PROSEMINARS   Spring 2010

PROSEMINAR  EUROPE

HIST 640.1  European Witch Craze
Laura Lisy-Wagner
Around the year 1000, it was considered a heresy to believe that witches existed. From the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, sometimes called the period of the "witch craze", tens of thousands of people were brought to trial for witchcraft. Sometimes these trials were sponsored by the church, sometimes by the state. In this course, we will look at the nature of these trials, the reasons they started, the reasons they stopped, and why they occurred in some areas and not in others. We will also be looking at the supernatural in general in this period - including vampires and werewolves, black and white magic, and religious mysticism. Students will focus on writing a primary source research paper, which may be on any aspect of the supernatural in the early modern period.

PROSEMINAR UNITED STATES

HIST 642.1  The American Civil War and Reconstruction
Chris Waldrep
Students will prepare a research paper looking at some aspect of the Civil War or Reconstruction. In addition they will read and analyze leading books covering the Civil War and its aftermath, gaining a broad knowledge of the field.

HIST 642.02   Americans and Nature
Phil Dreyfus
This course will investigate Americans’ perceptions of nature, their usually unconscious impact on the environments with which they interact, and their conscious efforts to reshape external nature to serve a variety of ends—moral, social, and economic.  Western industrial societies in general have constructed a categorical distinction between nature and the social order—a distinction that may be heightened in the United States by the nation’s origins as a “civilization carved out of wilderness.”  By no means universal to all societies across space and time, the conceptual separation of human society and culture from the natural world has influenced the ways that Americans have experienced, understood, and used “nature,” as well as the ways that historians have interpreted and told the story of this engagement.  We will examine this history, both in its content and in its telling.   Students will emerge with a framework for understanding the environmental relations of diverse groups of Americans, and will develop a grasp of how environmental history can be written at the intersection of multiple subfields—intellectual history, urban history, social history, and the history of “subordinate” races and classes.  As a culminating project, each student will produce a  paper based largely on research in primary sources.

HIST 642.03  Proseminar in U.S. History (History Culture Identity - Food)
Dawn Mabalon
This proseminar critically examines the historic role of food – its production, preparation, and politics -- in American history and culture from the colonial period to the most recent past. This course examines how cuisines, recipes, agricultural labor, the food industry, restaurants, and home cooking have reflected and shaped American economy, politics, ethnicity, race and racism, cultures, gender roles, families, domestic life, the sexual division of labor, sexualities, identities and experiences. Because the gathering, harvesting and preparation of food, and passing down of cuisines, food traditions and cultures have often fallen upon the shoulders of those whose roles in US history have been often obscured (i.e., women, the poor, working class people, and racial and ethnic minorities), the importance of food in American history has, in turn, been overlooked, and deserves a more critical interrogation. Moreover, cuisines are cultural symbols that bind people together, create community, and reflect and shape American experiences and identities.

PROSEMINAR WORLD

HIST 644 Middle East 1700 to Present
Maziar Behrooz
This is a seminar covering different aspects of Middle Eastern history from 1700 C.E. to the present.  The Middle East will be studied during an age of colonialism, reform, nationalism, emergence of nation states, revolutions, and emergence of political Islam.  Focus will be on major Twentieth century developments if the region, (e.g., Arab-Israeli conflict, Iranian revolutions, Arab nationalism, and Islamic revivalism).