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.