Course descriptions for fall 2011 HST topics courses HST 300: The Cuban Revolution (Lynn Stoner) Description to follow HST 300 The 1920s: American Modernity (Gayle Gullett) Students in this class move from reading history to creating history. To accomplish this goal students learn the fundamental skills of historians— how to read documents critically, to build arguments that explain past events, and to communicate their understanding of the past. Students will analyze how Americans in the 1920s became convinced that this was the decade when America became modern. Students will particularly focus on consumerism, how it challenged traditional values and encouraged new ones. Students will examine the Modern Woman, seeking to understand how she was both symbol of modernism and its active agent. Students will learn how Americans were torn between desire for the modern and longing for the traditional and that many at the time believed that two Americas, in the city and the small town, were uneasily coexisting. Students will study how these geographical terms were, on the one hand, racialized codes that fueled reactionary politics. On the other hand, the city was emblematic of a positive kind of pluralism, a place where African Americans’ and immigrants’ struggles for equality and voice shaped new notions of democracy and modernity. Students will teach themselves how to write history while they are learning about the 1920s. Students will read the opinions of other historians and documents written by people of the time. But students will do much more. They will listen to jazz, the music of the era, and watch a popular movie about “IT,” allegedly the new sexuality. Students will read the court records from two of the noted trials of the era, Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scopes trial. Students will analyze all of this material and transform it into their explanation of how Americans in the 1920s came to believe that the country was, for better or worst, modern. HST 300: Immigration in the 20th Century (Brian Gratton) HST 300 is a writing‐intensive course in historical methodology intended to prepare history majors for the senior seminar (HST 498). In this class, students will examine immigration to the United States across the 20th century, from the perspective of the immigrants and the perspective of the citizens of this country. Secondary and primary records will be used in learning how historians investigate and write about the past. HST 300: Colonialism and Violence in South Asia (Yasmin Sakia) The course will explore the history of British colonialism in India to critically evaluate the naturalizing of violence through claims of modernizing. Particularly, we will investigate how the British colonial rule ‘transformed” Indians by erasing their traditions, histories, customs and culture and reduced them to ‘subject groups’. What became of India and Indians at the end of colonialism? How is violence sustained in the region, particularly between India and Pakistan, and its impact on communities in the region? Students will be required to write a methodological essay on colonialism and Indian experience at the end of the seminar. HST 300 Slavery and Race in Africa (Chouki El Hamel) Although one of the major topics of current historical research has been the African diaspora in the Americas, a less researched, although equally important, aspect of the global African diaspora is that internal to Africa. Over time, blacks migrated -voluntarily and for the most part involuntarily-- across the Sahara to North Africa. The Islamization of northern Africa in the seventh century led to a huge increase in trade, especially in the trans-Saharan slave trade. This course will focus on the institution of slavery in Africa and its different forms in different historical periods and geographical locations. We will examine theories that have developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among scholars of different origins in their attempt to reconstruct the history of slavery in Africa. This course is designed to provide students with an overview of significant issues focusing on the historical, economic, political, and cultural relationships among and between black sub-Saharan Africans and North Africans. We will examine how race/ethnicity and gender; trade and religion affected African slavery; the impact of the decline of the trans-Saharan trade on slave trading and slavery; the impact of notions of gender on the trading of slaves; the historical relationship between black Africans and their descendants in North Africa; the self perception (identity) of the early blacks in North Africa; the emancipation of slaves; the social role and the economic status of freed slaves, and finally we will analyze the current ideas and existing knowledge in the study of the Africa Diaspora. HST 300: The Black Atlantic (Andrew Barnes) This course studies the world that displaced Africans – that is, Africans taken from Africa through slavery –created across the continents touching upon the Atlantic Ocean between 1400 and 1900. Drawing upon emerging research and an ever expanding collection of primary sources, the course will examine 1) the movement of Africans from Africa to South America, North America and Europe; 2) the establishment and maintenance of new African identities in the face of slavery and exploitation; 3) the case for the emergence of a collectively shared culture among the African peoples removed from their homelands. HST 300 is a methodology course, meaning that work for the course will involve introducing students to a set of the skills historians use to pursue historical research. In this case students will learn how to assess published scholarship on a topic and how to build a research bibliography. HST 306: The Civil Right Movement (Matthew Whitaker) This course examines the African American struggle for civil and human rights in America from the end of World War II(1946),to the present. Although this course will focus primarily on the Black freedom struggle in the United States, it will also connect this struggle for justice and equality to similar movements that were influenced by America’s Black freedom struggle (i.e. the Chicano Movement, the Native American Movement, the Feminist Movement, and Anti-colonial movements in Africa, etc.). In doing so, this course will closely examine the transformation and transitions of African Americans and emphasizes their creation of auniquecultureofstruggleandresistanceastheysoughttogivemeaningtofreedom. Students will analyze the Civil Rights Movement by exploring challenges to the nation’s “separate-but-equal’ doctrine, “Jim Crow,” disfranchisement, political marginalization, and economic exploitation. HST 394: Ante Blues (Arna Bontemps) This course attempts to comprehensively survey the sources of what became African American Culture in America, including the various forms its expression took, both sacred and secular. How, in other words, did captive Africans and their descendants in America give expression to their shared experience of captivity, enslavement and racial subordination? And how did the experience and its expression change or vary over time in response to changing circumstances? Of equal importance to the course is how did captives and their descendants respond and adapt to freedom (or quasi freedom), including the period covered by the First Emancipation (following the American Revolution) and Reconstruction (following the Civil War). Ironically, Reconstruction formally ended coincidental to ‘the birth of the blues’, or more accurately during the earliest period to which ethnomusicologists have been able to document surviving forms identifiable as the Blues, thus the course’s title, Ante Blues. The issue of slave testimony whether orally expressed or written (including the various forms in which artifacts of material culture have survived) will be a key issue that the course will need to address. For that reason the survey will include a brief introduction to methodological questions of relevance to our subject. The overriding objective of the course, however, is to introduce students to the great diversity and expressive richness of the cultural life blacks made for themselves in early America and to help them critically consider the challenge to which it was in response. Implicit in all of this are questions of cultural adaptation and influence consideration of which will be one of the primary analytic frames within which the course will situate itself. HST 494: Film as History (Sybil Thornton) Films about the past, whether fiction or non-fiction, are histories written with moving image media. This course asks students to reconstruct basic assumptions about a time or event by studio films. This year the films will cover the world in the seventeenth century. Grades are based on four papers. HST 494: Art Beyond Bible (Francoise Mirguet) The course examines the biblical and rabbinic positions on material art, and the different ways by which art has been associated with idolatry. It studies various forms of material art in early Judaism, during the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods (zodiacs in synagogues, funeral art, etc.), and in the early Middle Ages (figurative and non-figurative illuminations). The course will address both the techniques and the contents of the representations, to explore especially how art interprets and continues the biblical text. Different trends of aniconism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam will be explored and compared. HST 494: Slavophiles and Westernizers (Hilde Hoogenboom) A survey of the central debate in Russian culture since 1700, between the Slavophiles and Westernizers, through political philosophy, literary criticism, literature, history, religion, philosophy, and film. With a focus on nineteenth-century responses by the intelligentsia to the Peter the Great’s Europeanization of Russia, we trace these issues up through recent manifestations of this debate in theater and film. In addition to short works by Catherine the Great, Radishchev, Karamzin, Chaadaev, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Belinsky, Dobroliubov, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Tarkovsky, Mikhalkov, and Sokurov, we read perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century Russian memoir, Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thought. We will examine the special position of the elite and intelligentsia in Russian culture and politics, with particular attention to the institutional role of publications and journals, through the framework of debates in political theory about civil society. In particular, since the 1980s, ideas about the special role of elites and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have taken on a vigorous new role in Russia’s political transitions and its relationship with the United States. The historiography of debates about Russian culture continues to be shaped by the teleological concerns of today. HST 498: RUSSIANS ABROAD (Laurie Manchester) PREREQUISITE: To take this class, you must have previously completed HST 300: Russian Revolution or HST 435 or HST 436, with any instructor. Students meeting the prerequisites may email pflengel@asu.edu for an override. The current media is filled with discussions about immigration and the plight of refugees. This seminar focuses on Russians who traveled, migrated, fled, or worked abroad in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Russia, which geographically straddles both Asia and Europe, has been conceived by countries to her West as an exotic “other” for centuries. The borders of the Soviet Union, for the vast majority of its existence, were sealed shut. Yet the refugee flows generated by the Russian Revolution in 1917 were unprecedented: millions of residents of the Russian empire fled abroad. That “first” wave was followed by a “second” wave of refugees during the chaos that ensued as a result of the Nazi invasion in World War II. A “third” wave, comprised primarily of Soviet Jews, emigrated in the 1970s and 80s. During and following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands more Russians fled, mainly for economic reasons. But Russians did not start going abroad in 1917. Revolutionaries hid or were exiled abroad in the nineteenth century, and wealthy Russians traveled across the globe, while Russian scholars, diplomats and missionaries spent spells working abroad (as did some of their Soviet counterparts after 1917). This seminar will explore the views of Russians-both those who left voluntarily and those who left involuntarily-of the countries and peoples they encountered when they left Russia. Representations of Russians abroad will also be explored. Some of the broader issues to be raised include the effect traveling or living abroad has on one’s national identity, how living amongst cultures both similar (in terms of language, religion, history) and foreign affects the dynamics of assimilation and diaspora culture, and whether Russians abroad challenge or conform to existing theories about travel writing and diasporas. By reading together the many different types of translated primary documents now available on the subject (such as on-line archival oral histories, memoirs, fiction and travel narratives), theoretical works to analyze such documents, and discussing scholarly debates and interpretations of the subject, students will acquire the skills to research and write an original research seminar paper on the topic of their choice connected with Russian Abroad (provided adequate primary sources are available). Our working definition of “Russian” will be anyone who was born in the Russian empire or Soviet Union. HST 498: War in Vietnam (James Rush) Prerequisite: Successful completion of HST 456 or instructor approval. Vietnam’s violent decolonization between 1941 and 1975 was a traumatic period in both Vietnamese and American history. This research seminar will examine this period in detail by reading and discussing primary sources, historical scholarship, and interpretive essays that raise important historiographical questions. (Why did the United States support France against Vietnam’s nationalist revolutionaries? What accounts for the strength of the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong? What accounts for the weakness of the state of South Vietnam? And so on.) At the same time, each class member will embark upon a research project about a particular topic and, working from primary materials and in tandem with other members of the class, write an essay of 20-25 pages examining this topic in detail—placing it within the existing literature and the broad themes of the period. Completion of a full-fledged research paper meeting high critical standards will be the primary outcome of the course. HST 498: Western Women (Susan Gray) This course is an intensive reading and writing seminar on the history of women in the regional West from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. It is focused on women’s experience in the southwestern United States to lend continuity to the assigned readings of primary sources written by women, and to take advantage of the excellent holdings on the subject in Hayden Library, particularly in Arizona, Chicano/a and American Indian history. The ultimate objective of this course is a research paper on a topic of your choice. This course fulfills the requirement of a senior seminar for the major in history. HST 498: The U.S. Constitution: Origins and Meaning (T.J. Davis) A required, advanced course of study, the semester offers students the opportunity to demonstrate their competence at conceptualizing, constructing, and completing a piece of writing based on primary sources and publishable as an article or a research note in a scholarly historical journal or as a chapter or essay in a scholarly anthology or collection. The factual framework for the semester's inquiry treats the origins of the U.S. Constitution drafted in 1787 and the debates surrounding its ratification and early years of operation. Chronologically, attention spans the years roughly from 1763 to 1804. The earlier year marked the beginning of Great Britain's shifting relations with its North American colonies. That fueled growing argument about the proper character of relations between the Mother Country and its colonies and about the rights of British North American colonists within Britain's empire. The later year marked the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, a final ripple in the original wave of the Constitution's creation. It altered the manner of electing the president and vice president. The sweep of attention allows research into the political ideas and ideals expressed in the federal Constitution as the basis of the American nation as a polity. HST 498: History, Memory and National Myths: Changing European Master-Narratives of World War II (Volker Benkert) In many European countries, narratives of resistance and self-liberation from Nazi occupation give way to painful explorations of a history which also includes collaboration with the German oppressors. Given the trauma of war and genocide, these narratives, often literally carved in stone, served important functions everywhere in postwar Europe: to differentiate between the heroic victims and the few collaborators/perpetrators, and to rally the survivors around the moral and physical rebuilding of their countries. However, these national narratives have increasingly lost their importance in favor of a more fragmented and contradictory account of the past. Using the a concept of a nation as an "imagined community,” this course will explore questions concerning (1) the function of these national master narratives in the immediate post-war period, (2) the reasons why and how these narratives are being questioned today, and (3) how new, more diverse narratives on the past are being formed. HST 498 History of Racism (Chouki El Hamel) People do look different all over the world. Anyone can tell an African Ibo from a Maghreban Arab or an Asian from a European. Are these differences real? Do these differences account for variations in human character or ability? Why do people hold preconceived judgments or convictions within and outside their own culture? What does race mean? What is racism? This course is designed to provide students with an overview of significant issues focusing on relationship between ethnicity, race, class and gender. This course will focus on the different approaches to racism and racialized identities to analyze structures of power relations in different historical periods and geographical locations. We will examine theories on human classification as a process of exclusion and generating inequality from antiquity to pseudo-scientific modern racism. We will read important texts to help us understand the origins, formation and development of ideas of race and racism in the context of religious crusades, slavery, colonialism and imperialism. As a case study we will discuss the ideas and notions Africans and Westerners held about each other and how the language used to designate the ‘other’ changed over time. Colonized peoples for instance had a foreign language and culture imposed on them, but they have also appropriated them as tools to resist the colonial discourse and regime and sometimes to solve postcolonial problems.