2008–2009 History Courses
First-Year Studies: Empires to Nations: Inventing the Modern Middle East
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
Most of the states in the modern Middle East were born out of the rubble of World War I and the destruction of great empires. Britain and France divided the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire between themselves and drew the map of the modern Middle East by reorganizing the old political structures along nation-states. This seminar will examine the complex sociopolitical, religious, and cultural dynamics and external forces, which have shaped life in the region, as well as the dominant political ideologies—pan-nationalism, Islamism, and Arab socialism. It will begin with a survey of the modern Middle East (geography, people, religions, major countries, and international relations) and emphasize the close linkage and interlay between domestic, regional, and international processes. Special attention will be paid to the rise of European hegemony after World War I and the response of social groups to the cultural, economic, and political influence of Western powers. For example, why have some countries developed democratic institutions, while others have become increasingly dictatorial, espousing a form of secular authoritarianism, and yet others have sought to define their politics in terms of Islamic activism? What are the causes and consequences of the five Arab-Israeli wars on political governance, economic development, and relations between state and society?What does explain the rise and consolidation of military rule? And what are the repercussions of continuing Western meddling in the region’s internal affairs? This seminar will not only assess the role of Western powers in forging the region’s modern history but also the input of indigenous forces, such as secular nationalism and religion. We will study the diverse societies and regime type of the major states—Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—in an effort to understand why some countries have succeeded in developing democratic forms of government, while others have become increasingly dictatorial. The seminar will also address the question of reform and change. How and where will reform come from in light of the unholy alliance that exists between authoritarian rulers and the religious establishment? What role does the dominant international political and economic order play in perpetuating the status quo in the Middle East?
First-Year Studies: Becoming Modern: Europe in the Nineteenth Century
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
What are the distinctive features of our “modern” civilization? A partial list would include representative democracy, political parties, nationalism, religious pluralism, mass production, rapid technological change, consumerism, free markets, a global economy, and unceasing artistic experimentation. All these characteristically modern things became established in the nineteenth century, and most of them were pioneered by Europeans. Yet in Europe, with its ancient institutions and deeply rooted traditions, this new form of civilization encountered greater resistance than it did in that other center of innovation, the United States. The resulting tensions between old and new in Europe set the stage for the devastating world wars and revolutions of the twentieth century. In this course, we will examine various aspects of the epochal transformation in ways of making, thinking, and living that occurred in Europe during what historians call the “long nineteenth century” (1789–1914). We will also consider how the development of modern civilization in Europe was shaped by the resistance it encountered from the defenders of older ways. The course reading will focus primarily on the most innovative regions of nineteenth-century Europe: Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy; but we will also give some attention to the Hapsburg Empire and Russia, which gave birth to some of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century during the three decades that preceded World War I. We will ponder and discuss a broad array of historical evidence: from government documents, revolutionary proclamations, and political tracts to philosophical essays, fiction, plays, poetry, and works of visual art.
First-Year Studies: “In the Tradition”: An Introduction to African American History and Black Cultural Renaissance
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
African American history is an important window into the history of the United States and the rise of the modern world. Using African American history, culture, and consciousness as the focus, this course will introduce students to American history and world history. Students will begin with such classics as The Souls of Black Folk and Up from Slavery as well as Coming of Age in Mississippi and Down These Mean Streets. We will explore where such writers as St. Augustine, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Alexandre Dumas fit into the traditions of the African diaspora and Africana studies. The course will also examine such major developments as the Atlantic slave trade in the making of the modern world; comparative slavery and emancipation; the classic slave narratives; the Civil War and Reconstruction; the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance; making race and nation in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa; the racial politics of New Deal citizenship; African Americans in the city; the rise of blues and jazz; women in the black revolt; civil rights and black power; and the black arts movement.
Twentieth-Century Europe
Level: Open,Lecture
Semester: Year
Europe continues to face an uncertain future. Will the movement toward greater economic and political unity ultimately prevail and create a new historical community? Or will the focus of nationalism and religious and ethnic identity be the main determining factors in the coming decades? This course will attempt a fresh appraisal of the past hundred years, focusing on leading personalities, events, and movements throughout the European Continent. Of particular concerns are the advent of the First World War; the rise and development of communism in Russia and fascism in Italy and Germany; the impact of the Second World War; the reconstruction of Western Europe after 1945; and the collapse and aftermath of the Soviet empire. In order to achieve as full an understanding as possible, the course will rely not just on historical narrative but also on autobiography, biography, psychology, art and architecture, literature, and film. Group conferences will focus on primary readings and include important works by Robert Graves, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Hannah Arendt, and Milan Kundera.
Art and the Sacred in Late Antiquity and Medieval Europe
Level: Lecture
Semester: Spring
No time in history saw a richer, more varied expression of sacred art than the European Middle Ages. And no other age has known as powerful, as all-embracing a religious institution as the medieval church. In this interdisciplinary lecture course, we will ask why the Christian church and the art made in its service took such extraordinarily varied forms in the thousand-year period from the catacombs to Chartres, from the third century to the thirteenth. We will also ask why certain features of contemporary Christianity that are looked upon as quintessentially Catholic rather than Protestant were established not in the earliest years of the church but in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: monasteries and nunneries, the cult of the Virgin, a celibate clergy, and a papal monarchy with virtually unlimited powers. Since Christianity is a religion not only for the here and now but for the afterlife, of special interest will be such perplexing beliefs as that we on earth might affect the fate of the dead in purgatory and, conversely, that some of the “very special dead” might assist the living or perhaps punish them. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the course will be studying these topics in visual as well as written texts, for instance, in the architecture and decoration of early Christian and Romanesque churches and, at St. Denis and Chartres, in the birth of the uniquely Western style that we call Gothic. By also examining how sacred words were illuminated in manuscripts linked to Lindisfarne, Kells, and Charlemagne’s court, we will attempt to engage with a novel expression of spirituality in the Middle Ages, the book as icon. Near the end of our course, we will follow men and women from all over Europe on their pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, stopping at such memorable French Romanesque churches as Vézelay, Conques, and Moissac. In New York museums, students will have opportunities to view chapels and cloisters brought from Europe, as well as sculptures, ivories, metalwork, stained glass, books, paintings, and tapestries that are among the world’s most precious treasures. Lectures will be devoted primarily to art; the weekly group conferences, to readings from the Middle Ages.
Nature, Progress, and the Individual: American Exceptionalism in Historical Perspective
Level: Open
Semester: Year
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” announced Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841. Emerson recognized in this clarion call that the individual is not born so much as achieved. The belief in the potential of the individual to be at one and the same time an origin as well as a thread in the tapestry of the human condition has often been seen as a quintessentially American trait. The idea of America as a land of opportunity where the ideal of the self-made man could best be realized was in turn rooted in the perception of America as a place that by virtue of its closeness to nature was uniquely free of the corruption and burden of the past. Consequently, according to American exceptionalist ideology, not only did America have a special mission to further human progress, but it also possessed the unique ability to avoid the cycles of decay that had destroyed other nations and remain indefinitely in a state of continual progress. This course will look at how and why the belief in American exceptionalism came to be such an important element of American identity by focusing on the development of three central themes in exceptionalist ideology—nature, progress, and the individual—from the seventeenth century to World War I. How did a sense of American exceptionalism grow out of a colonial society that was deeply attached to its English roots and had no intention of establishing an independent nation? How did Americans come to define themselves in terms of the individual when the colonies they established were very much rooted in a communal ideal? What did Americans mean by the individual, and to whom did this ideal apply? What was the relationship between the Puritans’ view of their society as a “city on a hill” and the concept of “manifest destiny” that undergirded westward expansion in the nineteenth century? How did the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century affect the exceptionalist faith in the nation’s ability to escape social corruption through its closeness to nature? What were the political and social consequences of America’s view of itself as an exceptional nation—both for Americans’ relationship to one another and their relationship to others?
“Not by Fact Alone”: The Making of History
Level: Open
Semester: Year
History, like memory, is a reconstruction and as such does not call out to us to be seen or heard. Instead we seek and discover seeing only what our perspective illuminates. For the Puritans, history was the unfolding of providential design. Purpose, like the seed of a plant, was always present in the unfolding of events. For Enlightenment philosophes, history was the story of progress effected by human reason. Purpose in this case was a human triumph, such as the triumph of medicine over prayer. For Marx, history was the story of class struggle. In this case, purpose was no more than following the money trail, coupled with the added optimism that in the end the scales of justice would be balanced. Each of these perspectives recognized and struggled with the notion that history is, in the final analysis, a fate beyond human control because of the paramount role of unintended consequences that counterpoints the history of societies no less than it counterpoints the life of the individual. In other words, is purpose an artifact of human understanding or woven into the tapestry of history? We will study the different ways that American and European thinkers from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries grappled with this question in their writings on history. The course will examine the conflicts and changes in their views on both the nature of the historical process and the way that history should be represented by historians. We will look at how these differences both reflected and contributed to broader intellectual, political, and social changes in this period. Such an examination will demonstrate the ways in which conceptions of history were themselves the product of history.
The Sixties
Level: Open
Semester: Year
According to our national mythology, social insurgencies of the 1960s originated in the United States and pitted radical youth against the American mainstream. The real story is much more complicated. Politically speaking, the “sixties” began in the late 1940s and extended well into the 1970s; the ferment was by no means confined to youth; and developments within the United States reflected global patterns. Revolutionary movements and ideas reverberated from Asia and Africa to Europe and the Americas, and they mobilized people from virtually all walks of life. This course will situate U.S. movements within their global contexts and will focus especially on movements inspired by revolutionary nationalism and its various permutations among activists addressing issues of colonialism, class, race, gender, and sexuality. Readings include historical documents as well as scholarship, and we will also make ample use of music and film.
Women, Culture, and Politics in U.S. History
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Through fiction, memoir, poetry, and cultural criticism and through dance, visual art and sport, activism and organizing, American women have expressed their ideas and their desires, their values and their politics. This course will approach U.S. history through the words and actions of all kinds of American women from the early nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. Using a variety of primary sources mixed with histories narrow and broad, we will analyze the ways that women worked to intervene in the cultural and political world. Themes will include race, class, ethnicity, immigration and migration, sexuality, and of course gender. Considerable attention will be paid to the development or refinement of a fluent and graceful expository writing style well-buttressed by the careful use of textual evidence.
Rethinking the Racial Politics of the New Deal and Cold War Citizenship, Public Policy, and Social Welfare
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
Was the New Deal a major turning point in American history? The New Deal transformed the meaning of American citizenship. It introduced universal social welfare as an essential component of “social citizenship.” American citizenship was enriched from simple voting rights to social welfare rights that entitled citizens to a vast safety net of social programs from Social Security to the GI Bill. Programs such as the GI Bill had dramatic educational, cultural, and economic consequences as well. The GI Bill dramatically enlarged the American middle class, transforming millions of urban workers into college-educated suburban professionals and businesspeople. However, today scholars are debating the meaning and substance of the “universality” of those programs. They have questioned to what extent was that social citizenship “raced” and “gendered.” Did the New Deal trigger “identity politics” by excluding some women, African Americans, and Latinos from its new rights and economic bounty? Some scholars suggest that the New Deal programs that propelled some “white” groups into the middle-class plunged “nonwhite” groups into the underclass. This course explores the wealth of political, social, cultural, psychological, and economic issues at the heart of that rich debate. The seminar will draw on comparative history, looking not only at different ethnic groups but also exploring differences of “race and nation” between the United States, Germany, South Africa, and Brazil. In the United States, we will pay special attention to the impact those political and policy dynamics had on the “racial formation” of “white,” “black,” “Chicano,” and “Nuyorican” identities between the New Deal and the cold war and on the trajectory of American politics up to the 2008 elections.
Women and the City
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
Using a variety of sources, both historical (primary and secondary) and from popular culture (literature, film, art, music), we will examine the relationship between women and American cities from the colonial era to the present. How have women negotiated for power in cities? What roles have they played in shaping how cities developed and operated in public and private spheres, and on social, political, economic, and cultural fronts? Have women been merely pawns of patriarchal urban machines or powerful participants in the development of urban landscapes or something else? What brings/brought women together and pulls them apart? These are only some of the questions that we will address as we examine the place of women from many backgrounds throughout urban American history. There will be one field trip into New York City required per semester to look at the built environment and its relationship to what will be discussed in class.
Open to juniors and seniors with permission.
Visions/Revisions: Issues in U.S. Women’s History
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of U.S. women’s history and related subjects, including women’s lives beyond the United States. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960’s, from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions will range from fundamental questions—What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category?—to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history to clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. M.A. candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.
A graduate course open to qualified seniors and graduate students.
Leisure and Danger
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
The interaction between work and play has taken various forms in history. Our project in this course will be to examine the changes and continuities in the idea of leisure. Beginning in early modern Europe, we will trace the concept up to the present, concentrating on Europe and America, and reflecting on such subjects as travel and the pursuit of the exotic, theatricality, consumerism, luxury, and display. In the nineteenth century, leisure became democratized and an anxious debate grew louder. What were the implications of making leisure available to masses of people? From romance novels to cheap liquor, from shopping to the cinema, new avenues of leisure aroused both fear and excitement. Moralists felt a need to police both public and private space and to reassert the primacy of work, thrift, and duty. We will study them and the various forms of accommodations and resistance that met their efforts. Class, ethnicity, gender, and geography all acted to structure people’s access to leisure. We will look at struggles over race, gender, and popular culture; the way certain groups became designated as providers of entertainment; or how certain locations were created as places of pleasure. To set the terms of the debate, we will begin with some eighteenth-century readings about the theatre and the market, the salon and the court. Readings will include work of Montesquieu, Flaubert, Wilde, Wharton, George Eliot, and Fitzgerald. In addition we will read works of nonfiction that show how leisure helped to create new forms of subjectivity and interiority. Students will be encouraged to work on conference topics linking leisure to a variety of subjects, such as childhood and education, or the construction of racial identities, or the changing nature of parenthood as birth control became more and more widely available, to name just a few areas. Potentially this course, through the study of complex oppositions like need and desire, purpose and aimlessness, the necessary and gratuitous, can give us a sense of the dizzying questions about life’s very meaning that present themselves when we aim at a life of leisure.
Diplomacy and Intelligence in Modern History
Level: Open
Semester: Year
By what means have different historical states and empires acquired vital knowledge about one another? And how, over the centuries, have various techniques of negotiation evolved, leading either to reconciliation or to warfare? This course will begin its inquiry in the Italian Renaissance, which saw the birth of modern diplomacy, and then proceed to examine how balance of power and Realpolitik culminated in the remarkable state-system of the nineteenth century. The impact of totalitarianism in the twentieth century—as well as the struggles of the cold war—will also be carefully assessed. Finally, some key Eastern approaches to strategy and warfare will be explored to gain a better understanding of the nature of the non-Western world. Throughout the course, emphasis will be placed on the role of intelligence gathering and covert action and their influence on the course of events. Attention will also be given to the difficult problem of reconciling clandestine government operations with the ideals of an open democratic society. The class assignments will draw from a variety of sources—historical narrative, firsthand accounts, novels, and films.
Winds of Doctrine: Europe in the Age of the Reformation
Level: Open
Semester: Year
In the sixteenth century, Europe entered upon a religious crisis that was to permanently alter the character of Western Christianity. Between 1520 and 1580 the religious unity of Catholic Christendom was destroyed, as believers throughout Central and Northern Europe severed their ties with the papacy to form new “Protestant” communities. But the impact of the religious crisis was by no means confined to the emergence of the churches of the Reformation. Luther’s revolt against the Roman church ushered in an era of soaring religious creativity and savage religious conflict that lasted for nearly two centuries and revolutionized thought, art, music—and politics. The modern state is ultimately is a product of the Reformation crisis, as is the system of international law that still governs the relations among sovereign states. Students in this course will examine multiple aspects of the religious, intellectual, and political history of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The reading will focus attention on the diversity of religious thinking and religious experience in this era. Besides tracing the rise of the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican churches, and the complex history of the “radical Reformation,” we will consider forms of belief independent of any church, and new varieties of skepticism and doubt. We also will devote considerable attention to the reform movements that transformed Roman Catholicism during these two centuries and the upsurge of missionary energy and mystical spirituality that accompanied them. We will investigate the effects of the Reformation crisis on politics and the state and on the social order that Europe inherited from the Middle Ages. To this purpose, we will look at a number of political struggles waged in the name of religion, including the Peasants’ Revolt and Thirty Years’ War in Germany, the Dutch revolt against Spain, the French Wars of Religion, and the English Revolution.
The Medieval Foundations of English Art and History: An Interdisciplinary Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Interweaving history, religion, art, and archaeology, this course begins its exploration of major turning points in the making of England with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Roman Britannia. To explore the resulting interplay of cultures out of which England is born—classical and barbarian, pagan and Christian, Celtic and Germanic, insular and continental—we will closely examine unique sources of compelling interest: the Sutton Hoo burial ship treasure, considered En-gland’s most important archaeological discovery; Beowulf; medieval histories and biographies that make vivid the coming of Christianity to pagan England, Ireland, and Scotland. With respect to early Christian visual culture, we will puzzle out how and why European painting and calligraphy were revolutionized in such manuscripts as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, books that still amaze and inspire us. Our second major turning point will be the conquest of Anglo-Saxon England by the Normans, erstwhile pagan, seafaring Vikings who by 1066 had become Catholic, French, and Europe’s acknowledged masters of the arts of war. The Norman impact on Anglo-Saxon England, involving as it does the feudalization of every institution, secular and religious; the transformation of every social group; and the rebuilding of every Anglo-Saxon cathedral and abbey in the new Norman (i.e., Romanesque) style, will be the focus of much of our attention. In our study of the Norman and Angevin ages, we will constantly ask how great conflicts—English versus French, church versus state, king versus baron—led to the creation of ideals and institutions of such durability that they continue to shape our lives. Since our studies involve close examination of medieval sources, including such celebrated works of art and architecture as the Bayeux Tapestry, that contemporary but sometimes very enigmatic depiction of the Norman Conquest, and Durham Cathedral, a glorious building that embodies much of the spirit of the new Norman Age, one might consider this not just a course about medieval England but also a workshop in actually “doing” medieval history and “doing it” in an interdisciplinary way. Conference work may focus on medieval questions or related ones from another time and place.
Medieval Spirituality
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
The French medievalist André Vauchez defines spirituality as “the dynamic unity between the content of a faith and the way in which it is lived by historically determined human beings.” This course will explore this dynamic unity and the impact of gender and social status on the nature of religious experience. Topics will include medieval understandings of God, spirits, saints, relics, rituals, prayers, and visions.
Sophomores and above. Open to first-year students with permission of the instructor.
From the Catacombs to Chartres: A Research Seminar in Christian Iconography
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
All three religions of the book have rich traditions of verbal exegesis, but unlike Judaism and Islam, only Christianity created and sustained an elaborate visual language to represent and interpret its sacred texts. If the study of the subject matter in art is iconography, what such an investigation might mean in practice can vary widely from identification of personages, episodes, and symbols to the more challenging, historically oriented examination of what text is the basis for the imagery (if indeed the imagery is grounded in a text); why that imagery or architectural form was chosen in a particular time and place; why it might be grouped with others that appear unrelated; and what such choices might have meant to a patron, an artist, and their community. In short, iconography is about human beings making choices. Thus, one might need to consider biblical exegesis, theology, legends, historical context (including society, politics, controversies, psychology, climate of opinion), in addition to possible artistic models—indeed all the tools of history. Our goal in this course will be to strive for this more inclusive study of iconography, while recognizing time limitations. To move toward this goal we will learn from, while critiquing, iconographical interpretations by some of art history’s masters, André Grabar, Émile Mâle, Erwin Panofsky, Richard Krautheimer, Meyer Schapiro, scholars who sought the relationships of words to images, and of art more generally, including architecture, to historical context. However, student research projects, perhaps undertaken in collaboration with others, are the core of this course. We will learn how to use library research tools and, with the assistance of professionals in computer technology, we will refine skills to better use Internet images in doing research and making presentations. We will assist each other at every step of the way and present findings orally and in written drafts to the class for help and criticism. One might envision the results being “published,” i.e., posted on the Internet. Previous college study in some aspects of ancient, medieval, Renaissance culture is mandatory, though not necessarily in art history.
Permission of the instructor is required.
The Contemporary Practice of International Law
Level: Open
Semester: Year
International law, once quite marginal, has become an essential feature of contemporary legal and political life. It is not confined anymore to states in their relations to each other, but extends to international nongovernmental organizations and pervades the everyday life of individuals and multinational corporations alike. Can one identify which rules will ultimately prevail in the peculiar legal system of international law? How do sovereign states effectively yield to pressing common interests and cooperate, if ever they do? How can economic development, security concerns, and environmental protection be pursued cooperatively by states whose priorities often differ dramatically? Can those countries possessing a nuclear arsenal legitimately condemn those that also aspire to this status? By which process can entities acquire independence and statehood? What is the potential impact of the existence of an international criminal court on the conduct of the world’s various military establishments? Modern international law is under great scrutiny as high expectations have now been placed on it. This is a general course on public international law providing concepts and tools to understand the international legal system and its dynamic, and to analyze the decision-making process of the world community. Starting with how international law has been conceived, and then with how it is made and applied, the course will cover its main basic prescriptions. The expanding scope and depth of international law will be explored—the establishment of states and other actors, the pacific resolution of disputes and the banishment of the use of force, arms control, the protection and control of persons (nationality and human rights), the use of international areas, the utilization of the planet’s resources, environmental protection, and the regulation of trade. Drawing from a variety of sources, class assignments will work with a number of theoretical approaches as well as concrete cases.
Deadly Embrace: America’s Encounter with the World of Islam
Level: Open
Semester: Year
When the dust settled after World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two most powerful nations in the international system and, by far, one of the most respected great powers in the world of Islam. America was seen as a progressive island in a sea of European reaction and colonialism. At that moment, the dominant question was “why do they like us so much?” not “why do they hate us so much?” What went wrong with America’s relations with Muslim civil societies in the second part of the twentieth century? Why has the initial promising encounter between the United States and Arabs/ Muslims turned sour? What lies at the heart of the dramatic shift in American foreign policy and Muslims’ perceptions of the United States as well? To what extent has the United States inherited the colonial legacy of its European allies? Has the United States played empire? Or to what extent has America become a scapegoat for most of the ills and misfortunes that have befallen the world of Islam in the last fifty years? Is it not misleading to frame the debate about America and the world of Islam in such generalizing and reductionist terms? What are the most critical approaches and frameworks that throw lights on the nature, structure, and character of forces that have influenced relations between the two cultures and civilizations?
Global Africa: Theories and Cultures of Diaspora
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
Changes in migration patterns, immigration laws, and refugee policies have meant that Africans are living and working in unexpected places. Studies of the African diaspora used to focus on the dispersion of Africans as a result of the trans-Saharan, transatlantic, and Indian Ocean slave trades. More recent scholarship has focused on new African diasporas: Senegambians in Harlem and Rome, Ghanaians in Germany, Nigerians in Japan. These modern-day dispersals, powered in part by the forces of globalization, demand new levels of analysis by scholars. How have people of African descent ended up settling in places far from their natal homes? How has the concept of an African homeland contributed to the articulation of religious and political movements (Ethiopianism, black power, Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism) in the diaspora? How have theories about other diasporas (South Asian, Jewish, Chinese, etc.) informed scholarship on the African diaspora? This course will study these new African migrations, as well as revisit the histories of older settlement patterns. This will be a service learning course.
Students who have taken courses in Africana Studies, Asian Studies, Global Studies, Latin American Studies, or International Relations are particularly encouraged to apply.
Public Stories, Private Lives: Methods of Oral History
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
Oral history methodology has moved from a contested approach to studying history to an integral method of learning about the past. This is because oral histories allow us to gain an understanding of past events from a diverse array of vantage points. Methods of recording oral history also allow the possibility of bringing private stories into the public. In contrast, public history in the form of monuments, museums, and World Heritage Sites are consciously preserved in order to emphasize particular aspects of a national, regional, or local past, which its protectors deem to be important. Who owns this history? Is it Civil War reenactors who dedicate their weekends to remembering this war? Is it the African Americans who return to West Africa in search of their African past or the West Africans who want to forget about their slave trading past? What happens when the methods for interpreting public and oral histories combine? This course places particular attention on the importance of oral history in tracing memories of the past. We will discuss how Africanist and feminist scholars have used oral history to study the history of underrepresented groups. We will also investigate how methods of oral history and public history can be used in reconstructing the local history of our surrounding community (Yonkers, Bronxville, Westchester).