 1644 to the present. Covers the rise and fall of the Qing dynasty, economic and cultural encounters with the West, Republican government, war with Japan, the Communist revolution, and the People’s Republic under Mao Zedong. Also discusses social and economic reforms in post-Mao China, and the global Chinese overseas community. Major themes include political and intellectual trends, the ongoing tension between the center and local society, problems of ethnicity and gender, challenges of modernization, and the (re-)emergence of the world’s oldest and largest bureaucratic state as a major power in the twenty-first century. (Same as Asian Studies 275.)

283c,d - ESD, IP. (TTH 10:00-11:30) The Origins of Japanese Culture and Civilization. THOMAS CONLAN. How do a culture, a state, and a society develop? Designed to introduce the culture and history of Japan by exploring how “Japan” came into existence, and to chart how patterns of Japanese civilization shifted through time. Attempts to reconstruct the tenor of life through translations of primary sources, and to lead to a greater appreciation of the unique and lasting cultural and political monuments of Japanese civilization. (Same as Asian Studies 283.)