PROSEMINARS   Spring 2011

Proseminars represent the culminating experience for history majors, a chance to bring together the skills that you have developed in the history courses that you have taken during your undergraduate career. The ultimate outcome of the proseminar is a research paper based on primary source research placed within the context of the secondary writings available on the subject. Students will be exposed to the writings of other historians on a topic and conduct research in newspapers, periodicals, and archival resources. They will also present that research orally and in writing and critique the work of their fellow students.

PROSEMINAR  EUROPE

HIST 640.1  World War I: Social and Cultural Perspectives
Sarah Curtis
In this seminar, we will explore how European society was turned upside down during the "Great War" from 1914 to 1918 and in its immediate aftermath. Using primary documents, memoirs, fiction, poetry, film footage, images, and historical studies, we will examine such issues as the trauma of trench warfare, shell shock, women's work on the home front, the propaganda used to promote the war, objectors to the war, strikes and worker discontent, women's roles and gender anxieties, the "lost generation," and the construction of memory after the war. This seminar is not intended to be a diplomatic or military history of World War I, but rather an exploration of the societal and cultural transformations that accompanied the strains of Europe's first total war. The focus will be on the British, French, and German experience of war, but you may consider the Eastern Front in your research paper if you wish. Besides introducing you to the cultural and social aspects of World War I, this course also requires you to write a major research paper from primary sources. It serves as a capstone course for your history major and History 300 is a prerequisite for this course. Some background in modern European history is also useful.

PROSEMINAR UNITED STATES

HIST 642.1  The American Conservatism
Molly Oshatz
This course will investigate the conservative movement in 20th century America, with particular attention to its origin and its implications for American political culture. Course readings and discussions will examine the conservative response to the New Deal, Soviet communism, Civil Rights, and the counterculture; and the various types of twentieth-century American conservatism, including libertarianism, traditionalism, neo-conservatism, and religious conservatism. Students will engage in discussion, participate in class activities, and complete a 12-15 page research paper. In order to develop their critical thinking and writing skills, students will be required to write several short responses to the course reading and one in-class essay. During the final weeks of the class, students will read and critique one another's papers and present their research to the class. There will be additional requirements for graduate students.

HIST 642.02   Reformers and Radicals in American Society 1820 - 1865
Barbara Loomis
Reformers and Radicals in American Society, 1820-1865
On a March day in 1844, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a lecture in which he analyzed the variety of reform movements that were flourishing in the northern United States. Some of the movements are familiar to us: abolition, temperance, anti-war, women’s rights. Others seem strange and exotic: phrenology, hydropathy, even a “society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes,” an organization named by Emerson, perhaps with tongue in cheek. As he catalogued the multiplicity of causes, Emerson exclaimed: “What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world!”

Students in History 642 will have an opportunity to discover the fascinating, complex world of antebellum American reform movements. After discussing a shared set of readings and participating in several exercises to help establish the foundation of the topic, students will pursue their own research in primary sources, resulting in a final paper of 15-20 pages. All students must turn in a rough draft to be critiqued before submitting their final paper.

HIST 642.03  U.S. Race Relations and the Law, 1865 - 1965
Chris Waldrep

PROSEMINAR WORLD

HIST 644 Travelers to the Dragon Kingdom
Pi-ching Hsu
Today, China is among the world’s most popular tourist destinations. But even before the age of globalization, China has already attracted numerous visitors from both the East and the West. Many of them wrote detailed accounts of their sojourns in China. This seminar selects the journals of Japanese Buddhist monk Ennin, Venetian merchant Marco Polo, and Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci in the premodern period, and a collection of essays on European, American, and Australian missionaries, traders, diplomats, Sinologists, journalists, and professional travel writers who visited China at the age of western imperialism and Orientalism, to study cultural exchanges between this multi-ethnic nation of evolving history and her foreign visitors through ages. We will do close reading of the travelers’ accounts and put them in the historical context of China’s domestic as well as global histories. Class discussions and individual research will culminate in the production of a 15-page (20 for graduate students) paper.